There are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.
You sure about that? I'm in an HP office right now; the HP-UX boxes here come with CDE and I've never seen GNOME on any of them - it doesn't appear to be installed either.
I know Sun like GNOME. Can't comment on IBM though.
The problem is that people set their tab breaks at all sorts of places (eg: every 4 characters), and then use tabs to space things in the middle of lines, or they'll mix tabs and spaces at the beginnings of lines. When somebody with different settings opens the same file, the indentation looks really screwed. That happens even after you've gotten everybody to agree on a common number of columns for indentation.
I only know of two solutions:
Make all software, everywhere, ever, use tab stops every eight characters and never anything else.
Use spaces.
I didn't have the energy to do the first, so I use the second solution.
If you're developing on your own it's not an issue, but I don't like to have one coding style here and another there - it's not just confusing, but it takes a while to change my editor settings every time I open code for somebody else. I use spaces and that's that. At least my editors are clever enough to know that Makefiles still need tabs!
I'm one of those people who are interested in better 2D acceleration and hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration. I'm a MythTV user. Nvidia's hardware does have support for such acceleration; they call it Purevideo. Unfortunately, the Linux drivers don't support it.
Well, the "nv" driver doesn't support it, but Nvidia's own driver does ("it" being the XvMC extension in Xorg).
Given that you're a MythTV user, here's a link to their Wiki, which contains a page about XvMC support.
The new 7050PV [nvidia.com] chipset would be perfect for a high-definition...
I've not tried it, but the 7300GS just came out a month ago, and I happened to be upgrading so I got one - for 40 Euros; it's passively cooled, and so far has been working really well in TwinView mode on my Linux box. I use Kaffeine (Xine-based) rather than MythTV, but it's very smooth. I'm sure MythTV would be the same.
I wish Intel would release a standalone video card.
BTW, I'm using a machine with an integrated Intel VGA at work. It's OK - has open source drivers, and 3D acceleration, but it uses system memory, only has one output (not DVI either), and doesn't always behave itself. Personally, I much prefer the 7300. Oh yeah - the Intel driver supports XvMC too.
If you use a linux server and LVM, losing one drives loses everything.
That's why you use hardware RAID.
Eh?
LVM and RAID are orthogonal solutions, and don't do the same thing. LVM will let you make a single larger partition out of a number of real partitions, and before anyone says that's the same as RAID0, I should point out that RAID0 is not a real RAID level (as it has no redundancy). The circumstances for failure for LVM and RAID0 (JBOD too) are basically the same - if one part fails, you will quite possibly lose the whole lot.
As for hardware RAID, I would not necessarily recommend that either, as it moves the single point of failure without resolving the problem. Replacing a broken controller with something compatible some years down the road can prove impossible, especially with onboard controllers. There's also the fact that a number of RAID controller cards are buggy and others do most os the work in software drivers anyway! Performance is also no longer a reason to use a pure hardware RAID solution, especially now that multi-core machines are available cheaply.
Hot-swap is still someting that requires a good hardware solution, but that's about it. Good (and well supported) RAID products cost good money too, and for most of us it's just not worth doing - better to use software RAID, buy more RAM, and pocket the rest.
I wish I was Swiss so I could wash my clothes with Linux!
No you don't.
A couple of years ago, I got a Linux box for my birthday. It's pretty crap, really. It doesn't wash especially clean, and your clothes come out smelling slightly weird.
Micro&Soft is only marginally better - I've used that too (yeah - same friend, same birthday).
I've now gone back to using things like Persil and Ariel, and am much happier with the result - cleaner clothes that actually do smell better.
But that's just the washing. I've been using the Linux OS since '93...
HL2's ability to make me feel is the sole reason that I'd call it a great game. The Thief series are the only other games I've played that have been on par with it, in that respect.
HL2 was certainly very immersive; I really enjoyed the game, but I don't think anything beats the intense atmosphere of the Shalebridge Cradle. It still scares me now! I think Deadly Shadows (Thief 3) was quite underrated.
I also heard a story about the CEO of Virgin Atlantic (charles bronson??...)
