Wouldn't it be better to do just the opposite: "This media is free from DRM" or "Play it anywhere anyhow"?
That exists. It's the old compact disc logo that you don't see on these DRM'd albums. That one already went too court too, the result being that CDs that didn't accurately conform to the standard aren't allowed to use the logo. There was even a Slashdot article at the time (beginning of 2002).
The trouble is that the logo doesn't have high enough brand recognition - people will buy silver disks in jewel cases and expect them to work the same as proper compact discs.
Anyway, now that you know, only buy genuine CD-DA disks! Look for the logo!
NTFS support in linux is not safe as far as I'm aware. All of the NTFS mounting tools I've tried have recommended mounting read-only unless you really have to.
You really should take a look at the current status of the NTFS drivers. They are now quite safe (although a backup is always something you should have anyway).
The kernel driver was completely rewritten in 2002 (the version prior to the rewrite was NOT safe). It has all the read-related features you would expect; write support is limited, and it will only do things it knows it can - other operations are refused. You can also use a userspace version of the driver (albeit with a performance penalty) and the "ntfsprogs" to get more write functionality. Again, it's safe - if an operation is not safely doable, it is refused. See Linux NTFS driver for details.
There are alternatives too: there is Jan Kratchovil's Captive NTFS driver, which uses the Windows ntfs.sys driver. This can do everything (of course), but is a user-space driver, which means it's not that fast; I'm not sure how stable this is either.
You can also buy Paragon Software's commercial NTFS driver for Linux. Do not confuse this link with the linux-ntfs one! They have a demo version you can download, and it also provides full read-write access.
If you know of a Windows ext3 or Raiser driver, then please tell me.
If you want to read/write ext2 and ext3 under Windows, try this driver. I've been using it (over Firewire and USB). It works well and transparently. You should use the hack of changing the partition type to "NTFS" with cfdisk on external drives so that the Windows PnP notification works for hotplugging; the partition itself stays formatted with ext2/3 (both Windows and Linux look at partition content instead of the partition table to determine the format when mounting). This is mentioned in the included documentation; the alternative is a control panel to assign letters to ext2/3 partitions. You don't need to reboot after installation before the driver can be used; you still need to use Linux to mkfs and fsck any ext2/3 paritions though.
You know, there's a name for the principle you're describing: Parkinson's Law.
Actually, he originally made two observations:
work will expand so as to fill the time available for its completion
the number of subordinates in an organization will increase linearly regardless of the amount of work to be done
Just like you, and many others, I believe the principle applies equally to data and the amount of space available to store it. I would add that the quality/usefulness of the data will decrease (as a percentage of the total amount) - people will end up storing more and more junk. I'm not aware of any named law for this phenomenon, but it's already happenned with TV; the increase in the number of channels is vastly larger than the increase in the amount of good TV.
I'll second the recommendation for Acronis! It's good.
Back to the original question: if you don't want to use a hugely expensive client/server solution, use one which is cheaper! Go to www.enteo.com and look up their operating system deployment (OSD) software. Better still - call them and ask them about what's in the next version; I don't know if any details are on their website, but I have it on very good authority that it's extremely good. Their software is generally licensed per client, so if your company isn't very large, the price may still be acceptable.
Well, while it didn't use the SQL language, VMS did have many database style features supported in its filesystem, including row-level locking and indexing etc. MPE/iX was another OS that had a weird and wonderful filesystem with many such features (even things like fixed-length circular files).
It's true that neither is now in widespread use, but I think both were reasonably popular in the eighties - especially with large businesses and educational institutions.
The automobile is one of those trophy inventions that every country would like to take credit for and no one country really can. Considering that Henry Ford made it practical with the assembly line, I think we've got at least as much claim as the frenchmen who made an off-road steam engine or the British who poked around with internal combustion.
Actually, it would seem that the Germans can quite legitimately take credit for the car. Three people in particular are responsible for inventing the major components of the car engine: Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Karl Benz. They had a whole automobile industry on the go before Henry Ford streamlined the production process (1913). Ford did do a great deal to make cars much more popular, but he was more an industrialist than an inventor.
The French industry was based largely on designs by Maybach, and I'm not sure that the English had very much to do with the internal combustion engine used in cars - the valve gear came from George Stephenson (the Englishman who also invented the steam engine), but the use of petroleum, the injection system, accelerator and so on were all developed by the three Germans. We do, of course, have to thank the English for pneumatic inflatable tyres (some guy by the name of John Dunlop, in particular) - without which, we'd have a very bumpy ride.
