I think if you view the movie version of Minority Report again and take a close look at the interface of the computer used (with the glove extension) and bear in mind the story was published in The Little Black Box in 1987, and maybe before that as welll, I can see a case for attributing Philip K. Dick with the invention of Playstation 2 dance mats as a first step toward this thinkium-like interface and confusing screen. </BadAttemptAtHumour>
How much did he invent those things, as opposed to inspire them?
How can you tell when Microsoft will cease support for one of their operating systems?
I'm trying to influence a friend's purchase of a new PC, I think if it was shorter than 2 years the expiry date for support for XP Home/Professional could influence his opinion. (He wants gaming, and that's it, not even Word.)
It'd be handy for future reference too if I knew where to look for Windows details like this. A brief skim through the XP EULA didn't clarify this matter.
Here in Ireland companies are required to maintain a vast amount of information on phone logs which has put off a certain amount of corporate investment. It's not an area I know very well, but it is a bug bear of an excellent columnist, I believe to be American, living in Ireland and writing for a respected broadsheet newspaper The Irish Times.
For occasional mention of one European country's habits in data harvesting I advise checking the archives of Ms. Lillington's blog which features the full content of her articles as submitted to the aforementioned newspaper.
Anyone who has setup an e-mail client such as Thunderbird, Mail (on OS X) and Opera Mail - the only three I've set up in the past, but it should hold for all - might recall a strange experience.
If you do not change a setting in your Gmail preferences, when your client first connects to pop.gmail.com you download every message you have received since you started using your Gmail account. All incoming, not outgoing AFAIK.
This can be useful if you've deleted something by mistake. But, the point being, your messages don't go away even after you empty your trash, and we all knew this signing up for Gmail because of all the publicity over Gmail's targeted advertising. Personally, I don't mind the trade off against a 2+ GB e-mail account accessible anywhere, but I'll grant I'm also more conscious of message content in Gmail than other accounts.
To return to the point about e-mail client programs: the user can change a setting in Gmail preferences which will only let the client download messages from after a certain date, so if you were setting up Thunderbird to retrieve Gmail now, you set it to today's date and you only get new mail to your client. But I've always presumed Google still has a copy because you can always go back and change the date to an earlier time.
Switch made, but don't know how to re-init X without screwing up my emerges. Thanks for this, I will google this tomorrow, but here in Ireland it's 04.25 and please don't expect a reply futher to this.
It's a Logitech generic three button mouse, about 8 or more years old, I couldn't possibly hazard a guess at model number. I got it when I was using Windows 95, and I will never love another peripheral like it. It's a PS/2. From the xorg.conf:
Thanks, I'd already set that, and changed the setting to where it pointed to by default to find/dev/input/mouse0 instead of/dev/mouse or something similar, and tried a cat/dev/input/mouse0. Clicking the scrollwheel here does produce cursor movement and weird keystrokes, so there's probably only one or two things out of place. I'm still emerging OOo and GIMP, so it'll be morning before I can reboot. Thanks for the tips, much appreciated. Especially considering the thread it's in where "Don't fucking comment if you don't know what you're talking about" is modded up to Insightful, and all these comments were parented initially by a troll - which I only regretfully realised a long time after my initial post and means I feel no guilt whatsoever abusing this thread for lite tech support and off-topic banter.:-P
I use Gentoo on x86, I never could get it on my G5. Instead I put in Yellow Dog Linux 4 - which I blame for corrupting a filesystem. So I'll never let a Linux distro touch my Apple again. Anyway, I love Tiger too much now. But a friend is getting rid of his pc, so I harvested his hard drive and occasionally put it in my pc and I put Gentoo on it to see what it's like. All good reviews after you get past a few things:
1. unfortunately no damn desktop environment on initial install
2. not all, but some Gentoo users are so far up their own arse they think it's reasonable to tell newbs to get lost and that if they stopped using Gentoo, Gentoo would benefit. Nice. However, I put up with Apple's support - like the bitch who couldn't give a damn when one of their computers was ordered early December as a present for Christmas and was delivered mid-January, so a stuck up volunteer based support community is better than a stuck up professional support community, and quicker too.