His name's (Sir) Richard Branson, and he really is known for being down-to-earth and game for a laugh. I wouldn't call him an actor, but he has appeared in Friends (he sold Joey the hat while they were in London). He's had cameos in a couple of other things, such as the last Bond film.
In one Candid Camera style show, they played tricks on him by dressing up people he knows really well so that he wouldn't recognise them, and then putting him in strange situations. They had his sister and a couple of others as trespassers, camping on his land, and he was really nice and polite about it; they had Phil Collins in a wig as a taxi driver, taking him through London and jabbering on about this and that. They did something with Peter Gabriel too, but I don't recall what it was.
Richard has a good sense of humour (note: not "humor" as he's English). He had a hot air balloon, rigged with lights that would flash on to make it look like it was turning, and wanted to play an April fools' prank with it. It didn't quite work out as he expected, but still had a noticable effect!
IMHO, an omission in PXE is the lack of parameter passing before the image is loaded. As it is now, you can have only a single PXE image that is served to all the systems that attempt a network boot. You could select on some DHCP parameters in the DHCP server, but there is no parameter that you can control sitting at the keyboard of the booting system.
Things would be much more usable when a simple menu was part of the boot sequence, and/or you could press a key which would be passed in the DHCP request.
IIRC, the PXE system does actually support use of a simple menu, and this can be controlled by options sent by the PXE/DHCP server. I think you can use it to tell the PXE ROM where to boot from (based on a list of options). Don't quote me on that though!
The problem can also be handled by PXELinux, as it will try to load a config file whose name is based on the MAC address of the ethernet card the client used to boot. It tries a set of combinations, then looks for "default". This at least gives you the possibility of having tailor-made instructions for any given machine - with custom parameters passed to the kernel etc.
What is not possible is to pass boot parameters to DOS or Windows, when booting in this manner. The nearest you can get is to set PXE options, and have a program read them out via the PXE API after the OS boots. Space is limited though - each option can't be more than 256 bytes long, and there is almost certainly a cap on the maximum amount of option data that the PXE system on the client will hold while the OS boots.
I don't know your 3Com DOS system, but I would not expect them to be interested in updating it. I know that the previous NetInstall (OSD) version used DOS for unattended installation, and although this is still present in the new version, they want to drop it at some point. The new version adds imaging support, but this doesn't use DOS (it uses Linux), and all the new unattended stuff uses WinPE.
I think you should be able to get a trial version of NetInstall, with a time-limited license. At least then you can see if it suits you. It is, BTW, primarily aimed at managing running machines, and not just installing them - the "install" part of the name refers more to software, rather than the OS. You could try it with some VMs.
Well, you can use PXELinux (part of the whole SysLinux thing) to boot a kernel with a RAM disk (initrd), and run whatever you want from there. You will need a basic live distribution to go in the RAM disk, which contains init, libc.so, sh and whatever other bits you need. You can keep the size down by using busybox. Creating a working initrd can be a little hairy, as your compile-time paths are normally different than the runtime ones, which can break some programs without a little hacking. The initrd itself is a gzip'd cpio archive. You then have to set up a TFTP server for serving PXELinux; if you want to automate things, you can have your DHCP server tell PXE-capable clients to boot PXELinux from your TFTP server.
If you are in the market for a commercial solution, with centralised management and all the trimmings, you should get NetInstall v6 from enteo software with OSD (OS deployment); this includes TrueImage. It costs money, but it works very well. It's a primarily PC/Windows solution, however, so imaging to/from a Mac may well not work.
You are allowed by law to buy a PC without an OS on it, and Dell are obligated to offer to sell you the PC without the OS on it.
Don't expect it to be so easy anywhere else, Dell gets a lot of subsidy from Microsoft for the 'Linux' games it plays.
That's not quite what the law says. Dell are allowed by law to only sell PCs with Windows if they so choose. What the law says is that the "OEM" version of the software may be sold without any accompanying hardware, and that Microsoft is explicitly forbidden from making versions of Windows which are tied to (only run on) specific machines. You can see this article (in German) for an overview; the judgement itself, from 6th July 2000, is typed up here (also German). This law is also the reason that people in Germany can legally sell their used OEM Windows software on ebay, even if the EULA says that the software may not be sold separately from the machine it came with.
