Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> Most LOL-inducing moments: Standing in PC World and looking at the "Why
> Mac?" sticker on the shelf.
> 
> "#7: It runs Micro$oft Office."

Yep. Linux, *BSD, Irix, AIX and Solaris doesn't.

To be fair, I haven't tried MSO-over-Wine, but...

> Uh, dude, isn't the whole *point* of a Mac to get *away* from M$
> products? :-P

It's one point - and works here too (Win+MSO is more MS than OSX+MSO).

> Anyway, whatever. I doubt running highly compute-intensive applications
> in Parallels is a good idea...

Possibly, I haven't tested Parallels actually. Over Xen
compute-intensive applications work nicely.

>> No, you'll first need to find out what's it like and then decide if it's
>> what you'll want.
> 
> Heh. Well. No obvious way to do that...

You find that Apple store again and start clicking. ;)

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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>>> From Amazon the non-OEM non-upgrade 32-bit versions
>>>
>>> Home Basic £175
>>> Home Premium £214
>>> Business £238
>>> Ultimate £352
>>
>> You'd be silly not to buy the OEM version though...
>
> I agree, except the point is these are the real prices Microsoft are 
> trying to sell their operating system for. You're essentially saying it's 
> silly to buy that suit from the actual store when you can get it cheaper 
> in their 'factory' store except what is the cheaper price based upon?

Actually I read an interesting article the other day about things like this, 
where you get certain groups of people to pay more for essentially the same 
product.  Like when cinemas charge kids and OAPs half-price, what they're 
actually doing is charging people who have a job and can afford it double. 
Seems the same with MS here, they're just charging people who aren't geeks a 
lot more.  Which kind of makes sense, as the geeks are the ones most likely 
to switch to another OS...

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:50:04 +0000, Invisible wrote:

>>> [Last I heard - and I don't have any hard data for this - the guys you
>>> named aren't exactly short of cash.]
>> 
>> They're not, but what does that have to do with hardware support? 
>> Dell, HP, IBM/Lenovo all sell machines with Linux pre-installed on
>> them.  It would see that this would be hard to do if hardware support
>> "wasn't there yet".
> 
> Well, if you decide exactly what hardware goes in, you can select only
> supported hardware. Easy. :-D

As a consumer, I don't, though.  The vendor builds the machine with 
functioning hardware.

However, here at home, I have:

1 IBM Thinkpad t42p, running OpenSUSE 10.3 (work-provided)
1 Compaq EVO desktop, running OpenSUSE 10.1 (mine, not upgraded yet)
1 Dell C640 laptop, running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (work-provided)
1 HP Pavilion s7727c, running openSUSE 10.3 (mine)
1 custom-built AMD system, complete with external 1TB storage device, 
internal IDE drives, off-brand video card and USB 2.0 controller, running 
Open Enterprise Server 1 (which is SLES9 + additional software)
1 Compaq Armada M700 with an off-brand PCMCIA wireless adapter, running 
OpenSUSE 10.1 (my wife's, not yet upgraded)
1 custom-built gaming machine running Windows XP (my kid's machine, he's 
just upgraded it again)

Additionally, I have an Epson P1660 scanner that's connected to one of 
these machines (the OES box, I think, but I'd have to chase the cables 
down) and a Deskjet 882C (connected to the Evo via USB), both of which 
are accessible from any machine on the network.  That's right, network 
scanning, baby (thank you saned!).

Now of all of these machines, which one has the most problems, do you 
think?

Yep, it's the WINDOWS machine.  Ken's had to reinstall the OS at least 3 
times now because of BSODs, driver issues, and other problems.  If it 
weren't for gaming (as the games he plays don't run on Linux), he'd be 
running openSUSE as well.

My wife has run Linux on her laptop since the day we got it, and hasn't 
had any serious problems with it.  "Ah, but she has you to fix anything 
she has trouble with", I hear you say.  Yes, but I can't remember the 
last time I did anything on her machine other than shut it off at night.  
She's pretty non-technical, but she's managed to figure out how to use 
it, and she's shown some of our neighbors who were curious about Linux.

"Linux is difficult to use" is simply a myth.  5 years ago I would've 
agreed with you.  I see real differences in usability between GNOME 2.4 
(which runs on the OES box) and GNOME 2.20 (which is on my 10.3 boxes).

"Linux lacks hardware support" is also a myth.  Sure, you need to do some 
research before buying your hardware to make sure there are drivers 
available.  Consumers do research on all sorts of things they buy (cars, 
houses, stereos, etc.) but expect to not have to find out what the best 
hardware is when buying a computer?  Sorry, I don't buy that.

Jim

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 09:51:56 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
>>> It's still not [yet] as easy to use.
>> 
>> Wrong.
> 
> "Easy to use" is highly subjective.

