Hey, did you ever get your updating thing resolved?
After shifting jobs I ended up moving to Ubuntu at work and home. That would -- rather, will change at home as soon as I get a fast connection.
Using both chagrins me immensely, but for different reasons. They are the best of a marginally less-frustrating lot... Debian still takes too long to configure correctly, and Ubuntu still has some fit-and-finish issues that drive me nuts.
Actually, the speech Six gives in the finale makes more sense in light of the things Baltar's been doing. Specifically she refers to Baltar's role as protector of the new hybrid children between Cylon/clones and humans.
And Baltar has been assuming Christ-like poses (literally) for quite a long time now...
I know many of you think it's corny or nonsensical but I get the distinct impression Moore's had a lot of fun writing this stuff.
You're right, especially about the first point. I thought Gaeta did it so close almost in collusion with Boomer, as it throws suspicion off -- if anyone on the Galactica is even paying attention; I suspect they aren't.
Jury's still out on the detector, mainly because Gaeta hasn't even done any work on it, and because Baltar hasn't seen fit to entrust results to anyone else, staff or no.
I especially think you are right about the Cylon civil war idea. Don't know how, and certainly don't know exactly why, but it's bound to be very interesting.
In the finale he hands Boomer something, and the camera pauses momentarily on the 'handshake' just prior to her shooting the Commander.
Also, just after the 'handshake', she says to him, 'Thanks' -- and it appears to be entirely apropos of nothing, as it doesn't quite fit the short conversation they've just had about Apollo's mutiny.
Think about it.
- Who does Boomer dance with in the closing scenes of Colonial Day? - During the mini he says he's never plotted a successful jump before. Then in 33 -- five days later -- he's done 240? Without a hitch? - Who exonerates Baltar in Six Degrees of Separation? (Which has a fairly obvious reference to that Kevin Costner movie No Way Out as well) - Again in the mini, Gaeta is talking with Tigh about locating the Cylon transponder on the CIC. The former says, 'It's been there a week or so. I just never took any notice of it...'
---and another thing--- I really like seeing the soundman during Starbuck's shooting of the museum case! (He's wearing a red shirt and a dark vest, on the right)
Is why Yahoo in the US doesn't do this, but Yahoo UK does. Being in the UK, I just picked a yahoo.co.uk account. It was only when a friend of mine with an older yahoo.com account complained that he couldn't do POP3 that we discovered the two were different.
Too many potential users, perhaps?
Also, hotmail have just introduced the hotmail.co.uk domain for British users. Unlike Yahoo, once you select your geographic location, you are not allowed any choice in the matter.
Well, I take your point about Debian being a bit opaque. For me, when I switched six years ago, it came down to deciding whether I would put up with brokenness on a fairly regular basis, or roll up my sleeves and learn a bit more about configuring a Debian system.
As I started out with Linux some two years before that on a new shitty PC-Chips pile of poo with RH 5.1 I couldn't even get the GUI to come up for six weeks. I tell you, had to learn to love the command line fast... but I had been in the same situation before, so it wasn't so uncomfortable.
I understand the Debian-derived distros have a much better track record now, but I'm getting a bit set in my ways I suppose.
I've said it many times before here, but I trust Debian's anal-retentiveness about policy -- **this** is the real point of difference between rpm-based distros and the deb-based ones -- because it means I don't have to worry about those kinds of issues anymore. And in the end, this kind of stability, even on unstable or testing, matters to me more than a fancy installer or GUI admin tools, because once I figure out how to configure the thing and set it up, I don't have to mess with it ever again.
However, I am being a bit disingenuous, because occasionally upgrading from a fresh-but-old stable version to a newer testing or unstable does result in some subtle fuckups. This most recently bit me in the ass when I tried over the course of three days to upgrade a laptop from Debian Woody (3.0) to Testing in July of last year. This was partly due to Debian developers reworking their infrastructure yet again, as well as kernel upgrades from 2.4 to 2.6 (modules, etc). Good Christ, what a mess...
