If you want to control each light then here is a 1-wire ballast controller which should cost about $1 per controller. This would be great as you could add it to each individual bulb and get total control, but I can't find anyone that sells it. I want to light my entire apartment using LEDs, and am thinking of using this 8-channel PWM module as a dimmer. It's centrally controlled though and rapidly gets expensive if you want to control too many lights individually (with RBG you need three channels per light).
There are PICs with PWM output and CAN/RS485 built in. I'm amazed no-one is prepared to sell a micro-PWM dimmer for a couple of bucks each. Maybe someone can help this guy out?
Companies like IBM sells hardware. If making Linux available for their servers makes it easier for them to sell them, then yes, I can see them adding to the Linux kernel. To apply this in a broader sense, only hardware companies would be able to support software.
IBM makes its money from services, not hardware. Interesting take here. The fact is that for most businesses, maintaining their own kernel, or web server, or mail server, won't give them a competative advantage over the competition but more cost. Using and contributing to a FOSS project and paying someone to glue it to their business makes more sense.
I've seen the claim that FOSS developers can make money by selling support for their software. That's kind of backwards as then there is no incentive to make their software easy to use or install, and actually creates a disincentive because that means hard to use software generates more support money.
That's ridiculous. Ease of use has nothing to do with the amount of work it takes to customise a FOSS project for a customer. No software house wants to make support money from taking installation support calls either, it's more of a drain on resources than a profit-maker. I think you have an odd idea of 'support'.
Basic support is: * measuring the system needed to fulfill requirements and installing the software * correctly configuring the software for a business * training how to administer the software * fixing the system when the user screws up
This is built into the sticker price in off-the-shelf non-FOSS software. For specialist software you pay the sticker price AND for a support contract that does the above.
Real money in support is: * developing custom modules * interfacing the FOSS to corporate intranets or CRM software * creating an integrated business system tying together a number of different FOSS projects * data-mining the logs for ever more targetted stats and analysis
There are others. Every company I work with has more ideas for extras than they'd ever have time or money.
Because of their authentication system most people didn't buy it?
Phillip.
Think which MEP to vote for in the UK
on
VLC & European Patents
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've writtent to my MEPs.
Conservative party are FOR patenting software. The letter was a disgusting patronising excuse, and tries to worm out at the end suggesting they want a 3-year 'review' clause. (from Nirj Deva)
Green party are AGAINST patenting software. They also mention consulting with Alan Cox and Richard Stallman. A very well written response. (from Dr Caroline Lucas)
The Liberal party are AGAINST patenting software. A short letter saying they've heard the fears of small businesses are will definately vote against the directive.
Labour never replied but that is because they are FOR the Directive. Especially since Mr Mandelson, kicked out multiple times from government for corruption, is our EU council representative and has the ear of Tony Blair.
No matter how you want to vote in the General Election, remember when voting for your MEP not to vote Labour or Conservative. Even if some of us HAVE voted for a certain party all our lives:-(
It has to be a late April Fool that got stuck in the spool. What a load of Mandriva-l. They should have merged the best bits of both names and named the company: Mandrake. I agree with an above poster than when the names behind the merger are forgotten you are just going to end up with a bad name.
Tell me about it. I was looking forwards to visiting New York and Las Vegas for extended holidays but cancelled both because I've no intention of being treated like a criminal. Someone told me I could fly to Canada and drive down to New York to avoid having my privacy raped but now even that is no longer going to be an option. The phrase "Land of the Free" has turned into a sardonic joke. Instead I will be travelling to Malaysia and Thailand. Perhaps they will apreciate my hard earned cash?
God yes. London is about par with the French Riviera where I live now. When you walk to the station the whole street is like a supermodel catwalk. I simply cannot believe how huge American girls are! It really is a tribute to the natural genetic engineering of the human heart can sustain such behemoths. When my friends/family come back from the USA I'm tempted to sell their holiday videos as cannibal porn.