Yes, but at first you do need to make an effort.  Also note that there is 
a difference between "easy to use" and "works exactly the same way 
Windows does".  Most people confuse the two, and say it's not easy to use 
because it isn't Windows.

>>> Most hardware companies don't supply drivers for it, and refuse to
>>> hand over the information required for anybody else to write those
>>> drivers.
>> 
>> Wrong; this used to be the case, but not any more.
> 
> It's improving, certainly. I don't think it's there yet though.

See my other post.  Also have a look at Greg Kroah-Hartmann's Linux 
Driver Project.

>>> If you're into gaming, forget it. Almost no big developers target that
>>> platform.
>> 
>> Hmmm, Unreal Tournament III runs on it natively, and Cedega does a very
>> nice job for non-Linux games.  Again, maybe 5 years ago this was the
>> case, but these days there are plenty of game developers writing to
>> Linux.  It's not on par with Windows, true.  But it's improved greatly.
> 
> Sure. It's changing. (Doesn't the latest Quake engine also run there?)
> My point is that it isn't there yet.

Just depends on what you want from a gaming standpoint.

I use Linux every day for work.  I'm using it right now.  I've used it 
for 10 years (from when it was actively user-hostile).  I also have used 
Windows extensively, and while I dislike Windows, if it were the optimum 
choice for me, I'd use it.  Given the choice, I'd use Linux any day of 
the week and twice on Sunday.

My HP Pavilion workstation came with Vista.  What a load of horse crap 
that is.

Jim

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:17:15 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> is a pitty, because from what I've heard, if Apple did an office suite
> it would really 0wn...)
> 
> Presumably I can run OpenOffice instead though?

Yes.  In fact, there's a version of OpenOffice (I forget the name, but 
it's listed on freshmeat.net) designed specifically for the Mac that 
integrates better than standard OpenOffice does on that platform.

Jim

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Jim Henderson escribió:
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:17:15 +0000, Invisible wrote:
> 
>> is a pitty, because from what I've heard, if Apple did an office suite
>> it would really 0wn...)
>>
>> Presumably I can run OpenOffice instead though?
> 
> Yes.  In fact, there's a version of OpenOffice (I forget the name, but 
> it's listed on freshmeat.net) designed specifically for the Mac that 
> integrates better than standard OpenOffice does on that platform.
> 

Heh, have a look at other posts on the thread!

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:49:23 +0100, scott wrote:

>> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P
> 
> Didn't they take over Asda in the UK?

Yep.  And I hope Asda treats their employees better than they (Wallmart)
do over here.

Jim

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On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:58:58 -0500, Warp wrote:

>> Same way you do for Linux errors. You google the text of the error
>> message, or search for it on MSDN.
> 
>   Yes, like once I tried to install some modem drivers into a WinXP
> system, and at the end of the installation it said "failed to install
> driver", nothing more, nothing less. Not a single hint about why it
> failed.
> 
>   Now, try to google without an internet connection because you just
> failed to install the driver necessary for the internet connection.

Really frustrating experience here - my stepson's machine (during one of 
it's recent rebuilds) needed to be re-activated.  Problem is, the 
wireless card driver wasn't yet installed.  Do you think you could 
*possibly* install a wireless driver prior to activation?  Hah, he had to 
pack the whole thing into a different part of the house in order to plug 
it into an ethernet jack (older house, we don't have a wired network 
setup other than here at my desk).  I was *really* surprised that he 
didn't get the grace period after reinstalling the OS (reinstalled over 
the prior installation, apparently that means you have to activate again 
- which also means finding the damned license key again).

Jim

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:27:18 -0200, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Jim Henderson escribió:
>> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:17:15 +0000, Invisible wrote:
>> 
>>> is a pitty, because from what I've heard, if Apple did an office suite
>>> it would really 0wn...)
>>>
>>> Presumably I can run OpenOffice instead though?
>> 
>> Yes.  In fact, there's a version of OpenOffice (I forget the name, but
>> it's listed on freshmeat.net) designed specifically for the Mac that
>> integrates better than standard OpenOffice does on that platform.
>> 
>> 
> Heh, have a look at other posts on the thread!

Yeah, saw that after my post.  That figures. :-)

Jim

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Heh. Reminds me of my first attempt to use Perl for CGI. I tried to run 
>> it, and it didn't work. After a while I gave up waiting and closed IE. I 
>> did some more poking and prodding of the code before the lead tech came 
>> over and said "hey, you've using up 100% CPU on the webserver".
> 
>   Web servers which are configured properly will automatically kill
> any CGI process which is taking too long to terminate. Apparently
> that one wasn't.

Well, you know, small university web server, 4 technical staff 
supporting the entire IT infrastructure... Scary thing is, it's web 
accessible. [Or was back then anyway.]

