I have sometimes wondered if a realistic argument could be made about the unused keys actually contributing to unnecessary plastic waste on this planet. Especially when there is a huge amount of PC keyboards being made all the time. If you ripped just the Scroll Lock key away from about 100 keyboards, you would have the amount of keys to make one full keyboard.
That is still true, but Ctrl-Alt-Del seems to work almost always these days (to bring up the menu from where you can start Task Manager and then kill the game).
Nope. You can log in to Win8 by tapping the space bar. For additional security you can enable Ctrl-Alt-Del login by starting "netplwiz.exe" and going to the Advanced tab.
Open source software is a dying fad. There's really no need for Linux. Windows and OS X are just fine for most people. Even half of the new supercomputers in the top 500 in the past year are running Windows or OS X. Linux was a fad in the past 15 years, but it's going away and people are switching back to Windows and OS X.
This is something I've begun to think lately too. During the long XP era, Windows was still a terrible kludge. Thus, Linux was the better choice: it gave me better performance and stability. However since the advent of Windows 6 operating system core, things have been taking a much better shape on the other side. I could as well install Linux...but then I ask myself, what problem(s) would it solve anymore? There is a risk of actually getting a more slower and unstable computer. So the roles on the desktop have been somewhat changing.
For servers, supercomputers and embedded operating systems, Linux still seems the best choice. As a developer desktop with the nice toolchains and the UNIX command line it is also really good, even though on the Windows side we have Visual Studio, which excellent but in different ways. On the other hand Visual Studio is quite heavyweight and requires a reasonably fast desktop machine to be used comfortably.
I also have a bit of distaste towards the Ubuntu Software Center, but sometimes it can be quite nice way to discover software, compared to wading through repositories. It's a good application especially for newcomers.
The Unity desktop has for years suffered of terrible stability and performance issues. Part of the blame goes to Compiz, which makes for a quite heavyweight graphics stack for simple desktop effects. On certain computers Compiz also crashes every now and then. If you put the vanilla Ubuntu desktop to a small Atom / Bobcat laptop, you can easily see that even the basic functions are painfully slow and thus the desktop unusable. When we go up to relatively fast Core 2 Duo machines, even then opening the Dash is laggy and also dragging shortcut icons from Dash to taskbar is a jerky experience. Just try it.
Additionally there are some weird issues that seem to linger from release to another, some of which would be easy to fix:
* Brightness is changed in two steps at a time. Apparently the button press event gets handled by both OS and BIOS. Setting/sys/module/video/parameters/brightness_switch_enabled to 0 can be used as a workaround.
* Hibernation is disabled by default, while in practice it works just fine on most machines. (how to enable it manually)
* Bluetooth adapter on/off state is not remembered across reboots.
* I always get that "Your current network has a.local domain, which is incompatible with the Avahi network service and not recommended" popup. This just creates a bad out-of-box experience. What is Avahi? Why must I even care about it? Why did not the installer configure my hostname better then?
By the way, there is a "Portal clone" called Twin Sector. It received quite mediocre reviews, but I have been following a Let's Play about it, and to me the game does not seem like a complete disaster at all. So if you like the genre, maybe grab that one as a cheapie from Steam for a rainy day.
I have found out that if I check Slashdot frequently (multiple times in a day) I get virtually never any mod points. But if I am occupied with something else for a couple of days and then come back to/., I often find a five-pack bounty. It works quite consistently like this. Does anyone else experience this behavior? Is it intentional? It might also be related to some parameters specific to my account.
Intel and AMD have their cpu architectures opened to the public, why not gpu architectures so the linux and bsd communities can develop better drivers for wayland and mir windowing systems, what are they hiding. Or at least Nvidia and AMD can build an opengl only gpu for the open source world(linux, bsd). Fucking corporations.
What? This particular article is exactly about Nvidia releasing more open documentation about their hardware.
Pitiful as the drivers used to be pretty decent but you can't install just the driver anymore. You have to have their fscking shit catalyst control center with it.
True. The installer forces CCC to be installed (unless you get the plain driver via Windows Update). But after that you can actually make your configuration changes in CCC and then just close it (and possibly make it so that it does not run on startup at all). The driver will still remember the settings.