It has also been hinted at that extra conditions of use (eg: in the EULA) on boxed software that were not visible on the outside of the box prior to purchase may be counted as null and void, but this has not yet been confirmed by a court of law - in Germany, or AFAIK anywhere else in the EU.
The situation in the States is, of course, an entirely different kettle of fish. As far as being a consumer goes, it's the land of the not-so-free.
On XEmacs (possibly Emacs too) you can reformat code by highlighting a section and pressing CTRL-ALT-backspace. I think it's the best code formatter I have (better than indent). Anyway, on a US-layout keyboard, the backslash key is directly underneath the backspace, and if your aim is a little off...
I learnt very quickly (ie: after the second time) to always look at the keyboard for that key combination!
This is what people like to eat for breakfast around here:
Freshly made Italian coffee (filtered - none of that instant rubbish)
A "Butterbretzel" or two (fresh from the baker's)
Eating or drinking really sweet stuff (Coke, chocolate or sugary things) for breakfast is not something that is really done here. Some do eat jam, but there's nothing like Frischkäse and Spanish salami on your Brötchen...
The real thing that annoys me about opensuse is that certain parts come deliberately crippled (like getting a xine engine that won't play mp3's) and no visible instructions on how to un-cripple.
Yeah - they don't provide certain packages, such as the MP3 stuff, to avoid potential legal problems. There is a simple way to fix it though - add a Packman repository to your list of sources in YaST, and update/install whatever you need. Here's one location:
After you've added it, start the software manager and add/update "lame" and "xine-lib". It will automatically add any other libraries you need, except for libdvdcss (required for watching DVDs) - the RPM package that Packman has does not contain the source, but the site does give you some tips about how to get it and build the package; it's not difficult.
Another tip: set the filter to "Installation Summary", check all the boxes except "Do not install", then click the menu item Packages->All in This List->Update if newer version available. That will mark the newer Packman versions for installation over the original SuSE versions. Uncheck "Keep" and "Protected" to see a list of which packages it wants to change before clicking "Accept". There will probably be quite a few, so you may not want to do them all at once.
Just use a pay phone. Get rolls of dimes from the bank.
It's easier said than done. There aren't as many payphones about as there used to be*, and a lot of those that are left require phone cards.
Then, when you do find a suitable one, how do you know it isn't bugged already?
Lastly, getting a roll of dimes from the just isn't that easy in most of the countries in the world. Of course, most of the world's payphones don't accept dimes either...
-- Steve
* The UK has a unique situation: while the number of payphones in the UK may have decreased, the number of British Telephone Boxes has remained about the same - they've just moved to more exotic locations in other countries. The same goes for British Police Boxes, except that their movements appear not to be limited to the first three dimensions.
For your land line: get a new phone! There are plenty of models out now that not only show you the caller's number, but also keep a list of unanswered calls (who and when). Mine (4 years old) shows me the person's name too, if it's in the "address book" (which is a stupid name for something that does not contain addresses). A lot of these phones will let you turn the ring off, for silent operation.
By the way, some mobile phone networks will let you know who called you (and when) while your phone was off, by sending you a message when you turn it back on. Mine (Vodafone) does this. It's very useful.
Well, the term comes from "handheld telephone", so its understandable where they got it from.
I've never heard the term used to mean a handjob either. A lot of Germans actually think that the word "handy" is English for a mobile phone, and it's funny watching them having confusing conversations with English speakers who have no idea what they're on about. The English word "handy" is "geschickt" or "griffbereit" in German, which of course has nothing to do with telephones.
The whole German "handy" thing stems from a stupid obsession that anything English (or English sounding) is cool - it actually results in very bad English that looks stupid to people who can speak English properly, and is unintelligible to others who don't speak English.
I'm using a dual-core (AMD) right now, and the machine has a lot going on on it, but the bottleneck more often than not is not the CPU or even the memory - it's the disk! I have 2 cores, 4GB RAM, but only one HD (SATA), and it's definitely noticeable. I don't think an Intel Quad core would help significantly, even though I've got plenty of processes to spread across the cores.