One would also expect it to not allow a single session to comsume 100% 
CPU...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>
>>>> Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely 
>>>> useful out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk 
>>>> space.
>>>
>>> Generally, the source code is sufficient.
>>
>> Cool. Let me just contact the makers of every device driver I'm 
>> running and we can see where th... no, wait, that won't work. ;-)
> 
> Or send them the core file.

I'm pretty sure my employer would freak out about all the potentially 
confidential data I'd be leaking...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Darren New wrote:

> The original UNIX *design* was clean too, but the accumulation of 
> historical file names is nasty. The other ugliness, IMO, is the number 
> of places where an API is not provided but instead it's a file format, 
> or a library, or something like that. Stuff like opening a directory as 
> a file to read the directory (cured when BSD 4 forced a directory format 
> changed), reading /etc/passwd and parsing it to get information (cured 
> when shadow password files became common), etc.

The amount of backwards compatibility in Unix is scary. (E.g., do you 
know how many signals "init" responds to? Lots.)

OTOH, have you looked at the IA-32 manuals? There's a huge wedge of the 
stuff in there too... :-S

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> It's funny - I go into the Apple stores around here and ask to see their 
>> 64-bit machines, and the salesmen look at me like I have three heads or 
>> something. You'd think someone selling something even as user-friendly 
>> as Macs would know what that expression means.
> 
>   Well, the whole point of Macs is that you don't have to know how
> it works. No wonder salesmen don't either. ;)

LOL! That's really cute...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Eero Ahonen wrote:

>> Anyway, whatever. I doubt running highly compute-intensive applications
>> in Parallels is a good idea...
> 
> Possibly, I haven't tested Parallels actually. Over Xen
> compute-intensive applications work nicely.

Well, we'll see. :-P

>>> No, you'll first need to find out what's it like and then decide if it's
>>> what you'll want.
>> Heh. Well. No obvious way to do that...
> 
> You find that Apple store again and start clicking. ;)

Yeah, but, in a shop you can't really get the same feel for it as 
sitting at home and using it every single day.

Oh, BTW, have Apple added the ability to right-click yet?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> Oh, BTW, have Apple added the ability to right-click yet?
> 

You can Ctrl-click to get a popup menu. And many mouses for Mac have two 
buttons.

Post a reply to this message

>> Well, if you decide exactly what hardware goes in, you can select only
>> supported hardware. Easy. :-D
> 
> As a consumer, I don't, though.  The vendor builds the machine with 
> functioning hardware.

...which is what I meant. If HP gets to pick what hardware goes in, they 
can pick exactly the hardware that works with whichever OS they're 
preloading.

> Now of all of these machines, which one has the most problems, do you 
> think?
> 
> Yep, it's the WINDOWS machine.

:-|   <== not shocked face.

> My wife has run Linux on her laptop since the day we got it, and hasn't 
> had any serious problems with it.  "Ah, but she has you to fix anything 
> she has trouble with", I hear you say.  Yes, but I can't remember the 
> last time I did anything on her machine other than shut it off at night.  
> She's pretty non-technical, but she's managed to figure out how to use 
> it, and she's shown some of our neighbors who were curious about Linux.

Like I said, Linux has now become pretty easy to use once it's set up 
right. I find it's still tricky to set it up correctly sometimes, but 
once it works it's really not much different to Windoze. [Except no 
random OS crashes.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Yes, but at first you do need to make an effort.  Also note that there is 
> a difference between "easy to use" and "works exactly the same way 
> Windows does".  Most people confuse the two, and say it's not easy to use 
> because it isn't Windows.

I'd rather say "most current Windows users". People who aren't used to 
computers at all aren't going to care either way.

> I use Linux every day for work.  I'm using it right now.  I've used it 
> for 10 years (from when it was actively user-hostile).  I also have used 
> Windows extensively, and while I dislike Windows, if it were the optimum 
> choice for me, I'd use it.  Given the choice, I'd use Linux any day of 
> the week and twice on Sunday.

I tried to go down that road. I found too many things I couldn't do 
without Windoze. Sadly...

> My HP Pavilion workstation came with Vista.  What a load of horse crap 
> that is.

It's becoming seriously difficult to find a machine that comes with 
something that isn't Vista... This does not amuse me.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 escribió:
>> Oh, BTW, have Apple added the ability to right-click yet?
>>
> 
> You can Ctrl-click to get a popup menu. And many mouses for Mac have two 
> buttons.

...so basically that's "yes" then. :-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:54:29 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

>>> Well, if you decide exactly what hardware goes in, you can select only
>>> supported hardware. Easy. :-D
>> 
>> As a consumer, I don't, though.  The vendor builds the machine with
>> functioning hardware.
> 
> ...which is what I meant. If HP gets to pick what hardware goes in, they
> can pick exactly the hardware that works with whichever OS they're
> preloading.

