ubuntu seems to have a really decent and helpful community base of users
*Why* do I keep hearing this when all I ever hear from an Ubuntu user is "apt-get", and when I say "But my Ubuntu isn't running on the internet" they've lost track of the conversation already?
I'm not painting all American's with the same brush here, btw. I'm already OT so getting modded troll as well...
Pahdnuh, I *is* Amer'kin, and y'all can come up on in about back here any time and tell us more of your insightful wisdom into Americans! By the way, American TV is so bad because it costs a couple hundred dollars a month and it's so expensive because you cancel it in disgust in the second month. Then you take up reading. At night, the ice weasels come.
I gave in and listened to the hype, and I consider my having downloaded Ubuntu to burn it to CD and try it to be a waste of time. Ubuntu comes with just one desktop (Gnome, and I'm a Fluxbox man), 3/4 of the programs you would even expect to come with a live CD missing, takes 5 times as long as the other systems to boot (I mean I timed this. On multiple computers. With a stopwatch. Against Red Hat, Slackware, Mandriva, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Knoppix, Mepis, and MediainLinux...and MS Windows 98!!!), is the *only* Linux distro I have ever used to have crashed (from just *sitting* there!) and would not run on any of the computers in my household without extensive tweaking, even finding some machines it wouldn't run on at all.
There is *no* reason for Ubuntu to be this popular. It's been hyped, probably by people who get paid to hype. They do make money off of their tech support, don't they?
PS I'm COUNTING on flames, and have my filters set accordingly. This is the God's truth as I type it. Normally I'm all for an open debate on Slashdot, but this time, if your opinions differ from mine on this subject, you can basically tell it to the wall.
Programs that don't use the libraries won't run on Windows, unless it's the simplest DOS-command-line doohickey.
I forgot to add: "or unless you write your own entire library yourself, writen to emulate the Windows environment without copying it, which is how Free/Open Software gets ported to Windows."
When I speak of strings, I mean legal strings. Re: when you make a program with a Microsoft compiler, unless you paid extra for the super-duper licensed version, there is a restriction on what you can do with your own program! Say you compiled a program with the Visual C++ beginner's edition. Every time you run that program, a dialog box will pop up specifying that the terms of the EULA state that you cannot use it for a commercial purpose or redistribute it...and there's no way to use this compiler without that "feature". Further restrictions apply to using Microsoft foundation class libraries - code written to utilize this effectively belongs to Microsoft, period. It can't be released without paying them a fee. Programs that don't use the libraries won't run on Windows, unless it's the simplest DOS-command-line doohickey.
One of the biggest motivations to go open-source! In the Linux world, absolutely every line of code you write on a Linux box with a Linux tool is yours to give away or sell, whatever you want. But if that's not an option, as we've discussed elsewhere, there's Bloodshed's Dev-C++ compiler and other free options.
Here in the US, the plan seems to be to conquor the entire planet and pirate fossil fuels until the last drop is used...after which time, I wonder what plan B is? Scoop up corpes of vanquished third-world citizens and burn them, too? The heck with Soylent Green, we'll be too busy converting corpses into Soylent Gas, instead.
I remember reading about Australia's solar-powered car race back in the 80's in the Smithsonian. Naive child that I was, then, I thought, "Wow! If they're doing that already, it can't be five years until we see them on the streets in the US!"
Now, every time I bring this up, I hear "Aw, you can't drive from 'Frisco to Vegas in a single day in a solar-powered car!", so I'll cut out the middle man: You can keep your gas-guzzler for cross-country runs, industrial/commercial use, and off-road exploring. I'm talking about city-use only with these. The average urban dweller just needs to get around town, for driving times of less than 40 minutes each, on roads with lots of stop-and-go driving and speed limits 45 MPH or less - not counting the freeway (In places like LA, the freeways work out exactly the same, anyway, thanks to traffic!). To and from work, the store, appointments, etc. A hybrid electric-solar urban vehicle could be light (about half the raw materials we currently use), two-passenger (who needs the extra seats when most folks wouldn't car-pool if there were a gun to their heads?), and would only need to store a maximum of three or four hours charge (when was the last time you Big City types had a commute longer than that?). The expensive part comes in upgrading all the parking spaces - installing an outlet in each one. The car could locate the sensor whenever it's parked and automatically plug itself in, whenever it detects that it's low on juice. The cost is offset by the parking meters - which we already have all over the place downtown, anyway.
