Some people think a 320kbps mp3 is perfect, but its not.
Yes, sometimes it is possible to achieve transparency with mp3, but not with complex samples, especially those involving percussion in high frequencies. It is a format limitation, and can not be fixed without abandoning mp3.
Other lossy formats such as vorbis, are not limited in this regard; so if a passage (sample) is too complex, it can simply bump the bitrate as much as it needs until transparency is achieved. Of course, this needs extensive encoder tuning, but the format is no longer a limiting factor.
Unfortunately with mp3 you can't put frames above 320kbps, and the samples that fail, will fail and 320kbps cbr can't help you, so if you use mp3 you might as well use a more cost effective vbr choice such as lame -V2; otherwise you are simply wasting space and not achieving transparency anyway.
Furthermore, different lossy formats have different properties, and some can actually achieve transparency, given enough tuning a lots of abx testing and data gathering.
While lossless might be wasting some space compared to a perfectly tuned lossy, it allows you to have a safe, clean source to test all those existing and emerging formats to begin with. Think of it as archival quality; from which you can then lossy compress in whatever you need.
Also you should not transcode something already lossy compressed into another lossy format, every time you do this you introduce artifacts and reduce quality.
Those deeply interested in the subject should visit: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ and read the many years of quality discussion archived there.
Pychoacoustics (used to tune lossy encoders) introduce another factor. Aside from different people having different hearing abilities; you are supposed to equalize your listening environment for a "flat" response. People not only rarely ever do this, they bump the settings to make it sound how "they like"; ie lots of bass or treble getting away from the average perceptual "flat" eq curve; which is what lossy encoders strive to keep; resulting in poor perception. Raw/lossless has more data able to help this real time audio modification. Ie, a lossy encoder discarded something you would have normally never listened to, but with your misuse of eq, you were expecting to hear.
Note: its not actually flat, but "Equal loudness contour" which is an average of how humans actually perceive tones.
Who needs EA when there is crowdfunding? The good people left long ago, and are making strong comebacks on their own, even banding together like they used to without answering to idiots.
I agree with blocking ads, and trackers. If that would ever make some sites unsustainable, then so be it. Asking for donations is fine with me, forcing me to see annoying ads of things I'll never buy is not. And if i ever want to buy something, i read reviews on-line from many sources first, ads mean nothing to me (can even steer me away from a product, just because of annoyance).
The amount of bandwidth this could save is pretty much well the effort. It's ridiculous how much these third party connections make a page lag, and if your net is capped, blocking 'em is a must have.
It also reminds me of cable tv. Once upon a time, the idea of paying to watch tv seemed weird, but there were no ads and that seemed like a decent trade-off. Not anymore, you pay, AND are given ads, screw it; Internet access is not free either.
Ads are the same as spamming, unsolicited and massive, and should be treated as such. AdBlock is one of the most downloaded plugins for good reason, the fork Ad Block Lite instead of Plus, just to make sure that default option to "allow unobtrusive ads" never exists. And ghostery to get rid of trackers, they are no laughing matter, many sites are using too many of them. I also use noscript to avoid anti adblock measures, (with greasemonkey standing by as ultimate defense). Controlling cookies with cookie monster and referrers with refcontrol puts me back in control.
This is not a TV and you can't force me to see things the way you want. I hate white/bright backgrounds, Stylish to the rescue, etc.
I'm glad to not live in USA. Prison is meant to prevent individuals from physically harming others; someone arguably causing profit loss to some corporation belongs to a civil (not criminal) court.
Unlike theft, with copyright infringement there is no loss of the source, its someone taking a photograph of a painting without permission, not someone taking it away from its owner.
Besides copyright in USA was meant to put a limit to hereditary rights from the English printer guilds, not preserve them. That is why the original term was 14 years + 14 max; so after 28 years everything would go public domain and thus promote the arts, science, etc, which under colonial rule were forever restricted to few.
It seems you get shorter terms there by shoplifting several dvds than downloading a movie over there. absolute nonsense.
This is another proof that people there has no value, only corporation interests count. Unfortunately they are a bad influence to others, often using dirty persuasion to force their alien rule of law into other countries. Those who don't openly defy them are at their mercy; look at the 301 black list and you'll find spots of freedom from US corporate tyranny.
