Its like text messaging. Everyone wants it, so lets charge everyone ridiculous rates to send text.
Now that everyone wants smart phones, lets charge everyone for data because we can.... and theres nothing you can do about it.
Boost Mobile. $50, text all you want, unlimited web.
Cricket. $40, text all you want, unlimited web.
So there is something you can do about it, but you'd rather sit around and whine. Or maybe you want the top notch devices and top notch network but you don't want to pay for it. Okay.
the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.
Yikes, that's why I stopped using KDE. I can't have an odd crash here and there of my terminal emulator. That might take with it an email I've been working on, or a long-running file download. Stability is critical.
The ancient xterm that I now use has never crashed on me, not once.
The review pans the inclusion of a history chapter in the book. I haven't seen the book's history chapter, so maybe it is not a good one. However, I can say that knowing the history of vi helps enormously if you're trying to "hack" it so I think such a chapter is needed.
By knowing the history of vi you will know that it was built on top of a line editor, ex. That helps the beginner understand why vi is a modal editor and why some commands are available both as ex commands (with a colon preceding them) and as normal mode commands. One of the powerful things about all those ex mode commands is that they are easy to script. You can feed a bunch of ex commands into vim from standard input, thus completely scripting an editing session without learning a bizarre scripting language. (You do however have to learn bizarre ex commands:) This is an easy workaround for some Unix conundrums--that you can't, for example, easily stick text onto the beginning of a file from the command line. I've got shell scripts that do this. (One could also use ed, but again, it helps to know the history of vi to know this stuff.)
Knowing the history also explains other vim oddities. For search, vi uses patterns under which some characters, like curly braces, only have special meaning if they are escaped. When you understand that old Unix utilities used regular expressions that are like this, and that the vi patterns thus resemble the patterns that you use with grep (not egrep) or sed, this makes more sense. It also makes all the vim "magic" settings make more sense.
Also, understanding the history of Unix made it easier for me to understand vim's limitations. For awhile I tried to learn vim script so that I could write scripts that would automatically generate certain text for me. Maybe this would be easy with, say, emacs, but vim script just seemed painful to me--and then it would only work with vim. With time I learned that vi fits in with the Unix toolbox model. Rather than use your editor to generate boilerplate text, it's very easy to generate that sort of thing in a shell script or using m4. Then just load it up into the editor. Vim also uses some external programs, such as ctags.
Unix is a big grab bag of tools that have a long history. I have always found that knowing the history of these tools and where they came from and how they were meant to be used together is enormously helpful.
He says the browser might require me to reboot my phone. Isn't this a sign of a flawed operating system? An application shouldn't cause the entire phone to freeze.
I was experiencing random glitches on my Motorola Droid. Verizon told me to do a factory reset because sometimes apps make the phone do strange things, hampering the phone's functionality. Shouldn't a proper OS keep apps from messing up the whole phone, no matter how crappy the app is?
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless.
The problem is that Bing is not really innovative. Certainly Microsoft does not approach Bing from a perspective of innovation. When Ballmer talks about Bing he talks about beating Google. Zune was about beating iPod. Meanwhile Google and Apple, which have already perfected Google and iPod, are creating their next innovations while Microsoft just starts to catch up.
Most of the Apple products meanwhile are not produced to beat Microsoft or anyone else; instead they seem to make them to make the best product.
Same here. I had been a happy KDE user, but then they went to KDE 4. It lacked polish and crashed everywhere. This reminded me of my first experiences with KDE, which had finally been cleaned up with the later releases of the KDE 3.5 series. KDE 4 seemed a step backward. This caused me to look at other window managers. I found the tiling window managers. They are so much better to use--it's the first time I feel like an actual window manager (not desktop environment, but window manager) is actually a useful thing that makes me more productive. The window managers that come with the desktops just dump windows onto the screen willy nilly. I'd spend time moving them around. I used both xmonad and awesome a lot but have settled on xmonad. Neither is easy to configure but xmonad's documentation is better.