The heck with the future - we should have started doing this ten years ago! Don't give me the usual Slashdot chant: "Can't happen! Won't work! Impossible!" Apply the freakin' science already! Instead of gas running you several hundred dollars a week, you could pay half that in taxes to fund this project.
I lived for five years in Las Vegas putting up with construction hassles and traffic tie-ups while they built their monorail, then I moved away without ever getting to ride the thing! Anybody out that way Had The Priveledge, yet?
You'd think a monorail is a simple thing to build, until you live near one for awhile and realize that it's a massive undertaking. Building in the air is complicated by all the structures that are already up there.
The audience of people who consume "urine, defecation, S&M, etc." videos is rather small.
The urine and defecation factor you have pegged. But the whole S&M thing is so broad a definition, it's been estimated that the *majority* of people have engaged in it in some form or another. Oral sex, anal sex, tickling, holding...etc. All depends on who's defining it. Every been in a relationship where there was a consensual surrender of power, even playfully for one minute? Guilty! Had a girlfriend who asked you to be "rough" so she could fantasize she was being raped? Goner. Wife ever smacked you on the heinnie for being a smart-aleck? It's all the same thing to the law.
True story: I just got up from watching Disney's "the Three Musketeers" with my kids (worth every dollar of the $4.99 it cost - take it as you will). In it, there's a scene where Clarabell Cow has Goofy in chains and is ready to chuck him off a bridge, but Goofy sings her a song and gets her to fall in love with him. They kiss, etc, with him still chained up. Wow, S&m *and* dog/cow bestiality! I'm *so* perverted, now!
Anywho, you're at least right that S&m videos are a niche market. But the majority of people see S&m as something far, uh, dirtier than whatever it is they like to do. One thing for sure: the majority of people you'll see convicted off this will be lesbian, gay, non-white-color, non-Christian, and damned-near-never rich white Christian Republicans from Texas.
I wonder if, once the kernel, KDE, and GNOME guys have to lug around twenty years' worth of backward compatibility, they'll be exactly like Windows... bloated, buggy, and insecure.
*Ahem* Meet Blackbox, Fluxbox, XFCE, TWM, IceWM, FVWM, Window-Maker*, and Rat Poison...I use three Linux distros and don't touch KDE or Gnome, though I call their panels and programs up in my other window managers from time to time. As for the kernel, well, we'll just have to see, because Linux is, after all, an ongoing experiment. But consider that no billionaire - or even trillionaire - could buy the kind of manpower that happens every week on Linux, when somebody patches, tweaks, and re-compiles their own kernel.
Linux was never about perfect software. GNU and Linux were only the first to say, "Here's the same source and compiler that we work with - because you, the user, are just as smart as us!"
* Window-Maker - the underdog. My favorite is Fluxbox, but I love Window-Maker, too. Any cheers out there for Window-Maker? Anybody at all?
Because much as/. knocks them this is the sort of thing they can manage, astonishing turn arounds.
Oh, and rest assured, this latest news has completely restored my temporarily flagging faith in Microsoft...and surpassed it! Yes, I'll be deleting Linux off my machines the day Vista comes out, because Microsoft means quality!
It's hard to type with your nose touching the screen...how do you do it?
It is now officially against the law to be into BDSM in America! My kinky wife and I celebrated with hot wax, flavored body rubs, feather tickles, and then flogging each other into an endorphin-fueled state of catonia.
Now outlaw Linux and reading, you fools! Outlaw it, so I can truly say that *everything* I do is illegal! I can't wait to be a Master Criminal desperado staying in his house and committing his victimless crimes behind closed doors where nobody could possibly be affected, let alone care! Because the stupider this government gets, the more people tell it to go to hell!
Anybody who mods this down, you'll have Satan himself to answer to.
I'm guessing a good candidate for pictures would be something like jpg.
