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Fire Giant

WFG Retired
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Posts posted by Fire Giant

  1. I do not have time to read it all, but my (probably mistaken) opinion is that Red Hat isn't exactly a server system, and that you can only create a secure system by making all the detail configuration yourself and not only using a default install of some system - that's also why I like Debian so much - you are forced to know the ingredients (sp?) of your system and therefore you can understand it and make it secure.

    Just my 0.02 B)

  2. VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) should work, too - that's my DVD-player of choice for Windows, too, since it doesn't care about DVD-Codecs being installed or such (while Media Player keeps brabbling about me not having installed a compatible DVD-Decoder). Also, it can play damaged video files :wine: VLC isn't exactly easy to use, but still better than command-line only.

  3. Another solution would be, of course, to use LILO, but like I said as well, who wants to be staring (especially the people who just want to use the computer for their word processing, e-mail, etc.) at a blank boot: prompt? Of course, I think you can configure LILO to have Windows be default as well, but a black screen is still scary nontheless.

    Well, you could use the "menu-mode" of LILO ... it doesn't necissarily need to use the boot:-prompt. In menu-mode, you can choose the desired OS by using the arrow keys and pressing return - pretty intuitive, if you ask me. There's also something called "bitmap mode" in LILO, but I didn't manage to understand that yet (also, it doesn't seem to work on my laptop which has some problems with kernels where framebuffers are activated).

  4. Fire Giant,

    Can you give me some examples of your dialect versus Hochdeutsch. I was reading a book and the one charachter was speaking Schwäbnisch and it was nothing like what I've learned.

    Hmm, that's a little problematic, since I'm not a dialect speaker - in fact, I've grown up with Hochdeutsch, which is considered to be slowly superseeding the local dialects in our modern society. Also, I've no real idea of what's the difference between "Schwäbisch" and my language - since I've never been to an area where people speak that dialect.

    I can tell you, though, that the Bavarian dialect is quite different from our language in the norther parts of Germany - they have a very different pronounciation down there and also use different words for many things (like "Semmeln" instead of "Brötchen" [means: roll], "Grüß Gott" instead of "Moin, Moin" [a greeting formula, the first literally means "Greet God" while the second is just an abbreviation for "good morning"] and "Matura" instead of "Abitur" [which both mean the German final exam after 13 years of school]; yes, they even have words which we don't have an equivalent for up here: "heuer" [meaning: this year] is just one example). Also, there is a dialect called "Platt" in the northern coastal areas of Germany, which is a colorful mixture of German, English, Dutch and Scandinavian languages, but only few people are still learning and practicing that dialect.

    Ich hatte dieses jahre mein deutsch examen, dan muss ich deutsch reden uber ganz uninterresante sachen  :P

    Hehe, but I wouldn't consider my english exams to be too interesting, too :P

    By the way isn`t the title of this topic suppost to be; sprechen Sie deutsch?
    I was being informal, which I felt was more fitting of this forum. :wine:

    As said, the difference between "Sie" and "Du" in German is much of a matter of politeness and formality - "Sie" is being used for talking to (other) adults and people you don't know too well, while "du" is used for personal conversations and also became the general way of speaking in German speaking areas on the Internet. Besides, I personally prefer "du" over "Sie", since I'm not yet that old and it always gives me a shudder if someone refers to me as "Sie" - I simply don't feel like that right now :P

    und es ist das Internet :P

    Exactly.

  5. Oh yeah... I wonder how that happened... :\

    Holding Ctrl and scrolling changes the font size in Firefox. It's quite annoying sometimes, for example as I'm someone who often opens links in new tabs by Ctrl-clicking, and therefore often accidentally changes the font size. Ctrl-0 solves it, though :wine:

  6. Also, a cool feature in Firefox is actually the option to specify a "keyword" for bookmarks. If you use this option and then enter "%s" somewhere into the bookmark-URL, you can do like "keyword blah" and it will open the saved URL and replace "%s" by "blah". In that way, I've made myself quicksearch features for Google and Wikipedia:

    g Wildfire Games

    equals a Google search for "Wildfire Games" and gets rewritten to:

    http://www.google.com/search?q=Wildfire%20Games

    Same goes for Wikipedia:

    w Goethe

    gets rewritten to

    http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe

    This is VERY handy and already starts to save me a couple of seconds per day :wine:

  7. The reason for science is to make people think. People have to think, that makes them people. Hence, thinking is the most beautifull relaxation you can have. Science is cool, nomatter how you put it. The human race has according to me three needs, who are love (or reproduction, if you want to put it that way), knowledge and control (which results in power). Isn't it beautifull to know how nature works, and thus have a little bit of control over it?