Yeah, I've edited/etc/X11/xorg.conf to include
#Option "Buttons" "5"
I'm hoping a reboot solves this as it recognised the 3 buttons, but not the 4th and 5th for up and down.
//Yeah, I know. Not the time (02.50 a.m.) or the place for this.
Nope, just I've found Gentoo more responsive on the same hardware than Slackware 10. I'm new to Gentoo, so did a Stage 3 install. Presumably the compiling serves some purpose though - not that I'll ever do it myself in all likelihood, I can't even get X11 to recognise the scrollwheel on my mouse at the moment - but I'm sure if anywhere this is the right place for someone else to indicate if there is any real benefit to Stage 1. I did try it once on PPC64 - which I've given up on as terminally immature - the Stage 1 takes a massive amount of time, not obviously when compared with how long you're going to use an unchanged system for, but still, a long 4 or 5 hours to keep checking back on the machine looking at quickly scrolling lines of compilation details, which just makes it seem longer.........
Alternate answer:
No. Maybe someone else knows more about this.
If it's set up by an admin, then I would add Gentoo to that list. Sure it's a PITA that you have to emerge a desktop environment and compile it, but Portage makes it worthwhile, and if you really nail it with Stage 1 installs (which would of course take a whole weekend for just a small office) users could have marginally improved performance on Linux.
SuSE probably the best option because of tech support for corporate customers though.
While I do still have a My Pictures folder I use (still called For The GIMP even though I finally got Photoshop) other than that I use two main folders which I direct most documents to. They are:
F:\DownloadSoftware
and
F:\Horrible Untrustworthy Dangerous Software
The My Documents folder names sucked, and their location was annoying when you first start because of your very point. I'm a Mac fanboi anyway, but I think the Pictures/Movies/Music/Documents of OS X are more sensible.
Just the other day I removed their contents from my system hard drive and replaced them with aliases to other partitions, so the 4 categories point now to 4 differently defined sectors of the hard drives.
Of course, while possible with extended partitions, I don't think you can do this with Windows because of how it'd really annoy your average user when trying to defrag, or use other utilities, but with heavy read/write in these folders, why not have them able to be backed up on other partitions easier, making formatting easier for when defragging won't cut it?
Maybe I'm wrong to feel a little more in control of the space where my files, classified by type, reside. And I guess people would just baulk if instead of "Oooooh, your lovely files are in this specially named lovesy wovesy Folder. Yes they are. Yes they are:-)" their folder names were F:\Music, G:\Documents, H:\Pictures, I:\Movies..... iPictures? WTF!?
I know about dynamic and static IP addresses. I didn't get them confused with e-mail addresses. I'm curious as to whether, due to the finite number of IPv4 addresses that there won't come a time when your IP address is static IPv6, and it's something you just have, like a phone number, or like an Ethernet card number, or a social security number. Just another number you have which defines part of you and lets you do certain kinds of stuff.
Do you really find it so objectionable that people would for example know their IP by heart? That's what I mean by digits. You'd know it and identify yourself with it like you would an e-mail address or ICQ number.
The way I see it, your IP is becoming more and more like your phone number. It's part of who you are and we're fast approaching the day that the two will be essentials for anyone living anywhere in the world. You'll need your digits so people can call you, and your IPv4 or IPv6 digits for other reasons, and it'll become the norm.
How would people react if the Bush, or any, administration claimed the right to be able to tap anyone's phone for any reason?
From the article: The legal filing with the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York comes amid a debate in Congress over renewal of the Patriot Act and whether to expand the FBI's power to seek records without the approval of a judge or grand jury.
And will they also seek the entitlement to search domestic residences without a warrant approved by an authority figure? Would I be far off in this seeming to be about the same? For those who lost their short term memory, and those who like repetition:
Yeah, I know now. See mirrored files rehosted in my subsequent comment. Images from original site timed out often. I'm only using college supplied webspace, so maybe a temporary fix, but should be faster in the short term.