Sure.  Now, how surprised are you going to be when I tell you that my HP 
didn't come with openSUSE installed, but with Vista installed, and I 
installed openSUSE with no problems?  (Only thing not working is 
wireless, and I don't care about that - but I understand there are 
drivers for Linux for it, just can't be bothered).  This thing's got an 
Nvidia chipset ethernet card in it, not exactly a common type of ethernet 
card, at least not in my experience.

>> Now of all of these machines, which one has the most problems, do you
>> think?
>> 
>> Yep, it's the WINDOWS machine.
> 
> :-|   <== not shocked face.

Given that you're on v7, I'm not surprised. :-)

>> My wife has run Linux on her laptop since the day we got it, and hasn't
>> had any serious problems with it.  "Ah, but she has you to fix anything
>> she has trouble with", I hear you say.  Yes, but I can't remember the
>> last time I did anything on her machine other than shut it off at
>> night. She's pretty non-technical, but she's managed to figure out how
>> to use it, and she's shown some of our neighbors who were curious about
>> Linux.
> 
> Like I said, Linux has now become pretty easy to use once it's set up
> right. I find it's still tricky to set it up correctly sometimes, but
> once it works it's really not much different to Windoze. [Except no
> random OS crashes.]

It can be, particularly with laptops.  As I said, 5 years ago, it was 
fairly painful on laptops (in particular), but today the support is very 
good.

Jim

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On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:56:48 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

>> Yes, but at first you do need to make an effort.  Also note that there
>> is a difference between "easy to use" and "works exactly the same way
>> Windows does".  Most people confuse the two, and say it's not easy to
>> use because it isn't Windows.
> 
> I'd rather say "most current Windows users". People who aren't used to
> computers at all aren't going to care either way.

Possibly.

>> I use Linux every day for work.  I'm using it right now.  I've used it
>> for 10 years (from when it was actively user-hostile).  I also have
>> used Windows extensively, and while I dislike Windows, if it were the
>> optimum choice for me, I'd use it.  Given the choice, I'd use Linux any
>> day of the week and twice on Sunday.
> 
> I tried to go down that road. I found too many things I couldn't do
> without Windoze. Sadly...

Like what?  I do have a couple apps that I need Windows for, and I have a 
VMware machine for those circumstances.  Like the odd MS Excel XML 
document that won't open in OpenOffice (had one a couple days ago like 
that).  Usually they open fine, but every once in a while the converter 
just seizes up.

Similarly, I've found no OSS product that compares to Mappoint.  But now 
with a GPS for my phone, I don't need that app.

>> My HP Pavilion workstation came with Vista.  What a load of horse crap
>> that is.
> 
> It's becoming seriously difficult to find a machine that comes with
> something that isn't Vista... This does not amuse me.

Nor me.  My experience with Vista was bad.  Very bad.  You just won't 
believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly bad it was.  I mean, it's a 
long way from my experience with XP, but that's just peanuts to Vista!  
Listen!.... (and so on)

Jim

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On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:50:35 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely useful
> out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk space.

We've had this discussion before.  It doesn't take a hyper-nerd to get 
info out of a dump file.  Just a good debugger and access to the source 
code.

As for confidential data being leaked, the core file typically will 
contain just the crashed program info, but if it's reproducible, you send 
them a core from a simplified setup.

Jim

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"Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote in message 
news:47b37404@news.povray.org...
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:56:48 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> I tried to go down that road. I found too many things I couldn't do
>> without Windoze. Sadly...
>
> Like what?  I do have a couple apps that I need Windows for, and I have a
> VMware machine for those circumstances.  Like the odd MS Excel XML
> document that won't open in OpenOffice (had one a couple days ago like
> that).  Usually they open fine, but every once in a while the converter
> just seizes up.
>

I'm considering Ubuntu but I need to know if there is something free 
available like CorelDraw or Illustrator. I need to be able to export vectors 
to pdf and fonts and I like all the advanced capabillities of Corel and 
Illustrator.

-- 
-Nekar Xenos-

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"Nekar Xenos" <nek### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I'm considering Ubuntu but I need to know if there is something free
> available like CorelDraw or Illustrator.

I can't recommend Inkscape enough.
http://www.inkscape.org

just after installing Ubuntu, go to Applications -> Add/Remove and search for
it.  Or just download the version for Windows and play with it.

> I need to be able to export vectors
> to pdf

it exports to PDF, Postscript, povray (paths to prism) and a lot of others.  Its
native format is SVG.  I've designed some povray lathes with its bézier drawing
tool, which is one of the smoothest I've ever touched.

> and fonts and I like all the advanced capabillities of Corel and
> Illustrator.