Similarly, the move to Amarok 2 caused me to look at other ways to play music. I never found Amarok to be all that stable--sometimes it would simply vanish from my desktop--and it had lots of annoying bugs. When Amarok 2 came out I started looking for other ways to play music, deal with portable music players, and get podcasts. Now I use hpodder to get the podcasts, gnupod for the iPod (though I switched to a Sandisk Sansa, so I don't need gnupod anymore), moosic to play the music, and just mplayer CLI and screen to play podcasts and radio streams. To browse my music I use tree. Each of these programs is practically bug-free, which is much less frustrating than dealing with a crashy GUI program.
The folks at KDE and Amarok do great work, but it seems to me it's easier to write a stable, well-documented program when it sticks to doing one, relatively small task.
The very fact that you are asking this question shows that you do not know a huge amount about Linux and the different distributions. If you did then the choices would be obvious.
Your family and friends know NOTHING about Linux and the different distributions. They will be looking at you to fix everything, and since you obviously don't know that much, you aren't going to give them the best answers. Then they will think "this Linux crap sucks" because you can't help them.
Instead of foisting Linux on these people, they should stick with Windows or Mac. When things go wrong on those platforms there are plenty of places to go for help (including the vendor) rather than you being the sole source of support.
When you've had more experience with Linux maybe then you can try foisting an OS on other people. By then though you won't be here asking this question.
Breaking the crypto is almost assuredly not the weakest point in your connection. I'd stay connected,
You're right about the crypto not being a concern, but I think the bigger danger is that he gets up to go to the bathroom or printer or something and he forgets to lock the client machine. Cert change alerts are hard to ignore, at least with OpenSSH. Logout.
hree of the four big providers have very little difference between them. They all have the exact same price plan for minutes. The only difference is the extra features offered.
Tell that to the ATT iPhone customers who wish Verizon would get an iPhone because the ATT network is no good, or to the Verizon customers who think they don't have any good devices available, or to the Sprint customers who are enjoying 4G.
No way. A very large segment of home users need iTunes to sync with their iPod and iPhone, play video games, take photos off their cameras, work from home, etc.
Absolutely. For that they can use Windows computer that's in the basement. Maybe the Chrome OS computer goes in the kitchen, or the bathroom (yuck).
There's no reason a home can't have more computers. Already many homes have more television sets than human occupants.
I'm probably one of the few people that found his book, "the World is Flat" to be incredibly uninsightful.
Nah. I didn't even finish it. He kept repeating himself over and over. He had enough material for a NYT Magazine article, but definitely not for a book.
Modern news distribution derives its value from two things: First, the reliability of its product. Second, the timeliness of its product. Newspapers and magazines fail the test because they are release daily, weekly, or even monthly -- whereas other distribution mediums can do it in seconds or minutes. This is not, however, what killed them. The deciding factor is therefore the reliability of the product.
All the reasons you give in your post have to do with the quality of the content that major media organizations put out. That quality, or lack thereof, has little to do with the downfall of newspapers.
Like many you seem to assume that, as a reader of a newspaper, you are the newspaper's customer. This is false. During the print era, what you paid for a paper copy only covered the cost of printing and distributing the paper. During the web era, you don't even pay for what you read on the website.
You pay practically nothing; you are not the customer. No, the advertisers are the customers. Quite simply, the advertisers found better, lower-cost ways to advertise their products. Classified ads were a huge source of revenue for newspapers. That's been decimated by the Internet. Cars go to cars.com; real estate goes to trulia.com; jobs go to monster.com; everything goes to craigslist. Display ads have taken a huge hit too, which has been made worse by the economic downturn.
If your "low quality news has led to fewer readers" hypothesis were true, then people would not be reading the newspapers' Web products. To the contrary: the newspapers are drawing huge Web audiences. The problem for the newspapers is that advertisers aren't willing to pay nearly as much for Web ads as they will for print ads.
