So, now it is good to always update working software to the newestestest version available? I thought we had the mantra of "if it is working don't fix it".
But, if you want automatically updated Windows programs I suggest you go with LiberKey. You can install it in your PC and if you even want to reinstall your OS you just have to move one folder to a temporary position. Oh, and it detects and installs software from PortableApps too.
Linux has been "on the verge" of taking over the market for so long, it is in danger of becoming a has-been technology without ever having been the "hot" technology...
As much as a lot of us wanted (at some point or another) that to be true, the fact is that no single distribution or version of Linux has even been "on the verge" of taking over the PC desktop market. It has taken over servers and in some way over specialized devices. But Linux on the desktop has always been on the 2% adoption at most.
will be more productive then any programmer falling back to IDE's.
See? if you had an IDE with autocorrection features your comment would not have spelling errors.
I can imagine you compiling 10 new lines of a 10,000 line program where you write tihs->open() instead of this->open(). Sit down and wait until your compiler manage to tell you you have a compiling error.
Sure it may be bad drivers, but the fact they can *still* cause problems is not a good thing.
So, I have seen (in this very laptop I am writing now) Linux not recognizing several hardware (internal microphone, headphone and screen). Sure it may be bad drivers, but the fact they can *still* cause problems is not a good thing. (not Linux fault, hadware manufacturers blah blah)
I love lists like this contrasting Linux vs Windows "advantages" and "disadvantages" in Slashdot. They invariably always contain apologetic comments for the "disadvantages" of Linux.
No, Generally speaking, there is *always* some hardware that does not work well after installing a desktop Linux. And most often than not the only way to solve it is to fish around forums (because there is no manufacturer's page where you can download the appropriate driver) to see if by any chance someone else manage to solve the issue.
And I do not care that it is not Linux fault, it is still Linux problem.
Indeed. I was an RPM-based distro used for a long time. I started with RedHat and then Mandrake. a bit of SuSe and even Corel Linux. Very few people remember the RPM hell but alas I remember it very well. Staying all night looking for different RPMs to satisfy several dependencies. Having to unpack and manually replace some.so.?? so a darn package would install (due to cyclic dependencies).
Those days I really wondered why didn't more people just bundled a big binary file, and if a new "security" patch came, just updated that single file.
Because all the horror stories on broken hardware and packages while upgrading between Linux distro versions dare to say otherwise.
My latest attempt at having Linux (I like the bash environment) in my last laptop was "welcomed" with a non functioning internal mic, non functioning headphones, crappy screen resolution, 100% x-org usage (top). This in a 1 year old laptop (not too new, not to old).
I still use it (as I said, I like the integration of stuff like git, awk, ssh, etc within bash) but after spending a whole day hunting for ways to make it work I just gave up. I used to do that (spend whole weekends compiling FreeBSD or Linux kernel and configuring it to get the best of it) while I was in Uni. But nowadays, I do research 9 to 5, use saturdays to study some personal stuff and the rest of the time to my family. Tinkering with non-working technology stopped being my cup of tea.
The idea of playing with electronic circuit boards and joysticks to create a cool avionics-like interface is really cool. But in reality the application of this will become a nightmare.
I would suggest to the OP to stick with the keyboard. It already has more than 100 keys with tactile feedback, everybody is used to it, and they are cheap to replace.
What he could do is create a keyboard sheet like those available in early flight simulators. That way he could lay all the controls on the keyboard (and leave the mouse to "enter" or "leave" the keyboard control mode).
You touch a good point. In Mexico prisons are called something like "centre of social re-adaptation". The/spirit/ is that people go to prison to be re-adapted to be useful in society.
Nevertheless I agree with the sentiment that prisoners should not spend their time in prison mainly playing or having fun. I think prisoners have to pay for two things 1) For the resources they are consuming while in prison (food, electricity, guards, etc) and 2) For the crime they committed.
Prisoners have a debt when they enter prison. For this reason they should be put to work on the most productive tasks they can (sewing, basic manufacturing, picking fruit [now that Mexicans are leaving]) and from whatever salary they "produce", a percentage should be used to pay for their debt.
The problem with prison right now is that for a lot of people often times life inside it is as good or better than life outside. Tax payers money should be used to "enable" locking the bad guys but their stay there should be paid mainly by themselves.
There is also FuseCompress which supports LZMA, ZLIB, and bzip2 compression formats.