    Agreed - look back into the past: If we had abadoned science for the sake of bringing peace to the entire world (which is impossible, IMO) during the past centuries, we'd likely still be in the Middle Ages. And lots of things have improved since the middle ages - knowledge leads to understanding, and understanding leads to peace.

    Look a the modern Europe after the end of WW II - we've put asides our enmities and we accept the other cultures as a part of Europe. We're living in one of the most peaceful areas of earth, and though we have our differences, we're still unified in many areas. See, there's the large number of European multilateral projects (Airbus, ESA, GALILEO, education projects like Erasmus and many, many others) - they unify the people of Europe and make them feel being part of a unified group (at least that's how I feel about it), which shares success and failure. Put the same concept into other areas of the world, and it might work as well.

    I'm one of the people who favor the idea of an European national state (United States of Europe or whatever it might be called) - I think we could form a great family even though we are different in many aspects; but that's another topic.

    To summarize, I think the role of science in our modern society is quite important, we should keep in mind that the expeditures for science are only a very marginal part of out nation's budgets. I think, e.g. that Germany is on the right track with decreasing the military budget every year and demobilizing more and more troops (just some months ago, another barracks in Hamburg was shut down) - it isn't really needed in here any more, and for peace and humanity missions, we don't need an army of millions of men. And with all the expeditures saved through the lowering of military budgets, I have no problem to spend some billions on science (I'd even be willing to pay extra taxes for science - but not for the military!).

  8. The vast majority of Roman Houses would have been built with such "orange" bricks.  Then white stucco was placed over the bricks to give them a bright, white facade.  There were various other types of stone that could have been placed in patterns as an outer covering, though.

    Cement walls, called opus caementicium were used, and sometimes concrete walls were faced with irregular slabs of brick, called opus incertem.  If they were faced with uniform stones, though it would be called "opus reticulatem".

    That's what I heard, too. Even the Roman fortresses on the Limes frontier had this kind of white stucco (the ones made of stone, of course), to make them look more impressive.

    I also remember that the insulae in the poor areas of the cities had this stucco, but it was often of poor quality and crumbled from the walls soon.

  9. How can Linux be more expensive? I haven't spent one eurocent on it, yet it is working very well and has free equivalents of everything I have on windows. So in the end it's €0 vs €few thousands.

    All I can imagine are big companies that need to train their workers to use linux and equivalent software or that would need to have software developed equivalent to what they used on windows. But that's not really an argument against linux but an argument against the monopoly of Microsoft.

    Yepp, I think it came down to something like that - also, one would need more expensive system administrators and hardware to use Linux (which is, obviously, far from reality). I don't remember the exact reasons though - and I can't have a look which they were since the study book went into the wastebasket not long after the Cebit ended :wine:

  10. I just saw the movie - as Paul pointed out, the amount of historical detail and "correctness" is pretty good (much better than it was in Troy, and better than in Gladiator). Gaugamela is an adventure of dust, blood and glory - unfortunately they didn't show Issos as well (or a decent siege like Tyre). They start right with Gaugamela, which is a downside of the story, IMO.

    Also, be warned, there's a lot of talking in the movie, and various characters are a little stereotypical (like Olympias and Alexander's father).

    But overall, I'd rate it better than Troy, for example.

  11. He will bow one day before the power of Rome! :P

    Hmm, there are various way to make relucant people bow to the power of Rome :wine:

    However - great sketch, Mike. We might as well adapt it for the Romans :P

    Go away you Roman freak! :P

    Hmm, I'm standing side by side with my fellow "Roma Victor" comrade. You should better think about what you say or your house will get visited by a small group of Praetorians ... and they do not come for tea...