I'm actually reading the Adobe Features page of Illustrator, having done some
work myself previously on Corel Draw (some years ago).  Most of the features
seem to be  just there, like tracing bitmaps automatically, gaussian blur etc.
Try it for yourself to see if it matches.  Of course, don't expect the same
interface or the same way of doing the same things.

here's a nice sample of what it can do, from a fellow brazilian:
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/8295/capturadatelavc6.jpg
http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/4769/capturadatela2lj4.jpg

looks like acrylic painting to me... :)

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>> ...which is what I meant. If HP gets to pick what hardware goes in, they
>> can pick exactly the hardware that works with whichever OS they're
>> preloading.
> 
> Sure.  Now, how surprised are you going to be when I tell you that my HP 
> didn't come with openSUSE installed, but with Vista installed, and I 
> installed openSUSE with no problems?

That's a little different, yeah.

> (Only thing not working is 
> wireless, and I don't care about that - but I understand there are 
> drivers for Linux for it, just can't be bothered).

One of the prime areas that doesn't work, so I'm told. (I don't use such 
technology myself, so...)

> This thing's got an 
> Nvidia chipset ethernet card in it, not exactly a common type of ethernet 
> card, at least not in my experience.

My motherboard has the nVidia nForce IV chipset. For quite a while I had 
trouble with various distros not recognising either the Ethernet ports 
or the SATA ports. (Guess where my HD is...) Makes installing the OS 
interesting when it can't find your HD. (Also, the early nForce driver 
would enumerate the HDs in reverse order, which is damn confusing...)

>> :-|   <== not shocked face.
> 
> Given that you're on v7, I'm not surprised. :-)

Well, so many applications won't uninstall cleanly. :-S

>> Like I said, Linux has now become pretty easy to use once it's set up
>> right. I find it's still tricky to set it up correctly sometimes, but
>> once it works it's really not much different to Windoze. [Except no
>> random OS crashes.]
> 
> It can be, particularly with laptops.  As I said, 5 years ago, it was 
> fairly painful on laptops (in particular), but today the support is very 
> good.

Something like 8 years ago, I was manually editing the X11 configuration 
file to tell it what DAC chip my graphics card has in it... o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, so many applications won't uninstall cleanly. :-S

I truly hope you're not doing "rm -f /usr/bin/fooapp"

O_o

Post a reply to this message

And lo on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:11:27 -0000, scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> did  
spake, saying:

>>>> From Amazon the non-OEM non-upgrade 32-bit versions
>>>>
>>>> Home Basic £175
>>>> Home Premium £214
>>>> Business £238
>>>> Ultimate £352
>>>
>>> You'd be silly not to buy the OEM version though...
>>
>> I agree, except the point is these are the real prices Microsoft are  
>> trying to sell their operating system for. You're essentially saying  
>> it's silly to buy that suit from the actual store when you can get it  
>> cheaper in their 'factory' store except what is the cheaper price based  
>> upon?
>
> Actually I read an interesting article the other day about things like  
> this, where you get certain groups of people to pay more for essentially  
> the same product.  Like when cinemas charge kids and OAPs half-price,  
> what they're actually doing is charging people who have a job and can  
> afford it double. Seems the same with MS here, they're just charging  
> people who aren't geeks a lot more.  Which kind of makes sense, as the  
> geeks are the ones most likely to switch to another OS...

Try  
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford/dp/0349119856/ he  
discusses much the same thing though he concentrates on how companies get  
us to differentiate ourselves by the amount we spend. For example  
Sainsbury's bananas are 14p each, Sainsbury's Fair Trade bananas are 22p  
each; do you think the entire extra 8p per banana is going to the grower?

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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And lo on Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:27:28 -0000, Jim Henderson  
<nos### [at] nospamcom> did spake, saying:

> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:49:23 +0100, scott wrote:
>
>>> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P
>>
>> Didn't they take over Asda in the UK?
>
> Yep.  And I hope Asda treats their employees better than they (Wallmart)
> do over here.

Fortunately I think the only practice that got transferred over was having  
a greeter on the door.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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nemesis wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Well, so many applications won't uninstall cleanly. :-S
> 
> I truly hope you're not doing "rm -f /usr/bin/fooapp"
> 
> O_o

I meant on Windoze. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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nemesis wrote:
> "Nekar Xenos" <nek### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>> I'm considering Ubuntu but I need to know if there is something free
>> available like CorelDraw or Illustrator.
> 
> I can't recommend Inkscape enough.
> http://www.inkscape.org

I use it on Windoze. It works OK. Has a few annoying features, but I'm 
not aware of any other tool that does what Inskape does...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Or send them the core file.
>
> I'm pretty sure my employer would freak out about all the potentially 
> confidential data I'd be leaking...

Yeh I have that problem a lot.  One of the pieces of software we run (not by 
MS btw!) crashes a lot and they keep requesting I send them my files for 
them to see why it's crashing.  Except they're all confidential so I can't 
send them the files.  Great.  There's not really any way to move forward 
with this...