That's the second image, a smoking hunk of what must be a fallen rocket casing I guess.
There's 12 images in all, I've only seen the first two, but they seem to follow simple numeric order, so the others would end
.../sj3.jpg
and so on.
If anyone wants to send me a zip of the pictures if they can access them by email, I'll rehost and post the link. But as I say, right now I've only got two images.
the only people truly belonging in government are those who really don't want to serve in their heart of hearts
How very H2G2. Douglas Adams' take was anyone who wants power would be dangerous to allow to have it. Following this logic I suggest the USA get rid of 8 States, including Texas especially. Then you'll have an answer: 42.
You can't complain about Socialists and then pledge support for the Greens damnit. It doesn't make sense. Green policy is supposed to be driven by social conscience and socialist policy, probably in a more European sense of the word - anathema to a lot of US citizens I guess.
I admire socialism, but I swing from right of centre to left of centre on issues that matter (and back again). I just think that stating that Socialists "don't care about liberty" is inconceivable unless you're referring to National Socialism, which had nothing to do with Socialism in any real policy instance.
Any authority can pin the terrorist tag on illegal copyright infringement, and generalise it to cover all downloading that's a bit shady because of public ignorance, and no promotion of what honest filesharing entails.
Hell, a lot of people who'd use BitTorrent or Azurues or other clients wouldn't even get far enough into the Wiki entry to click the link to Legal Torrents to see a sensible applcation of torrent use. If you're a record label which disseminates mostly crap music and makes no profit, why not use torrents to find a wider audience? Some like Alpha Cat Boogie do. If you make a movie with Maya, Photoshop and a few other apps, spend months on it, but it's still an independent animation from a nobody, who is going to see it? No one, unless you set it free to be downloaded by a suitable protocol. Downloading movies and music can make sense for all concerned, and there's no PR department for uploaders to make this point to public representatives.
And, to swing wildly back on-topic, linking terrorist fundraising or involvement otherwise to copyright infringement or piracy is nothing new. I'm Irish. Back when there was a war on if I saw someone selling bootleg videos/appliances/DVDs out of a car boot and they were knocked off or imitation I'd have guessed the money raised would be used to put arms in the hands of morons who wanted to perpetuate a stupid homicidal situation.
From speaking to people who served military service in Lebanon and a few other places, there are well established markets for pirate copies of mainstream movies in places around the world. And frankly, if you're profiting from shady activity in Lebanon, or other hotspots in the Middle East, then I'm guessing you may have an affiliation with Hezbollah, or some other group. Given that you can catch most Hollywood movies over there at the times they're being premiered in the States, if not before, then it's got to be organised - and contrary to popular belief Joe Downloader is no more organised than/. is populated solely by 1337 #4>0|25 (translation: "elite hackers" - for those opposed to such shite as what I just typed).
That is a great point and well made. If I had a cap I would be dothing it to you sir (or madam?).
I see it similarly I think. Complaining about users using Windows because you're a Linux praising coder who wouldn't stoop to using Gates' platform is akin to someone harrassing another person for eating at McDonalds. Sure you could get better food, you could get cheaper food, or you could get really high quality food, and you might be opposed to some practices by the corporation which are outside of ethical standards. So why in the hell do so many people eat at McDonalds? Because it's convenient. You've got the price or a reasonable meal and you don't want to wait.
Why do people use Windows? It's a reasonable price, and it's preinstalled more often than not. There are less hurdles to overcome and it isn't even close to being a requirement for the user to be able to pick his way through the kernel, or construct hacks from a limited knowledge of C++. It's a commodity first, investment of time and resources second (or am I wrong on this and do professional PC sales account for greater takings than home PCs?).
That said, Gentoo does have Portage which is as handy for installation of software as the "point-click simplicity" of Windows .
I also like the use of the word Fark. But as a former Farker, I would.
Damnit I know this is irretrievably off topic. But I want to post the link so why the hell not.
Why reply to this comment? You mentioned Ireland and I'm Irish.