A lot of people are saying that newspapers aren't relevant for their readers, or they aren't credible sources anymore. Even if this is true (and Web traffic tells a different story) it simply ignores the business realities. Remember that readers don't pay for newspapers. They never have. Advertisers pay for newspapers. It is the advertising market that has changed, not the quality of what's in the newspapers and not the relevance or timeliness of what's in the newspapers.
You see anything in here about "translated"? Or a "plain language version" being "controlling"?
Yikes, modded up to 5. Slashdot's mod system ends up being a place where the uninformed moderate up the uninformed on topics like this. Then again, maybe that's what happens all the time and I just don't know it!
"Plain language version"? "Corrected"? "Translated"? "Legislation that is passed on"? What on earth are you talking about? This is horrifyingly wrong. There is no "plain language version". Legislation is not "translated". Committees report a bill with specific language; though it may be amended later (generally on the floor, or in conference) there is no "correction".
And "The legislative language isn't that important"? That is so amazingly, completely, and gravely wrong that I have no idea where to start debunking it.
Yes, I AM a lawyer and I work on issues involving legislation every single day, so I fully expect I will get modded down. The perils of crowdsourcing.
had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.
On Slackware I manually recompiled Freetype to enable the bytecode interpreter. Debian (and, presumably, Ubuntu) ship with the bytecode interpreter already enabled.
If you don't want things to look executable, mount it with the noexec option (which you could put in fstab). That way nothing on the device, even with FAT, will appear executable.
I just tested this out, and it does not work. mount(8) says that mounting something noexec means that execution of files on the filesystem is not allowed. However, that does not necessarily mean that the execute bit will be unset. Instead, on my system the execute permission bit is set, but attempting to execute something gives me "permission denied."
I've had the problem the questioner asks about before; the cleanest solution is to use "fmask=133" in the mount options, as described in mount(8). (There are also umask and dmask options, but I find fmask=133 is sufficient. umask=133 will screw you up because then you can't enter directories.)
This solution works well for me because I just mount everything from the command line and using the settings in fstab. (This actually is not as bad as it sounds, although I do most work in the command line shell anyway.) Setting the fmask for GNOME in Ubuntu likely would involve editing some HAL XML file somewhere in order to say what fmask options you want, though I'm surprised Ubuntu hasn't done this already.
Before I figured out how to use the fmask option, I had a little script to chmod the files on my photo memory cards as I copied them to my computer.
if it does more than wget, doesn't that mean it already has too many features?
wget is not a web browser, though. It just fetches files. A web browser does more than just fetch files. It also renders the HTML in a way humans can more easily understand (either with text or, usually, graphically.) These days it also executes a whole heapload of Javascript.
I first saw uzbl and thought it did not look very interesting to use for every day Web browsing, but it could be useful for other things. For example, I like to use scripts to automatically download bank statements, as banks are paranoid about emailing these things. Scripting an ordinary Web browser to do this from the command line is very hard. It's also hard to do it using something like wget or curl, because web pages include a lot of Javascript and often the pages just don't work if the scripts don't run. You can sort of "fake out" the web server by doing things that the Javascript would do if it really ran. For instance, if the Javascript would load a cookie or do a redirect, have curl load the cookie or do the redirect. But using curl to replicate a real browser gets tedious really fast.
If uzbl were a real scriptable browser, maybe it would be usable for things like this. Maybe I could also do this with Chickenfoot or Vimperator, though I have not investigated them enough to know whether I could also make them tie in well with the command line.
Slashdot Mirror
Its like text messaging. Everyone wants it, so lets charge everyone ridiculous rates to send text.
Now that everyone wants smart phones, lets charge everyone for data because we can.... and theres nothing you can do about it.
Boost Mobile. $50, text all you want, unlimited web.
Cricket. $40, text all you want, unlimited web.
So there is something you can do about it, but you'd rather sit around and whine. Or maybe you want the top notch devices and top notch network but you don't want to pay for it. Okay.
the odd crash here and there, e.g. of Konsole, particularly early on, but nothing that really blew up the whole desktop.