The problem I see with these features not being part of the filesystem is that if you wanted to access said data in another system (say, at a friends house using a usb disk) you will be screwed as you need to install the extension on each computer.
In Mexico people *already* know who are the powerful politicians and businessmen that are colluding with the drug cartels. Reputable sources like Semanario Zeta, Revista Proceso, and Reporte Indigo among others.
The problem is that because people in the high levels of the government profit from the drug business, there is no way they the government will try to catch the high level bosses.
So, a name list in a webpage would not make any difference in the current state of Mexico's drug war.
I don't like that there are always icons of programs I am not currently using littering the task bar. I do not like that the Skype or Messenger icons can not be hidden into the tray area. I do not like (and never did) taskbar window grouping. I like to put my taskbar veritcally on the right side of my screen (this gives me more vertical space and allows makes the taskbar look less cluttered with several open programs). I haven't found a way to add custom task bars like in Windows XP, where I could include icons of other programs.
And as you say, XP runs fast and lean. On the computers I have, I will never dare to install 7.
I am not proposing we wait for random mutations to make us capable of living in hard vacuum off of nothing but radiation and interstellar gas. I am proposing that we divorce our idea of what defines us as humanity from the animal homo sapiens sapiens, and work on ways to modify ourselves to be more adapted to our environment(s). Hairless apes are never going to thrive in space, but humanity might.
This will be read development. But unfortunately we as humanity still have to progress a lot both socially, to remove stigmas and scientifically to get to the point we can manipulate the right genes to achieve X or Y physical trait.
In the documentary "Dogs decoded" I saw about an long term experiment in Ukraine (I think, or maybe Russia) where wild mammals where made very very tame only by selecting and cross-breeding the ones that observed the desired behaviour. After 3 or 4 generations researchers had some units of the species behaving like dogs.
That sort of thing can can be achieved once some society gets rid of all the artificially self imposed social stigmas (about race, culture, etc). But we are waaaay to far away from such a thing.
Yup, that is the result of Google *using* their users for its own profit. Because chrome users, google docs users, and all other google's product's users are not the clients, Google can screw them without second thought. As long as Google's clients (the advertisers) are happy, everything is fine.
Another example (and the reason I use Office Live instead of Google Spreadsheet) of Google's arrogance is the lack of "text cell span" which has been asked by several people.
Just recently I came across yet another issue with one of Google services, which had the same response (users can ask all they want but Google does not care). Ultimately, Google is nowadays being more blunt in following their focus of "advertisement company" by removing several projects (labs, code search, etc).
I got bitten by another bug: The first one is this (The OSX^h^h^h Unity bar does not recognize that an application is already running).
I can't find the bug report now but I remember I saw it was set to "low priority". It is funny that a bug that is so blatantly showing to the user is considered low priority.
Oh! and my laptop's touchpad does not work (what is this, 1991?)
What I crave for is a big (A1 or A2 size) thin display which only a) Receives an image and b) Displays it full screen. Everything else could be done in a computer program which say had a dongle connected where you could paste the image you want to display.
That way I could make any program that renders my google calendar, my project's Gantt chart, a map, or any other stuff I need to have in sight for a longish period. It would be like "active paper".
I do not think at this point lot of innovation is required. It is only a matter of putting the pieces together to create and offer the product. The only problem I think is that eInk is still expensive by the cm^2.
He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
From what I have recollected about the late Mr. Jobs, he was not a delicate flower himself. In fact, one of his main characteristics is that we has straightforward in telling what he thought. So, what is wrong with someone with similar traits but opposite opinions talking about said opinions?
Although I have *never* bought any Apple product, I appreciate everything that Steve Jobs achieved and gave to the world. A lot of people think that if not him, someone else would have done it, but the reality is that sometimes (the majority of times) such kind of leader/"[ben]malevolent dictator for life" is needed to drive big organizations (open or closed) to achieve something (e.g., compare Ubuntu [Shuttleworth] vs Mandrake/iva [???], or Apple [Jobs] vs Microsoft [Nobody really]). On that respect, I respect and admire what Steve Jobs achieved.
Having said that, I do not agree with his products and services policies (including but not limited to prices, openess and choices); and to me this is the "bad" (consider that good and bad is a subjective appreciation) side of Steve Jobs as a CEO of Apple.