The company enteo provides software which will do what you want. Look at their Inventory and NetInstall products. You may find the others interesting too!
It's not open source, and it costs money to buy (I think it's licensed per client). It does save a lot of time in the long run though. The demo licence will let you try it out for 90 days.
It's also the only solution of this type I know of that supports Citrix.
Yeah, but look at the price! It was reduced from $1960 to $1650, but even for that money I'd want something significantly more powerful. It's only got 1GHz CPU, 20GB HD, 256RAM, 802.11b, USB 1.1. A laptop for $1000 would exceed it on all of these points.
I have a Jornada 710. It's just the right size (fits in my back pocket), has a wide screen (640x240), a keyboard and goes for 9 hours on the standard battery. I think this model came out in 2000 or 2001. I'd really like something with the same form factor, but more up-to-date innards, including much more storage space and WLAN. I don't know of anything on the market that matches.:-(
I think the real problem is that you (and lots of other people) are using an email system to do something it simply wasn't designed for, and it's a strain for the users, the administrators, and often for the server too.
Often what is required is an information management system, where you can store and exchange information with others, and which will tell you when new information arrives which is relevant to you.
That may sound like email, but there are some very basic differences. Imagine you email somebody a document, they change it and send it back. You've now got two separate instances. Do that a few times, and things get messy; it would be better if you had a single instance which could be changed. You could see who changed what, and when.
How do you sort your information? Maybe by date, or by name or subject. What if you want to sort by sales region and by partner account? Email isn't that extensible, but an info management system will do that. You can generally go further and have whole virtual folder trees that will let you find the information you want much more easily. Email normally only has fixed folders. Some email clients have virtual folders that are search results, but that's not the same thing and it's not as fast (doesn't scale).
A decent information management system will also define who can see what, and when (for information that has a lifecycle), and will be accessible in all the same places that the email server is. That means that partners or clients can have controlled access to data on your server that is related to them, and may be permitted to change or add information. This removes much of the need for email, although you can have the system email you when someone changes or adds something.
Once you have started working with such a system, everything suddenly becomes much more coordinated, and you leave email to do what it was supposed to do - be an electronic replacement for posting something.
Your car stereo does this by slowly draining your battery.
I was talking about the ability to reset the clock automatically, such as when the battery was dead/disconnected, or when we change between summer and winter time. A car battery will only help keep what you have, but yes, it will also be drained slowly.
In the case of my car radio, it uses RDS, which means it can extract the time from any station that broadcasts an RDS signal (which also means it has to be tuned in to such a station for the clock to re-sync). It also gets the station name and the name of the currently playing track, and can tell when traffic info is being broadcast.
My original point was that there are plenty of time sources available, and I see no reason why devices should not be able to sync to one of them; devices which can't should not have a clock! I will, however, consider allowing my wristwatch to be an exception to this rule...
I use a powerstrip for the TV etc too. The sat box picks remembers the time while off - only for a few hours, but it does pick it up again from the satellite after being on for a few minutes. The radio receiver on the stereo blinks 0:00, but I'll live with it. How many clocks do I need anyway?
Here (Germany), they have national time transmitters, which various clocks pick up. I'm pretty sure the UK has one in Rugby, and they probably have others.
Off is off. Standby isn't. My computer and monitor et al are on another powerstrip. I refuse to pay for electricity I'm not using. The prices aren't going down.
I want to be able to turn things off. I won't buy anything else that requires me to reset the clock every time I turn it on. There's no excuse for that. Even my car stereo can do it. Devices should do it properly, or not at all. Not everything needs a clock, and things that do must set themselves automatically.
You may just get your synchronised utopia - if we're lucky, the market will demand it from the manufacturers. The time sources are available already.
It's reasonably safe to assume that nobody is going to do a low level examination of magnetic patterns on the platter surfaces to see what was there before it was overwritten; that's quite expensive. (If you're paranoid, overwrite multiple times with different values.)
Try this (as root):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/ZERO sync rm/ZERO
Repeat once for each partition. If you're on Windows, you could make a program which writes bytes of a certain value to a file. Make sure the data is written to the disk before deleting the file.
We actually use this for another reason: if you do any disk imaging, "cleaned" partitions/disks compress much better!