I'm wondering if a hardware RAID solution would make things better, but I don't have first-hand experience with that. I've noticed that some of the consumer boards now have RAID5-capable controllers (with the nForce590 chipset), so the cost factor isn't too high.
... would be to switch off all items in your house and verify that with your little light not blinking...
Take this a step further: plug your TV/HiFi/etc into a powerstrip with its own on/off switch. When you're not using the devices, turn the powerstrip off, and get used to always doing that. Then you'll be using exactly zero Watts! European electronic devices can normally be switched off (in addition to any stanby modes), but it seems that this is not the case in the US. BTW: you can get powerstrips with surge protection, which is quite useful - I know two different people who have had computers damaged by surges (lightning induced).
As for the bulbs: turning the lights off completely saves even more than the low-power ones! It may sound obvious, but I've often noticed that people leave all sorts of lights on where it's really not necessary. Also remember: the low power bulbs' life expectancy has more to do with the number of times they are turned on than the total on-time, so they may not make sense for some locations; they don't work with dimmer switches either. Other than that, they're a very good idea, and I can now get ones that are the same shape as the old-style bulbs, thanks to a plastic cover over the tubes.
I think the energy ratings for fridges and the like are at least a European standard. We have them in Germany too. The downside of a highly efficient fridge is that you may end up pulling the handle off, because the vacuum inside is so strong!
HP's innovating, HP's selling products that work and that people and businesses want...
What on earth is it you think that HP is currently innovating?
They don't do medical equipment anymore (that part now belongs to Philips). They don't do Test & Measurement or components either (see Agilent).
HP used to make some extremely good printers, which were head-and-shoulders above others in the field (I'm talking about the LJ 4/5 era), but that's not true for their current printers. HP is certainly not the clear market leader it used to be. The technology they invented was excellent, and the printers today still benefit from that, but it seems to me that instead of real innovation now, they are more interested in finding ways of stopping people using ink from other manufacturers, so they can sell their own at horrendous prices. Why does HP's ink cost more than Dom Perignon champagne?
The same goes for PA-RISC, which was a strong architecture at the time. I see no advantage to buying an Itanium system now though. I wouldn't say that HP were the best at everything, but they definately had a significant edge; they don't have that anymore.
HP took the innovation out of the company and put it in their logo. I was there - I saw it with my own eyes. They don't do anywhere near as much innovation as they used to. It's a shame.
Reality says that HP is a good company that makes good products
You've missed what it is that is upsetting people. They used to make most excellent products; now they're only good. That's a big step backwards.
Back to the current story: anyone who worked at HP in the 80s and early 90s will know what an amazing corporate culture it had. This current scandal is yet another sign that HP has become the thing that Bill and Dave wanted to get away from. The old HP is dead, and what you see here is people in mourning.
Having lots and lots of client machines isn't such a problem if your PXE boot loader and TFTP server know about multicast. Clients listen to the broadcast image, and then request the bits they're missing. Still, I think you're right, and I wouldn't want a solution where it was necessary to regularly download large amounts of data, especially when most of it is the same!
There are professional solutions which can help, and Citrix is just one part. There are products for deploying and managing operating systems, including application installation, patch management and so on. You could put all your apps on Citrix servers and network boot thin clients, or have locally installed operating systems and apps, or even a mix.
I am familiar with the products from a company called enteo, and they do all of the above. Theirs is AFAIK the only such product with which you can manage Citrix servers. For the concerns of the original poster: if a machine breaks, you can use the software to redeploy a given state (OS, patches, apps, settings) to the fixed machine or its replacement over the net when the machine boots. In the case of new hardware, you can have the old machine store certain files and settings, partitions or even whole disk images first, and use them as part of the redeployment.
Other people have suggested mirroring the restore-image on the local machine. While rsync would be a very effective solution for doing that, these people have completely missed one of the use cases - if the hardware breaks, you're worse off because you then have two levels of restoration (host and guest) that need to be done. Another missed point is that if you're only managing these VM images, every update kills any local changes. Also, all of the VMs would have the same MAC address, NETBIOS name and so on (this includes various client identifiers, SSH keys and such).