It was obvious "toothing" is a hoax here as by default bluetooth is turned off on all phones as it drains the batteries too much.
But does it take more electricity to compress the air into the tank than it does to just run the car on electric power? Sounds like just another degree of separation from energy we'll be getting from oil, anyway.
The MDI version can be refilled in 3 mins using around $2 of electricity for a 120 mile range. Things may be improving but until now it's the sheer weight of all the batteries that have made electric cars inefficient.
Did you actually look at the list of those offering python jobs? Google, Lockheed Martin, Sun, Akamai, IBM and many other well respected companies. Python is only starting to ramp up slightly, and it will take a while longer whilst the libraries become more mature and extensive, but I personally think it's going to take a large chunk of the market away from both Java and PHP.
If this were the case, why are big, heavy, and above all else *slow* SUVs selling so well?
I'm surprised an American hasn't replied to this. From what I've *heard*, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the reason SUVs sell so well is that they exploit a loophole in the tax law as it manages to get itself classed as an agricultural (?) vehicle.
Even though these cars are using more electrical, they're still getting electricity from a grid largely powered by filthy coal and gas power plants, and through a system that's most likely less efficient than the car's internal power grid. They might be using less gasoline in the car, but in the grander scheme they're creating more pollution by making the power plants burn even more for them.
That depends on where you live. Here in France around 80% of electricity is generated by clean nuclear power. An increasing amount of electricity in the UK is generated by renewable energy, and the government has set a target of 10% by 2010.
Also, power plants normally have strict emissions tests. In theory cars do but this is far more difficult to enforce. In addition, power plant emmisions occur in remote locations, not outside my house, my office, etc.
The compressed air car, created by Guy Nègre, costs about $2 to fill a tank and goes up to 68mph for 120 miles. It takes around 3 mins to refill. Mexico city have placed an order for 40,000 vehicles to replace their old polluting taxis. Some more, if old, details here about trying to get them into the UK. It's a great idea for a town vehicle.
Depends where you live. Where I am petrol is $4.36/gallon (France). The relatively new Volvo I drive says 28.1mpg average on the dash. City driving really kills your mpg. That makes 689 gallons hence only 19,364 miles. Many people do more than that in a year.
At all costs. What else is there? Why would anybody develop software, if not to perform a function? The second that other things get in the way of "functionality", is the same second that that software starts to suck. What do you propose is more important than functionality?
Microsoft said the same thing, relegating security and stability, but that's now come back to bite them in the ass.
The article shows it's roots in voodoo and urban myth with the statement about moving the swap file to a separate partition.
A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.
If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.
However, if you're looking for ways to improve your swapfile performance, you're a freakin' idiot who needs to stop touching PC's.
I thought the first partition, being closer to the inside of the platter, had shorter seek times. This means that the arm would move less hence less wear and tear. Also means faster to access information than that stored on the outside of the platter hence better performance. Can you point out the site that proves this to be urban myth?
What I find it interesting is that a country with 1/4 the US's population and with a roughly equivalent standard of living represents a roughly equivalent percentage of the world's hacked PCs, even if the difference between the UK and US is within this poll's margin of error.
I find it incredible that a country that contains 4% of the world's population produce 25% of the world's pollution. Different kind of ignorance I guess.
Wow, a Fuel Cell ($$$$) bike that has almost caught up with a pure Electric vehicle.
Actually if you RTFA you'll see it's a fuel-cell/electric hybrid.
Except that it's top speed is lower, it costs more to build, and is far more difficult to refuel.
On the other hand it's lighter, goes further and can be refilled in seconds instead of overnight.
The only reason Fuel Cells are being pushed so hard is that they retain the Big Company infrastructure needed to use them.
Big bad corporations being forced to do something good for the environment to survive? I could think of worse situations to be in.
You will need a large distribution network if you want to refuel lots of cars, AND you will need to produce all that hyrdrogen - which will likely be made from oil.