Give the employees lots of pizza - that works wonders for motivation. Make sure you give them something to wipe their hands on though, or you might end up with lots of typos in the code.
You don't have kids, do you? If you don't live so close to your parents, you'll find yourself the "videophone" so they can see their grandchildren. Then, once you have it anyway, it's nice to be able to see friends and relatives. Usage depends on how good (smooth) the implementation is. It's not a must-have, but it does grow on you.
I've been using the free video plugin for Skype for quite a while now. It wasn't bad, but it did go a little weird every now and then (lost the camera etc). I'm hoping that the integrated version will be better.
So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?
That depends on your definition of high capacity, but if you're happy with the amount of data that would fit on a DVD-R, then your answer is DVD-RAM. It's significantly more durable, and it's the only format that drives can read and write at the same time. The +/- RW format disks die eventually, but I've not yet had a DVD-RAM die on me.
Why the hell would anyone want to play a "bully" game?
Why would anyone want to play a game where you steal cars and shoot the police?
I guess neither you nor the politicians ever played Skool Daze, where you could go around hitting other kids. (There was actually more to the game than that, though!)
Real life bullying is a serious problem, but I don't (yet) see that such games make kids more prone to violence or bullying. In fact, too much game-playing tends to lead to apathy, AFAICT.
All that said, I too think it's a bizarre idea for a game. I shan't be getting it!
So... you find me a site that sells an AMD Turion64 computer with 1GB RAM, a 100GB hard drive, DVD+/-RW, an included WinXP Pro license (I could care less if it's pre-installed with the partition scheme I want or just a blank hard drive and the install media included), and has it for under $1300.
Does that $1300 include tax?
The next best thing I can find here is an Asus A6K: 1.8GHz Turion64 (25W), 1Gb RAM, 80Gb disk (5400rpm), 8x dual layer DVD burner (+/- R,RW), NVidia 6200, 15.4" WXGA, 802.11b/g, 10/100 eth, built-in webcam, XP Pro OEM, other features I can't be bothered to type in. That comes to 1128 Euros ($1344), and that includes tax. Shipping is extra. You must be able to get a similar deal, if not a better one, in the States.
On a 'precious Mac' most programs just get dragged fron the source CD disk or disk image to wherever the user likes to have the program and then the program runs. That simplicity has not yet dawned on Linux programmers.
So, you haven't heard of Klik yet, then? It does exactly that - whole application in a single file; run it from whereever (zero installation?), uninstall by deleting the file. This one file can then be used on multiple distributions, and has no dependencies!
Funny, for me one of the advantages of linux is that every executable is in/usr/bin (or/usr/local/bin), so when I want to run something I just type the command name.
Elminst wrote:
On Windows you click Start, click Programs, then click your application. [...] Until you can do this on Linux with 99.999% of programs like you can on Windows, you lose this argument.
Firstly, programs under Unix-style operating systems are not limited to the two directories you mentioned. There are, of course,/bin and/usr/X11R6/bin, but a number of larger packages are likely to get installed under/opt. This is distribution dependent, and the/opt/foo/bin directories may or may not be included in $PATH automatically - SuSE adds them (KDE and GNOME at least), which means that those that like to type in program names are happy... but not everyone likes to.
The second point is quite valid, and now that both KDE and GNOME use a common.desktop format, there's no reason why applications should not appear under the programs menu. Not only that, but you don't even need to know which desktop software is installed or in use - you just drop the.desktop file into a common directory; on SuSE, this is/usr/share/applications, but this sort of thing is documented on freedesktop.org.
Never understood why HP stopped making them and other manufacturers never started.
Probably because they didn't sell so well.
The next question would have to be, "Why?" The answer to that is simple when you compare the prices of these to other things on the market at the time. They're not cheap.
It's too bad. I had a 320LX, and now still use a 710. I really like it. Nobody else AFAIK made anything with a nice wide screen and a useable keyboard. The instant on/off is great, and I wish I had a laptop that could do it that fast.
I got my 710 for Eur300 nearly 3 years ago, as a "refurnished" device (which is effectively new). That was a reasonable price, but given that they cost more like Eur800 for a new one, it's not surprising that they didn't sell. You could get a "real" laptop for that money, so that's exactly what people did. While the Jornadas are good, there was no real perceived benefit for that amount of money.
Silly HP - overpriced their products (again), and had to discontinue them because they didn't sell.