Notice how they hate pharmaceutic patent infringement. Sure, as if poorer countries should put the lives of their citizens below the interests of foreign corporations; lose profits or lose lives... Great. And you wonder where the people stands in their power hierarchy. Not to mention this stupid movie/music studios/labels "losing profits" crap.
Its no wonder people there are pushed out of their homes instead of putting the executives who caused the bubble burst into jail. And this is the country whose government dares to speak of others freedoms? Are the people living in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya living in paradise today? And this is what they want for Syria and others? Millions to military funds, and nothing to homeless? Bail corporations but kick homeowners? Is that power for the people?
My respects to the 99% movement and similar, the few with courage to defy the rotted system.
Mcafee virus scan. Yes i remember, it used to tell how many viruses could detect. The earliest antivirus programs would work only for a single virus (eg: pong, or stoner) and this one could take care of many at a time. My msdos days are long gone, and even windows looks in the ancient malware past.
I remember running this program in the school lab, on 8088 Epson machines; prior to running maniac mansion in glory green monochrome graphics. Late 80ies indeed...
When the earliest windows version came along, it felt too slow and bloated, even back then, so i switched to something else, and forgot about it.
This is no longer needed. Some countries are phasing out even CFLs in favor of LEDs, for example China by 2016 won't allow sale of units over 15w. LEDs are already "shatter proof" and they don't carry any gases inside ("solid state").
China will ban imports and sales of certain incandescent light bulbs starting October 2012 to encourage the use of alternative lighting sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 5-year plan of phasing-out incandescent light bulbs over 100 watts starting October 1, 2012, and gradually extend the ban to those over 15 watts on October 1, 2016.http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/05/us-china-light-bulbs-idUSTRE7A40MV20111105
I have a couple of 10w (4x 2.5w pcs) LED flood lamps, they are too strong for direct lightning but pointing them up allows the light to reflect and diffuse back down nicely. They come up instantly and there is no flickering. Unfortunately they get a little too hot at the base because of the AC/DC transformer, thankfully i'm not enclosing them but overheating could be a problem for others. Perhaps we should adopt some form of DC power distribution inside the house to keep away this conversion from the lamps (and so many devices use DC anyway).
Have you seen white LED street lamps? I have, and they work perfectly. They are also instant (instead of minutes) and the light lets you see many more colors at night. They are about 80w to 100w, instead of the usual 250w, and happen to last 10x more.
Last time i tried, KDE4 just took too long to boot, AND would easily eat 1g of ram for itself. XFCE (and LXDE) on the other hand, are instant and provide anything needed to quickly launch apps and stay out of the way.
As a gamer, i wouldn't want that memory hog lying around, but i can see its appeal to windows vista users; unlike gnome which makes no sense whatsoever.
I'm not a fan of unity but it gets the job done, albeit slowly and bug prone (and its a dependency nightmare). Unity just mimics a bit of the MacOSX interface, which i don't particularly like either.
With XFCE, i can have a vertical panel and put a few icons there, i don't need a dock. I also don't like the "start" menu used by default with KDE, the classical style works good.
XFCE is also very stable, at least in Xubuntu 12.04, it has never ever crashed on me. Only the idiot tumbler would, very few times but you won't notice unless apport is running. Some people dislike thunar because of it, but tumbler is optional.
Being able to disable compositing is good for windowed 3d apps, like playing a rpg where you need to consult documentation or just need to leave other windows open, which is why we have larger screens for, and it also happens to consume less power.
Customary/Imperial units are a mess, and to make matters worse, you don't use a single unit but TWO different ones for measuring things (feet AND inches?). What the hell is an inch? half a feet? quarter? decimal? no... its freaking 1/12. OF COURSE you don't fit 12 feet in a yard, that would be too easy, its 3... AND you also don't fit 12 pica in an inch, but 6...
To make sense of your nonsense, we have to convert to a single unit first (eg. inches), and THEN move to metric, that is not a trivial mental operation for many.
Another American annoyance is paper sheet sizes. But there are many more areas for frustration in those outdated customs.
Let them sink in their isolation, is what we say here.
"the israelis are the ONLY ones in that entire region that have any similarity to our western ways of thought and our world views."