  12. Our German books have these interviews with "native speakers" and the example had the person being interviewed saying " Also, ich..."

    Hehe, well, it isn't grammatically wrong - the problem is that "also" can mean a lot of things in German. In this case, you wanted to express a consequence of something, and in that case, you do not seperate the "also" and the rest of the sentence with a comma. You can do that if you want to say something to the direction of "Well, it happened ten years ago..." and you start to tell a story. It's a "starting word" for a longer explanation like "well" in that particular case.

    Oh, and another little mistake in your last post (the whole first sentence is correct):

    Als ein Affe hat!

    "Als" is a word of comparison here ("than"), so you either need "mehr" ("more") or you need to say "Wie ein Affe." ("Like a monkey").

  13. http://www.techweb.com/wire/security/60300209

    Note how Microsoft's security chief says that Windows had fewer vaulnerabilities, but he never mentioned the severity of them.  A study a while ago admitted that Red Hat Linux had more vaulnerabilities, but all of Windows's security holes have been "Critical" or "Highly Critical", whereas Red Hat's security flaws have all been very minor.

    Well, that "study" surely was conducted by someone paid by MS, right? I've seen that kind of stuff at the last Cebit (worlds largest computer exposition in Hannover, Germany) - they had a study about the overall cost of MS and Linux products there. I got it from a MS saleswoman, opened the book and read the last page (where the "conclusions" were) - the first paragraph told me what the whole thing was about: On the long run, Linux would be more insecure and expensive than Windows. Needless to say, I've never opened that "study" book again :wine:

  14. Haha, that's funny.

    I think, though, that the technical reasons for this behaviour might be the fact that Googlebot is a spider which follows any link on a webpage, and therefore also the "posting" link - but since it can't perform POST-requests (sending the Post-FORM), it won't complete the posting action. The user system recognizes that it followed the post-link, though and therefore shows it on the active users page :wine:

  15. The regents is a test that I think only New York takes, they have it for every subject and if you fail you have to take the course over, its really dumb.

    I see. Well, tests aren't an uncommon pratice at school, but it sounds like that one is a centralized check of your achievements?

    P.S. Please correct my german. It's not very good.

    It's quite good considering you're not a native speaker. Still, as you wish, I'm correcting your mistakes:

    Um meine Schule haben wir Deutsch, Französisch und Spanisch.

    Only a spelling thing - it's "An meiner Schule" ("at my school", indicating the location here), not "Um".

    Ich habe das Französisch ist blöd gedenkt.

    Sorry, I had to laugh on that one. Don't make it that difficult - it's much easier to say "Ich dachte mir, dass Französisch blöd ist." (simple "Imperfekt" tense, also note the pronoun "mir", which indicates who thought it).

    Und ich mag Spanisch nicht.

    Bravo, correct! :wine:

    Also, ich habe Deutsch genommen.

    Word order - this sentence isn't wrong in a sense of language, but nobody would say it like that. Rather, we'd say "Also habe ich Deutsch genommen.".

    @Argalius: Well, at least something :P

  16. Ja ich spreche deutsch, aber es ist nicht so gut. Ich habe deutsch fur drie jahren gelernt.  Ich muss meine deutsch fur dem regents....um wie spricht man "practice" auf deutsch. Das regents gefallt mir nicht!

    What do you mean by "regents" ("Regenten" means rulers like kings or dukes in German, but I believe that's hardly what you want to say :wine:)? "Practice" is "Übung" in German.

    I learnt German when I was at school, but that was too long ago :P

    I can remember a few things though ... and I enjoy watching the news on German channels ... bliss morgen :P and when I went to Switzerland, I could understand quite a bit of what was said ...

    Hehe, nice to hear that. When I went to France during the last autumn vacation, I met some people who spoke some German. Some of them were older people, some were younger students; but the majority did only speak English and Italic or Spanish.

    Besides, I guess your German is probably better than my French :P

  17. I assume you didn't know I was talking about the control center? And yes, GNOME usually doesn't look like Windows :).

