Older users are more likely to have a Yahoo address as their primary email, etc.
Real geezers telnet into the server and read their email using MH. If the command line was good enough in 1982, then it is good enough today.
Joking aside, ssh and pine(*) work really well. If the content of the email is heavily using some sort of markup language and graphics it is probably not an email I need or want. On some days I think ssh/pine would be more efficient than a modern GUI-based client.
For those unfamiliar with text email clients think of them as twitter without a 140 character limit.;-)
(*) Substitue alpine, mutt, whatever if you prefer.
+1 for pine/alpine.
I'm a big fan of that, especially when visiting China where I can still ssh to my old university account and use alpine from there. Plus it's much faster to load than mutt when dealing with huge IMAP inboxes.
What are you talking about? GNOME 3 supports display of multiple non-maximised windows. Have you even used it?
Sort of. But it doesn't really seem to like that. Go to the Dash or Application menu to open a new terminal window, and instead Gnome says - "oh - Terminal! Here's your terminal window right HERE", and just maximizes the one already open. So I have to get Terminal to open a new one for me. Every application works like that. "You don't want ANOTHER application window - use THIS OPEN ONE INSTEAD!"
So Gnome does what it wants, not what I want it to do. And it takes me more mouse click and keystrokes to do anything than it did in Gnome 2. Why?!?
Middle click the terminal button will open a fresh instance, or just use a keyboard shortcut. Vanilla Gnome 3 is terrible, but with Shell Extensions, and Tweak Tools you can have a great DE back. Of course we should not have to install plugins to restore functionality, but I have to say it's a pleasant surprise. I started with FreeBSD in 2001, and tried all the major DEs and WMs (tiling and floating) since then. I'm still waiting for KDE4 to reach the dizzy usabillity heights of KDE3.
...but I'd tend to be optimistic about the long term: GPU driver support has always been a sore spot. Compiler support for CPU instructions, on the other hand, has generally been pretty good.
While I understand the history, I've always found the terms "East", "West", "Middle East" and similar non-geographic geographic/cultural nomenclature to be arrogant at best. West of Japan is China, and they may end up being the new west if the arrogant USA doesn't get it's intellectual act together.
The world is not some flat map that some idiot in the 1800s drew on paper. I agree that using the pacific was probably a pretty good idea for a separator there on paper, but the general terms of "East" and "West" as used by most talking heads is just shallow-thinking.
Sort of like the words/terms "perfect storm", "actually", and "blog" really annoy me.
Now get off my lawn.
If you are using the English language then the terms East West etc. are valid. These terms have their origins in Graeco-Roman culture, i.e. the occident and the orient which identify regions that had cultural similarites and connections. Of course with such generalisations there will inevitably be some blurred lines and inaccuracies. With the advent of colonialisation and globalisation the geographic/directional connotations of West and East have lost some of their importance.
In Japanese you may use whatever terms you like, as you might know all foreigners could be referred to as gaikokujin or the more impolite gaijin, but the economic and cultural power of the "Western" nations in the 19th and 20th centuries has led to the term Western becoming adopted in some senses. In fact
historically, the Portuguese, the first Europeans to visit Japan, were known as nanbanjin (literally "southern barbarians").
Before you make any silly western colonial superiority statements against me, I am from a nation that suffered from colonialsm, so I am not biased in that regard.
> First, the universe is not a sentient being - it cannot "forbid" anything.
If you will pardon the pun, that is a mighty big ASSUMPTION.
And I'm not even going to get into the fact that you don't even know what consciousness is... let alone matter.
Occam would like his razor back.
A universe without an all encompassing sentience is a simpler, more reasonable assumption compared to a sentient universe. That does not rule it out, or forbid it; it just make it less likely. Likewise, the universe does not actively prevent things from occurring, one example is the that of the so-called forbidden transitions in energy states of a nucleus. They are nominally forbidden by selection rules, but there is a finite, measurable probability for a transition to occur.
In your defence, a sentient universe would certainly be interesting, but as you stated, we already have enough difficulty understanding our sentience let alone something on the scale of the universe.
No wait, even if we have a video that ran at one million frames per second all we would see is an immobile object. At two million frames per second we would see it move instantly by 180 degrees...
How did they calculate that 60 million rotations per minute again?
They shoot a laser beam through the sample, which they measure with a detector at the other side. Then they apply an electric field to the flakes at high frequency (> 1 MHz). They scan the frequency of the electric field from 4 kHz up to 3MHz. When the frequency of the electric field is the same as the frequency of the rotating flake you get a resonance which appears as a sudden spike in the laser detector. That's how they know what the rotation rate is, and the dielectric response of graphite to an electric field is well known so they can cross check this with theory.
