elrohir

Many distros, like linspire (see 'g0dd4m fuzkcfcae ret4d'd ristro') have the aim of acting like windows. Or at least, easing the user into linux setting from a Windows environment. I think I will stand by saying that if users had started with linux rather than windows, they would find windows just as confusing as the windows migrants find linux, if not more so. Customisation does take a little tinkering, but it doesn't HAVE to be done. Gnome works pretty nice 'out of the box', and a lot of the people who use KDE think that is nice as well. even as it comes with the system.Linux is not hard. it is different. One you know how to use it, it work flawlessly (most of the time) and well. Not to mention being open source...

try using a media player that works. vlc is great, even if it doesn't have all the unnecessary bells and whistles that WMP comes with, but at least it works. What do you want the visualisations for in the first place?? You can turn the off, you know...

same everywhere. *BLEEP*. Depends on the school's admin.

google does actually have an operating system - Goobuntu - based on Ubuntu Linux Google rocks. They are not currently planning to release it, though. Google does have office software, though it is mostly based online, and it beta, as far as I know. They have their own filesystem - GFS - for the servers. It is supposedly extrememly efficient. But they don't seem to be going in that direction. Makes you wonder where they ARE going...

In that case, what is wrong with Open Office?

blaghM$ has a hand in a lot, and they are bigger than google at the moment, that's for sure, but I don't think it will last all that long. Hopefully people will begin to see that two glaring failures in their main field - referring to Windows Vista and XP, obviously - are not just bad luck. But I guess I'm a little too optimistic :/

sorry for coming in late; I had to comment on killer*BLEEP*on's post: You need to know what you are doing in Windows, as well. You are just used to doing it. The Linux way is different and therefore to your mind harder. Hello? That's what the original quoted article was about! Open office? Does the same, saves in .doc format. Has done for years, ever since it BECAME open office - and I assume that even as Star Office it had some of the same stuff. "shared e-mail calendaring groupware"? I will admit that it is not very compatible with the windows solution, but I think it is time to stop centring things on this Windows Way. The Unix mailspool works fine on all unix based systems. If there is a system who doesn't support it, that would be Windows. I'm afraid that the Open Source communty beats the crap out of Windows there. And then stamps on the corpse, cuts it up in little bits and feeds it to Bill Gates. With Windows, you can try the konwledge base... rarely any help there... You could try calling (I would rather die) the support line and test their knowledge. From the stuff I have seen from people around me, the support is support for the kind of things you shouldn't need any help with in the first place. And with Open Source, the first thing you do is go to the distro's forums. And that generally solves it, since the people there are users just like you, who know what they are doing, and do what they are doing because they want to give back to the communities that helped them onto their feet. If it doesn't you go to the people who developed the software's site, and need look no further. I haven't ever had a problem that couldn't be solved. How often do you hear that about Windows? I also have to salute realthor for his post. Driver issues? What the hell? No sofware? Have you windows slaves heard of Synaptic? I doubt it... MS would never let you know about something that nice untill they copied it. A pity for you that they can't due to their closed source mania. Synapcit enables you to download and install thousands of software packages developed by various people from all over the place. With HALF the repositories enabled, I have over 19,000 programs available - everything from chess games to drivers for NTFS to web servers to PHP 5. Really, it makes the software management of windows look a teeny bit pre-historic.

Let me start off by saying: there is nothing new about the vista interface Vista is basically XP with a new look. And what good does that look do? Not much, exept that it attracts customers who think that a shiny paintjob automatically makes something better. It also makes it slower. I downloaded rc1 from the MS site just to see what it was like. I was reformatting a partition anyways, so I decided why the hell not. After getting a fake serial to bypass the 30 day limit (which I might as well to have wasted my time doing, I hasten to add), I installed Vista. It took about 1hr 30min, and after that I had to reinstall GRUB, since this version of Windows still ignores other O/Ses. Yay! Now, lets get to this "new look" thing. The Aero theme didn't work out the way it should have, and after about an hour of poking around on the web, I found out that the reason it wasn't in the list of themes was that Vista checks out your specs and denies you features that are boasted on the site based on the results. I don't have a fancy comp, no multi-million GFX card, and only 512 MB RAM. But linux works fine - with compis and XGL, which do pretty much the same thing as this Aero, just without the lags. I usually have them turned off, just cause I like things simple. I had expected Vista to be slow on my machine. Hell, I was in for a shock. I got the speed I would have expected WITH the Aero theme WITHOUT it. Bloody hell, they really blew that on me. I hope for the sake of all the insane Windows users out there that Vista will work on boxes with less than 4GB RAM, and that 32-bit systems won't be obselete purely because of Vista's non-existant improvements. People have said that Vista looks like MAC, they have said it resembles Linux. And I have to agree. I found the theme similar to MAC - all shiny and beveled, with anti-aliased fonts (at last - that actually IS an improvement!). I don't have much experience with MACs, but at a glance it could be a MAC with a retarded colour sceme and no menu. As for the Linux part of that, a lot seems to have been taken from there, as well. Take the Open and Save dialogues, for example. They work the same way as the ones for Gnome, which is one of the window managers for Linux. And the best one, I think Both use the same expandable lists of filetypes (that it, when any MS software will allow you to save in a non-proprietry format) and the favourites list works the same way as Gnome's. I think KDE has the same thing, but I'm not sure. So what good does this Aero thing, which I can't use, do me? None. None at all. XGL and compis, which took me half an hour to set up, have not been developed by a capitalist company (I know Aero wasn't actually made by MS; but that's beside the point) and work just fine. So, if the only thing that's new is the look, and the look works better in other systems, why should I as a normal user use Windows Vista? I'm still waiting for someone to come up with that answer... In the end, I reformatted Vista into a media partition. It's ext3.