Why in this thread? Because my login is 64nDh1. Yes, I'm stuck with it now, but a 1337 version of the common name for Indian pacifist and political leader Mohandas Karamchai Gandhi.
What does this have to do with OSS in India? Nothing, but http://fsf.org.inlogo.html64ndh1hlenclientsafari/" target="_blank">Google seems to associate the only other instance of 64nDh1 usage it can find on the web on a page that I haven't contributed to.
It's a reference to the Free Software Foundation of India. I haven't checked it out, I'm not interested in whether this is piracy or OSS in the link. I just wanted to blurt out something about what I found to be an odd coincidence.
Feel free to mod this down, and resume your lives as you were.
Yes but my point is: if there is support for the format in the most popularly used web browser, then there follows that there is an increased likelihood of more instances of the format being used.
Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror are not going to change this if they support jpeg2000 fully*, although it'd certainly be welcome.
If IE7 got behind a format like that it's possible jpeg2000 would have the prominence it merits; it would be a realistic alternative, smaller in filesize but equal in function, to jpeg.
*I have no idea if they do support it, maybe they do.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if you view the movie version of Minority Report again and take a close look at the interface of the computer used (with the glove extension) and bear in mind the story was published in The Little Black Box in 1987, and maybe before that as welll, I can see a case for attributing Philip K. Dick with the invention of Playstation 2 dance mats as a first step toward this thinkium-like interface and confusing screen.
</BadAttemptAtHumour>
How much did he invent those things, as opposed to inspire them?
I'm trying to influence a friend's purchase of a new PC, I think if it was shorter than 2 years the expiry date for support for XP Home/Professional could influence his opinion. (He wants gaming, and that's it, not even Word.)
It'd be handy for future reference too if I knew where to look for Windows details like this. A brief skim through the XP EULA didn't clarify this matter.
As ever, any help appreciated in advance.
For occasional mention of one European country's habits in data harvesting I advise checking the archives of Ms. Lillington's blog which features the full content of her articles as submitted to the aforementioned newspaper.
If you do not change a setting in your Gmail preferences, when your client first connects to pop.gmail.com you download every message you have received since you started using your Gmail account. All incoming, not outgoing AFAIK.
This can be useful if you've deleted something by mistake. But, the point being, your messages don't go away even after you empty your trash, and we all knew this signing up for Gmail because of all the publicity over Gmail's targeted advertising. Personally, I don't mind the trade off against a 2+ GB e-mail account accessible anywhere, but I'll grant I'm also more conscious of message content in Gmail than other accounts.
To return to the point about e-mail client programs: the user can change a setting in Gmail preferences which will only let the client download messages from after a certain date, so if you were setting up Thunderbird to retrieve Gmail now, you set it to today's date and you only get new mail to your client. But I've always presumed Google still has a copy because you can always go back and change the date to an earlier time.
Much valued advice.
Need much sleep now.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device"
"/dev/input/mouse0"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection
Lemme just try switching that to /dev/input/mice instead........
Thanks, I'd already set that, and changed the setting to where it pointed to by default to find /dev/input/mouse0 instead of /dev/mouse or something similar, and tried a cat /dev/input/mouse0. Clicking the scrollwheel here does produce cursor movement and weird keystrokes, so there's probably only one or two things out of place. I'm still emerging OOo and GIMP, so it'll be morning before I can reboot. Thanks for the tips, much appreciated. Especially considering the thread it's in where "Don't fucking comment if you don't know what you're talking about" is modded up to Insightful, and all these comments were parented initially by a troll - which I only regretfully realised a long time after my initial post and means I feel no guilt whatsoever abusing this thread for lite tech support and off-topic banter. :-P
1. unfortunately no damn desktop environment on initial install
2. not all, but some Gentoo users are so far up their own arse they think it's reasonable to tell newbs to get lost and that if they stopped using Gentoo, Gentoo would benefit. Nice. However, I put up with Apple's support - like the bitch who couldn't give a damn when one of their computers was ordered early December as a present for Christmas and was delivered mid-January, so a stuck up volunteer based support community is better than a stuck up professional support community, and quicker too.