Note to Debian devels: Stop fucking with the module infrastructure, and start documenting that shit please! Thank you.
Well, here in the UK, 4 weeks is customary at a minimum. When I worked in Canada it was as you say. Usually these kinds of things are spelled out in the contract, here at least, but given that the poster appears to be in an 'at-will' state, he actually has a lot more leverage than he realises.
I wouldn't let the boss get away with proposing that kind of crap. If he were employing people here in Europe, he'd be eligible for a nice business-breaking hauling before an industrial tribunal for his shitty practices.
The poster should get himself an attorney sharpish. You never know what kind of madness a prick like his boss would do if frustrated.
Have they improved their upgrading between versions yet?
This isn't a troll or snarky question. I gave up on Mandrake around version 7 or 8 when they had flaky drivers of one sort or another.
Of course, I moved to Debian, so upgrading between stable versions became a moot point -- Doh! All kidding aside, though, the only way to 'enjoy' Debian's quality in 'testing' (on a personal workstation, mind) was to have a good net connection.
At the time I was located in southern Italy, and our connections were poor. As it happened, I had a chat with Frederick Lepied and he persuaded me to try out version 9. I then installed it on a colleague's machine as a dual-boot after he lamented his Windows system's constant crashing, and tried out the then-new LiveCD on a laptop I had access to.
When we couldn't upgrade his system (online urpmi was broken), and I encountered severe breakage with the LiveCD, I gave up on Mandrake.
I still really like it, and believe it would be good for newbies, but feel their underlying flimsiness is the distro's Achilles heel. Still true?
Anyone look at the suggested retail prices for these?
Apple has just recently reduced the price of its wired mouse to $29 and its wireless optical mouse to $59. The two-button wireless optical mouse would likely debut at the $69 price point once reserved for the company's current wireless mouse.
"Jaws will drop," said one insider.
Now, I know what the Mac fans will say: 'Plenty of people spend far more than that on gaming sticks and PC peripherals,' etc, etc.
But why can't they make the mice cheaper? I had to pop out a few months ago to buy an Apple mouse for a client here in London. Not knowing any better, and needing the thing immediately for the client's OS X rack, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the prices for bog-standard and other Mac mice at Micro Anvika.
In the end I found a busted old iMac with a working hockey puck and just lifted that.
About the X-Files, though: Gillian Anderson married and later divorced a crew member from the area, and still has a house in Vancouver last I heard. It might be because she doesn't want to disrupt her daughter's schooling by moving about so much, but I always had the impression it was Duchovny being a self-important prick as opposed to both the leads disliking the place.
Not physically being in the US I couldn't comment on the themes being different, or some of the shots. But:
It's made in Vancouver... We're still not part of the States just yet!:).
Sky One funded half the first season's episodes. One of their conditions for doing so was the right of first showing in the UK.
Actually this fact is quite important to mention, because there have been delays in broadcast and contract negotiations in the past over here, even when dealing with parts of the same network.
Case in point: one year Sky One couldn't show the latest season's episodes of Voyager on time when it turned out Paramount couldn't agree a suitable price with Sky One's media buyers. Totally embarrassing for the latter network, especially as they had already hyped it up in their promotional advertising and had viewers frothing at the mouth for the opener. They had to explain it on air at the last minute, and IIRC it fucked them up for two or three weeks.
Actually me and my friends (we're all refugees from Vancouver/White Rock) all think that this might be saying something -- I'd say 'significant', but that would be extraordinarily pretentious;) -- about the visions of the future that Vancouver might represent.
Think about it: on account of its rainy climate and unique location in a basin surrounded by mountains, the city has a wealth of incredible places to show alt.takes on reality. I mean, which shows were/are filmed there? X-Files, Smallville, MacGyver... and now BSG. And that is not to mention all the commercials. I heard sometime ago that a good 70-80% of all ads in N. America are filmed there. And there is a Peugeot ad playing now here in London where they feature the Harbour Centre quite prominently.