Did you guess why this is? They don't belong there. The modern Israel was made by western people coming mostly from european countries. Zionism is a political movement, never ever forget that. If you are Jew, read Neturei Karta (USA) to learn why Zionism goes against your own beliefs.
Also, they didn't come peacefully, they took the land by force. You can't expect the invaded to receive them cheerfully, especially after pushing the survivors into ghettos and forced exile.
The "IDF" is using banned chemical weapons against the civil population (eg. white phosphor) and military grade arsenal against civilians mostly armed with rocks and sticks.
The Americans killed Hussein and Gaddafi accusing them of the same crimes, yet nothing is done against those who lead Israel and commit all the atrocities they want.
What Hamas does is nothing more than a lonely yell of desperation against the invincible monster stomping over them, while everyone else is looking the other way.
The only sad thing here is that nothing is ever done to stop this wanton genocide of Palestinians.
As for the (true) left, they don't believe in borders but in the working exploited uniting against capitalist exploiters, to seize power and establish the government of the people, with everyone working as equals for the common benefit. The left will support class struggle only in this context, not "national" or religious, and genocides against civilians is out of the question.
I used Mint before Unity. It's "selling point", was to ignore the 4 countries which enforce software patents, and distribute codecs (such as mp3) by default. Later Ubuntu introduced "restricted-extra" packages and i forgot about Mint.
It is a separate distro, so when Canonical decided a way, and they chose another, some people decided to go with them instead. This important freedom of choice is something we should encourage instead of criticize. 3 distros? Good, 600? better. Many desktops = many options, people can use what they like, no one can force you their "one true way".
Because of unity, I simply switched desktops to XFCE, so used Xubuntu (Ubuntustudio is also using XFCE). XFCE (and LXDE) use a classic desktop, you can still sit a windows user and make them use it quickly, provided you configure it in a traditional way (single panel below, apps menu to the left, etc).
Mint is pretty much Ubuntu with a different desktop, but it lags some months behind Ubuntu, which in turn lags some months behind Debian Sid. I would recommend Mint users to stay in the version based off Ubuntu 12.04 LTS until the next one (in 2 years) comes out. That means using Linux Mint 13 instead of 14, and stick to precise PPAs for selected apps.
Mint is becoming complex, offering mini flavors of its own, they even have a Debian (instead of Ubuntu) flavor. So its hard to know when someone mentions "Mint", which "Mint" they mean.
Having used and customized XFCE, i see no reason to go with Mate. XFCE could use better defaults, but the distros can fix that. Ie: you could define the "win" (super) key to show the apps menu, assigning both super keys to run xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu.
Ad Block Lite, not Plus. Plus has an option to "allow unobtrusive ads" which is enabled by default...
Also we are talking about tracking here, not just ads, so you will also need Ghostery as well. But because they will try to detect and disable your blocking, then you are forced to enter the world of Noscript, Cookie Monster and RefControl (or equivalent combo).
The web is hostile, and for this we need to take active measures whitelisting only the few elements from the pages we trust.
Obviously this will never be respected. Like ads, we have to take active measures such as using the ghostery add on to block all known tracking methods (there is still some server side fingerprinting involving your browser version/os etc).
Nowdays you HAVE TO block this stuff; people often complain their browsing is slow, and then you discover the insane amount of traffic sent to third parties before content is even displayed in most sites. Of course using Chrome is suicidal, it belongs to a corporation who does both ads and tracking for business.
Active blocking most always needs Noscript and the discipline to use it property. This is because they use scripts to bypass/detect blocking, so for firefox adblock/ghostery/noscript are usually all needed. Because cookies and referrer are also used sometimes, you might as well add cookie monster and RefControl. In short, you have to whitelist those "features" from trusted sites and only a few things from each trusted site in order to have a decent browsing experience again. Block by default and only allow what you need.
This is done not for paranoia, but for bandwidth and latency reasons.
XFCE is not ugly. it can look identical to gnome2, and in fact can often use the very same themes. Unlike gnome2, things work as intended (ie. vertical panels); and you can visually change things without going into obscure registry like wannabes. Oh, and things go faster too...
If you refer to the american release, you are correct. There is no Super Mario Bros 2 game, its Doki Doki Panic! with different sprites, few improvements and easier game play.