    Oh, sorry, I must have missed that genitive "'s". You're right there, the GNOME control center looks quite like the windows control panel - though it doesn't have that many options. I prefer my own collection of bash-scripts anyway :P

  18. Why? There are 26 letters in the alphabet :P (unless of course, my counting skills have gone down the drain :)).

    Actually, it's a little less: You have to subtract the two letters which are reserved for the floppy drives (A and B, where B is a "virtual" drive link to A, that's a remnant of old DOS times), and which are hidden from you even if you do not have a floppy drive.

    Hmm, I was wondering what would happen after 26 drives

    I think nothing - it simply won't be possible to install more drives, they won't be listed in windows explorer and won't be accessible :) (I'm only guessing here, but I'm sure someone has already tried - Google will know..)

  19. Instead of modifying the boot.ini file you should allow the Linux installer to find your Windows partition and use the Linux bootloader instead.

    When I installed Mandrake on a secondary HD, LILO automatically edited the MBR of my primary (Windows) HD and set everything up so I could dual-boot between Windows and Linux. Didn't need to configure anything manually, very nice :) Keep that in mind if you are planning on installing Mandrake.

    Exactly. The windows bootloader will give you much more headaches than simply using a Linux one. I remember to have read some howto on using the Windows bootloader to boot into windows, but that one was very long and very complicated (I think it involved some usage of virtual SCSI drives - scary stuff) and setting up a Linux bootloader unlikely takes more than a few minutes.

    Oh, and yes, as Frank already said - always install Windows first, because Windows tends to destroy the Linux boot-settings and make it impossible to get into Linux without using a bootdisk :P

  20. Hui, ich glaube, dies ist das erste Mal, dass ich im WFG-Forum etwas in Deutsch schreibe :P

    Da ich in Deutschland lebe und aufgewachsen bin, spreche ich Deutsch, seit ich überhaupt sprechen kann.

    Ich finde es sehr interessant, dass anscheinend eine ganze Menge Personen hier im Forum sich mit Deutsch als Fremdsprache beschäftigen (oder beschäftigt haben) - uns wird hier immer erzählt, dass kein Mensch Deutsch lernen will, weil die Sprache so schwer sei... aber anscheinend ist die Annahme falsch :)

    Falls irgendjemand Hilfe mit Hausaufgaben oder so in Deutsch brauchen kann, bin ich gerne bereit, zu helfen... natürlich auch, falls jemand nur einmal ein bisschen "sprechen" will. Ah, und falls ich Fehler korrigieren soll, sagt es...

    Und, @Adam: Du sprichst nicht nur ein "bisschen" Deutsch, sondern ziemlich gut für einen nicht-Muttersprachler :)!

    ---

    Translation:

    Wow, I think this is the first time I'm writing something in German into the WFG forums :P

    Since I'm living in Germany and have been born there as well, I'm speaking German ever since I'm able to speak.

    I think it's very interesting that obviously quite some people in here are studying (or have been studying) German - we are often told over here that nobody wants to learn German because the language is quite hard to learn.... but it seems like that assumption is wrong.

    In case anyone could use assistance with German homework, coursework or something like that, I'll gladly offer to assist him/her... of course, also if someone only wants to "speak" a little German for fun. Ah, and if you want me to correct your mistakes, tell me...

    And, @Adam: You're not only speaking "a little bit" of German, but rather good for a non-native speaker :)!

  21. Well, it's more or less a matter of setting up the bootloader - most modern distros should be able to automatically determine the installed operating systems and the needed parameters for the bootloader.

    I suggest you to use a linux bootloader like LILO or GRUB, since the windows "bootloader" doesn't really support booting Linux (only with lots of tricks, I think), while the Linux ones are pretty compatible with Windows.

    If your distro can't do an automatic configuration, you'll have to mess with the config file(s) yourself - /etc/lilo.conf for LILO - and then try to get the bootloader installed through the shell. For LILO, information about the config file and the bootloader in general can be obtained using "man 5 lilo.conf" or "man lilo", and executing "lilo" installs the bootloader (there are some tricks regarding the installation into/not into the MBR, but generally, it's okay to put it into the MBR, since LILO isn't stupid and you should have no problem to get back into windows with some configuration editing, also, you can always restore the Windows bootloader using the Windows Recovery Console on the Windows CD).

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