Then again, I've felt for a long time that the best film to show off Vancouver was Cousins, so what do I know, eh? My favourite telly shot was a shot in the first season of the X-Files where Mulder and Scully are supposedly going into the CIA. The building is the Burnaby Public Library... I think I had to love the show even with all the wooden acting, just on that basis...
Oh, sod it, I do sound pretentious! Love that BSG, though; best sci-fi I've seen in years!
Vancouver has pretty much the same sort of climate as London with some variation: about the same amount of rain but it seems to be concentrated in the spring. Vancouver pretty much has Indian summers every year. I've lived in London now for six years and I do prefer it, but that is because of the opportunity here as opposed to Vancouver (where I grew up).
Vancouver's climate is relatively stable as there is a bit of a valley thing going on. Two sides are mountainous, the southern bit's not far from the Rockies, and the only 'open' part to the sea is actually protected by Vancouver Island to the east. So when the weather changes you can relatively sure it will remain like that for several days.
The 'philosopher'-consort of the Governor-General, John Ralston Saul, once noted that one of the main reasons Canada (I think he really meant Toronto) is so cumbersome in terms of winter living is that the architecture takes no account of what the average person has to wear in order to be comfortable. So when you go to the cinema or the theatre there are no cloakrooms for your winter coats and boots, etc. Despite the impression I have that Saul is a buffoon, I think his observations about that aspect of Canadian culture are accurate. And, I can say that after living in Montreal during my first degree, that Quebec seems to have a better sense of what's what in precisely that 'taking-care-of-you' way.
So tell me something: after living over there in TO, you strike me as having adopted the Canadian custom of taking off your shoes by the door. Did you ever see anyone in Britain doing that? I still find it hard not to do so myself over here...
... esd drives me nuts. I have to kill it before I can use any sound app aside from Gnome events.
Also, sound seems to be an exclusive thing -- only one sound app at a time; I can't have multiple streams. Anyone have ideas as to why?
Re:Computers are nice. Computers are fun...
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's true, but would you want Nicholas Negroponte really determining how the world gets its vital necessities?
All kidding aside, though, while the point you make is a good one, one problem with this line of thinking is that it 'forces' or leads people to believe that they shouldn't do anything until the basics and only the basics are handled adequately for all.
Given the level of economic underdevelopment in the countries targeted by this campaign, I'd suggest just letting it go ('let anyone try to improve things if they see a way to do it') might prove to be a better approach in the long run.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, and then I realised what the problem would be - standardisation. Too many machines, too many different combinations of hardware to troubleshoot effectively. And who would do that job? I suppose a country could get their high school geeks on the cheap to do some of the maintenance. However, I think this is one of the reasons why the recycling programmes already in place haven't been successful on an international basis -- in terms of the number of PCs that get turned into landfill, as opposed to the number that do get shipped abroad, the ratio must be ridiculously bad.
That being said, I wholeheartedly agree with you and think it should be done regardless. I guess in principle I object to just simply throwing things out and buying new stuff when older equipment could, with a bit of work, be perfectly serviceable. (I'm typing this on a crappy old 1998-vintage 633mhz Celery II as I'm broke too right now! But I do think it's fine for what I need at the moment)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, did you ever get your updating thing resolved?
... Debian still takes too long to configure correctly, and Ubuntu still has some fit-and-finish issues that drive me nuts.
After shifting jobs I ended up moving to Ubuntu at work and home. That would -- rather, will change at home as soon as I get a fast connection.
Using both chagrins me immensely, but for different reasons. They are the best of a marginally less-frustrating lot
Cheers
t30
Fuck off.
Thank you.
Isn't the last thing this world needs is the extension of celebrity bullshit?
Not a troll ... who is Willie Brown?