...and technically we do have video systems that can acquire data up to 1 peta Hz (or if you're american you'd say 1 quadrillion Hz). Femtosecond lasers are used in chemistry for more than a decade now to image fast chemical reactions.
A bit like "ay-lan ruah" apparently but yes, let us know if we're supposed to prounce that in an Irish accent, an American accent, or a Martian accent.....;-)
I never claimed his work was original, only an idiot would, especially since Clonus was already mentioned by someone else; anyway there are only seven basic plots (according to Christopher Booker). It's not hard to find the same stories and ideas cropping up again and again in fiction. What is relevant is what influenced the script for the Island. The Clonus Horror was a minor low budget film, the film rights to Spares -which was a very successful book by a well known author- was bought by DreamWorks who went on to produce The Island after those rights lapsed. It is simplistic to think Spares or Clonus are the sole influence/inspiration for The Island, but it is certainly disingenuous to suggest Spares had nothing to do with it, or any apparent connections are only coincidental.
The controversy surrounding the lawsuit opened the floodgates to more criticism and accusations. Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel, Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", whose clients are told they are not conscious, was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, and so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile[5] to pursue legal action over the similarities. Paramount (once sister studio to DreamWorks after its parent Viacom purchased DreamWorks in late 2005, then spinning it off again in 2008) was in talks to option the novel after DreamWorks' rights expired, but declined after The Island was released. Marshall Smith considers it unlikely a Spares film will ever be made
I've found the best thing is to treat them like a corporation. Make sure their accounts are only user level, and either hold on to the Administrator password or make sure they know the real reason to use it. Done that with a few family friends I do work for and the amount of trouble i've had has dropped drastically.
Absolutely, I did this for my brother's machine, compared to my parents machine it's remained extremely tidy and worry free!
The only issue is Firefox updating. On Windows XP, Firefox cannot update itself when running in a non-admin account. (Bugzilla:407875) Probably means my brother is running a months-old Firefox..
Makes me wonder if Internet Explorer would actually be safer for him, at least it would get updated automatically.
It's great how fast it is, but it also eats ridiculous amount of RAM. It easily can take 100MB per tab on popular sites.
It's hard to notice on machines with 3GB RAM or more, but after I moved some people with more modest configurations from Firefox to Chrome, they started experiencing heavy swapping and constant PC slowdowns. And as we know, when your PC is swapping, any other performance optimization pales in comparison.
Another major blow for Chrome is its plugin performance. Visiting a site with Flash is sure to kill any decent performance you're experiencing with Chrome, never mind your CPU or RAM. Even sites like YouTube, where other browsers have zero problems.
Perhaps your setup needs tweaking. I'm on an atom based netbook running ArchLinux, and I have had quite the opposite experience. I have to open up a lot of tabs to use 100MB of RAM, it loads faster than FF, and for me is far more responsive. I compile my own PGO versions of FF (betas and normal versions) and even still FF is a lot slower and ram resource hungry than chrome (well chromium in my case).
One final thing, the performance of plugins has increased for me using chrome. As everyone knows Adobes flash plugin is terrible under Linux, in FF videos stutter and it's horrible. It's only under chrome that I can watch full screen flash videos smoothly.
Caveat: Anecdote != data, this is merely my personal experience.
AdBlock slows firefox down way too much for me. Privoxy is a far superior solution that works with any/all browsers. It acts as a proxy through which you direct all your web-browsing. The only thing that kept me with Firefox for so long was vimperator, and once uzbl came along I switched to that.
There is also The Namless Mod (TNM), a massive TC for Deus Ex 1 that was only finished this year (I think). TNM is a lot of fun, and is worthwhile reviving your Deus Ex install for.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at mutt, you will love it
Used to use it for years, but got fed up with how long it takes to load imap folders so I moved back to alpine.
Older users are more likely to have a Yahoo address as their primary email, etc.
Real geezers telnet into the server and read their email using MH. If the command line was good enough in 1982, then it is good enough today.
Joking aside, ssh and pine(*) work really well. If the content of the email is heavily using some sort of markup language and graphics it is probably not an email I need or want. On some days I think ssh/pine would be more efficient than a modern GUI-based client. For those unfamiliar with text email clients think of them as twitter without a 140 character limit. ;-)
(*) Substitue alpine, mutt, whatever if you prefer.
+1 for pine/alpine. I'm a big fan of that, especially when visiting China where I can still ssh to my old university account and use alpine from there. Plus it's much faster to load than mutt when dealing with huge IMAP inboxes.
Horses for courses and all that...