The true SMB2 game made it to america in the form of "Lost Levels", for the Snes.
So you have the original SMB2 game not released in america. An improved version for snes called "Lost Levels" in america. And now this. 3 versions, not counting the Doki Doki Panic variations.
Lack of codecs is not the distro's fault, it is the US gov obeying corporations and their laws about patenting software such as codecs, which is a problem mainly in 4 countries of the world.
You deserve getting modded down because you blame it on "Linux", when the actual culprit is software patents. Distros sometimes leave this mess to the user, so you can get the codecs on your own, and you are supposed to pay for the licenses yourself or ignore the issue if you live elsewhere.
Some other distros are not based in one of those 4 oppressed countries and don't care, which is why they include the codecs.
Dell is probably paying the annual fees so they can bundle the codecs in the machines they sell.
To avoid painful updates you can get a stable distro such as Debian, or Ubuntu LTS, and stick to official repositories. You should investigate things before attempting upgrades. For instance, if using gnome2/kde3, switch to xfce/lxde before upgrade to avoid the unholy gnome3/kde4 nightmare.
Older computers are easier to service but they are bulkier, you might actually want it to be bulkier in some cases such as when you don't want them being moved around (ie. dedicated lab).
I'm seeing too many perfectly working p4s being thrown away these days. With CRTs it's even worse, many of these would last far more years than the lcds they get replaced with. A crt can last something from 15 to 30 years, where a flat screen can easily die before 5 years. Yet far too many perfectly working CRTs get dumped because they are "out of fashion".
Not to mention the absurd e-waste this causes, are the still many schools and other institutions without a single computer, even in your own country, to not mention others... Reusing machines about to be dumped is a good thing.
I believe you are talking gtk2 vs gtk3 here, and you might have a problem with the IM gui. Apps using gtk3 (there's a few more such as audacious) would need the im ui to support gtk3 in addition to gtk2. Remember qt3/4 apps also need it?
For example there is uim-gtk2.0 and uim-gtk3 along with uim-qt3 and uim-qt packages in debian based distros.
This happened because you went out of the way installing an unsupported package. Normally when you upgrade your distro using its official repositories or install new from cd, you will have all the required apps already in place tested against the bundled packages.
Once you cross the line, you should be ready to face challenges and be willing to solve them, otherwise wait for your distro to do it properly.
If you were using Ubuntu LTS (support lasts 5 years) you would simply add a PPA for gimp 2.8 and maybe the aforementioned packages depending which IME you use. Perhaps your choice of distro is what locked you in the first place, or there is a proper way to fix your problem which you missed (ie, said packages in rpm, could and most certainly have different names).
http://www.linuxjournal.com/ufiles/debian_netinstall.png If you do a netinstall, there comes a point when you are asked if you want to install a "Standard system" and there is a choice for "Desktop environment" without any futher choice. In Debian, this meant gnome. If you do the same with ubuntu (minimal iso=netinstall), it shows a longer list with choices including lxde, xfce, kde an others. http://i.imgur.com/DTFyq.png
Debian does have better tasksel choices, but they are not exposed by the installer. Sure, any pro user can stick to Standard system and after finishing, complete the install from the command line (either by running tasksel and or apt-get/aptitude, etc.
But the point is, if you do pick "Standard" and "Desktop" in the installer, it would install a gnome desktop.
The little ones to plug into usb3 ports are 32g already... I'm often finding myself with unused usb connectors on the motherboard these days. There is also sata and pata.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes: Ubuntu Minimal.
If you wanted Ubuntu with E17, the natural choice would be Bodhi Linux, which is the actual E17 flavor.
http://www.bodhilinux.com/
Some people think a 320kbps mp3 is perfect, but its not.
Yes, sometimes it is possible to achieve transparency with mp3, but not with complex samples, especially those involving percussion in high frequencies. It is a format limitation, and can not be fixed without abandoning mp3.
Other lossy formats such as vorbis, are not limited in this regard; so if a passage (sample) is too complex, it can simply bump the bitrate as much as it needs until transparency is achieved. Of course, this needs extensive encoder tuning, but the format is no longer a limiting factor.