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> Orchid XP v7 escribió:
>>> Oh, BTW, have Apple added the ability to right-click yet?
>>>
>>
>> You can Ctrl-click to get a popup menu. And many mouses for Mac have 
>> two buttons.
> 
> ...so basically that's "yes" then. :-)

And you know the best thing? On their laptops, tapping the touchpad with 
two fingers instead of just one performs a right-click (I don't think 
this is default behaviour, but it's in the desktop settings - and it's 
genius).

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scott wrote:
>>> Or send them the core file.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure my employer would freak out about all the potentially 
>> confidential data I'd be leaking...
> 
> Yeh I have that problem a lot.  One of the pieces of software we run 
> (not by MS btw!) crashes a lot and they keep requesting I send them my 
> files for them to see why it's crashing.  Except they're all 
> confidential so I can't send them the files.  Great.  There's not really 
> any way to move forward with this...

Well, unless you invite the devs to come camp at your place until the 
next time it crashes, and don't let them take any data away with them.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Bill Pragnell wrote:

> And you know the best thing? On their laptops, tapping the touchpad with 
> two fingers instead of just one performs a right-click (I don't think 
> this is default behaviour, but it's in the desktop settings - and it's 
> genius).

Gah. I *hate* that! I wish I knew how to disable that on my Linux 
laptop... You go to make a big mouse movement, which involves lifting 
your fingers off the glide pad and putting them down again several 
times, and each time you do you end up randomly clicking something on 
the screen. GRRR!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Try 
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford/dp/0349119856/ he 
> discusses much the same thing though he concentrates on how companies get 
> us to differentiate ourselves by the amount we spend. For example 
> Sainsbury's bananas are 14p each, Sainsbury's Fair Trade bananas are 22p 
> each; do you think the entire extra 8p per banana is going to the grower?

Yeh the article was by him ;-)

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Invisible wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
> 
>> And you know the best thing? On their laptops, tapping the touchpad 
>> with two fingers instead of just one performs a right-click (I don't 
>> think this is default behaviour, but it's in the desktop settings - 
>> and it's genius).
> 
> Gah. I *hate* that! I wish I knew how to disable that on my Linux 
> laptop... You go to make a big mouse movement, which involves lifting 
> your fingers off the glide pad and putting them down again several 
> times, and each time you do you end up randomly clicking something on 
> the screen. GRRR!

You must be joking! This sort of behaviour is what makes laptops usable 
without a mouse. Anyway, it's easy to avoid your problem on the Mac 
because the pointer speed varies non-linearly with finger speed. That 
is, move quickly and you can go from one side of the desktop to the 
other without lifting your finger, but move slowly and you get 
pixel-by-pixel accuracy.

Having seen the wealth of desktop settings in e.g. SUSE, I'd be very 
surprised if you couldn't set all this and more on your machine.

The other thing I like is scrolling the currently active window by 
moving two fingers on the touchpad instead of one. Better than a mouse 
scrollwheel cos you can go in any direction. This sort of thing makes 
most of my casual desktop use 10x faster than it otherwise would be. :-)

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And lo on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:37:46 -0000, scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> did  
spake, saying:

>> Try  
>> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Undercover-Economist-Tim-Harford/dp/0349119856/  
>> he discusses much the same thing though he concentrates on how  
>> companies get us to differentiate ourselves by the amount we spend. For  
>> example Sainsbury's bananas are 14p each, Sainsbury's Fair Trade  
>> bananas are 22p each; do you think the entire extra 8p per banana is  
>> going to the grower?
>
> Yeh the article was by him ;-)

Heh it's a good book, I don't agree completely with his conclusions of the  
Free Market System. From what I recall he tends to skip over the effects  
of transparency, and illegality; that is where that 8p goes, how you can  
compete with a nation that might enslave their population to work  
producing goods, and why we shouldn't follow the Afghan example and grow  
poppies

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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>> Gah. I *hate* that! I wish I knew how to disable that on my Linux 
>> laptop... You go to make a big mouse movement, which involves lifting 
>> your fingers off the glide pad and putting them down again several 
>> times, and each time you do you end up randomly clicking something on 
>> the screen. GRRR!
> 
> You must be joking! This sort of behaviour is what makes laptops usable 
> without a mouse.

On the contrary - this is the number #2 reason for me always plugging a 
mouse in. (#1 is that, obviously, a glide pad is, what, 2 inches square?)

> Anyway, it's easy to avoid your problem on the Mac 
> because the pointer speed varies non-linearly with finger speed.

Ah-hah! Another thing I really hate... Makes it easy to move the pointer 
half way across the screen, but almost impossible to aim at a 1-pixel dot.

> Having seen the wealth of desktop settings in e.g. SUSE, I'd be very 
> surprised if you couldn't set all this and more on your machine.