Lastly, as a person I was very very sad to hear about his death, and even before abouth his health. Cancer is a bitch and I think it is the ultimate display of the unfairness in life (that is life is not fair, luck is uniformly distributed among population IMHO).
Yeah, yeah, it's always everyone else's fault except the Linux kernel itself.
Definitely, as with almost all Linux issues, this is not Linux fault, but it still is its problem. From a pragmatic point of view the fact is that Linux in a laptop draws more power than other operating systems (such as OSX or Windows).
Funny, IIRC the slashdot modding system started with something like that. However all the modding classifications were added to avoid biased modding. I even recall somewhere in the slashdot help pages it specifically reads that the mods like -1 Troll and -1 Flamebait do not mean "I Disagree". People often abuse it that way.
Usually when I have the urge to comment I remind myself it's just Slashdot and posting is a waste of time.
Ugh, this has happened to me lately. Back in the day (between 4 and 5 years ago) I loved Slashdot comments because you could really read interesting information from people who *knew* how to do things (e.g., people working witih electronic circuits commenting in a story about a DIY house automation system). Thus, even if I was not sure of some things I would go on and comment as I usually got insightful replies.
Nowadays comments are only mainly bashing or snarky snippets. It seems all the people who really know how to do stuff (i.e. hackers) have moved on.
For AI, I would suggest enrolling into the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Course. It will start on October 10th this year and lasts until December (I think).
Just about a week ago I got a terribly weird problem after updating Firefox (from the previous to the last version, whatever that is). After restarting Firefox (due to the update) I only got an error window showing some problem in the XUL renderer (I don't remember what was it).
At the end the problem was a "language switching" extension, which I had to install to switch between English and German (btw, the only "English" language pack available to install is from South Africa... WTF?).
Even chrome with its "let's remove all configuration" allows to easily change the language.
Slashdot Mirror
So... okay -- so what do you suggest?
Using something that works ;-)
So, now it is good to always update working software to the newestestest version available? I thought we had the mantra of "if it is working don't fix it".
But, if you want automatically updated Windows programs I suggest you go with LiberKey. You can install it in your PC and if you even want to reinstall your OS you just have to move one folder to a temporary position. Oh, and it detects and installs software from PortableApps too.
Linux has been "on the verge" of taking over the market for so long, it is in danger of becoming a has-been technology without ever having been the "hot" technology...
As much as a lot of us wanted (at some point or another) that to be true, the fact is that no single distribution or version of Linux has even been "on the verge" of taking over the PC desktop market. It has taken over servers and in some way over specialized devices. But Linux on the desktop has always been on the 2% adoption at most.
will be more productive then any programmer falling back to IDE's.
See? if you had an IDE with autocorrection features your comment would not have spelling errors.
I can imagine you compiling 10 new lines of a 10,000 line program where you write tihs->open() instead of this->open(). Sit down and wait until your compiler manage to tell you you have a compiling error.
Great flamebait by the way.
Sure it may be bad drivers, but the fact they can *still* cause problems is not a good thing.
So, I have seen (in this very laptop I am writing now) Linux not recognizing several hardware (internal microphone, headphone and screen). Sure it may be bad drivers, but the fact they can *still* cause problems is not a good thing. (not Linux fault, hadware manufacturers blah blah)
See the double standard there?
I love lists like this contrasting Linux vs Windows "advantages" and "disadvantages" in Slashdot. They invariably always contain apologetic comments for the "disadvantages" of Linux.
No, Generally speaking, there is *always* some hardware that does not work well after installing a desktop Linux. And most often than not the only way to solve it is to fish around forums (because there is no manufacturer's page where you can download the appropriate driver) to see if by any chance someone else manage to solve the issue.
And I do not care that it is not Linux fault, it is still Linux problem.
Indeed. I was an RPM-based distro used for a long time. I started with RedHat and then Mandrake. a bit of SuSe and even Corel Linux. Very few people remember the RPM hell but alas I remember it very well. Staying all night looking for different RPMs to satisfy several dependencies. Having to unpack and manually replace some .so.?? so a darn package would install (due to cyclic dependencies).
Those days I really wondered why didn't more people just bundled a big binary file, and if a new "security" patch came, just updated that single file.
Really?
Because all the horror stories on broken hardware and packages while upgrading between Linux distro versions dare to say otherwise.