Unfortunately with mp3 you can't put frames above 320kbps, and the samples that fail, will fail and 320kbps cbr can't help you, so if you use mp3 you might as well use a more cost effective vbr choice such as lame -V2; otherwise you are simply wasting space and not achieving transparency anyway.
Furthermore, different lossy formats have different properties, and some can actually achieve transparency, given enough tuning a lots of abx testing and data gathering.
While lossless might be wasting some space compared to a perfectly tuned lossy, it allows you to have a safe, clean source to test all those existing and emerging formats to begin with. Think of it as archival quality; from which you can then lossy compress in whatever you need.
Also you should not transcode something already lossy compressed into another lossy format, every time you do this you introduce artifacts and reduce quality.
Those deeply interested in the subject should visit: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ and read the many years of quality discussion archived there.
Pychoacoustics (used to tune lossy encoders) introduce another factor. Aside from different people having different hearing abilities; you are supposed to equalize your listening environment for a "flat" response. People not only rarely ever do this, they bump the settings to make it sound how "they like"; ie lots of bass or treble getting away from the average perceptual "flat" eq curve; which is what lossy encoders strive to keep; resulting in poor perception. Raw/lossless has more data able to help this real time audio modification. Ie, a lossy encoder discarded something you would have normally never listened to, but with your misuse of eq, you were expecting to hear.
Note: its not actually flat, but "Equal loudness contour" which is an average of how humans actually perceive tones.
Who needs EA when there is crowdfunding? The good people left long ago, and are making strong comebacks on their own, even banding together like they used to without answering to idiots.
I'm supposed to be there, I'm not supposed to be looking at things from a camera, get this right once and for all.
I agree with blocking ads, and trackers. If that would ever make some sites unsustainable, then so be it. Asking for donations is fine with me, forcing me to see annoying ads of things I'll never buy is not. And if i ever want to buy something, i read reviews on-line from many sources first, ads mean nothing to me (can even steer me away from a product, just because of annoyance).
The amount of bandwidth this could save is pretty much well the effort. It's ridiculous how much these third party connections make a page lag, and if your net is capped, blocking 'em is a must have.
It also reminds me of cable tv. Once upon a time, the idea of paying to watch tv seemed weird, but there were no ads and that seemed like a decent trade-off. Not anymore, you pay, AND are given ads, screw it; Internet access is not free either.
Ads are the same as spamming, unsolicited and massive, and should be treated as such. AdBlock is one of the most downloaded plugins for good reason, the fork Ad Block Lite instead of Plus, just to make sure that default option to "allow unobtrusive ads" never exists. And ghostery to get rid of trackers, they are no laughing matter, many sites are using too many of them. I also use noscript to avoid anti adblock measures, (with greasemonkey standing by as ultimate defense). Controlling cookies with cookie monster and referrers with refcontrol puts me back in control.
This is not a TV and you can't force me to see things the way you want. I hate white/bright backgrounds, Stylish to the rescue, etc.
I'm glad to not live in USA. Prison is meant to prevent individuals from physically harming others; someone arguably causing profit loss to some corporation belongs to a civil (not criminal) court.
Unlike theft, with copyright infringement there is no loss of the source, its someone taking a photograph of a painting without permission, not someone taking it away from its owner.
Besides copyright in USA was meant to put a limit to hereditary rights from the English printer guilds, not preserve them. That is why the original term was 14 years + 14 max; so after 28 years everything would go public domain and thus promote the arts, science, etc, which under colonial rule were forever restricted to few.
It seems you get shorter terms there by shoplifting several dvds than downloading a movie over there. absolute nonsense.
This is another proof that people there has no value, only corporation interests count. Unfortunately they are a bad influence to others, often using dirty persuasion to force their alien rule of law into other countries. Those who don't openly defy them are at their mercy; look at the 301 black list and you'll find spots of freedom from US corporate tyranny.
Notice how they hate pharmaceutic patent infringement. Sure, as if poorer countries should put the lives of their citizens below the interests of foreign corporations; lose profits or lose lives... Great. And you wonder where the people stands in their power hierarchy. Not to mention this stupid movie/music studios/labels "losing profits" crap.