... but his first actions as DPL make me wonder exactly just what the fuck Michlmayr had been doing for 2 consecutive terms.
It is refreshing to see someone trying to get to the bottom of the project's murkier depths.
(I'm writing this from Ubuntu's Hoary version, on a workstation computer at work. Nothing would please me more to go back to Debian soon.)
Actually, the speech Six gives in the finale makes more sense in light of the things Baltar's been doing. Specifically she refers to Baltar's role as protector of the new hybrid children between Cylon/clones and humans.
...
And Baltar has been assuming Christ-like poses (literally) for quite a long time now
I know many of you think it's corny or nonsensical but I get the distinct impression Moore's had a lot of fun writing this stuff.
You're right, especially about the first point. I thought Gaeta did it so close almost in collusion with Boomer, as it throws suspicion off -- if anyone on the Galactica is even paying attention; I suspect they aren't.
Jury's still out on the detector, mainly because Gaeta hasn't even done any work on it, and because Baltar hasn't seen fit to entrust results to anyone else, staff or no.
I especially think you are right about the Cylon civil war idea. Don't know how, and certainly don't know exactly why, but it's bound to be very interesting.
No, I think that would be too obvious.
...'
===spoiler???===
My money is on Lt Gaeta.
In the finale he hands Boomer something, and the camera pauses momentarily on the 'handshake' just prior to her shooting the Commander.
Also, just after the 'handshake', she says to him, 'Thanks' -- and it appears to be entirely apropos of nothing, as it doesn't quite fit the short conversation they've just had about Apollo's mutiny.
Think about it.
- Who does Boomer dance with in the closing scenes of Colonial Day?
- During the mini he says he's never plotted a successful jump before. Then in 33 -- five days later -- he's done 240? Without a hitch?
- Who exonerates Baltar in Six Degrees of Separation? (Which has a fairly obvious reference to that Kevin Costner movie No Way Out as well)
- Again in the mini, Gaeta is talking with Tigh about locating the Cylon transponder on the CIC. The former says, 'It's been there a week or so. I just never took any notice of it
---and another thing---
I really like seeing the soundman during Starbuck's shooting of the museum case! (He's wearing a red shirt and a dark vest, on the right)
Not quite :)
from the for-not-quite-beginners dept.
...
Looks like Timothy needs to read this himself.
Oh wait, Slashdot runs on Perl
Thank you, I'm here all week.
Is why Yahoo in the US doesn't do this, but Yahoo UK does. Being in the UK, I just picked a yahoo.co.uk account. It was only when a friend of mine with an older yahoo.com account complained that he couldn't do POP3 that we discovered the two were different.
Too many potential users, perhaps?
Also, hotmail have just introduced the hotmail.co.uk domain for British users. Unlike Yahoo, once you select your geographic location, you are not allowed any choice in the matter.
Well, I take your point about Debian being a bit opaque. For me, when I switched six years ago, it came down to deciding whether I would put up with brokenness on a fairly regular basis, or roll up my sleeves and learn a bit more about configuring a Debian system.
... but I had been in the same situation before, so it wasn't so uncomfortable.
...
As I started out with Linux some two years before that on a new shitty PC-Chips pile of poo with RH 5.1 I couldn't even get the GUI to come up for six weeks. I tell you, had to learn to love the command line fast
I understand the Debian-derived distros have a much better track record now, but I'm getting a bit set in my ways I suppose.
I've said it many times before here, but I trust Debian's anal-retentiveness about policy -- **this** is the real point of difference between rpm-based distros and the deb-based ones -- because it means I don't have to worry about those kinds of issues anymore. And in the end, this kind of stability, even on unstable or testing, matters to me more than a fancy installer or GUI admin tools, because once I figure out how to configure the thing and set it up, I don't have to mess with it ever again.