You *are* aware what a lossy format.jpg's are, right?.png's are nearly as universal, and they'd be able to reproduce the original image data better, so you could shrink 'em smaller. Just my 1.999-cents. Used to work with microfilm, so i'm used to thinking it terms of "highest-definition resolution for smallest amount of space". Unfortunately,.png's do take up more "space" (memory), but it might be negligible if you could make every pixel count instead of "close enough". Interresting points, all round...
Having worked around welders, the acetylene thing put me off. Next time you're around a big metal bottle of the stuff (and there's nothing lit or burning for miles around, and you're outside!), crack the valve real quick and take a whiff. Farts don't begin to describe it, you have to mix in a rotten egg and a scortched garlic clove, along with the kind of farts your dog makes after eating liver. Good thing it's 821,190,000 miles from Earth, or we'd be able to smell it from here.
Come to that, there's the Bloodshed C compiler
http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html , also free. "Fancy" IDE and all! But that's still small potatoes compared to the support for some 10-15 compilers/interpretters shipping with major Linux distros (let's see, I have C, C++, objective C, Lisp, CLisp, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java (the gcj? I think I recall), Tcl/Tk, awk, sed, POVray scene description language, assembly (in a couple of flavors)...
We can't stop a rag-tag band of thugs from high-jacking our planes. We're helpless as kittens for two weeks dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. We can do nothing to generate energy but burn more dead dinosaurs. But rest assured that if you try to hide in a hole in the Antarctic ice and play 1 $14.99 CD illegally on your Linux box, our Goon Squad will be all over you like ants on a donut.
For God's sake, it's still my language of choice! It's not like I'm condemning it, I'm just saying it'll be nice when the whole language can sit still for a few months. Here:
It says "deprecated functions". Now, go scream "FUD" at Guido, yah swab!
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode?
on
State of the Onion 9
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can't imagine any thing that broke older python programs.
Well, Blender scripts (specifically anything calling the math module) no go on 2.4, go on 2.3. To name *one* example. And what about the string/character-handling functions? Going through the docs, every other one of them has "Do not use, we're getting rid of this one." stamped all over it. Whole language has been that way since I got into it, where have you been?
I don't love to hate MS. I don't hate MacIntosh, or SunOS, or BSD after all. If Microsoft quit coming on like the motherboard-Mafia and accepted that it's own customers, as well as the rest of the world, get more value when the companies co-exist peacefully, my attitude towards Bill Gates would change from hatred to passive indifference over-night.
The tragedy of it all is, MS persists in this at it's own expense. Imagine waking up tomorrow to see MS touting it's new open documant formats, company-hosted utilities for converting to and from other OS's native file formats, a new release of their OS (call it "good neighbor" Windows!) that accepts it's place in a hard-drive's file system and even co-operates with Lilo. Wait, don't faint, yet! How about a live Windows-CD that runs on top of Linux systems, an OS release that includes a free compiler (which creates fully capable binaries with NO STRINGS ATTATCHED!) and a Windows utility that can handle a man page, a.png file, and run.elf binaries? Now, don't you think that would change the ill will to good will? Wouldn't this be a new selling point - "Why *switch* to Linux when we'll generously let you have both?" I mean, come on, would there be any end to the marketing potential? MS is frantically clawing, looking for a foothold in the changing field - and this most obvious answer is staring them in the face, and they can't see it. So down they go, and the rest of us will have a more peaceful co-existence when they're gone.
Hell, I don't hate Microsoft, I pity them. They might have more money than me, but I sleep soundly at night with a serene conscience.
Slashdot Mirror
On the plus side, you can program in Lisp, now.
*Why* do I keep hearing this when all I ever hear from an Ubuntu user is "apt-get", and when I say "But my Ubuntu isn't running on the internet" they've lost track of the conversation already?
Pahdnuh, I *is* Amer'kin, and y'all can come up on in about back here any time and tell us more of your insightful wisdom into Americans! By the way, American TV is so bad because it costs a couple hundred dollars a month and it's so expensive because you cancel it in disgust in the second month. Then you take up reading. At night, the ice weasels come.
There is *no* reason for Ubuntu to be this popular. It's been hyped, probably by people who get paid to hype. They do make money off of their tech support, don't they?
PS I'm COUNTING on flames, and have my filters set accordingly. This is the God's truth as I type it. Normally I'm all for an open debate on Slashdot, but this time, if your opinions differ from mine on this subject, you can basically tell it to the wall.