What are you talking about? GNOME 3 supports display of multiple non-maximised windows. Have you even used it?
Sort of. But it doesn't really seem to like that. Go to the Dash or Application menu to open a new terminal window, and instead Gnome says - "oh - Terminal! Here's your terminal window right HERE", and just maximizes the one already open. So I have to get Terminal to open a new one for me. Every application works like that. "You don't want ANOTHER application window - use THIS OPEN ONE INSTEAD!"
So Gnome does what it wants, not what I want it to do. And it takes me more mouse click and keystrokes to do anything than it did in Gnome 2. Why?!?
Middle click the terminal button will open a fresh instance, or just use a keyboard shortcut. Vanilla Gnome 3 is terrible, but with Shell Extensions, and Tweak Tools you can have a great DE back. Of course we should not have to install plugins to restore functionality, but I have to say it's a pleasant surprise. I started with FreeBSD in 2001, and tried all the major DEs and WMs (tiling and floating) since then. I'm still waiting for KDE4 to reach the dizzy usabillity heights of KDE3.
It's been discussed to death, but for that kind of price they really are a steal.
Lost at C:\
Found at C
...but I'd tend to be optimistic about the long term: GPU driver support has always been a sore spot. Compiler support for CPU instructions, on the other hand, has generally been pretty good.
Excellent point!
Will it run Linux?
I'm not being facetious, I got stung by the lack of support by Nvidia for their Optimus graphics cards on my ASUS U30JC.
Thankfully Martin Juhl has been working on a solution using VirtualGL, which gives us the use of our Nvidia cards under linux
While I understand the history, I've always found the terms "East", "West", "Middle East" and similar non-geographic geographic/cultural nomenclature to be arrogant at best. West of Japan is China, and they may end up being the new west if the arrogant USA doesn't get it's intellectual act together.
The world is not some flat map that some idiot in the 1800s drew on paper. I agree that using the pacific was probably a pretty good idea for a separator there on paper, but the general terms of "East" and "West" as used by most talking heads is just shallow-thinking.
Sort of like the words/terms "perfect storm", "actually", and "blog" really annoy me.
Now get off my lawn.
If you are using the English language then the terms East West etc. are valid. These terms have their origins in Graeco-Roman culture, i.e. the occident and the orient which identify regions that had cultural similarites and connections. Of course with such generalisations there will inevitably be some blurred lines and inaccuracies. With the advent of colonialisation and globalisation the geographic/directional connotations of West and East have lost some of their importance.
In Japanese you may use whatever terms you like, as you might know all foreigners could be referred to as gaikokujin or the more impolite gaijin, but the economic and cultural power of the "Western" nations in the 19th and 20th centuries has led to the term Western becoming adopted in some senses. In fact
historically, the Portuguese, the first Europeans to visit Japan, were known as nanbanjin (literally "southern barbarians").
from wikipedia.
Before you make any silly western colonial superiority statements against me, I am from a nation that suffered from colonialsm, so I am not biased in that regard.
considering I pasted it from my phone using the default browser I disagree.
You misunderstand me, I never made an assumption about the used browser. In fact I too use the default browser, so your point is moot.
it wasn't because of firefox you couldn't post. it's mobile slashdot that suck donkey ass.
i tried at least 3 diferent mobile browsers and gave up.
on mobile space, slashdot is just like microsoft. they just don't get it
Try the classic comments mode. I have it set to that, and I no longer have problems reading /. from my HTC Legend.
@JDmetro
Ah do you remember Plumbers Don't Wear Ties? Possibly the worst game ever made. I remember GamesMaster made a big deal out of it at the time.
> First, the universe is not a sentient being - it cannot "forbid" anything. If you will pardon the pun, that is a mighty big ASSUMPTION. And I'm not even going to get into the fact that you don't even know what consciousness is... let alone matter.
Occam would like his razor back.
A universe without an all encompassing sentience is a simpler, more reasonable assumption compared to a sentient universe. That does not rule it out, or forbid it; it just make it less likely. Likewise, the universe does not actively prevent things from occurring, one example is the that of the so-called forbidden transitions in energy states of a nucleus. They are nominally forbidden by selection rules, but there is a finite, measurable probability for a transition to occur.
In your defence, a sentient universe would certainly be interesting, but as you stated, we already have enough difficulty understanding our sentience let alone something on the scale of the universe.
. An oracular theory of everything can predict the outcome of any experiment in a finite amount of time, albeit possibly a very long, long time.?
Personally I like to use the wavefunction of the universe
Ducks...
No wait, even if we have a video that ran at one million frames per second all we would see is an immobile object. At two million frames per second we would see it move instantly by 180 degrees... How did they calculate that 60 million rotations per minute again?
