I started a bit earlier and went through the same sort of learning experience (also fvwm, PPP scripts, etc), but I don't think KDE stinks anymore. Konqueror is probably no faster than before but CPUs are, so it doesn't feel slow anymore either. If you feel it takes ages to start it's just because it has to start the whole KDE stuff if you don't run it already. If you do it starts fast and stays fast.
I do use a console to remove files, but this is just because I'm familiar with the command line. A new user familiar with Windows Explorer would have exactly zero trouble with Konqi, I think.
The developers have offered you something, they've at least bothered to give you their code to do as you please.
Your post sounds a bit like the neighbour who gives you their lawnmower but you complain that they didn't mow the lawn for you as well. At least it came across that way.
Open source/Free software doesn't work like commercial software. Developers develop for fun and that's it. Very few want to be bothered (your words) by users. The whole discussion regarding the `success' of FOSS is irrelevant, in my view. Other people are free to use the work of the developers and package it if they want, but in the same way that in software companies the same people don't do the documentation, the marketing, the packaging, the testing, etc, it is not realistic to expect developers to do it themselves and for free. Sometimes geeks have very poor people skills as well, almost by definition.
For a start testers and tech writers usually want to be payed because it's not often fun work. On the other hand developing for geeks is its own reward.
I mean no AA fonts, KDE 2 (!), etc. Things have changed so much useability-wise it's like a different era.
> Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are still on dialup >> What is the option in any other distribution that gets around this?
Actually what I meant was that if you want a reasonably up-to-date with KDE 3, AA, etc, then you are up for quite a bit of downloading, because it's not in stable, and not in testing, and you cannot find unstable on CDs for purchase anywhere. There are Debian-based distros that are reasonably recent, I haven't tried those I must say.
So assuming you start from stable CDs, good luck to upgrade to unstable via dialup. Moreover once you are on unstable you can assume you'll be downloading stuff *all*the*time*. A lot more than with other distros, believe me.
Also Debian developers don't make any selection I find. They give you 9 CDs worth of stuff. Where is the good stuff? the first 3 are inadequate IMHO. You need to do your own, which is great but time-consuming.
I like Debian but I find it's not easy to maintain. It's good for backend/server stuff using stable (where things are really stable, as good as the BSDs or better), for desktop it's too much work (for me).
Just a thought, how do you decide that something exist that you cannot control? For example if some huge company pollutes a large area in India where thousands of people die (as it has happened), do you decide that you can't be bothered and don't worry about it, or do you decide not to give them business from now on and you let them know why, something you definitely can control?
Regarding the poor support of Intel motherboard integrated soundchips in OSS, I guess most of the work the sound kernel developers have done went into ALSA. Can't blame them really. I have an AC'97 too and it works well with ALSA. previously I had all sorts of delay problems like you experience.
The good thing with ALSA is that you'll be able to use both soundcards at once, very handy sometime (one for silly systems sounds, say, and the other to hook on a good quality stereo for home theather use, maybe). Also you can test the AC'97 sound quality compared with the other soundcard you've got.
Several possibilities for your sound lagging problem:
1- you might be using a sound daemon with too big a buffer. First see if you are using a sound daemon (arts (KDE) or esd (Gnome)). I don't use Gnome, but to turn off arts in KDE, run the control center, Sound and Multimedia, Sound system, untick the "start aRts soundserver on KDE startup". This should actually stop it.
The odd thing is that you don't need these sound daemons most of the time. At least I live perfectly well without them. They are needed on cheap hardware to mix sounds coming from different applications at once. On good quality sound cards this is done in hardware, no deamon needed.
2- Your sound card is not very well supported in Linux. This is often an issue with sound cards integrated with the motherboard, and particularly the Intel kind. To fix this, you can either buy an el-cheapo PCI soundblaster, or you can use ALSA (advanced Linux sound architecture) instead of OSS (the traditional Linux drivers). The former are included with Linux 2.6.x, the latter are included with 2.4.x and before.
If you are still running 2.4.x (as I am) you can compile ALSA separately for your kernel (or maybe your distribution provides it). There is a world of difference between ALSA and OSS in terms of quality and it is well worth the switch.
With both tips combined you should be able to get rid of your delays. Good luck.
Is *is* possible to survive as a restricted user under XP and Win2k. There is one little trick you need to remember: when installing programs or reconfiguring systemy stuff, use shift+right-click on the application you need to run (setup, adding users, reconfiguring the network, etc).
Now notice the extra `Run As' in the menu that pops up? Click that, then select Administrator as the user and give its password. Presto, the program runs as Administrator.
This way to continue administrating your machine you don't need to log-out, log as Administrator, log out again and log back in as yourself. Very handy.
The thing that worries me with your post is that you may well be 100% completely right, but what if you are not? Which is the path to God? How to tell?