I forgot to add: "or unless you write your own entire library yourself, writen to emulate the Windows environment without copying it, which is how Free/Open Software gets ported to Windows."
One of the biggest motivations to go open-source! In the Linux world, absolutely every line of code you write on a Linux box with a Linux tool is yours to give away or sell, whatever you want. But if that's not an option, as we've discussed elsewhere, there's Bloodshed's Dev-C++ compiler and other free options.
"hybrid electric-solar" cars - part battery, part solar panels, electric feed in should you run out of daylight.
I mean, use a sensor to locate the outlet...
I remember reading about Australia's solar-powered car race back in the 80's in the Smithsonian. Naive child that I was, then, I thought, "Wow! If they're doing that already, it can't be five years until we see them on the streets in the US!"
Now, every time I bring this up, I hear "Aw, you can't drive from 'Frisco to Vegas in a single day in a solar-powered car!", so I'll cut out the middle man: You can keep your gas-guzzler for cross-country runs, industrial/commercial use, and off-road exploring. I'm talking about city-use only with these. The average urban dweller just needs to get around town, for driving times of less than 40 minutes each, on roads with lots of stop-and-go driving and speed limits 45 MPH or less - not counting the freeway (In places like LA, the freeways work out exactly the same, anyway, thanks to traffic!). To and from work, the store, appointments, etc. A hybrid electric-solar urban vehicle could be light (about half the raw materials we currently use), two-passenger (who needs the extra seats when most folks wouldn't car-pool if there were a gun to their heads?), and would only need to store a maximum of three or four hours charge (when was the last time you Big City types had a commute longer than that?). The expensive part comes in upgrading all the parking spaces - installing an outlet in each one. The car could locate the sensor whenever it's parked and automatically plug itself in, whenever it detects that it's low on juice. The cost is offset by the parking meters - which we already have all over the place downtown, anyway.
The heck with the future - we should have started doing this ten years ago! Don't give me the usual Slashdot chant: "Can't happen! Won't work! Impossible!" Apply the freakin' science already! Instead of gas running you several hundred dollars a week, you could pay half that in taxes to fund this project.
You'd think a monorail is a simple thing to build, until you live near one for awhile and realize that it's a massive undertaking. Building in the air is complicated by all the structures that are already up there.
The urine and defecation factor you have pegged. But the whole S&M thing is so broad a definition, it's been estimated that the *majority* of people have engaged in it in some form or another. Oral sex, anal sex, tickling, holding...etc. All depends on who's defining it. Every been in a relationship where there was a consensual surrender of power, even playfully for one minute? Guilty! Had a girlfriend who asked you to be "rough" so she could fantasize she was being raped? Goner. Wife ever smacked you on the heinnie for being a smart-aleck? It's all the same thing to the law.
True story: I just got up from watching Disney's "the Three Musketeers" with my kids (worth every dollar of the $4.99 it cost - take it as you will). In it, there's a scene where Clarabell Cow has Goofy in chains and is ready to chuck him off a bridge, but Goofy sings her a song and gets her to fall in love with him. They kiss, etc, with him still chained up. Wow, S&m *and* dog/cow bestiality! I'm *so* perverted, now!
Anywho, you're at least right that S&m videos are a niche market. But the majority of people see S&m as something far, uh, dirtier than whatever it is they like to do. One thing for sure: the majority of people you'll see convicted off this will be lesbian, gay, non-white-color, non-Christian, and damned-near-never rich white Christian Republicans from Texas.
*Ahem* Meet Blackbox, Fluxbox, XFCE, TWM, IceWM, FVWM, Window-Maker*, and Rat Poison...I use three Linux distros and don't touch KDE or Gnome, though I call their panels and programs up in my other window managers from time to time. As for the kernel, well, we'll just have to see, because Linux is, after all, an ongoing experiment. But consider that no billionaire - or even trillionaire - could buy the kind of manpower that happens every week on Linux, when somebody patches, tweaks, and re-compiles their own kernel.
Linux was never about perfect software. GNU and Linux were only the first to say, "Here's the same source and compiler that we work with - because you, the user, are just as smart as us!"