Yeah, I've edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf to include
#Option "Buttons" "5"
I'm hoping a reboot solves this as it recognised the 3 buttons, but not the 4th and 5th for up and down.
This isn't a bad thing.
Alternate answer:
No. Maybe someone else knows more about this.
If it's set up by an admin, then I would add Gentoo to that list. Sure it's a PITA that you have to emerge a desktop environment and compile it, but Portage makes it worthwhile, and if you really nail it with Stage 1 installs (which would of course take a whole weekend for just a small office) users could have marginally improved performance on Linux.
SuSE probably the best option because of tech support for corporate customers though.
F:\DownloadSoftware
and
F:\Horrible Untrustworthy Dangerous Software
The My Documents folder names sucked, and their location was annoying when you first start because of your very point. I'm a Mac fanboi anyway, but I think the Pictures/Movies/Music/Documents of OS X are more sensible.
Just the other day I removed their contents from my system hard drive and replaced them with aliases to other partitions, so the 4 categories point now to 4 differently defined sectors of the hard drives.
Of course, while possible with extended partitions, I don't think you can do this with Windows because of how it'd really annoy your average user when trying to defrag, or use other utilities, but with heavy read/write in these folders, why not have them able to be backed up on other partitions easier, making formatting easier for when defragging won't cut it?
Maybe I'm wrong to feel a little more in control of the space where my files, classified by type, reside. And I guess people would just baulk if instead of "Oooooh, your lovely files are in this specially named lovesy wovesy Folder. Yes they are. Yes they are :-)" their folder names were F:\Music, G:\Documents, H:\Pictures, I:\Movies..... iPictures? WTF!?
Actually, it's pronounced Eval medical school
Do you really find it so objectionable that people would for example know their IP by heart? That's what I mean by digits. You'd know it and identify yourself with it like you would an e-mail address or ICQ number.
How would people react if the Bush, or any, administration claimed the right to be able to tap anyone's phone for any reason?
From the article:
The legal filing with the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York comes amid a debate in Congress over renewal of the Patriot Act and whether to expand the FBI's power to seek records without the approval of a judge or grand jury.
And will they also seek the entitlement to search domestic residences without a warrant approved by an authority figure? Would I be far off in this seeming to be about the same? For those who lost their short term memory, and those who like repetition:
without the approval or a judge or grand jury
How do you respect a law like that?
That is all true...but Christ on a bike above all of those things he's Deckard.
Yeah, I know now. See mirrored files rehosted in my subsequent comment. Images from original site timed out often. I'm only using college supplied webspace, so maybe a temporary fix, but should be faster in the short term.
Directory now full. Please do not mail images. 1-12 available at above link until slashdotting reoccurs.
http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~64ndhi/SlashdotKazakh stan/
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/culture/imag es/sj2.jpg [eurasianet.org]
That's the second image, a smoking hunk of what must be a fallen rocket casing I guess.
There's 12 images in all, I've only seen the first two, but they seem to follow simple numeric order, so the others would end
and so on.
If anyone wants to send me a zip of the pictures if they can access them by email, I'll rehost and post the link. But as I say, right now I've only got two images.
the only people truly belonging in government are those who really don't want to serve in their heart of hearts
How very H2G2. Douglas Adams' take was anyone who wants power would be dangerous to allow to have it. Following this logic I suggest the USA get rid of 8 States, including Texas especially. Then you'll have an answer: 42.
But what will it mean?
You can't complain about Socialists and then pledge support for the Greens damnit. It doesn't make sense. Green policy is supposed to be driven by social conscience and socialist policy, probably in a more European sense of the word - anathema to a lot of US citizens I guess.
/. is populated solely by 1337 #4>0|25 (translation: "elite hackers" - for those opposed to such shite as what I just typed).