However, I am being a bit disingenuous, because occasionally upgrading from a fresh-but-old stable version to a newer testing or unstable does result in some subtle fuckups. This most recently bit me in the ass when I tried over the course of three days to upgrade a laptop from Debian Woody (3.0) to Testing in July of last year. This was partly due to Debian developers reworking their infrastructure yet again, as well as kernel upgrades from 2.4 to 2.6 (modules, etc). Good Christ, what a mess
Note to Debian devels: Stop fucking with the module infrastructure, and start documenting that shit please! Thank you.
Well, here in the UK, 4 weeks is customary at a minimum. When I worked in Canada it was as you say. Usually these kinds of things are spelled out in the contract, here at least, but given that the poster appears to be in an 'at-will' state, he actually has a lot more leverage than he realises.
I wouldn't let the boss get away with proposing that kind of crap. If he were employing people here in Europe, he'd be eligible for a nice business-breaking hauling before an industrial tribunal for his shitty practices.
The poster should get himself an attorney sharpish. You never know what kind of madness a prick like his boss would do if frustrated.
Have they improved their upgrading between versions yet?
This isn't a troll or snarky question. I gave up on Mandrake around version 7 or 8 when they had flaky drivers of one sort or another.
Of course, I moved to Debian, so upgrading between stable versions became a moot point -- Doh! All kidding aside, though, the only way to 'enjoy' Debian's quality in 'testing' (on a personal workstation, mind) was to have a good net connection.
At the time I was located in southern Italy, and our connections were poor. As it happened, I had a chat with Frederick Lepied and he persuaded me to try out version 9. I then installed it on a colleague's machine as a dual-boot after he lamented his Windows system's constant crashing, and tried out the then-new LiveCD on a laptop I had access to.
When we couldn't upgrade his system (online urpmi was broken), and I encountered severe breakage with the LiveCD, I gave up on Mandrake.
I still really like it, and believe it would be good for newbies, but feel their underlying flimsiness is the distro's Achilles heel. Still true?
Anyone look at the suggested retail prices for these?
Apple has just recently reduced the price of its wired mouse to $29 and its wireless optical mouse to $59. The two-button wireless optical mouse would likely debut at the $69 price point once reserved for the company's current wireless mouse.
"Jaws will drop," said one insider.
Now, I know what the Mac fans will say: 'Plenty of people spend far more than that on gaming sticks and PC peripherals,' etc, etc.
But why can't they make the mice cheaper? I had to pop out a few months ago to buy an Apple mouse for a client here in London. Not knowing any better, and needing the thing immediately for the client's OS X rack, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the prices for bog-standard and other Mac mice at Micro Anvika.
In the end I found a busted old iMac with a working hockey puck and just lifted that.
'Jaws will drop,' indeed.
Yes, that is a good point.
About the X-Files, though: Gillian Anderson married and later divorced a crew member from the area, and still has a house in Vancouver last I heard. It might be because she doesn't want to disrupt her daughter's schooling by moving about so much, but I always had the impression it was Duchovny being a self-important prick as opposed to both the leads disliking the place.
Not physically being in the US I couldn't comment on the themes being different, or some of the shots. But:
... We're still not part of the States just yet! :) .
It's made in Vancouver
Sky One funded half the first season's episodes. One of their conditions for doing so was the right of first showing in the UK.
Actually this fact is quite important to mention, because there have been delays in broadcast and contract negotiations in the past over here, even when dealing with parts of the same network.
Case in point: one year Sky One couldn't show the latest season's episodes of Voyager on time when it turned out Paramount couldn't agree a suitable price with Sky One's media buyers. Totally embarrassing for the latter network, especially as they had already hyped it up in their promotional advertising and had viewers frothing at the mouth for the opener. They had to explain it on air at the last minute, and IIRC it fucked them up for two or three weeks.