Inside the Christian faiths there are lots of incompatible variants: Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherians, Southern Baptists & whatnot. What about the Jehovah Withnesses, or the Mormons? Or even the Scientologists? Is it enough to believe that Jesus is the son of God? some say yes, some say no. In past centuries it was common practice to burn at stake all the heretics without a single thought. What do you think of this practice?
What if the Jews are right? What if Islam is the one true religion? What if the Hindus are right?
You know the Russians had the Bomb then, don't you?
It would have escalated, almost certainly. Talking from your comfy chair I don't think you realize what that means. If you show your ennemy you are willing to use any means to get to your end, they know where they stand, and that means pulling all the stops to kill you first.
Effective propaganda you've read somewhere. The fact might be a little different.
The Spaniards were ready to kick their government out no matter what before the bombing, it got them into a war they didn't want without a single good rational reason, it wasn't managing the economy well enough, it got Spain into a fistfight with the rest of Europe. After the bombing the Spanish government lied to its population trying to blame the blast on ETA and generally not being forthright.
Result: massive turnout at the polls, not on a wave of anxiety but on a normal democratic reaction: the terrorists, whoever they are, were not going to change the outcome of the election.
That the US gov't didn't like the outcome is clear, that they tried to paint the Spaniards as cowards is typical.
> I'd just relocate to another society more in-line with my beliefs.
What if you really can't due to poverty, absence of passport, visa, or country willing to have you? Do you really think most Palestinian are happy to stay where they are right now?
If you can evacuate the tunnel, and run maglev, then if you dig your tunnel correctly you would need no extra power to make it run: with a gentle slope going down and then back up you could let the train run under the influence of gravity, with zero departure speed and zero arrival speed. I wonder how long the trip would take.
Not quite, special relativity was accepted quite quickly (that one gives you the well-known formula E=mc^2) and integrated into quantum mechanics, which no one was laughing at, since it was explaning lots of stuff such at the photoelectric effect (this is the result that got Einstein his Nobel prize).
Many people did not believe general relativity because one of the few conclusive test in support of it was the light bending effect of the Sun, observed by Eddington during a solar eclipse, and the measurement errors in this particular experiment are pretty high. The other test was the precession of the orbit of Mercury, and that is a tiny effect which could come from somewhere else. Most of the precession in the orbit of Mercury is explained by classical effects but there was a residual, unexplained effect ; GR explains most of the residual effect, but not absolutely completely.
However few were laughing at Einstein, and the Bomb only served as an illustration of a SR effect, not a GR one. So far GR hasn't been used to build a somehow improved bomb, to my very limited knowledge.
> Please note that security updates for "unstable" > distribution are not managed by the security team. > Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in > a timely manner.
You'd be taking risk to run Sid on a production box. Meanwhile it's not that up-to-date. I heard it got XFree86 4.3 really really late.
Debian stable also runs on a restricted set of hardware compared with a lot of distros. We spent weeks trying to make it run on a standard DELL to run a forge server. No luck, had to revert to RHEL.
As for testing, it's for testing. Compared to RH it feels like RH7.3
Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are stil on dialup. Who would like to lug around 9 CDs or wait for hours for the.deb to download?
Debian is great, don't get me wrong. We will always have Debian, and this makes me all warm and fuzzy, but it doesn't solve all the Linux problems.
Precisely, I agree with you, and the guy is fighting the judge's decision, and so far he is ahead and I hope he wins. It's not as if there is something uniquely European there, I can perfectly picture a US judge with a penchant for penny pinching coming to the same decision under some brain dead reasoning completely out of touch with common decency standards.
The fact remains that you quoted, willingly or unwillingly, only a snipped of the judge's decision and not the whole picture, possibly with the intend of shocking people into believing that in Europe people are commonly (a) held in prison when they are innocent and (b) routinely charged for the priviledge. While (a) might unfortunately happen, as it does everywhere, (b) is simply not true. This is typically what tabloids do.
Re:Scientists think Einstein was wrong?
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 1
QM gives a value for the cosmological constant which is 120 *orders* of magnitudes too big, see this link. I seem to recall that a prominent scientist named that fact the most glaring embarassing result of modern science, but I can't find a source for the quote, sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
I started a bit earlier and went through the same sort of learning experience (also fvwm, PPP scripts, etc), but I don't think KDE stinks anymore. Konqueror is probably no faster than before but CPUs are, so it doesn't feel slow anymore either. If you feel it takes ages to start it's just because it has to start the whole KDE stuff if you don't run it already. If you do it starts fast and stays fast.
I do use a console to remove files, but this is just because I'm familiar with the command line. A new user familiar with Windows Explorer would have exactly zero trouble with Konqi, I think.