The fact is that machines, virtual or real, need to be managed as individual instances and not as clones of each other - using VMs is just an extra level of complexity and is not a real substitute for a proper management system.
Good desktop HDs get around 40 MB/sec sustained read speeds. At an order of magnitude difference, you're claiming laptop drives get 4 MB/sec?
That's not an order of magnitude - that's just ten times less. Changing the magnitude down by one (ie: from MB to kB), we see he's claiming the drives only do 40 kilobytes per second, and that's even more absurd!
Slashdot Mirror
You should try 57 Mount Pleasant Street.
It's the same room, but everything's different...
-- Steve
You sure about that? I'm in an HP office right now; the HP-UX boxes here come with CDE and I've never seen GNOME on any of them - it doesn't appear to be installed either.
I know Sun like GNOME. Can't comment on IBM though.
-- Steve
Because the test set was 18, and not 25 as reported. 100/18=5.555. Have a look at the test results.
-- Steve
The problem is that people set their tab breaks at all sorts of places (eg: every 4 characters), and then use tabs to space things in the middle of lines, or they'll mix tabs and spaces at the beginnings of lines. When somebody with different settings opens the same file, the indentation looks really screwed. That happens even after you've gotten everybody to agree on a common number of columns for indentation.
I only know of two solutions:
I didn't have the energy to do the first, so I use the second solution.
If you're developing on your own it's not an issue, but I don't like to have one coding style here and another there - it's not just confusing, but it takes a while to change my editor settings every time I open code for somebody else. I use spaces and that's that. At least my editors are clever enough to know that Makefiles still need tabs!
-- Steve
Well, the "nv" driver doesn't support it, but Nvidia's own driver does ("it" being the XvMC extension in Xorg).
Given that you're a MythTV user, here's a link to their Wiki, which contains a page about XvMC support.
I've not tried it, but the 7300GS just came out a month ago, and I happened to be upgrading so I got one - for 40 Euros; it's passively cooled, and so far has been working really well in TwinView mode on my Linux box. I use Kaffeine (Xine-based) rather than MythTV, but it's very smooth. I'm sure MythTV would be the same.
BTW, I'm using a machine with an integrated Intel VGA at work. It's OK - has open source drivers, and 3D acceleration, but it uses system memory, only has one output (not DVI either), and doesn't always behave itself. Personally, I much prefer the 7300. Oh yeah - the Intel driver supports XvMC too.
-- Steve
Eh?
LVM and RAID are orthogonal solutions, and don't do the same thing. LVM will let you make a single larger partition out of a number of real partitions, and before anyone says that's the same as RAID0, I should point out that RAID0 is not a real RAID level (as it has no redundancy). The circumstances for failure for LVM and RAID0 (JBOD too) are basically the same - if one part fails, you will quite possibly lose the whole lot.
As for hardware RAID, I would not necessarily recommend that either, as it moves the single point of failure without resolving the problem. Replacing a broken controller with something compatible some years down the road can prove impossible, especially with onboard controllers. There's also the fact that a number of RAID controller cards are buggy and others do most os the work in software drivers anyway! Performance is also no longer a reason to use a pure hardware RAID solution, especially now that multi-core machines are available cheaply.
Hot-swap is still someting that requires a good hardware solution, but that's about it. Good (and well supported) RAID products cost good money too, and for most of us it's just not worth doing - better to use software RAID, buy more RAM, and pocket the rest.
-- Steve
No you don't.
A couple of years ago, I got a Linux box for my birthday. It's pretty crap, really. It doesn't wash especially clean, and your clothes come out smelling slightly weird.
Micro&Soft is only marginally better - I've used that too (yeah - same friend, same birthday).
I've now gone back to using things like Persil and Ariel, and am much happier with the result - cleaner clothes that actually do smell better.
But that's just the washing. I've been using the Linux OS since '93...
