Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:file transfer (Score 1) 466

But it looks harder to use.

It was: It needed both boxes to run DOS 6.0 -- same version. Even so, results were not guaranteed.

Laplink can negotiate its protocol over a std LPT Cable or Null Modem.

I take out the drives and connect them to a modern box either with a PATA cable to the motherboard or via a USB\PATA connector to the modern box.

Comment Do Nothing (Score 1) 239

In the ideograms of Laotzu -- "Do nothing. That way everything will get done."

The Soviet-style surveillance state was disassembled when the Soviet Union imploded. This was due to various causes, including but not limited to a rising consumerist demand with a resulting balance-of-payment deficit, the cost of military "defense" against capitalism, mismanagement, corruption in high and low places, a failing currency and fiscal policy, and cynicism of the populace with respect to government's inability to plan for the future.

All of these conditions obtain currently in the USA. So, doing nothing will allow us to coast to the same fate as our former adversary.

And Laotzu will be shown to be right again.

Comment Re:Just started using it (Score 1) 129

I used their xfce version of #!-10 and it was wicked quick. Not fast, in that rendering in GiMP or loading web pages was quicker -- it wasn't --, but in responsiveness. When I clicked on something, the desktop responded instantly; I had the feeling it had read my mind and prepared for my request for action before I made it.

It was installed on a rotating hard disk, unlike Mint 10, which was on a SSD, and it beat Mint for speed (on a 1.6 gHz Pentium-M box with 4 G ram. YMMV)

Ironically, when the community xfce spin was discontinued, the announcement used the same logic -- You can add xfce to Debian and don'y need #! for that....

Sad to see it go. I would still have been using it had CUPS worked for printing....

Comment Re:Wait... (Score 4, Insightful) 431

In the BC (Before Computers) era, if one wanted perfect privacy, they would remember things and not write them down. They would talk to each other in their own homes with security from government eavesdropping about ideas, politics, anything they felt like. The fifth amendment gave them the right to keep such things from government "oversight."

Now, there is more to remember and machines to help us do so. Should these modern aids help the individual or make the jobs of surveillance agencies easier?

Put another way, would anyone want their careless/drunk/drugged/lusty words used against them in a courtroom?

Comment Re:kde5 (Score 2) 84

people who grew up on kde 3 said the same about kde4 when it came out

Yes, I was one of the horde. Early iterations of KDE-4 were not as functional as the KDE3 later versions were. I adopted KDE4 very late (two years ago) and am still not comfortable with it. I am loath to even taste KDE5 until it is feature-rich and stable.

I have begun to miss blackbox...but that's another story.

Comment Re:But ... but ... but (Score 2) 168

OPEC doesn't set the price, just output levels.

I was under the impression there is a relationship between supply and demand; now you say maintaining supply in the face of falling demand has no effect on price?

Or are you simply playing with words? "Set the price" being a function of "set the supply," I think even that argument fails.

Comment Solution *for me* (Score 2) 464

I had a similar problem with bifocals. My optometrists and I settled on a pair of glasses for working on my desktop computer which were corrected to three feet, my usual distance from my monitor. I find they are also useful for reading off paper, too.

See your doctor for a single-vision prescription for the distance from which you use your monitor.

Comment Re:Showfoto (Score 1) 259

Truth be told, I don't use Showfoto/Digikam anymore since Showfoto's indexing only seems to work if the default directory is in /home/user; since I use a small SSD for my installation and a larger disk partition for data, it is of little use to me. I have switched to duplicating SD-card directory structure by date and depending on my human memory --- just the way I did for film.

Comment Numbers Don't Lie, But -- (Score 4, Insightful) 160

Their sample size is 11-thousand. According to my results, 1-in-6 computers are running Linux!

This is absurd, unscientific to the extreme, fear-mongering.

In your example, based only on the statistics you provided, there were 11099x0.0109 or 120 people in the central time zone *in their sample*, which is the sample size of UTC-6 users.

Their data is useless.

In comparison, https://panopticlick.eff.org/i... has almost 5-million in their database. This is somewhat more helpful.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra

Working...