heheh, ubuntu ftw. What goes wrong? Have you tried posting about it in Ubuntuforums?

Untrue. I don't use anything from MS on a daily basis. The only reason that MS software is prominent in your life is because you want it there.

A while back, I spotted the book Eragon (Christopher Paolini) in the English section of the local library, and tried it out. It was good, and as soon as they got in the second of the Inheritance trilogy - Eldest - I took that one out as well. It wasn't quite as great, but then they never are. Live with it. I have known for a while that they were making a movie about it, and I got round to seeing it just last night. To get straight to it, I was really disappointed. I thought that there was a lot in the Lord of the Rings that didn't go into the films, but that was nothing, NOTHING compared to what happened to Eragon. And it appears that a lot of people on the web seem to agree with me on that. The scenery was great, as was the animation of Saphira, the dragon. The filming was fantastic. Ed Speelers did a reasonable job at Eragon, and Brom was great. What there was was good, and as a movie in itself it was reasonable. It reminded me a little of Dragon Heart 2. Exept that it did have some kind of plot. That plot was, however, not what the book was about. There was so much missing, so many points that just never appeared, that I doubt they will be able to make up even if they do make a film of Eldest. They just don't have a good enough foundation to make it any more related to the book than Eragon was. Fox really failed to meet expectations there, and I am sorry I paid to watch the movie rather than DLing it after the DVD was released. Has anybody else here seen it (and preferably have read the book)?It would be nice to see what people who did like it thought was so great (I'm still trying to get that out of the people who were so enthusiastic about the LOTR films, btw... ), just to try and understand their POV. Not that I really respect about the ideas of anyone who liked that thing, but that's beside the point...-E

well, that thing uses databases, but I wouldn't call it database driven. The reson being that mysql is rather slow on my server, and I didn't want to cause visitors pain by using them too much...

Well, here it is.I added it to a template from dreamweaver that I played with ages ago - before switching to linux... :/ It is a little delicate, but it works after a manner.The system uses a database in the structure of the table.sql dump file. Replace the username and password values with what you want, import it through phpmyadmin or whatever tool you use for databases and it will make the table users. Edit the file /file_editor/data/main_data/top_sec_enabled/functions.php and you're all set.

koo...I have something like it on a site I have somewhere or other, but the code needs updating, so I'll post it here when I have something working...I'm embedding ajax into it at the moment, but I don't think I'll include that... it it extremely messy...

I haven't had all that much contact with MACs, but I consider myself fairly proficient in both linux and windows systems. Linux Pros: Free, Open source LOTS of choice in distrobutions! Highly portable - you can install it on pretty much anything Runs of all kinds of hardware, from the lates AMD (and MACs) to the old pile of metal in the cellar. Systematic, organised Customisable Has a great community - where you are known as a USER rather than a CLIENT Has a LOT of software available! It is a myth that there is little software available for Linux systems. There is little commercial software available. (I have 19,000 pakages available in the repos, and have not enabled even half of them) Software managers (synaptic,apt-get,alien,etc...) Very stable Doesn't WASTE resources on graphics (see 'Windows Vista') Good for servers - efficient data management. Cons: Most distros are fairly hard to get to know Not as much commecial software is available for Linux as Windows and MAC (see 'Macromedia, Adobe...'), Java apps being the exeption. Not for those intimidated by the command line (see 'Old Gran') Drivers are not always available (see 'Broadcom chipsets') Doesn't work the same way as Windows, so many people think it is worse. (though these people would most likely not be welcomed into the linux community anyways, thinking like that. Hardware like mice (see 'Logitech wireless','Microsoft products'), keyboard shortcuts (like the keyboards that have buttons to open a web browser, etc) and combinations (I have Fn - PU/D for volume, for example) do not neccessarily work (Ubuntu being a great example of things working CORRECTLY) Wireless networking is one of the most common problems, and with more and more things going wireless these days... Windows XP and VistaPros: Popular (see 'inexplicable') Good support for games, tons of programs available "Ease" of use <- so long as you don't try to do anything too complicated, you don't need a university degree in computer science to keep it from crashing. Hardware is made for it. Drivers are made for Windows before anything else. Commercial software is always released for Windows first. (see 'Flash Player') A lot of manufacturers sell their computers with Windows preinstalled (see 'retards'). Cons: The next downgrade is vista! (see English-Latvian dictionary under 'chicken') Hogs memory (Vista even more than XP Windows networking is really really really slow. And stops working at random times. By buying windows, you support a capitalist company in monopolising the market. Windows comes with enough software preinstalled to... almost equal the time it takes to boot it in milliseconds. Has horrible colour schemes by defult, and you can't get out of them for free legally (at least, I didn't find out how untill I got Linux... ). Registry. Say no more... Illogical menus and folder structure. (like being able to access "my documents" from at least three different places in the tree. I'll leave it at that.