Yikes, that's why I stopped using KDE. I can't have an odd crash here and there of my terminal emulator. That might take with it an email I've been working on, or a long-running file download. Stability is critical.
The ancient xterm that I now use has never crashed on me, not once.
Have you tried recently? A few years ago I blocked all incoming text messages on Verizon Wireless.
So what's going on with the asterisk in the name? A disclaimer?
* Prices and participation may vary. See store for details. We may actually steal all your data and post it publicly.
The review pans the inclusion of a history chapter in the book. I haven't seen the book's history chapter, so maybe it is not a good one. However, I can say that knowing the history of vi helps enormously if you're trying to "hack" it so I think such a chapter is needed.
By knowing the history of vi you will know that it was built on top of a line editor, ex. That helps the beginner understand why vi is a modal editor and why some commands are available both as ex commands (with a colon preceding them) and as normal mode commands. One of the powerful things about all those ex mode commands is that they are easy to script. You can feed a bunch of ex commands into vim from standard input, thus completely scripting an editing session without learning a bizarre scripting language. (You do however have to learn bizarre ex commands :) This is an easy workaround for some Unix conundrums--that you can't, for example, easily stick text onto the beginning of a file from the command line. I've got shell scripts that do this. (One could also use ed, but again, it helps to know the history of vi to know this stuff.)
Knowing the history also explains other vim oddities. For search, vi uses patterns under which some characters, like curly braces, only have special meaning if they are escaped. When you understand that old Unix utilities used regular expressions that are like this, and that the vi patterns thus resemble the patterns that you use with grep (not egrep) or sed, this makes more sense. It also makes all the vim "magic" settings make more sense.
Also, understanding the history of Unix made it easier for me to understand vim's limitations. For awhile I tried to learn vim script so that I could write scripts that would automatically generate certain text for me. Maybe this would be easy with, say, emacs, but vim script just seemed painful to me--and then it would only work with vim. With time I learned that vi fits in with the Unix toolbox model. Rather than use your editor to generate boilerplate text, it's very easy to generate that sort of thing in a shell script or using m4. Then just load it up into the editor. Vim also uses some external programs, such as ctags.
Unix is a big grab bag of tools that have a long history. I have always found that knowing the history of these tools and where they came from and how they were meant to be used together is enormously helpful.
Yeah, I'm sure they won't object when I have sex on their couch, and hopefully the cat hasn't taken a piss on the couch either.
Yep, hotels are for suckers.
He says the browser might require me to reboot my phone. Isn't this a sign of a flawed operating system? An application shouldn't cause the entire phone to freeze.
I was experiencing random glitches on my Motorola Droid. Verizon told me to do a factory reset because sometimes apps make the phone do strange things, hampering the phone's functionality. Shouldn't a proper OS keep apps from messing up the whole phone, no matter how crappy the app is?
Wow, you call the near extermination of an entire group of people "civil"?
Unbelievable.
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless.
The problem is that Bing is not really innovative. Certainly Microsoft does not approach Bing from a perspective of innovation. When Ballmer talks about Bing he talks about beating Google. Zune was about beating iPod. Meanwhile Google and Apple, which have already perfected Google and iPod, are creating their next innovations while Microsoft just starts to catch up.
Most of the Apple products meanwhile are not produced to beat Microsoft or anyone else; instead they seem to make them to make the best product.
Same here. I had been a happy KDE user, but then they went to KDE 4. It lacked polish and crashed everywhere. This reminded me of my first experiences with KDE, which had finally been cleaned up with the later releases of the KDE 3.5 series. KDE 4 seemed a step backward. This caused me to look at other window managers. I found the tiling window managers. They are so much better to use--it's the first time I feel like an actual window manager (not desktop environment, but window manager) is actually a useful thing that makes me more productive. The window managers that come with the desktops just dump windows onto the screen willy nilly. I'd spend time moving them around. I used both xmonad and awesome a lot but have settled on xmonad. Neither is easy to configure but xmonad's documentation is better.