One thing I noticed, under Linux CCC is a native app which uses Qt and I was pleasantly surprised how fast it runs compared to the.NET version under Windows. On some computers the Windows version takes multiple seconds to pop up the window and then when you use it, you can see how it crawls through drawing the UI elements. Additionally the installer is one of those apps which have a progress bar which makes no sense: it swipes constantly from empty to full during the installation. The Windows 8 marching pearls animation would be better suited for the purpose.
A couple of days ago there was the Slashdot article about Linus being asked if he has been ever asked to insert a backdoor into Linux. Now as the full talk is available in YouTube, you might want to check the particular comment at 24:15 and judge for yourself. After his nodding and audience laughter, a few seconds after that Linus writes it off by shaking his head and saying "no", in a voice that to me sounds like it really was just meant to be only a joke. Any comments?
I remember this effect the first few times I used a wheel mouse. It didn't take long to learn to press in a certain way (angle) so there's no scrolling. Is there something in more recent mice that makes this harder?
I know what you mean. I also could find the certain angle in which to click the button in older mice, but there really seems to be something in the more recent mice that makes this harder. Could be that the scroll wheel is positioned higher, that is one guess.
<rant>Every year, we seem to have fewer keys on the keyboard and more widgets on the mouse. For example, on most laptops we've lost PgUp/Dn keys and the arrow keys keep shrinking, probably because a wheel mouse is supposed to do the same thing. I predict that some day they don't sell keyboards any more, but a typical mouse will have 102 buttons.</rant>
The Ducky Mini is an interesting case as it omits arrow keys completely.
Slashdot Mirror
There's probably some clicky-click way to access the same window. :) Maybe through Control Panel or some policy editor, I don't know.
I have sometimes wondered if a realistic argument could be made about the unused keys actually contributing to unnecessary plastic waste on this planet. Especially when there is a huge amount of PC keyboards being made all the time. If you ripped just the Scroll Lock key away from about 100 keyboards, you would have the amount of keys to make one full keyboard.
That is still true, but Ctrl-Alt-Del seems to work almost always these days (to bring up the menu from where you can start Task Manager and then kill the game).
Well, even the Amazon Spying Lens snuck into Ubuntu even though the OS is mostly based on free software.
That is true. Thank you for the correction.
I am not completely convinced about it either.
By the way, is it these days still possible to see the full kernel panic message in Linux if the kernel crashes when I'm inside X desktop?
Thank god we are at least past the era in which pressing the Win key or Alt-Tabbing in a game would jam the whole operating system.
Nope. You can log in to Win8 by tapping the space bar. For additional security you can enable Ctrl-Alt-Del login by starting "netplwiz.exe" and going to the Advanced tab.
Because not everyone has one?
In that case they could have still used both Ctrl-Alt-Del and Windows key for the function.
It seems to work at least in text fields in Chrome.
The basic set of UNIX command line tools is the only area on which a Linux operating system depends on GNU.
If you are interested, the GoingNative 2013 talks include a C++11/14 Sampler by Scott Meyers.
Open source software is a dying fad. There's really no need for Linux. Windows and OS X are just fine for most people. Even half of the new supercomputers in the top 500 in the past year are running Windows or OS X. Linux was a fad in the past 15 years, but it's going away and people are switching back to Windows and OS X.
This is something I've begun to think lately too. During the long XP era, Windows was still a terrible kludge. Thus, Linux was the better choice: it gave me better performance and stability. However since the advent of Windows 6 operating system core, things have been taking a much better shape on the other side. I could as well install Linux...but then I ask myself, what problem(s) would it solve anymore? There is a risk of actually getting a more slower and unstable computer. So the roles on the desktop have been somewhat changing.
For servers, supercomputers and embedded operating systems, Linux still seems the best choice. As a developer desktop with the nice toolchains and the UNIX command line it is also really good, even though on the Windows side we have Visual Studio, which excellent but in different ways. On the other hand Visual Studio is quite heavyweight and requires a reasonably fast desktop machine to be used comfortably.
I also have a bit of distaste towards the Ubuntu Software Center, but sometimes it can be quite nice way to discover software, compared to wading through repositories. It's a good application especially for newcomers.