The larger log structures don't cooperate with the flush procedure; leaving things unflushed is just asking for problems - you're going to get an overflow sooner or later.
While Murphy dictates that if you don't plan for the worst, it will happen, we should all also know that washing your car to make it rain doesn't work. Assume you'll lose either way.
If the information is really that important to you, keep two backups of it, and use different types of media. By that I mean that if one is magnetic, make sure that the other one isn't.
I'd recommend a 2.5" HD in its own enclosure and DVD-RAM. Don't use DVD +/- RW as they just aren't as robust. The rewritable RWs die far too quickly.
Consider what format your backup creates: a simple copy of all of your data files means that recovery is extremely simple but incremental changes and change history are more awkward. That probably isn't an issue for you, as a simple full copy is probably closest to what you want. It also means you are not relying on any specific software, which is very important if you need to perform an out-of-environment recovery.
b) packages should have a list of certified sites for their dependencies. OR, there should be an https repository for ALL packages.
You appear to be using SuSE, yet you say you have to go hunting around for packages. This doesn't make sense.
If you use YaST to install packages, you can do so from one of the official mirrors. These contain all of the dependencies, so you don't need to go hunting. I've got the latest KDevelop, and everything it needed was installed automatically, so I'm wondering what on earth you did to have problems. The machine here has KDevelop 3.2.2 on KDE 3.4.2b, all installed via YaST with SuSE's own packages, and no googling for anything.
Furthermore, SuSE do appear to sign their packages. I'm not sure when this is checked though, so it may or may not be OK to rely on that. Using https for transfers won't really change anything; it wouyld stop eavesdroppers, but I don't think anyone is interested on eavesdropping on transfers of publicly available packages.
Your point is otherwise valid, and installing random packages from random/untrusted locations is an accident waiting to happen. Major distributions, however, do take steps to ensure that their packages are safe. Any distribution which provides a package which is dependent on an external package (ie: not provided by that distribution) is providing you with a bug, and it should be reported as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be better to do just the opposite: "This media is free from DRM" or "Play it anywhere anyhow"?
That exists. It's the old compact disc logo that you don't see on these DRM'd albums. That one already went too court too, the result being that CDs that didn't accurately conform to the standard aren't allowed to use the logo. There was even a Slashdot article at the time (beginning of 2002).
The trouble is that the logo doesn't have high enough brand recognition - people will buy silver disks in jewel cases and expect them to work the same as proper compact discs.
Anyway, now that you know, only buy genuine CD-DA disks! Look for the logo!
-- Steve
NTFS support in linux is not safe as far as I'm aware. All of the NTFS mounting tools I've tried have recommended mounting read-only unless you really have to.
You really should take a look at the current status of the NTFS drivers. They are now quite safe (although a backup is always something you should have anyway).
The kernel driver was completely rewritten in 2002 (the version prior to the rewrite was NOT safe). It has all the read-related features you would expect; write support is limited, and it will only do things it knows it can - other operations are refused. You can also use a userspace version of the driver (albeit with a performance penalty) and the "ntfsprogs" to get more write functionality. Again, it's safe - if an operation is not safely doable, it is refused. See Linux NTFS driver for details.
There are alternatives too: there is Jan Kratchovil's Captive NTFS driver, which uses the Windows ntfs.sys driver. This can do everything (of course), but is a user-space driver, which means it's not that fast; I'm not sure how stable this is either.
You can also buy Paragon Software's commercial NTFS driver for Linux. Do not confuse this link with the linux-ntfs one! They have a demo version you can download, and it also provides full read-write access.
If you know of a Windows ext3 or Raiser driver, then please tell me.
If you want to read/write ext2 and ext3 under Windows, try this driver. I've been using it (over Firewire and USB). It works well and transparently. You should use the hack of changing the partition type to "NTFS" with cfdisk on external drives so that the Windows PnP notification works for hotplugging; the partition itself stays formatted with ext2/3 (both Windows and Linux look at partition content instead of the partition table to determine the format when mounting). This is mentioned in the included documentation; the alternative is a control panel to assign letters to ext2/3 partitions. You don't need to reboot after installation before the driver can be used; you still need to use Linux to mkfs and fsck any ext2/3 paritions though.
-- Steve
You know, there's a name for the principle you're describing: Parkinson's Law.