Large companies such have Shell have committed to installing hydrogen in all their petrol stations the moment there is any demand. We have a large network of LPG (Liquid Petrolium Gas) pumps despite a disappointigly low take-up of the technology.
To begin with the large oil corps will be pushing oil as a solution for generating hydrogen, but once our dependency switches to hydrogen then not only will more and more be generated by renewable energy but there will be such an incentive to find a more efficient way of extracting one of the most abundant substances in the universe I'm sure science will find the answer.
EV's can do it now at lower cost than Fool Cells, but for some reason are being ignored. (Or actively discouraged - like GM crushing the quite nice EV1's.)
Nice as the idea was, it turned out batteries just couldn't cut it. Battery technology has advanced but no-where near enough. The major laptop manufacturers are now showing off hydrogen fuel-cell laptops, and I've even seen fuel-cell mobile phone prototypes. I sincerely hope work will continue on developing electric vehicles, but I for one am exciting by the new hydrogen economy. Check out: http://www.futureenergies.com/
Java is a langauge and say it is prorietary is like saying C or C# are proprietary.
Java is a platform, not a language, dependent on a Virtual Machine and a ton of libraries. C is a solely a language targetted at being compiled directly into machine code.
I have read the freely available documentation on Java and you'd be surprised how complete it is.
It's a user guide, not a guide to what's under the hood.
There is no need to reverse engineer anything since JavaDoc spells it all out for gou, and heck Sun provide the source code to the files too!
It gives Java source to some of the libraries. Not to the JVM itself.
It bugs me that people perfer Mono'a C# over Java because it's "more free".
I don't know where you get that idea. Most prefer to avoid Mono C# because they know M$ is going to pull the rug on them at some point.
Well it's only free because people coded it up. If they spent half the time coding a JVM that they've spent coding a Mono they'd be done years ago. And if Sun keeps their own implementation proprietary, well they own so let them. You can use IBM's or Apple's or your own.
There is kaffe and gjc. Java is a bit of a moving target though and not easy to keep up with. If there was one standard Open Source version then we wouldn't need a dozen different versions all trying to play catch-up with the 'official' Sun version.
Why don't people stop using C since Intel still offers it's own closed source compiler?
Try reading the history of C. If the language B wasn't Open Source then C wouldn't have existed at all!
Java is really spread wide open from letting people participate with JSR (though just like in democracies unless you are with someone big you won't get heard.. but you are free to try), and even poke around with the source. Is there some big piece that I'm missing that would bother anyone besides GPL Zealots?
You must be a young programmer to be satisfied with a few scraps thrown out to you. The thing you are missing is the bigger picture.
Wow, so much ignorance in one single post! Must be a record. Others have dealt with the FUD about solar. Windmills tend to be large, ugly and kill birds? When was the last time you visited a wind farm? The one's I've seen tend to be quiet and elegant. Hydrogen isn't a fuel source but just a fancy battery? Then petrol/gas isn't a fuel source either but just a fancy battery. You can convert a standard car to run on hydrogen instead of petrol. BMW has a car has an internal combustion engine tailored to get the best out of hydrogen pumped directly into the tank.
So, pray tell, how do we plan on generating alternate energy? Take the blinkers off and look around you. It's happening right now! Solar, wind, tidal, hydro, thermal, they are all growing. Check out Future Energies.
Make Printing or CUPS work. Period. Don't make me fuck with it. Just make it work. And have more drivers than 10 yer old HP laserjets.
Amen. I just bought a brand new HP and it worked out of the box. The first time a printer hasn't been a Linux nightmare.
We don't need 4 or 5 6 windows managers. We need X term, K, and a lighterweight one like fluxbox or ICEWM but not both and absolutely either put all of the same apps in all the menus or strip them all down to minimum.
Definately. Just use xfce4. Not bloated WMs like KDE or Gnome. Or masochist WMs like fluxbox.