The developers have offered you something, they've at least bothered to give you their code to do as you please.
Your post sounds a bit like the neighbour who gives you their lawnmower but you complain that they didn't mow the lawn for you as well. At least it came across that way.
Open source/Free software doesn't work like commercial software. Developers develop for fun and that's it. Very few want to be bothered (your words) by users. The whole discussion regarding the `success' of FOSS is irrelevant, in my view. Other people are free to use the work of the developers and package it if they want, but in the same way that in software companies the same people don't do the documentation, the marketing, the packaging, the testing, etc, it is not realistic to expect developers to do it themselves and for free. Sometimes geeks have very poor people skills as well, almost by definition.
For a start testers and tech writers usually want to be payed because it's not often fun work. On the other hand developing for geeks is its own reward.
Startup konqueror or your favourite file manager, click on file, press the delete key. What is wrong there?
Developers didn't bother doing this, didn't bother doing that, blablabla.
You didn't bother doing much yourself, did you?
Hi,
... feels like? ...
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
> It feels like RH7.3
>>
I mean no AA fonts, KDE 2 (!), etc. Things have changed so much useability-wise it's like a different era.
> Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are still on dialup
>> What is the option in any other distribution that gets around this?
Actually what I meant was that if you want a reasonably up-to-date with KDE 3, AA, etc, then you are up for quite a bit of downloading, because it's not in stable, and not in testing, and you cannot find unstable on CDs for purchase anywhere. There are Debian-based distros that are reasonably recent, I haven't tried those I must say.
So assuming you start from stable CDs, good luck to upgrade to unstable via dialup. Moreover once you are on unstable you can assume you'll be downloading stuff *all*the*time*. A lot more than with other distros, believe me.
Also Debian developers don't make any selection I find. They give you 9 CDs worth of stuff. Where is the good stuff? the first 3 are inadequate IMHO. You need to do your own, which is great but time-consuming.
I like Debian but I find it's not easy to maintain. It's good for backend/server stuff using stable (where things are really stable, as good as the BSDs or better), for desktop it's too much work (for me).
Cheers
A lot of FLTK apps are available here. There are quite a few. A good demo of the usefulness of the toolkit is this application.
Another little FLTK applet which I like a lot is xpp.
Just a thought, how do you decide that something exist that you cannot control? For example if some huge company pollutes a large area in India where thousands of people die (as it has happened), do you decide that you can't be bothered and don't worry about it, or do you decide not to give them business from now on and you let them know why, something you definitely can control?
Hi,
Yes one should not need slashdot, but eh...
Regarding the poor support of Intel motherboard integrated soundchips in OSS, I guess most of the work the sound kernel developers have done went into ALSA. Can't blame them really. I have an AC'97 too and it works well with ALSA. previously I had all sorts of delay problems like you experience.
The good thing with ALSA is that you'll be able to use both soundcards at once, very handy sometime (one for silly systems sounds, say, and the other to hook on a good quality stereo for home theather use, maybe). Also you can test the AC'97 sound quality compared with the other soundcard you've got.
Best of luck.
Several possibilities for your sound lagging problem:
1- you might be using a sound daemon with too big a buffer. First see if you are using a sound daemon (arts (KDE) or esd (Gnome)). I don't use Gnome, but to turn off arts in KDE, run the control center, Sound and Multimedia, Sound system, untick the "start aRts soundserver on KDE startup". This should actually stop it.
The odd thing is that you don't need these sound daemons most of the time. At least I live perfectly well without them. They are needed on cheap hardware to mix sounds coming from different applications at once. On good quality sound cards this is done in hardware, no deamon needed.
2- Your sound card is not very well supported in Linux. This is often an issue with sound cards integrated with the motherboard, and particularly the Intel kind. To fix this, you can either buy an el-cheapo PCI soundblaster, or you can use ALSA (advanced Linux sound architecture) instead of OSS (the traditional Linux drivers). The former are included with Linux 2.6.x, the latter are included with 2.4.x and before.
If you are still running 2.4.x (as I am) you can compile ALSA separately for your kernel (or maybe your distribution provides it). There is a world of difference between ALSA and OSS in terms of quality and it is well worth the switch.
With both tips combined you should be able to get rid of your delays. Good luck.
Is *is* possible to survive as a restricted user under XP and Win2k. There is one little trick you need to remember: when installing programs or reconfiguring systemy stuff, use shift+right-click on the application you need to run (setup, adding users, reconfiguring the network, etc).
Now notice the extra `Run As' in the menu that pops up? Click that, then select Administrator as the user and give its password. Presto, the program runs as Administrator.
This way to continue administrating your machine you don't need to log-out, log as Administrator, log out again and log back in as yourself. Very handy.
Someone's life, perhaps? Can you see a big argument coming down that path?