Similarly, the move to Amarok 2 caused me to look at other ways to play music. I never found Amarok to be all that stable--sometimes it would simply vanish from my desktop--and it had lots of annoying bugs. When Amarok 2 came out I started looking for other ways to play music, deal with portable music players, and get podcasts. Now I use hpodder to get the podcasts, gnupod for the iPod (though I switched to a Sandisk Sansa, so I don't need gnupod anymore), moosic to play the music, and just mplayer CLI and screen to play podcasts and radio streams. To browse my music I use tree. Each of these programs is practically bug-free, which is much less frustrating than dealing with a crashy GUI program.
The folks at KDE and Amarok do great work, but it seems to me it's easier to write a stable, well-documented program when it sticks to doing one, relatively small task.
The very fact that you are asking this question shows that you do not know a huge amount about Linux and the different distributions. If you did then the choices would be obvious.
Your family and friends know NOTHING about Linux and the different distributions. They will be looking at you to fix everything, and since you obviously don't know that much, you aren't going to give them the best answers. Then they will think "this Linux crap sucks" because you can't help them.
Instead of foisting Linux on these people, they should stick with Windows or Mac. When things go wrong on those platforms there are plenty of places to go for help (including the vendor) rather than you being the sole source of support.
When you've had more experience with Linux maybe then you can try foisting an OS on other people. By then though you won't be here asking this question.
Breaking the crypto is almost assuredly not the weakest point in your connection. I'd stay connected,
You're right about the crypto not being a concern, but I think the bigger danger is that he gets up to go to the bathroom or printer or something and he forgets to lock the client machine. Cert change alerts are hard to ignore, at least with OpenSSH. Logout.
hree of the four big providers have very little difference between them. They all have the exact same price plan for minutes. The only difference is the extra features offered.
Tell that to the ATT iPhone customers who wish Verizon would get an iPhone because the ATT network is no good, or to the Verizon customers who think they don't have any good devices available, or to the Sprint customers who are enjoying 4G.
No way. A very large segment of home users need iTunes to sync with their iPod and iPhone, play video games, take photos off their cameras, work from home, etc.
Absolutely. For that they can use Windows computer that's in the basement. Maybe the Chrome OS computer goes in the kitchen, or the bathroom (yuck).
There's no reason a home can't have more computers. Already many homes have more television sets than human occupants.
I'm probably one of the few people that found his book, "the World is Flat" to be incredibly uninsightful.
Nah. I didn't even finish it. He kept repeating himself over and over. He had enough material for a NYT Magazine article, but definitely not for a book.
Modern news distribution derives its value from two things: First, the reliability of its product. Second, the timeliness of its product. Newspapers and magazines fail the test because they are release daily, weekly, or even monthly -- whereas other distribution mediums can do it in seconds or minutes. This is not, however, what killed them. The deciding factor is therefore the reliability of the product.
All the reasons you give in your post have to do with the quality of the content that major media organizations put out. That quality, or lack thereof, has little to do with the downfall of newspapers.
Like many you seem to assume that, as a reader of a newspaper, you are the newspaper's customer. This is false. During the print era, what you paid for a paper copy only covered the cost of printing and distributing the paper. During the web era, you don't even pay for what you read on the website.
You pay practically nothing; you are not the customer. No, the advertisers are the customers. Quite simply, the advertisers found better, lower-cost ways to advertise their products. Classified ads were a huge source of revenue for newspapers. That's been decimated by the Internet. Cars go to cars.com; real estate goes to trulia.com; jobs go to monster.com; everything goes to craigslist. Display ads have taken a huge hit too, which has been made worse by the economic downturn.
If your "low quality news has led to fewer readers" hypothesis were true, then people would not be reading the newspapers' Web products. To the contrary: the newspapers are drawing huge Web audiences. The problem for the newspapers is that advertisers aren't willing to pay nearly as much for Web ads as they will for print ads.