You need:
one office suite
Indeed. OpenOffice. Unless you want something that loads faster in which case Abiword. Or if you need something inbetween then Ted. Though if you need more DTP then one of the Framemaker clones.
one IM client for AOL/Yahoo. etc.
Yup, gaim. Or Kopete if you use KDE.
one IRC
gaim will do this too, as will kopete. Though BitchX is pretty popular.
one image management app
Er, depends what you want to do with images.
one burner
Exactly. k3b is reputedly the best. groast if not. You may as well instally Nero if you have Windoze license.
one real/quicktime/etcetera
Well duh. mplayer. Tho xine is good to keep handly.
one file manager
Of course, ROX is what everyone should be using. Though many prefer Nautilus. And KDE users of course like Konqueror (with the fish: option I'm not surprised). Midnight Commander is prefered by many for some reason.
You need to make the appearance of the filesystem in the file manager MORE simple not LESS simple. if that means making a linear type arrangement like windows then so be it.
If Windows means having nothing but a sterile proscribed bunch of sub-standard options I'll take the Linux approach. Let Darwin do its work.
I agree that the main menu having a million different options upon install is def disingenous though.
Slashdot Mirror
Saving 3 legged kittens? Feline amputation pales in comparison to the hideous cruely inflicted in the sick art of creating bonsai kittens.
Phillip.
If you want to control each light then here is a 1-wire ballast controller which should cost about $1 per controller. This would be great as you could add it to each individual bulb and get total control, but I can't find anyone that sells it. I want to light my entire apartment using LEDs, and am thinking of using this 8-channel PWM module as a dimmer. It's centrally controlled though and rapidly gets expensive if you want to control too many lights individually (with RBG you need three channels per light).
There are PICs with PWM output and CAN/RS485 built in. I'm amazed no-one is prepared to sell a micro-PWM dimmer for a couple of bucks each. Maybe someone can help this guy out?
Phillip.
Sad that in this case it comes from ... a reputable news source. I'd expect to see this ... on Slashdot.
Amen. Slashdot are so poor now they don't even need someone to hoax them, they hoax themselves.
Phillip.
Top 3 reasons to release on MTV instead of allowing public near the box:
3) experienced gamers may comment on the gameplay instead of the pretty cut sequences
2) the BSOD occurences can be snipped from the 'live' broadcast
1) the prototype board which happens to have better specs can be hidden under the desk and empty xbox2 case
Phillip.
Companies like IBM sells hardware. If making Linux available for their servers makes it easier for them to sell them, then yes, I can see them adding to the Linux kernel. To apply this in a broader sense, only hardware companies would be able to support software.
IBM makes its money from services, not hardware. Interesting take here. The fact is that for most businesses, maintaining their own kernel, or web server, or mail server, won't give them a competative advantage over the competition but more cost. Using and contributing to a FOSS project and paying someone to glue it to their business makes more sense.
I've seen the claim that FOSS developers can make money by selling support for their software. That's kind of backwards as then there is no incentive to make their software easy to use or install, and actually creates a disincentive because that means hard to use software generates more support money.
That's ridiculous. Ease of use has nothing to do with the amount of work it takes to customise a FOSS project for a customer. No software house wants to make support money from taking installation support calls either, it's more of a drain on resources than a profit-maker. I think you have an odd idea of 'support'.
Basic support is:
* measuring the system needed to fulfill requirements and installing the software
* correctly configuring the software for a business
* training how to administer the software
* fixing the system when the user screws up
This is built into the sticker price in off-the-shelf non-FOSS software. For specialist software you pay the sticker price AND for a support contract that does the above.
Real money in support is:
* developing custom modules
* interfacing the FOSS to corporate intranets or CRM software
* creating an integrated business system tying together a number of different FOSS projects
* data-mining the logs for ever more targetted stats and analysis
There are others. Every company I work with has more ideas for extras than they'd ever have time or money.