The thing that worries me with your post is that you may well be 100% completely right, but what if you are not? Which is the path to God? How to tell?
Inside the Christian faiths there are lots of incompatible variants: Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherians, Southern Baptists & whatnot. What about the Jehovah Withnesses, or the Mormons? Or even the Scientologists? Is it enough to believe that Jesus is the son of God? some say yes, some say no. In past centuries it was common practice to burn at stake all the heretics without a single thought. What do you think of this practice?
What if the Jews are right? What if Islam is the one true religion? What if the Hindus are right?
Admit it is at least a little confusing.
You know the Russians had the Bomb then, don't you?
It would have escalated, almost certainly. Talking from your comfy chair I don't think you realize what that means. If you show your ennemy you are willing to use any means to get to your end, they know where they stand, and that means pulling all the stops to kill you first.
Yeah, it was great, I rememberit well.
Who is the ennemy this time around? China?
I don't see Australia in the list. I doubt it's accurate.
Effective propaganda you've read somewhere. The fact might be a little different.
The Spaniards were ready to kick their government out no matter what before the bombing, it got them into a war they didn't want without a single good rational reason, it wasn't managing the economy well enough, it got Spain into a fistfight with the rest of Europe. After the bombing the Spanish government lied to its population trying to blame the blast on ETA and generally not being forthright.
Result: massive turnout at the polls, not on a wave of anxiety but on a normal democratic reaction: the terrorists, whoever they are, were not going to change the outcome of the election.
That the US gov't didn't like the outcome is clear, that they tried to paint the Spaniards as cowards is typical.
> I'd just relocate to another society more in-line with my beliefs.
What if you really can't due to poverty, absence of passport, visa, or country willing to have you? Do you really think most Palestinian are happy to stay where they are right now?
It's not that simple.
If you can evacuate the tunnel, and run maglev, then if you dig your tunnel correctly you would need no extra power to make it run: with a gentle slope going down and then back up you could let the train run under the influence of gravity, with zero departure speed and zero arrival speed. I wonder how long the trip would take.
What about Nader? I thought he had run as well in the last election?
Well, still no news of direct measurement of gravity waves.
Not quite, special relativity was accepted quite quickly (that one gives you the well-known formula E=mc^2) and integrated into quantum mechanics, which no one was laughing at, since it was explaning lots of stuff such at the photoelectric effect (this is the result that got Einstein his Nobel prize).
Many people did not believe general relativity because one of the few conclusive test in support of it was the light bending effect of the Sun, observed by Eddington during a solar eclipse, and the measurement errors in this particular experiment are pretty high. The other test was the precession of the orbit of Mercury, and that is a tiny effect which could come from somewhere else. Most of the precession in the orbit of Mercury is explained by classical effects but there was a residual, unexplained effect ; GR explains most of the residual effect, but not absolutely completely.
However few were laughing at Einstein, and the Bomb only served as an illustration of a SR effect, not a GR one. So far GR hasn't been used to build a somehow improved bomb, to my very limited knowledge.
From the Debian site, front page:
.deb to download?
> Please note that security updates for "unstable"
> distribution are not managed by the security team.
> Hence, "unstable" does not get security updates in > a timely manner.
You'd be taking risk to run Sid on a production box. Meanwhile it's not that up-to-date. I heard it got XFree86 4.3 really really late.
Debian stable also runs on a restricted set of hardware compared with a lot of distros. We spent weeks trying to make it run on a standard DELL to run a forge server. No luck, had to revert to RHEL.
As for testing, it's for testing. Compared to RH it feels like RH7.3
Apt-get is great but a real bummer if you are stil on dialup. Who would like to lug around 9 CDs or wait for hours for the
Debian is great, don't get me wrong. We will always have Debian, and this makes me all warm and fuzzy, but it doesn't solve all the Linux problems.
Cheers
Precisely, I agree with you, and the guy is fighting the judge's decision, and so far he is ahead and I hope he wins. It's not as if there is something uniquely European there, I can perfectly picture a US judge with a penchant for penny pinching coming to the same decision under some brain dead reasoning completely out of touch with common decency standards.
The fact remains that you quoted, willingly or unwillingly, only a snipped of the judge's decision and not the whole picture, possibly with the intend of shocking people into believing that in Europe people are commonly (a) held in prison when they are innocent and (b) routinely charged for the priviledge. While (a) might unfortunately happen, as it does everywhere, (b) is simply not true. This is typically what tabloids do.
QM gives a value for the cosmological constant which is 120 *orders* of magnitudes too big, see this link. I seem to recall that a prominent scientist named that fact the most glaring embarassing result of modern science, but I can't find a source for the quote, sorry.
I've only read one short couple of pages on the authors' explanation of the Olbert paradox, and it doesn't make sense. I'd be wary of the rest.