My latest attempt at having Linux (I like the bash environment) in my last laptop was "welcomed" with a non functioning internal mic, non functioning headphones, crappy screen resolution, 100% x-org usage (top). This in a 1 year old laptop (not too new, not to old).
I still use it (as I said, I like the integration of stuff like git, awk, ssh, etc within bash) but after spending a whole day hunting for ways to make it work I just gave up. I used to do that (spend whole weekends compiling FreeBSD or Linux kernel and configuring it to get the best of it) while I was in Uni. But nowadays, I do research 9 to 5, use saturdays to study some personal stuff and the rest of the time to my family. Tinkering with non-working technology stopped being my cup of tea.
The idea of playing with electronic circuit boards and joysticks to create a cool avionics-like interface is really cool. But in reality the application of this will become a nightmare.
I would suggest to the OP to stick with the keyboard. It already has more than 100 keys with tactile feedback, everybody is used to it, and they are cheap to replace.
What he could do is create a keyboard sheet like those available in early flight simulators. That way he could lay all the controls on the keyboard (and leave the mouse to "enter" or "leave" the keyboard control mode).
You touch a good point. In Mexico prisons are called something like "centre of social re-adaptation". The /spirit/ is that people go to prison to be re-adapted to be useful in society.
Nevertheless I agree with the sentiment that prisoners should not spend their time in prison mainly playing or having fun. I think prisoners have to pay for two things 1) For the resources they are consuming while in prison (food, electricity, guards, etc) and 2) For the crime they committed.
Prisoners have a debt when they enter prison. For this reason they should be put to work on the most productive tasks they can (sewing, basic manufacturing, picking fruit [now that Mexicans are leaving]) and from whatever salary they "produce", a percentage should be used to pay for their debt.
The problem with prison right now is that for a lot of people often times life inside it is as good or better than life outside. Tax payers money should be used to "enable" locking the bad guys but their stay there should be paid mainly by themselves.
There is also FuseCompress which supports LZMA, ZLIB, and bzip2 compression formats.
The problem I see with these features not being part of the filesystem is that if you wanted to access said data in another system (say, at a friends house using a usb disk) you will be screwed as you need to install the extension on each computer.
Unfortunately nothing would had happened.
In Mexico people *already* know who are the powerful politicians and businessmen that are colluding with the drug cartels. Reputable sources like Semanario Zeta, Revista Proceso, and Reporte Indigo among others.
The problem is that because people in the high levels of the government profit from the drug business, there is no way they the government will try to catch the high level bosses.
So, a name list in a webpage would not make any difference in the current state of Mexico's drug war.
Me too.
I do not like the Windows 7 taskbar.
I don't like that there are always icons of programs I am not currently using littering the task bar.
I do not like that the Skype or Messenger icons can not be hidden into the tray area.
I do not like (and never did) taskbar window grouping.
I like to put my taskbar veritcally on the right side of my screen (this gives me more vertical space and allows makes the taskbar look less cluttered with several open programs).
I haven't found a way to add custom task bars like in Windows XP, where I could include icons of other programs.
And as you say, XP runs fast and lean. On the computers I have, I will never dare to install 7.
I am not proposing we wait for random mutations to make us capable of living in hard vacuum off of nothing but radiation and interstellar gas. I am proposing that we divorce our idea of what defines us as humanity from the animal homo sapiens sapiens, and work on ways to modify ourselves to be more adapted to our environment(s). Hairless apes are never going to thrive in space, but humanity might.
This will be read development. But unfortunately we as humanity still have to progress a lot both socially, to remove stigmas and scientifically to get to the point we can manipulate the right genes to achieve X or Y physical trait.
In the documentary "Dogs decoded" I saw about an long term experiment in Ukraine (I think, or maybe Russia) where wild mammals where made very very tame only by selecting and cross-breeding the ones that observed the desired behaviour. After 3 or 4 generations researchers had some units of the species behaving like dogs.
That sort of thing can can be achieved once some society gets rid of all the artificially self imposed social stigmas (about race, culture, etc). But we are waaaay to far away from such a thing.
Yup, that is the result of Google *using* their users for its own profit. Because chrome users, google docs users, and all other google's product's users are not the clients, Google can screw them without second thought. As long as Google's clients (the advertisers) are happy, everything is fine.
Another example (and the reason I use Office Live instead of Google Spreadsheet) of Google's arrogance is the lack of "text cell span" which has been asked by several people.