Phillip.
Because of their authentication system most people didn't buy it?
Phillip.
I've writtent to my MEPs.
:-(
Conservative party are FOR patenting software. The letter was a disgusting patronising excuse, and tries to worm out at the end suggesting they want a 3-year 'review' clause.
(from Nirj Deva)
Green party are AGAINST patenting software. They also mention consulting with Alan Cox and Richard Stallman. A very well written response.
(from Dr Caroline Lucas)
The Liberal party are AGAINST patenting software. A short letter saying they've heard the fears of small businesses are will definately vote against the directive.
Labour never replied but that is because they are FOR the Directive. Especially since Mr Mandelson, kicked out multiple times from government for corruption, is our EU council representative and has the ear of Tony Blair.
No matter how you want to vote in the General Election, remember when voting for your MEP not to vote Labour or Conservative. Even if some of us HAVE voted for a certain party all our lives
Phillip.
It has to be a late April Fool that got stuck in the spool. What a load of Mandriva-l. They should have merged the best bits of both names and named the company: Mandrake. I agree with an above poster than when the names behind the merger are forgotten you are just going to end up with a bad name.
Phillip.
Tell me about it. I was looking forwards to visiting New York and Las Vegas for extended holidays but cancelled both because I've no intention of being treated like a criminal. Someone told me I could fly to Canada and drive down to New York to avoid having my privacy raped but now even that is no longer going to be an option. The phrase "Land of the Free" has turned into a sardonic joke. Instead I will be travelling to Malaysia and Thailand. Perhaps they will apreciate my hard earned cash?
Phillip.
God yes. London is about par with the French Riviera where I live now. When you walk to the station the whole street is like a supermodel catwalk. I simply cannot believe how huge American girls are! It really is a tribute to the natural genetic engineering of the human heart can sustain such behemoths. When my friends/family come back from the USA I'm tempted to sell their holiday videos as cannibal porn.
It was obvious "toothing" is a hoax here as by default bluetooth is turned off on all phones as it drains the batteries too much.
Phillip.
Also, can you embed Python in HTML? (seems that the whitespace issue would cause a lot of problems with doing that)
Ouch. I thought we'd just spent the last decade trying to separate logic from presentation?
Phillip.
But does it take more electricity to compress the air into the tank than it does to just run the car on electric power? Sounds like just another degree of separation from energy we'll be getting from oil, anyway.
The MDI version can be refilled in 3 mins using around $2 of electricity for a 120 mile range. Things may be improving but until now it's the sheer weight of all the batteries that have made electric cars inefficient.
Phillip.
Did you actually look at the list of those offering python jobs? Google, Lockheed Martin, Sun, Akamai, IBM and many other well respected companies. Python is only starting to ramp up slightly, and it will take a while longer whilst the libraries become more mature and extensive, but I personally think it's going to take a large chunk of the market away from both Java and PHP.
Phillip.
If this were the case, why are big, heavy, and above all else *slow* SUVs selling so well?
I'm surprised an American hasn't replied to this. From what I've *heard*, and please correct me if I'm wrong, the reason SUVs sell so well is that they exploit a loophole in the tax law as it manages to get itself classed as an agricultural (?) vehicle.
Phillip.
Even though these cars are using more electrical, they're still getting electricity from a grid largely powered by filthy coal and gas power plants, and through a system that's most likely less efficient than the car's internal power grid. They might be using less gasoline in the car, but in the grander scheme they're creating more pollution by making the power plants burn even more for them.
That depends on where you live. Here in France around 80% of electricity is generated by clean nuclear power. An increasing amount of electricity in the UK is generated by renewable energy, and the government has set a target of 10% by 2010.
Also, power plants normally have strict emissions tests. In theory cars do but this is far more difficult to enforce. In addition, power plant emmisions occur in remote locations, not outside my house, my office, etc.
Phillip.