Think about it: on account of its rainy climate and unique location in a basin surrounded by mountains, the city has a wealth of incredible places to show alt.takes on reality. I mean, which shows were/are filmed there? X-Files, Smallville, MacGyver ... and now BSG. And that is not to mention all the commercials. I heard sometime ago that a good 70-80% of all ads in N. America are filmed there. And there is a Peugeot ad playing now here in London where they feature the Harbour Centre quite prominently.
Then again, I've felt for a long time that the best film to show off Vancouver was Cousins, so what do I know, eh? My favourite telly shot was a shot in the first season of the X-Files where Mulder and Scully are supposedly going into the CIA. The building is the Burnaby Public Library ... I think I had to love the show even with all the wooden acting, just on that basis ...
Oh, sod it, I do sound pretentious! Love that BSG, though; best sci-fi I've seen in years!
Vancouver has pretty much the same sort of climate as London with some variation: about the same amount of rain but it seems to be concentrated in the spring. Vancouver pretty much has Indian summers every year. I've lived in London now for six years and I do prefer it, but that is because of the opportunity here as opposed to Vancouver (where I grew up).
...
Vancouver's climate is relatively stable as there is a bit of a valley thing going on. Two sides are mountainous, the southern bit's not far from the Rockies, and the only 'open' part to the sea is actually protected by Vancouver Island to the east. So when the weather changes you can relatively sure it will remain like that for several days.
The 'philosopher'-consort of the Governor-General, John Ralston Saul, once noted that one of the main reasons Canada (I think he really meant Toronto) is so cumbersome in terms of winter living is that the architecture takes no account of what the average person has to wear in order to be comfortable. So when you go to the cinema or the theatre there are no cloakrooms for your winter coats and boots, etc. Despite the impression I have that Saul is a buffoon, I think his observations about that aspect of Canadian culture are accurate. And, I can say that after living in Montreal during my first degree, that Quebec seems to have a better sense of what's what in precisely that 'taking-care-of-you' way.
So tell me something: after living over there in TO, you strike me as having adopted the Canadian custom of taking off your shoes by the door. Did you ever see anyone in Britain doing that? I still find it hard not to do so myself over here
Thank you, that's great.
... esd drives me nuts. I have to kill it before I can use any sound app aside from Gnome events.
Also, sound seems to be an exclusive thing -- only one sound app at a time; I can't have multiple streams. Anyone have ideas as to why?
That's true, but would you want Nicholas Negroponte really determining how the world gets its vital necessities?
All kidding aside, though, while the point you make is a good one, one problem with this line of thinking is that it 'forces' or leads people to believe that they shouldn't do anything until the basics and only the basics are handled adequately for all.
Given the level of economic underdevelopment in the countries targeted by this campaign, I'd suggest just letting it go ('let anyone try to improve things if they see a way to do it') might prove to be a better approach in the long run.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, and then I realised what the problem would be - standardisation. Too many machines, too many different combinations of hardware to troubleshoot effectively. And who would do that job? I suppose a country could get their high school geeks on the cheap to do some of the maintenance. However, I think this is one of the reasons why the recycling programmes already in place haven't been successful on an international basis -- in terms of the number of PCs that get turned into landfill, as opposed to the number that do get shipped abroad, the ratio must be ridiculously bad.
That being said, I wholeheartedly agree with you and think it should be done regardless. I guess in principle I object to just simply throwing things out and buying new stuff when older equipment could, with a bit of work, be perfectly serviceable. (I'm typing this on a crappy old 1998-vintage 633mhz Celery II as I'm broke too right now! But I do think it's fine for what I need at the moment)
I should have clarified the running order of those last two comments you quoted.
I did not say I suffered malware attacks from windowsupdate, though I may have implied it, and that was a mistake. Sorry.
Holy shit, really?!
I tried it several months and got nowhere. Is there anything I need to be aware of?
No, I am saying that I was unwilling to do so because I was concerned about XP bothering me for product activation keys again.
Oh fuck it. Why am I responding to you? I've had a look at your comments, and you're obviously a troll.