Just recently I came across yet another issue with one of Google services, which had the same response (users can ask all they want but Google does not care). Ultimately, Google is nowadays being more blunt in following their focus of "advertisement company" by removing several projects (labs, code search, etc).
I got bitten by another bug:
The first one is this (The OSX^h^h^h Unity bar does not recognize that an application is already running).
I can't find the bug report now but I remember I saw it was set to "low priority". It is funny that a bug that is so blatantly showing to the user is considered low priority.
Oh! and my laptop's touchpad does not work (what is this, 1991?)
What I crave for is a big (A1 or A2 size) thin display which only a) Receives an image and b) Displays it full screen. Everything else could be done in a computer program which say had a dongle connected where you could paste the image you want to display.
That way I could make any program that renders my google calendar, my project's Gantt chart, a map, or any other stuff I need to have in sight for a longish period. It would be like "active paper".
I do not think at this point lot of innovation is required. It is only a matter of putting the pieces together to create and offer the product. The only problem I think is that eInk is still expensive by the cm^2.
If UNIX hadn't arisen, we may very well be using a system that was based off of TOPS-20 or VMS instead.
The funny thing is that we actually are using a system which has its roots in VMS.
He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
From what I have recollected about the late Mr. Jobs, he was not a delicate flower himself. In fact, one of his main characteristics is that we has straightforward in telling what he thought. So, what is wrong with someone with similar traits but opposite opinions talking about said opinions?
Although I have *never* bought any Apple product, I appreciate everything that Steve Jobs achieved and gave to the world. A lot of people think that if not him, someone else would have done it, but the reality is that sometimes (the majority of times) such kind of leader/"[ben]malevolent dictator for life" is needed to drive big organizations (open or closed) to achieve something (e.g., compare Ubuntu [Shuttleworth] vs Mandrake/iva [???], or Apple [Jobs] vs Microsoft [Nobody really]). On that respect, I respect and admire what Steve Jobs achieved.
Having said that, I do not agree with his products and services policies (including but not limited to prices, openess and choices); and to me this is the "bad" (consider that good and bad is a subjective appreciation) side of Steve Jobs as a CEO of Apple.
Lastly, as a person I was very very sad to hear about his death, and even before abouth his health. Cancer is a bitch and I think it is the ultimate display of the unfairness in life (that is life is not fair, luck is uniformly distributed among population IMHO).
Yeah, yeah, it's always everyone else's fault except the Linux kernel itself.
Definitely, as with almost all Linux issues, this is not Linux fault, but it still is its problem. From a pragmatic point of view the fact is that Linux in a laptop draws more power than other operating systems (such as OSX or Windows).
Funny, IIRC the slashdot modding system started with something like that. However all the modding classifications were added to avoid biased modding. I even recall somewhere in the slashdot help pages it specifically reads that the mods like -1 Troll and -1 Flamebait do not mean "I Disagree". People often abuse it that way.
Usually when I have the urge to comment I remind myself it's just Slashdot and posting is a waste of time.
Ugh, this has happened to me lately. Back in the day (between 4 and 5 years ago) I loved Slashdot comments because you could really read interesting information from people who *knew* how to do things (e.g., people working witih electronic circuits commenting in a story about a DIY house automation system). Thus, even if I was not sure of some things I would go on and comment as I usually got insightful replies.
Nowadays comments are only mainly bashing or snarky snippets. It seems all the people who really know how to do stuff (i.e. hackers) have moved on.
Besides, the goals of "terrorism," ever since the Anglo-Irish War, has always been to cause the enemy to grossly over-react
You mean, like the lady that thought they were being attacked by terrorists during the Washington quake while she was in the obelisk?
I just saw her interview in the CNN international news. It seems the USA government has their people *really* terrorised!
For AI, I would suggest enrolling into the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Course. It will start on October 10th this year and lasts until December (I think).
Just about a week ago I got a terribly weird problem after updating Firefox (from the previous to the last version, whatever that is). After restarting Firefox (due to the update) I only got an error window showing some problem in the XUL renderer (I don't remember what was it).
At the end the problem was a "language switching" extension, which I had to install to switch between English and German (btw, the only "English" language pack available to install is from South Africa... WTF?).
Even chrome with its "let's remove all configuration" allows to easily change the language.