well, it wasn't exacly the most important number, so I just set the default in the database to 1 instead. I think it considered it 0 as in NULL, cause that solved it thanks anyways

that should do the trick... -.- would have thought that it would not matter if there was only one record matching the WHERE...I'll give that a go

yeh... it worked after 5 refreshes, for some reason :/ but now it won't update... $query ="UPDATE users SET logins='$new' WHERE id='$id'";// echo $id returns the correct number. ? -E

sorry for joining so late, but how about having one template file and storing the middle contents in seperate files in a different folder - /data/, say, and include them with a $_GET variable. That way you can have menus and stuff on one page, and only have to edit one page when changing something, and you can edit the pages after you have made them - using readdir to create a menu.... if anybody wants, I could post something in a couple days. Not trying to steal your glory, shadowx, just trying to help ;P-e

I am attempting to perform mathematical operations on a number extracted from a MySQL database. The integer is stored as an integer in the database, and nothing I am doing to it in the PHP script would transform it into a floating-point value. I don't even want to worry about sticking it back in just yet: // the value I want to increase here is logins... $query1 = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id='$id'";$result1 = mysql_query($query1) or die(mysql_error());$row1 = mysql_fetch_array($result1);$new = $row['logins'] ++;echo $new; returns: aka, nothing. NULL. It's like I'm trying to add something to a string :/ Any ideas? Thanks, -E

How, by killing them??

Hope that you realise that you are going a little bit to the other side - neutrality is a skill we all need, I guess. About Iraq, I don't think that ANYBODY should START a war just for the hell of it. No matter how powerful they think they are. Or ARE, for that matter. But now that troops have succesfully destroyed the social structure, they might as well build a Disney World there - and why not put Wendey's on every block?"The anti-bush federation" indeed. Concerning the "National Debt" [of the US, of course], it has not just failed to go down during Bush's reign - it has existed since before the 1940's, and has not gone down since then, though it has had periods when it rose less. That is, of course, if you don't count the inflation that has been going on. If you count that, it went down by approximately USD 500 000 000 000 in the late 1940's and by approximately USD 100 000 000 000 in 2001-2, and that is all calculated in 2000's USD value. Now, compared to appriximately USD 8 644 457 540 944 (at the current USD value), they weren't really that influential. Not long ago they set the limit to 7 trillion, and once more it has been capped at 9 trillion. Makes you wonder how long it will take to hit 10 trillion, eh? I seriously can't believe that anybody lends the US government money. Could somebody please explain this to me? And could somebody please explain what this B$ I just wrote while normal people are sleeping has to do with the topic? I sure can't!

I don't think impeaching bush would have any effect on what people outside the US think of what your government is trying to do. Personally, I think that it all comes down to having too much power, and too much influence in the rest of the world. Some day, they are just going to have to realise that they are not the centre of the world - and I'm not saying that the US is the only country who need to take a step back, far from it. Another thing that I find quite amusing is that in Norway, there are quite a lot of people from the US who come with the oil industry. Most of them go to the same school, the "International" school. I also attend this school, though I have lived in Norway for most of my life - we are considered permanent residents. I notice a very distinct arrogance in a lot of the people from the US - I tend to think as it as pure naivety. They just don't realise that nobody gives a flying f?kk about the US. Why the hell would they? It can be really annoying sometimes, especially when they don't even take the trouble to hide it. I still haven't decided whether that's actually trying to be rude, or whether they are just plain obnoxious. Another thing is that they are always saying how things are so much smaller here - from shopping centres to roads. That takes it out of me. Nobody WANTS it big, especially when it has worked fine for as long as anybody remembers, which is more than can be said for other places. The sad thing is, we are dependant on workers from elsewhere to keep our exports up, and without many of the foreign workers, most people here would be farmers. Personally, I'd love that, but it's not really likely that many other people share that opinion after having been snuggled against the lap of luxury for ages. On the other hand, there is a lot going on that is unfair the other way. There has been explosive growth all over the region, mostly of houses, apartments and industrial stuff. Not many people like this "development", but there's not much anybody can do. So they blame it on "Americans". Ok, WTF? Much as life here has been influenced by the US, I don't see how they can attribute the destroying of nature to anybody but the person directly resposible - I guess they just haven't done their homework aren't sure who that person is. So, if I was really extremist, I would go along and say "blow the US off the map!" but I'm not, so I say "ignore whatever the hell they are trying to do, unless it has a direct influence on you - and then start complaining".

Really? Nothing was that bad when I was there... but then I guess you can't see it all

didn't the VIC-20's have 5K or so?