Well, under Windoze the device driver for the glide pad lets you change 
it. I had assumed it's a software thing, but under SUSE the glide pad 
seems to malfunction in exactly the same way, so it must be hardware...

> The other thing I like is scrolling the currently active window by 
> moving two fingers on the touchpad instead of one.

Ah, yet another thing I really hate about using the glide pad. "Oh, I 
accidentally touched the pad slightly too far to the side, now it thinks 
I want to *scroll* this window rather than point at the one behind it". >_<

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> Ah, yet another thing I really hate about using the glide pad. "Oh, I 
> accidentally touched the pad slightly too far to the side, now it thinks 
> I want to *scroll* this window rather than point at the one behind it". >_<

Oh well, we're going to have to agree to differ on this one!

I see a lot of people using laptops, and hardly any of them use tapping 
the pad as a mouse click, preferring to use the buttons (often with 
their other hand!). I find this tedious and slow.

If you're used to linear pointer speeds and no additional pad 
functionality I guess it will take some practice and getting used to. 
Bizarrely, I used to hate the turbo-mouse behaviour when actually using 
a mouse, but found it really easy with the pad.

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Bill Pragnell wrote:

> Oh well, we're going to have to agree to differ on this one!

Fair enough. It's a free country... ;-)

> I see a lot of people using laptops, and hardly any of them use tapping 
> the pad as a mouse click, preferring to use the buttons (often with 
> their other hand!). I find this tedious and slow.

Well, you can't type with one hand anyway, so you might as well use both 
to work the glide pad.

As for the scroll pads... now if there was some kind of divider between 
the part of the pad that scrolls things and the part that moves the 
mouse, that would be fine. (Indeed, having a vertical strip of pad would 
probably be easier than a scroll wheel - it's bigger after all.) But 
with no dividing line, it's frustratingly hard to make the thing do what 
you actually want.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible wrote:
> Bill Pragnell wrote:
>> I see a lot of people using laptops, and hardly any of them use 
>> tapping the pad as a mouse click, preferring to use the buttons (often 
>> with their other hand!). I find this tedious and slow.
> 
> Well, you can't type with one hand anyway, so you might as well use both 
> to work the glide pad.

True, but if you're using keyboard shortcuts a lot then you *can* use 
one hand (say, moving blocks of text or code around in an editor 
window), and then a tap-click is much more convenient.

> As for the scroll pads... now if there was some kind of divider between 
> the part of the pad that scrolls things and the part that moves the 
> mouse, that would be fine. (Indeed, having a vertical strip of pad would 
> probably be easier than a scroll wheel - it's bigger after all.) But 
> with no dividing line, it's frustratingly hard to make the thing do what 
> you actually want.

My HP windoze laptop has exactly that - a thin strip on the right edge 
of the touchpad that does the job of a scroll wheel. It's just so 
frustrating, when switching from the Mac to the PC, expecting the (to 
me) wonderful, convenient navigation and having to fanny around with 
scrollbar buttons or switch to using the keyboard instead... :)

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> Well, unless you invite the devs to come camp at your place until the next 
> time it crashes, and don't let them take any data away with them.

Well yes, but given that half of the dev team is in a different country, and 
the other half is in a different continent...

And still, I don't think my superiors would want me to show them what we're 
doing, especially since it's one of two industry standard packages - so I 
guess they are working with our competitors too...

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Invisible escribió:
> Ah-hah! Another thing I really hate... Makes it easy to move the pointer 
> half way across the screen, but almost impossible to aim at a 1-pixel dot.
> 

You got that backwards... The non-linear movement is what LETS you aim 
at a 1-pixel dot and ALSO move the pointer from one corner of the screen 
to the other.

Move twice as fast, cursor moves three times as fast. If you move 
slowly, you can surely get 1px precision.

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Bill Pragnell escribió:
> If you're used to linear pointer speeds

...you can configure the Mac to have linear speed.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Invisible escribió:
>> Ah-hah! Another thing I really hate... Makes it easy to move the 
>> pointer half way across the screen, but almost impossible to aim at a 
>> 1-pixel dot.
>>
> 
> You got that backwards... The non-linear movement is what LETS you aim 
> at a 1-pixel dot and ALSO move the pointer from one corner of the screen 
> to the other.

Not IME. Generally it means that no matter how you move your hand, the 
pointer shoots off so fast it smashes into the corner of the screen. 
Unless you move your finger so slowly it sticks to the pad and pulls all 
the skin out from under your nails...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Bill Pragnell escribió:
>> If you're used to linear pointer speeds
> 
> ...you can configure the Mac to have linear speed.

Yes. The default is the nonlinear though, and by the time I got around 
to hunting out the settings I'd got used to it, and preferred it.