* Window-Maker - the underdog. My favorite is Fluxbox, but I love Window-Maker, too. Any cheers out there for Window-Maker? Anybody at all?
Oh, and rest assured, this latest news has completely restored my temporarily flagging faith in Microsoft...and surpassed it! Yes, I'll be deleting Linux off my machines the day Vista comes out, because Microsoft means quality!
It's hard to type with your nose touching the screen...how do you do it?
OK, perhaps it might be unwise to go around cracking gas can valves just for the experience. Live 'n' learn, kiddies!
Now outlaw Linux and reading, you fools! Outlaw it, so I can truly say that *everything* I do is illegal! I can't wait to be a Master Criminal desperado staying in his house and committing his victimless crimes behind closed doors where nobody could possibly be affected, let alone care! Because the stupider this government gets, the more people tell it to go to hell!
Anybody who mods this down, you'll have Satan himself to answer to.
You *are* aware what a lossy format .jpg's are, right? .png's are nearly as universal, and they'd be able to reproduce the original image data better, so you could shrink 'em smaller. Just my 1.999-cents. Used to work with microfilm, so i'm used to thinking it terms of "highest-definition resolution for smallest amount of space". Unfortunately, .png's do take up more "space" (memory), but it might be negligible if you could make every pixel count instead of "close enough". Interresting points, all round...
I'm putting off my re-entry to life as long as possible about now...
Having worked around welders, the acetylene thing put me off. Next time you're around a big metal bottle of the stuff (and there's nothing lit or burning for miles around, and you're outside!), crack the valve real quick and take a whiff. Farts don't begin to describe it, you have to mix in a rotten egg and a scortched garlic clove, along with the kind of farts your dog makes after eating liver. Good thing it's 821,190,000 miles from Earth, or we'd be able to smell it from here.
Come to that, there's the Bloodshed C compiler http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.html , also free. "Fancy" IDE and all! But that's still small potatoes compared to the support for some 10-15 compilers/interpretters shipping with major Linux distros (let's see, I have C, C++, objective C, Lisp, CLisp, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java (the gcj? I think I recall), Tcl/Tk, awk, sed, POVray scene description language, assembly (in a couple of flavors)...
We can't stop a rag-tag band of thugs from high-jacking our planes. We're helpless as kittens for two weeks dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. We can do nothing to generate energy but burn more dead dinosaurs. But rest assured that if you try to hide in a hole in the Antarctic ice and play 1 $14.99 CD illegally on your Linux box, our Goon Squad will be all over you like ants on a donut.
For God's sake, it's still my language of choice! It's not like I'm condemning it, I'm just saying it'll be nice when the whole language can sit still for a few months. Here:
http://docs.python.org/lib/node110.html
It says "deprecated functions". Now, go scream "FUD" at Guido, yah swab!
Well, Blender scripts (specifically anything calling the math module) no go on 2.4, go on 2.3. To name *one* example. And what about the string/character-handling functions? Going through the docs, every other one of them has "Do not use, we're getting rid of this one." stamped all over it. Whole language has been that way since I got into it, where have you been?
The tragedy of it all is, MS persists in this at it's own expense. Imagine waking up tomorrow to see MS touting it's new open documant formats, company-hosted utilities for converting to and from other OS's native file formats, a new release of their OS (call it "good neighbor" Windows!) that accepts it's place in a hard-drive's file system and even co-operates with Lilo. Wait, don't faint, yet! How about a live Windows-CD that runs on top of Linux systems, an OS release that includes a free compiler (which creates fully capable binaries with NO STRINGS ATTATCHED!) and a Windows utility that can handle a man page, a .png file, and run .elf binaries? Now, don't you think that would change the ill will to good will? Wouldn't this be a new selling point - "Why *switch* to Linux when we'll generously let you have both?" I mean, come on, would there be any end to the marketing potential? MS is frantically clawing, looking for a foothold in the changing field - and this most obvious answer is staring them in the face, and they can't see it. So down they go, and the rest of us will have a more peaceful co-existence when they're gone.
Hell, I don't hate Microsoft, I pity them. They might have more money than me, but I sleep soundly at night with a serene conscience.
It works for getting comments modded up on /.