They shoot a laser beam through the sample, which they measure with a detector at the other side. Then they apply an electric field to the flakes at high frequency (> 1 MHz). They scan the frequency of the electric field from 4 kHz up to 3MHz. When the frequency of the electric field is the same as the frequency of the rotating flake you get a resonance which appears as a sudden spike in the laser detector. That's how they know what the rotation rate is, and the dielectric response of graphite to an electric field is well known so they can cross check this with theory.
...and technically we do have video systems that can acquire data up to 1 peta Hz (or if you're american you'd say 1 quadrillion Hz). Femtosecond lasers are used in chemistry for more than a decade now to image fast chemical reactions.
Hope this rambling post helps!
A bit like "ay-lan ruah" apparently but yes, let us know if we're supposed to prounce that in an Irish accent, an American accent, or a Martian accent..... ;-)
A closer pronunciation is "ill-aawn rew-ah".
From a friendly martian.
I do!
feck...
I never claimed his work was original, only an idiot would, especially since Clonus was already mentioned by someone else; anyway there are only seven basic plots (according to Christopher Booker). It's not hard to find the same stories and ideas cropping up again and again in fiction. What is relevant is what influenced the script for the Island. The Clonus Horror was a minor low budget film, the film rights to Spares -which was a very successful book by a well known author- was bought by DreamWorks who went on to produce The Island after those rights lapsed. It is simplistic to think Spares or Clonus are the sole influence/inspiration for The Island, but it is certainly disingenuous to suggest Spares had nothing to do with it, or any apparent connections are only coincidental.
The controversy surrounding the lawsuit opened the floodgates to more criticism and accusations. Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel, Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", whose clients are told they are not conscious, was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, and so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile[5] to pursue legal action over the similarities. Paramount (once sister studio to DreamWorks after its parent Viacom purchased DreamWorks in late 2005, then spinning it off again in 2008) was in talks to option the novel after DreamWorks' rights expired, but declined after The Island was released. Marshall Smith considers it unlikely a Spares film will ever be made
I've found the best thing is to treat them like a corporation. Make sure their accounts are only user level, and either hold on to the Administrator password or make sure they know the real reason to use it. Done that with a few family friends I do work for and the amount of trouble i've had has dropped drastically.
Absolutely, I did this for my brother's machine, compared to my parents machine it's remained extremely tidy and worry free!
The only issue is Firefox updating. On Windows XP, Firefox cannot update itself when running in a non-admin account. (Bugzilla:407875) Probably means my brother is running a months-old Firefox..
Makes me wonder if Internet Explorer would actually be safer for him, at least it would get updated automatically.
How about trying Opera instead?
It's great how fast it is, but it also eats ridiculous amount of RAM. It easily can take 100MB per tab on popular sites. It's hard to notice on machines with 3GB RAM or more, but after I moved some people with more modest configurations from Firefox to Chrome, they started experiencing heavy swapping and constant PC slowdowns. And as we know, when your PC is swapping, any other performance optimization pales in comparison. Another major blow for Chrome is its plugin performance. Visiting a site with Flash is sure to kill any decent performance you're experiencing with Chrome, never mind your CPU or RAM. Even sites like YouTube, where other browsers have zero problems.
Perhaps your setup needs tweaking. I'm on an atom based netbook running ArchLinux, and I have had quite the opposite experience. I have to open up a lot of tabs to use 100MB of RAM, it loads faster than FF, and for me is far more responsive. I compile my own PGO versions of FF (betas and normal versions) and even still FF is a lot slower and ram resource hungry than chrome (well chromium in my case).
One final thing, the performance of plugins has increased for me using chrome. As everyone knows Adobes flash plugin is terrible under Linux, in FF videos stutter and it's horrible. It's only under chrome that I can watch full screen flash videos smoothly.
Caveat: Anecdote != data, this is merely my personal experience.
Or if Debian is not good enough, use Slackware
hehe, the mighty Slack, very true.
I actually went the other way a year ago and use ArchLinux. It's bleeding edge but I've never had upgrade grief.
...6 months releasing cycles are a joke. Just look at how long Windows 7 has been tested before release.
Then use Debian.
AdBlock slows firefox down way too much for me. Privoxy is a far superior solution that works with any/all browsers. It acts as a proxy through which you direct all your web-browsing. The only thing that kept me with Firefox for so long was vimperator, and once uzbl came along I switched to that.
There is also The Namless Mod (TNM), a massive TC for Deus Ex 1 that was only finished this year (I think). TNM is a lot of fun, and is worthwhile reviving your Deus Ex install for.