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:47b210da$1@news.povray.org...
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> > Darren New wrote:
> >
> >>> Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely useful
> >>> out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk space.
> >>
> >> Generally, the source code is sufficient.
> >
> > Cool. Let me just contact the makers of every device driver I'm running
> > and we can see where th... no, wait, that won't work. ;-)
>
> Or send them the core file.

I had IBM once insist that I attach a debugger to the application that was
crashing, so they could get detailed stack anaylsis.

Let's see, attach a debugger to my production SQL Server, just so I can
track a problem with one ODBC driver. I think not.

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On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:31:18 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

>>> ...which is what I meant. If HP gets to pick what hardware goes in,
>>> they can pick exactly the hardware that works with whichever OS
>>> they're preloading.
>> 
>> Sure.  Now, how surprised are you going to be when I tell you that my
>> HP didn't come with openSUSE installed, but with Vista installed, and I
>> installed openSUSE with no problems?
> 
> That's a little different, yeah.
> 
>> (Only thing not working is
>> wireless, and I don't care about that - but I understand there are
>> drivers for Linux for it, just can't be bothered).
> 
> One of the prime areas that doesn't work, so I'm told. (I don't use such
> technology myself, so...)

Um, my wife's wireless card works fine, the one in my t42p works fine, 
and the one in my kids' machine (running from a liveCD) works fine.  In 
fact, the t42p uses an atheros chipset, and the driver is a reverse-
engineered driver, and it works pretty well (just don't ask about the 
access point at the office - that thing is a piece of crap.  The one here 
at home works fine).

>> This thing's got an
>> Nvidia chipset ethernet card in it, not exactly a common type of
>> ethernet card, at least not in my experience.
> 
> My motherboard has the nVidia nForce IV chipset. For quite a while I had
> trouble with various distros not recognising either the Ethernet ports
> or the SATA ports. (Guess where my HD is...) Makes installing the OS
> interesting when it can't find your HD. (Also, the early nForce driver
> would enumerate the HDs in reverse order, which is damn confusing...)

Oh, yes, and this HP uses a SATA drive as well.

>>> :-|   <== not shocked face.
>> 
>> Given that you're on v7, I'm not surprised. :-)
> 
> Well, so many applications won't uninstall cleanly. :-S

One of the *major* problems I have with Windows.

>>> Like I said, Linux has now become pretty easy to use once it's set up
>>> right. I find it's still tricky to set it up correctly sometimes, but
>>> once it works it's really not much different to Windoze. [Except no
>>> random OS crashes.]
>> 
>> It can be, particularly with laptops.  As I said, 5 years ago, it was
>> fairly painful on laptops (in particular), but today the support is
>> very good.
> 
> Something like 8 years ago, I was manually editing the X11 configuration
> file to tell it what DAC chip my graphics card has in it... o_O

That was 8 years ago.  This is now - with OpenSUSE, you use sax2 to do 
the configuration.  ATI cards can be a little flakey to get working, but 
AMD has opened the specs so real OSS drivers are on the way.  The Nvidia 
graphics drivers are quite good, even though they're binary-only (that's 
also what's in the HP for video).

Jim

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On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:27:59 +0200, Nekar Xenos wrote:

> "Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote in message
> news:47b37404@news.povray.org...
>> On Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:56:48 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>>> I tried to go down that road. I found too many things I couldn't do
>>> without Windoze. Sadly...
>>
>> Like what?  I do have a couple apps that I need Windows for, and I have
>> a VMware machine for those circumstances.  Like the odd MS Excel XML
>> document that won't open in OpenOffice (had one a couple days ago like
>> that).  Usually they open fine, but every once in a while the converter
>> just seizes up.
>>
>>
> I'm considering Ubuntu but I need to know if there is something free
> available like CorelDraw or Illustrator. I need to be able to export
> vectors to pdf and fonts and I like all the advanced capabillities of
> Corel and Illustrator.

I use Inkscape for that kind of work - the latest version is pretty 
good.  It ain't Illustrator (which I have running in a VM).

Jim

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On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:22:44 -0500, nemesis wrote:

> povray (paths to prism)

I do wish it did a better job with fonts.  I'm always trying to remember 
how I got it to work "the last time".  It's something about having to 
convert the object to curves, IIRC.

I also have odd problems with it coming up with "nan" values for some of 
the points.

But generally, I like that feature a lot.

Jim

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On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:41:20 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> Bill Pragnell wrote:
> 
>> And you know the best thing? On their laptops, tapping the touchpad
>> with two fingers instead of just one performs a right-click (I don't
>> think this is default behaviour, but it's in the desktop settings - and
>> it's genius).
> 
> Gah. I *hate* that! I wish I knew how to disable that on my Linux
> laptop... You go to make a big mouse movement, which involves lifting
> your fingers off the glide pad and putting them down again several
> times, and each time you do you end up randomly clicking something on
> the screen. GRRR!

Change the mouse sensitivity.

Jim

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