Its no wonder people there are pushed out of their homes instead of putting the executives who caused the bubble burst into jail. And this is the country whose government dares to speak of others freedoms? Are the people living in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya living in paradise today? And this is what they want for Syria and others? Millions to military funds, and nothing to homeless? Bail corporations but kick homeowners? Is that power for the people?
My respects to the 99% movement and similar, the few with courage to defy the rotted system.
Mcafee virus scan. Yes i remember, it used to tell how many viruses could detect. The earliest antivirus programs would work only for a single virus (eg: pong, or stoner) and this one could take care of many at a time. My msdos days are long gone, and even windows looks in the ancient malware past.
I remember running this program in the school lab, on 8088 Epson machines; prior to running maniac mansion in glory green monochrome graphics. Late 80ies indeed...
When the earliest windows version came along, it felt too slow and bloated, even back then, so i switched to something else, and forgot about it.
This is no longer needed. Some countries are phasing out even CFLs in favor of LEDs, for example China by 2016 won't allow sale of units over 15w. LEDs are already "shatter proof" and they don't carry any gases inside ("solid state").
China will ban imports and sales of certain incandescent light bulbs starting October 2012 to encourage the use of alternative lighting sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 5-year plan of phasing-out incandescent light bulbs over 100 watts starting October 1, 2012, and gradually extend the ban to those over 15 watts on October 1, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/05/us-china-light-bulbs-idUSTRE7A40MV20111105
I have a couple of 10w (4x 2.5w pcs) LED flood lamps, they are too strong for direct lightning but pointing them up allows the light to reflect and diffuse back down nicely. They come up instantly and there is no flickering. Unfortunately they get a little too hot at the base because of the AC/DC transformer, thankfully i'm not enclosing them but overheating could be a problem for others. Perhaps we should adopt some form of DC power distribution inside the house to keep away this conversion from the lamps (and so many devices use DC anyway).
Have you seen white LED street lamps? I have, and they work perfectly. They are also instant (instead of minutes) and the light lets you see many more colors at night. They are about 80w to 100w, instead of the usual 250w, and happen to last 10x more.
Last time i tried, KDE4 just took too long to boot, AND would easily eat 1g of ram for itself. XFCE (and LXDE) on the other hand, are instant and provide anything needed to quickly launch apps and stay out of the way.
As a gamer, i wouldn't want that memory hog lying around, but i can see its appeal to windows vista users; unlike gnome which makes no sense whatsoever.
I'm not a fan of unity but it gets the job done, albeit slowly and bug prone (and its a dependency nightmare). Unity just mimics a bit of the MacOSX interface, which i don't particularly like either.
With XFCE, i can have a vertical panel and put a few icons there, i don't need a dock. I also don't like the "start" menu used by default with KDE, the classical style works good.
XFCE is also very stable, at least in Xubuntu 12.04, it has never ever crashed on me. Only the idiot tumbler would, very few times but you won't notice unless apport is running. Some people dislike thunar because of it, but tumbler is optional.
Being able to disable compositing is good for windowed 3d apps, like playing a rpg where you need to consult documentation or just need to leave other windows open, which is why we have larger screens for, and it also happens to consume less power.
Notably the "blue people syndrome". Incidentally, it also allows the playback of 10bit content, if you manage to find a site serving those.
In any case, Adobe is at fault for the lousy "hardware" support.
I learned under metric, for me those "customary" units of height are very hard to grasp.
In metric, everything is in tens, you add or subtract zeros, thats it.
A meter contains 10 decimeters (rarely used), a decimeter contains 10 centimeters, a centimeter contains 10 milliliters, etc.
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html
Customary/Imperial units are a mess, and to make matters worse, you don't use a single unit but TWO different ones for measuring things (feet AND inches?). What the hell is an inch? half a feet? quarter? decimal? no... its freaking 1/12. OF COURSE you don't fit 12 feet in a yard, that would be too easy, its 3... AND you also don't fit 12 pica in an inch, but 6...
To make sense of your nonsense, we have to convert to a single unit first (eg. inches), and THEN move to metric, that is not a trivial mental operation for many.
Another American annoyance is paper sheet sizes. But there are many more areas for frustration in those outdated customs.
Let them sink in their isolation, is what we say here.
"the israelis are the ONLY ones in that entire region that have any similarity to our western ways of thought and our world views."