I admire socialism, but I swing from right of centre to left of centre on issues that matter (and back again). I just think that stating that Socialists "don't care about liberty" is inconceivable unless you're referring to National Socialism, which had nothing to do with Socialism in any real policy instance.
Any authority can pin the terrorist tag on illegal copyright infringement, and generalise it to cover all downloading that's a bit shady because of public ignorance, and no promotion of what honest filesharing entails.
Hell, a lot of people who'd use BitTorrent or Azurues or other clients wouldn't even get far enough into the Wiki entry to click the link to Legal Torrents to see a sensible applcation of torrent use. If you're a record label which disseminates mostly crap music and makes no profit, why not use torrents to find a wider audience? Some like Alpha Cat Boogie do. If you make a movie with Maya, Photoshop and a few other apps, spend months on it, but it's still an independent animation from a nobody, who is going to see it? No one, unless you set it free to be downloaded by a suitable protocol. Downloading movies and music can make sense for all concerned, and there's no PR department for uploaders to make this point to public representatives.
And, to swing wildly back on-topic, linking terrorist fundraising or involvement otherwise to copyright infringement or piracy is nothing new. I'm Irish. Back when there was a war on if I saw someone selling bootleg videos/appliances/DVDs out of a car boot and they were knocked off or imitation I'd have guessed the money raised would be used to put arms in the hands of morons who wanted to perpetuate a stupid homicidal situation.
From speaking to people who served military service in Lebanon and a few other places, there are well established markets for pirate copies of mainstream movies in places around the world. And frankly, if you're profiting from shady activity in Lebanon, or other hotspots in the Middle East, then I'm guessing you may have an affiliation with Hezbollah, or some other group. Given that you can catch most Hollywood movies over there at the times they're being premiered in the States, if not before, then it's got to be organised - and contrary to popular belief Joe Downloader is no more organised than
That is a great point and well made. If I had a cap I would be dothing it to you sir (or madam?).
I see it similarly I think. Complaining about users using Windows because you're a Linux praising coder who wouldn't stoop to using Gates' platform is akin to someone harrassing another person for eating at McDonalds. Sure you could get better food, you could get cheaper food, or you could get really high quality food, and you might be opposed to some practices by the corporation which are outside of ethical standards. So why in the hell do so many people eat at McDonalds? Because it's convenient. You've got the price or a reasonable meal and you don't want to wait.
Why do people use Windows? It's a reasonable price, and it's preinstalled more often than not. There are less hurdles to overcome and it isn't even close to being a requirement for the user to be able to pick his way through the kernel, or construct hacks from a limited knowledge of C++. It's a commodity first, investment of time and resources second (or am I wrong on this and do professional PC sales account for greater takings than home PCs?).
That said, Gentoo does have Portage which is as handy for installation of software as the "point-click simplicity" of Windows .
I also like the use of the word Fark. But as a former Farker, I would.
Damnit I know this is irretrievably off topic. But I want to post the link so why the hell not.
" target="_blank">Google seems to associate the only other instance of 64nDh1 usage it can find on the web on a page that I haven't contributed to.
Why reply to this comment? You mentioned Ireland and I'm Irish.
Why in this thread? Because my login is 64nDh1. Yes, I'm stuck with it now, but a 1337 version of the common name for Indian pacifist and political leader Mohandas Karamchai Gandhi.
What does this have to do with OSS in India? Nothing, but http://fsf.org.inlogo.html64ndh1hlenclientsafari/
It's a reference to the Free Software Foundation of India. I haven't checked it out, I'm not interested in whether this is piracy or OSS in the link. I just wanted to blurt out something about what I found to be an odd coincidence.
Feel free to mod this down, and resume your lives as you were.
Yes but my point is: if there is support for the format in the most popularly used web browser, then there follows that there is an increased likelihood of more instances of the format being used.
Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror are not going to change this if they support jpeg2000 fully*, although it'd certainly be welcome.
If IE7 got behind a format like that it's possible jpeg2000 would have the prominence it merits; it would be a realistic alternative, smaller in filesize but equal in function, to jpeg.
*I have no idea if they do support it, maybe they do.