-- Steve
HL2 was certainly very immersive; I really enjoyed the game, but I don't think anything beats the intense atmosphere of the Shalebridge Cradle. It still scares me now! I think Deadly Shadows (Thief 3) was quite underrated.
-- Steve
I guess you'd be interested in this geek service then...
-- Steve
His name's (Sir) Richard Branson, and he really is known for being down-to-earth and game for a laugh. I wouldn't call him an actor, but he has appeared in Friends (he sold Joey the hat while they were in London). He's had cameos in a couple of other things, such as the last Bond film.
In one Candid Camera style show, they played tricks on him by dressing up people he knows really well so that he wouldn't recognise them, and then putting him in strange situations. They had his sister and a couple of others as trespassers, camping on his land, and he was really nice and polite about it; they had Phil Collins in a wig as a taxi driver, taking him through London and jabbering on about this and that. They did something with Peter Gabriel too, but I don't recall what it was.
Richard has a good sense of humour (note: not "humor" as he's English). He had a hot air balloon, rigged with lights that would flash on to make it look like it was turning, and wanted to play an April fools' prank with it. It didn't quite work out as he expected, but still had a noticable effect!
-- Steve
IIRC, the PXE system does actually support use of a simple menu, and this can be controlled by options sent by the PXE/DHCP server. I think you can use it to tell the PXE ROM where to boot from (based on a list of options). Don't quote me on that though!
The problem can also be handled by PXELinux, as it will try to load a config file whose name is based on the MAC address of the ethernet card the client used to boot. It tries a set of combinations, then looks for "default". This at least gives you the possibility of having tailor-made instructions for any given machine - with custom parameters passed to the kernel etc.
What is not possible is to pass boot parameters to DOS or Windows, when booting in this manner. The nearest you can get is to set PXE options, and have a program read them out via the PXE API after the OS boots. Space is limited though - each option can't be more than 256 bytes long, and there is almost certainly a cap on the maximum amount of option data that the PXE system on the client will hold while the OS boots.
I don't know your 3Com DOS system, but I would not expect them to be interested in updating it. I know that the previous NetInstall (OSD) version used DOS for unattended installation, and although this is still present in the new version, they want to drop it at some point. The new version adds imaging support, but this doesn't use DOS (it uses Linux), and all the new unattended stuff uses WinPE.
I think you should be able to get a trial version of NetInstall, with a time-limited license. At least then you can see if it suits you. It is, BTW, primarily aimed at managing running machines, and not just installing them - the "install" part of the name refers more to software, rather than the OS. You could try it with some VMs.
-- Steve
Well, you can use PXELinux (part of the whole SysLinux thing) to boot a kernel with a RAM disk (initrd), and run whatever you want from there. You will need a basic live distribution to go in the RAM disk, which contains init, libc.so, sh and whatever other bits you need. You can keep the size down by using busybox. Creating a working initrd can be a little hairy, as your compile-time paths are normally different than the runtime ones, which can break some programs without a little hacking. The initrd itself is a gzip'd cpio archive. You then have to set up a TFTP server for serving PXELinux; if you want to automate things, you can have your DHCP server tell PXE-capable clients to boot PXELinux from your TFTP server.
If you are in the market for a commercial solution, with centralised management and all the trimmings, you should get NetInstall v6 from enteo software with OSD (OS deployment); this includes TrueImage. It costs money, but it works very well. It's a primarily PC/Windows solution, however, so imaging to/from a Mac may well not work.
-- Steve
That's not quite what the law says. Dell are allowed by law to only sell PCs with Windows if they so choose. What the law says is that the "OEM" version of the software may be sold without any accompanying hardware, and that Microsoft is explicitly forbidden from making versions of Windows which are tied to (only run on) specific machines. You can see this article (in German) for an overview; the judgement itself, from 6th July 2000, is typed up here (also German). This law is also the reason that people in Germany can legally sell their used OEM Windows software on ebay, even if the EULA says that the software may not be sold separately from the machine it came with.
It has also been hinted at that extra conditions of use (eg: in the EULA) on boxed software that were not visible on the outside of the box prior to purchase may be counted as null and void, but this has not yet been confirmed by a court of law - in Germany, or AFAIK anywhere else in the EU.