A lot of people are saying that newspapers aren't relevant for their readers, or they aren't credible sources anymore. Even if this is true (and Web traffic tells a different story) it simply ignores the business realities. Remember that readers don't pay for newspapers. They never have. Advertisers pay for newspapers. It is the advertising market that has changed, not the quality of what's in the newspapers and not the relevance or timeliness of what's in the newspapers.
A question for anyone here, which if any of those PDF readers works properly with PDF forms?
I was going to complain that none of the free Linux programs did this, but apparently both Evince and Okular support this now. Arch forum link.
Whoops, should have previewed...
How a bill becomes law:
http://www.votesmart.org/resource_govt101_02.php
How a bill becomes law.
You see anything in here about "translated"? Or a "plain language version" being "controlling"?
Yikes, modded up to 5. Slashdot's mod system ends up being a place where the uninformed moderate up the uninformed on topics like this. Then again, maybe that's what happens all the time and I just don't know it!
"Plain language version"? "Corrected"? "Translated"? "Legislation that is passed on"? What on earth are you talking about? This is horrifyingly wrong. There is no "plain language version". Legislation is not "translated". Committees report a bill with specific language; though it may be amended later (generally on the floor, or in conference) there is no "correction".
And "The legislative language isn't that important"? That is so amazingly, completely, and gravely wrong that I have no idea where to start debunking it.
Yes, I AM a lawyer and I work on issues involving legislation every single day, so I fully expect I will get modded down. The perils of crowdsourcing.
Wow, the mod system is seriously broken if this got modded up to +5.
had to deliberately disable it in order to comply with patents. I vaguely recall this happening at least once in another project that involved font rendering.
Yep:
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html
On Slackware I manually recompiled Freetype to enable the bytecode interpreter. Debian (and, presumably, Ubuntu) ship with the bytecode interpreter already enabled.
If you don't want things to look executable, mount it with the noexec option (which you could put in fstab). That way nothing on the device, even with FAT, will appear executable.
I just tested this out, and it does not work. mount(8) says that mounting something noexec means that execution of files on the filesystem is not allowed. However, that does not necessarily mean that the execute bit will be unset. Instead, on my system the execute permission bit is set, but attempting to execute something gives me "permission denied."
I've had the problem the questioner asks about before; the cleanest solution is to use "fmask=133" in the mount options, as described in mount(8). (There are also umask and dmask options, but I find fmask=133 is sufficient. umask=133 will screw you up because then you can't enter directories.)
This solution works well for me because I just mount everything from the command line and using the settings in fstab. (This actually is not as bad as it sounds, although I do most work in the command line shell anyway.) Setting the fmask for GNOME in Ubuntu likely would involve editing some HAL XML file somewhere in order to say what fmask options you want, though I'm surprised Ubuntu hasn't done this already.
Before I figured out how to use the fmask option, I had a little script to chmod the files on my photo memory cards as I copied them to my computer.
Have you tried Privoxy? Then you can get adblocking on any browser.
if it does more than wget, doesn't that mean it already has too many features?
wget is not a web browser, though. It just fetches files. A web browser does more than just fetch files. It also renders the HTML in a way humans can more easily understand (either with text or, usually, graphically.) These days it also executes a whole heapload of Javascript.
I first saw uzbl and thought it did not look very interesting to use for every day Web browsing, but it could be useful for other things. For example, I like to use scripts to automatically download bank statements, as banks are paranoid about emailing these things. Scripting an ordinary Web browser to do this from the command line is very hard. It's also hard to do it using something like wget or curl, because web pages include a lot of Javascript and often the pages just don't work if the scripts don't run. You can sort of "fake out" the web server by doing things that the Javascript would do if it really ran. For instance, if the Javascript would load a cookie or do a redirect, have curl load the cookie or do the redirect. But using curl to replicate a real browser gets tedious really fast.
If uzbl were a real scriptable browser, maybe it would be usable for things like this. Maybe I could also do this with Chickenfoot or Vimperator, though I have not investigated them enough to know whether I could also make them tie in well with the command line.