Actually, he originally made two observations:
Just like you, and many others, I believe the principle applies equally to data and the amount of space available to store it. I would add that the quality/usefulness of the data will decrease (as a percentage of the total amount) - people will end up storing more and more junk. I'm not aware of any named law for this phenomenon, but it's already happenned with TV; the increase in the number of channels is vastly larger than the increase in the amount of good TV.
-- Steve
I'll second the recommendation for Acronis! It's good.
Back to the original question: if you don't want to use a hugely expensive client/server solution, use one which is cheaper! Go to www.enteo.com and look up their operating system deployment (OSD) software. Better still - call them and ask them about what's in the next version; I don't know if any details are on their website, but I have it on very good authority that it's extremely good. Their software is generally licensed per client, so if your company isn't very large, the price may still be acceptable.
-- Steve
Well, while it didn't use the SQL language, VMS did have many database style features supported in its filesystem, including row-level locking and indexing etc. MPE/iX was another OS that had a weird and wonderful filesystem with many such features (even things like fixed-length circular files).
It's true that neither is now in widespread use, but I think both were reasonably popular in the eighties - especially with large businesses and educational institutions.
-- Steve
The automobile is one of those trophy inventions that every country would like to take credit for and no one country really can. Considering that Henry Ford made it practical with the assembly line, I think we've got at least as much claim as the frenchmen who made an off-road steam engine or the British who poked around with internal combustion.
Actually, it would seem that the Germans can quite legitimately take credit for the car. Three people in particular are responsible for inventing the major components of the car engine: Gottlieb Daimler, Wilhelm Maybach and Karl Benz. They had a whole automobile industry on the go before Henry Ford streamlined the production process (1913). Ford did do a great deal to make cars much more popular, but he was more an industrialist than an inventor.
The French industry was based largely on designs by Maybach, and I'm not sure that the English had very much to do with the internal combustion engine used in cars - the valve gear came from George Stephenson (the Englishman who also invented the steam engine), but the use of petroleum, the injection system, accelerator and so on were all developed by the three Germans. We do, of course, have to thank the English for pneumatic inflatable tyres (some guy by the name of John Dunlop, in particular) - without which, we'd have a very bumpy ride.
-- Steve
The company enteo provides software which will do what you want. Look at their Inventory and NetInstall products. You may find the others interesting too!
It's not open source, and it costs money to buy (I think it's licensed per client). It does save a lot of time in the long run though. The demo licence will let you try it out for 90 days.
It's also the only solution of this type I know of that supports Citrix.
-- Steve
You must have been asleep, or hiding under a rock!
10.0 was released last year already. They're currently in the beta phase for 10.1, and should start with RCs for it in a few weeks.
They certainly don't appear to be shying away from using the number ten.
-- Steve
Yeah, but look at the price! It was reduced from $1960 to $1650, but even for that money I'd want something significantly more powerful. It's only got 1GHz CPU, 20GB HD, 256RAM, 802.11b, USB 1.1. A laptop for $1000 would exceed it on all of these points.
I have a Jornada 710. It's just the right size (fits in my back pocket), has a wide screen (640x240), a keyboard and goes for 9 hours on the standard battery. I think this model came out in 2000 or 2001. I'd really like something with the same form factor, but more up-to-date innards, including much more storage space and WLAN. I don't know of anything on the market that matches. :-(
-- Steve
I think the real problem is that you (and lots of other people) are using an email system to do something it simply wasn't designed for, and it's a strain for the users, the administrators, and often for the server too.
Often what is required is an information management system, where you can store and exchange information with others, and which will tell you when new information arrives which is relevant to you.
That may sound like email, but there are some very basic differences. Imagine you email somebody a document, they change it and send it back. You've now got two separate instances. Do that a few times, and things get messy; it would be better if you had a single instance which could be changed. You could see who changed what, and when.
How do you sort your information? Maybe by date, or by name or subject. What if you want to sort by sales region and by partner account? Email isn't that extensible, but an info management system will do that. You can generally go further and have whole virtual folder trees that will let you find the information you want much more easily. Email normally only has fixed folders. Some email clients have virtual folders that are search results, but that's not the same thing and it's not as fast (doesn't scale).
A decent information management system will also define who can see what, and when (for information that has a lifecycle), and will be accessible in all the same places that the email server is. That means that partners or clients can have controlled access to data on your server that is related to them, and may be permitted to change or add information. This removes much of the need for email, although you can have the system email you when someone changes or adds something.