The situation in the States is, of course, an entirely different kettle of fish. As far as being a consumer goes, it's the land of the not-so-free.
-- Steve
Well, I've pressed it by accident!
On XEmacs (possibly Emacs too) you can reformat code by highlighting a section and pressing CTRL-ALT-backspace. I think it's the best code formatter I have (better than indent). Anyway, on a US-layout keyboard, the backslash key is directly underneath the backspace, and if your aim is a little off...
I learnt very quickly (ie: after the second time) to always look at the keyboard for that key combination!
-- Steve
This is what people like to eat for breakfast around here:
Eating or drinking really sweet stuff (Coke, chocolate or sugary things) for breakfast is not something that is really done here. Some do eat jam, but there's nothing like Frischkäse and Spanish salami on your Brötchen...
-- Steve
Yeah - they don't provide certain packages, such as the MP3 stuff, to avoid potential legal problems. There is a simple way to fix it though - add a Packman repository to your list of sources in YaST, and update/install whatever you need. Here's one location:
http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/10.2/
After you've added it, start the software manager and add/update "lame" and "xine-lib". It will automatically add any other libraries you need, except for libdvdcss (required for watching DVDs) - the RPM package that Packman has does not contain the source, but the site does give you some tips about how to get it and build the package; it's not difficult.
Another tip: set the filter to "Installation Summary", check all the boxes except "Do not install", then click the menu item Packages->All in This List->Update if newer version available. That will mark the newer Packman versions for installation over the original SuSE versions. Uncheck "Keep" and "Protected" to see a list of which packages it wants to change before clicking "Accept". There will probably be quite a few, so you may not want to do them all at once.
-- Steve
It may be, but is it a net carbon emission? These plants absorb it while growing, so the overall change is much closer to zero than conventional oil.
-- Steve
It's easier said than done. There aren't as many payphones about as there used to be*, and a lot of those that are left require phone cards.
Then, when you do find a suitable one, how do you know it isn't bugged already?
Lastly, getting a roll of dimes from the just isn't that easy in most of the countries in the world. Of course, most of the world's payphones don't accept dimes either...
-- Steve
* The UK has a unique situation: while the number of payphones in the UK may have decreased, the number of British Telephone Boxes has remained about the same - they've just moved to more exotic locations in other countries. The same goes for British Police Boxes, except that their movements appear not to be limited to the first three dimensions.
For your land line: get a new phone! There are plenty of models out now that not only show you the caller's number, but also keep a list of unanswered calls (who and when). Mine (4 years old) shows me the person's name too, if it's in the "address book" (which is a stupid name for something that does not contain addresses). A lot of these phones will let you turn the ring off, for silent operation.
By the way, some mobile phone networks will let you know who called you (and when) while your phone was off, by sending you a message when you turn it back on. Mine (Vodafone) does this. It's very useful.
-- Steve
Well, the term comes from "handheld telephone", so its understandable where they got it from.
I've never heard the term used to mean a handjob either. A lot of Germans actually think that the word "handy" is English for a mobile phone, and it's funny watching them having confusing conversations with English speakers who have no idea what they're on about. The English word "handy" is "geschickt" or "griffbereit" in German, which of course has nothing to do with telephones.
The whole German "handy" thing stems from a stupid obsession that anything English (or English sounding) is cool - it actually results in very bad English that looks stupid to people who can speak English properly, and is unintelligible to others who don't speak English.
-- Steve
Damn right!
I'm using a dual-core (AMD) right now, and the machine has a lot going on on it, but the bottleneck more often than not is not the CPU or even the memory - it's the disk! I have 2 cores, 4GB RAM, but only one HD (SATA), and it's definitely noticeable. I don't think an Intel Quad core would help significantly, even though I've got plenty of processes to spread across the cores.
I'm wondering if a hardware RAID solution would make things better, but I don't have first-hand experience with that. I've noticed that some of the consumer boards now have RAID5-capable controllers (with the nForce590 chipset), so the cost factor isn't too high.