The compressed air car, created by Guy Nègre, costs about $2 to fill a tank and goes up to 68mph for 120 miles. It takes around 3 mins to refill. Mexico city have placed an order for 40,000 vehicles to replace their old polluting taxis. Some more, if old, details here about trying to get them into the UK. It's a great idea for a town vehicle.
Phillip.
Depends where you live. Where I am petrol is $4.36/gallon (France). The relatively new Volvo I drive says 28.1mpg average on the dash. City driving really kills your mpg. That makes 689 gallons hence only 19,364 miles. Many people do more than that in a year.
Phillip.
Crownhill are selling them in the UK for £47 inc VAT, which is around 68 euros (as opposed to 99 euros). How easy is it to flash uClinux onto it?
Phillip.
At all costs. What else is there? Why would anybody develop software, if not to perform a function? The second that other things get in the way of "functionality", is the same second that that software starts to suck. What do you propose is more important than functionality?
Microsoft said the same thing, relegating security and stability, but that's now come back to bite them in the ass.
Phillip.
The article shows it's roots in voodoo and urban myth with the statement about moving the swap file to a separate partition.
A separate partition is STILL THE SAME DRIVE. Same platters, same heads. The only benefit is that it's a little cleaner to look at.
If you need better swap performance, the ONLY way to get it is to move the swapfile to a seperate, hopefully faster, drive.
However, if you're looking for ways to improve your swapfile performance, you're a freakin' idiot who needs to stop touching PC's.
I thought the first partition, being closer to the inside of the platter, had shorter seek times. This means that the arm would move less hence less wear and tear. Also means faster to access information than that stored on the outside of the platter hence better performance. Can you point out the site that proves this to be urban myth?
Phillip.
What I find it interesting is that a country with 1/4 the US's population and with a roughly equivalent standard of living represents a roughly equivalent percentage of the world's hacked PCs, even if the difference between the UK and US is within this poll's margin of error.
I find it incredible that a country that contains 4% of the world's population produce 25% of the world's pollution. Different kind of ignorance I guess.
Phillip.
Wow, a Fuel Cell ($$$$) bike that has almost caught up with a pure Electric vehicle.
Actually if you RTFA you'll see it's a fuel-cell/electric hybrid.
Except that it's top speed is lower, it costs more to build, and is far more difficult to refuel.
On the other hand it's lighter, goes further and can be refilled in seconds instead of overnight.
The only reason Fuel Cells are being pushed so hard is that they retain the Big Company infrastructure needed to use them.
Big bad corporations being forced to do something good for the environment to survive? I could think of worse situations to be in.
You will need a large distribution network if you want to refuel lots of cars, AND you will need to produce all that hyrdrogen - which will likely be made from oil.
Large companies such have Shell have committed to installing hydrogen in all their petrol stations the moment there is any demand. We have a large network of LPG (Liquid Petrolium Gas) pumps despite a disappointigly low take-up of the technology.
To begin with the large oil corps will be pushing oil as a solution for generating hydrogen, but once our dependency switches to hydrogen then not only will more and more be generated by renewable energy but there will be such an incentive to find a more efficient way of extracting one of the most abundant substances in the universe I'm sure science will find the answer.
EV's can do it now at lower cost than Fool Cells, but for some reason are being ignored. (Or actively discouraged - like GM crushing the quite nice EV1's.)
Nice as the idea was, it turned out batteries just couldn't cut it. Battery technology has advanced but no-where near enough. The major laptop manufacturers are now showing off hydrogen fuel-cell laptops, and I've even seen fuel-cell mobile phone prototypes. I sincerely hope work will continue on developing electric vehicles, but I for one am exciting by the new hydrogen economy.
Check out:
http://www.futureenergies.com/
Phillip.
Java is a langauge and say it is prorietary is like saying C or C# are proprietary.
Java is a platform, not a language, dependent on a Virtual Machine and a ton of libraries. C is a solely a language targetted at being compiled directly into machine code.