The Unity desktop has for years suffered of terrible stability and performance issues. Part of the blame goes to Compiz, which makes for a quite heavyweight graphics stack for simple desktop effects. On certain computers Compiz also crashes every now and then. If you put the vanilla Ubuntu desktop to a small Atom / Bobcat laptop, you can easily see that even the basic functions are painfully slow and thus the desktop unusable. When we go up to relatively fast Core 2 Duo machines, even then opening the Dash is laggy and also dragging shortcut icons from Dash to taskbar is a jerky experience. Just try it.
Additionally there are some weird issues that seem to linger from release to another, some of which would be easy to fix: /sys/module/video/parameters/brightness_switch_enabled to 0 can be used as a workaround. .local domain, which is incompatible with the Avahi network service and not recommended" popup. This just creates a bad out-of-box experience. What is Avahi? Why must I even care about it? Why did not the installer configure my hostname better then?
* Brightness is changed in two steps at a time. Apparently the button press event gets handled by both OS and BIOS. Setting
* Hibernation is disabled by default, while in practice it works just fine on most machines. (how to enable it manually)
* Bluetooth adapter on/off state is not remembered across reboots.
* I always get that "Your current network has a
By the way, there is a "Portal clone" called Twin Sector. It received quite mediocre reviews, but I have been following a Let's Play about it, and to me the game does not seem like a complete disaster at all. So if you like the genre, maybe grab that one as a cheapie from Steam for a rainy day.
And me without mod points... dammit.
I have found out that if I check Slashdot frequently (multiple times in a day) I get virtually never any mod points. But if I am occupied with something else for a couple of days and then come back to /., I often find a five-pack bounty. It works quite consistently like this. Does anyone else experience this behavior? Is it intentional? It might also be related to some parameters specific to my account.
And of course let's not forget Thunderbird. A very good e-mail client in my opinion.
Intel and AMD have their cpu architectures opened to the public, why not gpu architectures so the linux and bsd communities can develop better drivers for wayland and mir windowing systems, what are they hiding. Or at least Nvidia and AMD can build an opengl only gpu for the open source world(linux, bsd). Fucking corporations.
What? This particular article is exactly about Nvidia releasing more open documentation about their hardware.
I thought that was part of the graphics driver, but I'm not familiar with the details.
Support for Optimus was later added to the Nvidia closed source Linux graphics driver (May 3, 2013 / 319.17).
Pitiful as the drivers used to be pretty decent but you can't install just the driver anymore. You have to have their fscking shit catalyst control center with it.
True. The installer forces CCC to be installed (unless you get the plain driver via Windows Update). But after that you can actually make your configuration changes in CCC and then just close it (and possibly make it so that it does not run on startup at all). The driver will still remember the settings.
One thing I noticed, under Linux CCC is a native app which uses Qt and I was pleasantly surprised how fast it runs compared to the .NET version under Windows. On some computers the Windows version takes multiple seconds to pop up the window and then when you use it, you can see how it crawls through drawing the UI elements. Additionally the installer is one of those apps which have a progress bar which makes no sense: it swipes constantly from empty to full during the installation. The Windows 8 marching pearls animation would be better suited for the purpose.
A couple of days ago there was the Slashdot article about Linus being asked if he has been ever asked to insert a backdoor into Linux. Now as the full talk is available in YouTube , you might want to check the particular comment at 24:15 and judge for yourself. After his nodding and audience laughter, a few seconds after that Linus writes it off by shaking his head and saying "no", in a voice that to me sounds like it really was just meant to be only a joke. Any comments?
I remember this effect the first few times I used a wheel mouse. It didn't take long to learn to press in a certain way (angle) so there's no scrolling. Is there something in more recent mice that makes this harder?
I know what you mean. I also could find the certain angle in which to click the button in older mice, but there really seems to be something in the more recent mice that makes this harder. Could be that the scroll wheel is positioned higher, that is one guess.
<rant>Every year, we seem to have fewer keys on the keyboard and more widgets on the mouse. For example, on most laptops we've lost PgUp/Dn keys and the arrow keys keep shrinking, probably because a wheel mouse is supposed to do the same thing. I predict that some day they don't sell keyboards any more, but a typical mouse will have 102 buttons.</rant>
The Ducky Mini is an interesting case as it omits arrow keys completely.
Stop buying cheap mice then? All the mice I've bought over the last 5 years have all had great scroll wheel clickers.
A usable middle button is not a deluxe feature which should require buying an expensive mouse.