-- Steve
Take this a step further: plug your TV/HiFi/etc into a powerstrip with its own on/off switch. When you're not using the devices, turn the powerstrip off, and get used to always doing that. Then you'll be using exactly zero Watts! European electronic devices can normally be switched off (in addition to any stanby modes), but it seems that this is not the case in the US. BTW: you can get powerstrips with surge protection, which is quite useful - I know two different people who have had computers damaged by surges (lightning induced).
As for the bulbs: turning the lights off completely saves even more than the low-power ones! It may sound obvious, but I've often noticed that people leave all sorts of lights on where it's really not necessary. Also remember: the low power bulbs' life expectancy has more to do with the number of times they are turned on than the total on-time, so they may not make sense for some locations; they don't work with dimmer switches either. Other than that, they're a very good idea, and I can now get ones that are the same shape as the old-style bulbs, thanks to a plastic cover over the tubes.
I think the energy ratings for fridges and the like are at least a European standard. We have them in Germany too. The downside of a highly efficient fridge is that you may end up pulling the handle off, because the vacuum inside is so strong!
-- Steve
What on earth is it you think that HP is currently innovating?
They don't do medical equipment anymore (that part now belongs to Philips). They don't do Test & Measurement or components either (see Agilent).
HP used to make some extremely good printers, which were head-and-shoulders above others in the field (I'm talking about the LJ 4/5 era), but that's not true for their current printers. HP is certainly not the clear market leader it used to be. The technology they invented was excellent, and the printers today still benefit from that, but it seems to me that instead of real innovation now, they are more interested in finding ways of stopping people using ink from other manufacturers, so they can sell their own at horrendous prices. Why does HP's ink cost more than Dom Perignon champagne?
The same goes for PA-RISC, which was a strong architecture at the time. I see no advantage to buying an Itanium system now though. I wouldn't say that HP were the best at everything, but they definately had a significant edge; they don't have that anymore.
HP took the innovation out of the company and put it in their logo. I was there - I saw it with my own eyes. They don't do anywhere near as much innovation as they used to. It's a shame.
You've missed what it is that is upsetting people. They used to make most excellent products; now they're only good. That's a big step backwards.
Back to the current story: anyone who worked at HP in the 80s and early 90s will know what an amazing corporate culture it had. This current scandal is yet another sign that HP has become the thing that Bill and Dave wanted to get away from. The old HP is dead, and what you see here is people in mourning.
-- Steve
Having lots and lots of client machines isn't such a problem if your PXE boot loader and TFTP server know about multicast. Clients listen to the broadcast image, and then request the bits they're missing. Still, I think you're right, and I wouldn't want a solution where it was necessary to regularly download large amounts of data, especially when most of it is the same!
There are professional solutions which can help, and Citrix is just one part. There are products for deploying and managing operating systems, including application installation, patch management and so on. You could put all your apps on Citrix servers and network boot thin clients, or have locally installed operating systems and apps, or even a mix.
I am familiar with the products from a company called enteo, and they do all of the above. Theirs is AFAIK the only such product with which you can manage Citrix servers. For the concerns of the original poster: if a machine breaks, you can use the software to redeploy a given state (OS, patches, apps, settings) to the fixed machine or its replacement over the net when the machine boots. In the case of new hardware, you can have the old machine store certain files and settings, partitions or even whole disk images first, and use them as part of the redeployment.
Other people have suggested mirroring the restore-image on the local machine. While rsync would be a very effective solution for doing that, these people have completely missed one of the use cases - if the hardware breaks, you're worse off because you then have two levels of restoration (host and guest) that need to be done. Another missed point is that if you're only managing these VM images, every update kills any local changes. Also, all of the VMs would have the same MAC address, NETBIOS name and so on (this includes various client identifiers, SSH keys and such).
The fact is that machines, virtual or real, need to be managed as individual instances and not as clones of each other - using VMs is just an extra level of complexity and is not a real substitute for a proper management system.
-- Steve
That's not an order of magnitude - that's just ten times less. Changing the magnitude down by one (ie: from MB to kB), we see he's claiming the drives only do 40 kilobytes per second, and that's even more absurd!
-- Steve