I have read the freely available documentation on Java and you'd be surprised how complete it is.
It's a user guide, not a guide to what's under the hood.
There is no need to reverse engineer anything since JavaDoc spells it all out for gou, and heck Sun provide the source code to the files too!
It gives Java source to some of the libraries. Not to the JVM itself.
It bugs me that people perfer Mono'a C# over Java because it's "more free".
I don't know where you get that idea. Most prefer to avoid Mono C# because they know M$ is going to pull the rug on them at some point.
Well it's only free because people coded it up. If they spent half the time coding a JVM that they've spent coding a Mono they'd be done years ago. And if Sun keeps their own implementation proprietary, well they own so let them. You can use IBM's or Apple's or your own.
There is kaffe and gjc. Java is a bit of a moving target though and not easy to keep up with. If there was one standard Open Source version then we wouldn't need a dozen different versions all trying to play catch-up with the 'official' Sun version.
Why don't people stop using C since Intel still offers it's own closed source compiler?
Try reading the history of C. If the language B wasn't Open Source then C wouldn't have existed at all!
Java is really spread wide open from letting people participate with JSR (though just like in democracies unless you are with someone big you won't get heard.. but you are free to try), and even poke around with the source. Is there some big piece that I'm missing that would bother anyone besides GPL Zealots?
You must be a young programmer to be satisfied with a few scraps thrown out to you. The thing you are missing is the bigger picture.
Phillip.
Wow, so much ignorance in one single post! Must be a record. Others have dealt with the FUD about solar. Windmills tend to be large, ugly and kill birds? When was the last time you visited a wind farm? The one's I've seen tend to be quiet and elegant. Hydrogen isn't a fuel source but just a fancy battery? Then petrol/gas isn't a fuel source either but just a fancy battery. You can convert a standard car to run on hydrogen instead of petrol. BMW has a car has an internal combustion engine tailored to get the best out of hydrogen pumped directly into the tank.
So, pray tell, how do we plan on generating alternate energy? Take the blinkers off and look around you. It's happening right now! Solar, wind, tidal, hydro, thermal, they are all growing. Check out Future Energies.
Phillip.
Make Printing or CUPS work. Period. Don't make me fuck with it. Just make it work. And have more drivers than 10 yer old HP laserjets.
Amen. I just bought a brand new HP and it worked out of the box. The first time a printer hasn't been a Linux nightmare.
We don't need 4 or 5 6 windows managers. We need X term, K, and a lighterweight one like fluxbox or ICEWM but not both and absolutely either put all of the same apps in all the menus or strip them all down to minimum.
Definately. Just use xfce4. Not bloated WMs like KDE or Gnome. Or masochist WMs like fluxbox.
You need:
one office suite
Indeed. OpenOffice. Unless you want something that loads faster in which case Abiword. Or if you need something inbetween then Ted. Though if you need more DTP then one of the Framemaker clones.
one IM client for AOL/Yahoo. etc.
Yup, gaim. Or Kopete if you use KDE.
one IRC
gaim will do this too, as will kopete. Though BitchX is pretty popular.
one image management app
Er, depends what you want to do with images.
one burner
Exactly. k3b is reputedly the best. groast if not. You may as well instally Nero if you have Windoze license.
one real/quicktime/etcetera
Well duh. mplayer. Tho xine is good to keep handly.
one file manager
Of course, ROX is what everyone should be using. Though many prefer Nautilus. And KDE users of course like Konqueror (with the fish: option I'm not surprised). Midnight Commander is prefered by many for some reason.
You need to make the appearance of the filesystem in the file manager MORE simple not LESS simple. if that means making a linear type arrangement like windows then so be it.
If Windows means having nothing but a sterile proscribed bunch of sub-standard options I'll take the Linux approach. Let Darwin do its work.
I agree that the main menu having a million different options upon install is def disingenous though.
Phillip.