Once you have started working with such a system, everything suddenly becomes much more coordinated, and you leave email to do what it was supposed to do - be an electronic replacement for posting something.
-- Steve
Your car stereo does this by slowly draining your battery.
I was talking about the ability to reset the clock automatically, such as when the battery was dead/disconnected, or when we change between summer and winter time. A car battery will only help keep what you have, but yes, it will also be drained slowly.
In the case of my car radio, it uses RDS, which means it can extract the time from any station that broadcasts an RDS signal (which also means it has to be tuned in to such a station for the clock to re-sync). It also gets the station name and the name of the currently playing track, and can tell when traffic info is being broadcast.
My original point was that there are plenty of time sources available, and I see no reason why devices should not be able to sync to one of them; devices which can't should not have a clock! I will, however, consider allowing my wristwatch to be an exception to this rule...
-- Steve
I use a powerstrip for the TV etc too. The sat box picks remembers the time while off - only for a few hours, but it does pick it up again from the satellite after being on for a few minutes. The radio receiver on the stereo blinks 0:00, but I'll live with it. How many clocks do I need anyway?
Here (Germany), they have national time transmitters, which various clocks pick up. I'm pretty sure the UK has one in Rugby, and they probably have others.
Off is off. Standby isn't. My computer and monitor et al are on another powerstrip. I refuse to pay for electricity I'm not using. The prices aren't going down.
I want to be able to turn things off. I won't buy anything else that requires me to reset the clock every time I turn it on. There's no excuse for that. Even my car stereo can do it. Devices should do it properly, or not at all. Not everything needs a clock, and things that do must set themselves automatically.
You may just get your synchronised utopia - if we're lucky, the market will demand it from the manufacturers. The time sources are available already.
-- Steve
create a huge file of all zeros and delete it?
Actually, yes!
It's reasonably safe to assume that nobody is going to do a low level examination of magnetic patterns on the platter surfaces to see what was there before it was overwritten; that's quite expensive. (If you're paranoid, overwrite multiple times with different values.)
Try this (as root):
Repeat once for each partition. If you're on Windows, you could make a program which writes bytes of a certain value to a file. Make sure the data is written to the disk before deleting the file.
We actually use this for another reason: if you do any disk imaging, "cleaned" partitions/disks compress much better!
-- Steve
Donuts?
Maybe in America. We like pizza here!
Give the employees lots of pizza - that works wonders for motivation. Make sure you give them something to wipe their hands on though, or you might end up with lots of typos in the code.
-- Steve
You don't have kids, do you? If you don't live so close to your parents, you'll find yourself the "videophone" so they can see their grandchildren. Then, once you have it anyway, it's nice to be able to see friends and relatives. Usage depends on how good (smooth) the implementation is. It's not a must-have, but it does grow on you.
I've been using the free video plugin for Skype for quite a while now. It wasn't bad, but it did go a little weird every now and then (lost the camera etc). I'm hoping that the integrated version will be better.
-- Steve
So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?
That depends on your definition of high capacity, but if you're happy with the amount of data that would fit on a DVD-R, then your answer is DVD-RAM. It's significantly more durable, and it's the only format that drives can read and write at the same time. The +/- RW format disks die eventually, but I've not yet had a DVD-RAM die on me.
-- Steve
I doubt it - he was an English teacher, not a maths teacher.
-- Steve
Why the hell would anyone want to play a "bully" game?
Why would anyone want to play a game where you steal cars and shoot the police?
I guess neither you nor the politicians ever played Skool Daze, where you could go around hitting other kids. (There was actually more to the game than that, though!)
Real life bullying is a serious problem, but I don't (yet) see that such games make kids more prone to violence or bullying. In fact, too much game-playing tends to lead to apathy, AFAICT.
All that said, I too think it's a bizarre idea for a game. I shan't be getting it!
-- Steve
So... you find me a site that sells an AMD Turion64 computer with 1GB RAM, a 100GB hard drive, DVD+/-RW, an included WinXP Pro license (I could care less if it's pre-installed with the partition scheme I want or just a blank hard drive and the install media included), and has it for under $1300.
Does that $1300 include tax?