Did you guess why this is? They don't belong there. The modern Israel was made by western people coming mostly from european countries.
Zionism is a political movement, never ever forget that. If you are Jew, read Neturei Karta (USA) to learn why Zionism goes against your own beliefs.
Also, they didn't come peacefully, they took the land by force. You can't expect the invaded to receive them cheerfully, especially after pushing the survivors into ghettos and forced exile.
The "IDF" is using banned chemical weapons against the civil population (eg. white phosphor) and military grade arsenal against civilians mostly armed with rocks and sticks.
The Americans killed Hussein and Gaddafi accusing them of the same crimes, yet nothing is done against those who lead Israel and commit all the atrocities they want.
What Hamas does is nothing more than a lonely yell of desperation against the invincible monster stomping over them, while everyone else is looking the other way.
The only sad thing here is that nothing is ever done to stop this wanton genocide of Palestinians.
As for the (true) left, they don't believe in borders but in the working exploited uniting against capitalist exploiters, to seize power and establish the government of the people, with everyone working as equals for the common benefit. The left will support class struggle only in this context, not "national" or religious, and genocides against civilians is out of the question.
Bad example, steam and the games don't need Unity, the rest you already have it in the Ubuntu derived Mint.
Mint 14 = Ubuntu 12.10, Mint 13 = Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
All Ubuntu derivatives should have no issues running Steam. I tested with Xubuntu 12.04 64 bits and it works perfectly.
I used Mint before Unity. It's "selling point", was to ignore the 4 countries which enforce software patents, and distribute codecs (such as mp3) by default. Later Ubuntu introduced "restricted-extra" packages and i forgot about Mint.
It is a separate distro, so when Canonical decided a way, and they chose another, some people decided to go with them instead. This important freedom of choice is something we should encourage instead of criticize. 3 distros? Good, 600? better. Many desktops = many options, people can use what they like, no one can force you their "one true way".
Because of unity, I simply switched desktops to XFCE, so used Xubuntu (Ubuntustudio is also using XFCE). XFCE (and LXDE) use a classic desktop, you can still sit a windows user and make them use it quickly, provided you configure it in a traditional way (single panel below, apps menu to the left, etc).
Mint is pretty much Ubuntu with a different desktop, but it lags some months behind Ubuntu, which in turn lags some months behind Debian Sid. I would recommend Mint users to stay in the version based off Ubuntu 12.04 LTS until the next one (in 2 years) comes out. That means using Linux Mint 13 instead of 14, and stick to precise PPAs for selected apps.
Mint is becoming complex, offering mini flavors of its own, they even have a Debian (instead of Ubuntu) flavor. So its hard to know when someone mentions "Mint", which "Mint" they mean.
Having used and customized XFCE, i see no reason to go with Mate. XFCE could use better defaults, but the distros can fix that. Ie: you could define the "win" (super) key to show the apps menu, assigning both super keys to run xfce4-popup-applicationsmenu.
Red Hat; Caldera; Suse; Slackware; Debian; Ubuntu; Linux Mint; Xubuntu.
So the entire world does not agree with you...
Ad Block Lite, not Plus. Plus has an option to "allow unobtrusive ads" which is enabled by default...
Also we are talking about tracking here, not just ads, so you will also need Ghostery as well. But because they will try to detect and disable your blocking, then you are forced to enter the world of Noscript, Cookie Monster and RefControl (or equivalent combo).
The web is hostile, and for this we need to take active measures whitelisting only the few elements from the pages we trust.
Obviously this will never be respected. Like ads, we have to take active measures such as using the ghostery add on to block all known tracking methods (there is still some server side fingerprinting involving your browser version/os etc).
Nowdays you HAVE TO block this stuff; people often complain their browsing is slow, and then you discover the insane amount of traffic sent to third parties before content is even displayed in most sites. Of course using Chrome is suicidal, it belongs to a corporation who does both ads and tracking for business.
Active blocking most always needs Noscript and the discipline to use it property. This is because they use scripts to bypass/detect blocking, so for firefox adblock/ghostery/noscript are usually all needed. Because cookies and referrer are also used sometimes, you might as well add cookie monster and RefControl. In short, you have to whitelist those "features" from trusted sites and only a few things from each trusted site in order to have a decent browsing experience again. Block by default and only allow what you need.