The next best thing I can find here is an Asus A6K: 1.8GHz Turion64 (25W), 1Gb RAM, 80Gb disk (5400rpm), 8x dual layer DVD burner (+/- R,RW), NVidia 6200, 15.4" WXGA, 802.11b/g, 10/100 eth, built-in webcam, XP Pro OEM, other features I can't be bothered to type in. That comes to 1128 Euros ($1344), and that includes tax. Shipping is extra. You must be able to get a similar deal, if not a better one, in the States.
-- Steve
On a 'precious Mac' most programs just get dragged fron the source CD disk or disk image to wherever the user likes to have the program and then the program runs. That simplicity has not yet dawned on Linux programmers.
So, you haven't heard of Klik yet, then? It does exactly that - whole application in a single file; run it from whereever (zero installation?), uninstall by deleting the file. This one file can then be used on multiple distributions, and has no dependencies!
-- Steve
chgros wrote:
Elminst wrote:
Firstly, programs under Unix-style operating systems are not limited to the two directories you mentioned. There are, of course, /bin and /usr/X11R6/bin, but a number of larger packages are likely to get installed under /opt. This is distribution dependent, and the /opt/foo/bin directories may or may not be included in $PATH automatically - SuSE adds them (KDE and GNOME at least), which means that those that like to type in program names are happy... but not everyone likes to.
The second point is quite valid, and now that both KDE and GNOME use a common .desktop format, there's no reason why applications should not appear under the programs menu. Not only that, but you don't even need to know which desktop software is installed or in use - you just drop the .desktop file into a common directory; on SuSE, this is /usr/share/applications, but this sort of thing is documented on freedesktop.org.
-- Steve
Never understood why HP stopped making them and other manufacturers never started.
Probably because they didn't sell so well.
The next question would have to be, "Why?" The answer to that is simple when you compare the prices of these to other things on the market at the time. They're not cheap.
It's too bad. I had a 320LX, and now still use a 710. I really like it. Nobody else AFAIK made anything with a nice wide screen and a useable keyboard. The instant on/off is great, and I wish I had a laptop that could do it that fast.
I got my 710 for Eur300 nearly 3 years ago, as a "refurnished" device (which is effectively new). That was a reasonable price, but given that they cost more like Eur800 for a new one, it's not surprising that they didn't sell. You could get a "real" laptop for that money, so that's exactly what people did. While the Jornadas are good, there was no real perceived benefit for that amount of money.
Silly HP - overpriced their products (again), and had to discontinue them because they didn't sell.
-- Steve
The larger log structures don't cooperate with the flush procedure; leaving things unflushed is just asking for problems - you're going to get an overflow sooner or later.
-- Steve
While Murphy dictates that if you don't plan for the worst, it will happen, we should all also know that washing your car to make it rain doesn't work. Assume you'll lose either way.
If the information is really that important to you, keep two backups of it, and use different types of media. By that I mean that if one is magnetic, make sure that the other one isn't.
I'd recommend a 2.5" HD in its own enclosure and DVD-RAM. Don't use DVD +/- RW as they just aren't as robust. The rewritable RWs die far too quickly.
Consider what format your backup creates: a simple copy of all of your data files means that recovery is extremely simple but incremental changes and change history are more awkward. That probably isn't an issue for you, as a simple full copy is probably closest to what you want. It also means you are not relying on any specific software, which is very important if you need to perform an out-of-environment recovery.
-- Steve
b) packages should have a list of certified sites for their dependencies. OR, there should be an https repository for ALL packages.
You appear to be using SuSE, yet you say you have to go hunting around for packages. This doesn't make sense.
If you use YaST to install packages, you can do so from one of the official mirrors. These contain all of the dependencies, so you don't need to go hunting. I've got the latest KDevelop, and everything it needed was installed automatically, so I'm wondering what on earth you did to have problems. The machine here has KDevelop 3.2.2 on KDE 3.4.2b, all installed via YaST with SuSE's own packages, and no googling for anything.
Furthermore, SuSE do appear to sign their packages. I'm not sure when this is checked though, so it may or may not be OK to rely on that. Using https for transfers won't really change anything; it wouyld stop eavesdroppers, but I don't think anyone is interested on eavesdropping on transfers of publicly available packages.
Your point is otherwise valid, and installing random packages from random/untrusted locations is an accident waiting to happen. Major distributions, however, do take steps to ensure that their packages are safe. Any distribution which provides a package which is dependent on an external package (ie: not provided by that distribution) is providing you with a bug, and it should be reported as such.
-- Steve