This is done not for paranoia, but for bandwidth and latency reasons.
XFCE is not ugly. it can look identical to gnome2, and in fact can often use the very same themes. Unlike gnome2, things work as intended (ie. vertical panels); and you can visually change things without going into obscure registry like wannabes. Oh, and things go faster too...
If you refer to the american release, you are correct. There is no Super Mario Bros 2 game, its Doki Doki Panic! with different sprites, few improvements and easier game play.
The true SMB2 game made it to america in the form of "Lost Levels", for the Snes.
So you have the original SMB2 game not released in america.
An improved version for snes called "Lost Levels" in america.
And now this. 3 versions, not counting the Doki Doki Panic variations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doki_Doki_Panic#Development
Lack of codecs is not the distro's fault, it is the US gov obeying corporations and their laws about patenting software such as codecs, which is a problem mainly in 4 countries of the world.
You deserve getting modded down because you blame it on "Linux", when the actual culprit is software patents. Distros sometimes leave this mess to the user, so you can get the codecs on your own, and you are supposed to pay for the licenses yourself or ignore the issue if you live elsewhere.
Some other distros are not based in one of those 4 oppressed countries and don't care, which is why they include the codecs.
Dell is probably paying the annual fees so they can bundle the codecs in the machines they sell.
To avoid painful updates you can get a stable distro such as Debian, or Ubuntu LTS, and stick to official repositories. You should investigate things before attempting upgrades. For instance, if using gnome2/kde3, switch to xfce/lxde before upgrade to avoid the unholy gnome3/kde4 nightmare.
Older computers are easier to service but they are bulkier, you might actually want it to be bulkier in some cases such as when you don't want them being moved around (ie. dedicated lab).
I'm seeing too many perfectly working p4s being thrown away these days. With CRTs it's even worse, many of these would last far more years than the lcds they get replaced with. A crt can last something from 15 to 30 years, where a flat screen can easily die before 5 years. Yet far too many perfectly working CRTs get dumped because they are "out of fashion".
Not to mention the absurd e-waste this causes, are the still many schools and other institutions without a single computer, even in your own country, to not mention others... Reusing machines about to be dumped is a good thing.
I believe you are talking gtk2 vs gtk3 here, and you might have a problem with the IM gui. Apps using gtk3 (there's a few more such as audacious) would need the im ui to support gtk3 in addition to gtk2. Remember qt3/4 apps also need it?
For example there is uim-gtk2.0 and uim-gtk3 along with uim-qt3 and uim-qt packages in debian based distros.
This happened because you went out of the way installing an unsupported package. Normally when you upgrade your distro using its official repositories or install new from cd, you will have all the required apps already in place tested against the bundled packages.
Once you cross the line, you should be ready to face challenges and be willing to solve them, otherwise wait for your distro to do it properly.
If you were using Ubuntu LTS (support lasts 5 years) you would simply add a PPA for gimp 2.8 and maybe the aforementioned packages depending which IME you use. Perhaps your choice of distro is what locked you in the first place, or there is a proper way to fix your problem which you missed (ie, said packages in rpm, could and most certainly have different names).
http://www.linuxjournal.com/ufiles/debian_netinstall.png
If you do a netinstall, there comes a point when you are asked if you want to install a "Standard system" and there is a choice for "Desktop environment" without any futher choice. In Debian, this meant gnome. If you do the same with ubuntu (minimal iso=netinstall), it shows a longer list with choices including lxde, xfce, kde an others.
http://i.imgur.com/DTFyq.png
Debian does have better tasksel choices, but they are not exposed by the installer. Sure, any pro user can stick to Standard system and after finishing, complete the install from the command line (either by running tasksel and or apt-get/aptitude, etc.
But the point is, if you do pick "Standard" and "Desktop" in the installer, it would install a gnome desktop.
Quite interesting, all sorts of inside ports can be used to plug flash memory:
http://www.supertalent.com/products/ssd_category_detail.php?type=FDM
The little ones to plug into usb3 ports are 32g already... I'm often finding myself with unused usb connectors on the motherboard these days. There is also sata and pata.