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...that the crappy AOpen laptop that this one replaces has never had MS-Windows on it, and has never been crashed by software (even having the CPU fan fail only shut it down). If I hadn't had to glue a replacement fan to the outside of it to make it work and spend ~AUD$300 on a replacement battery that would only last 3.5 hours on a good day to make it portable, I wouldn't have bothered with a replacement.

One of our local "LUGgers" made this a while back:
http://lappyvator.cyberknights.com.au/

...then rest the front edge on your knees, oriented vertically and type with your hands raised. A bit hunt-and-peck at first but not as bad as you might think. Not radically different from this.

And get one of those matchbox-sized optical scrollwheel mice 'coz they work on airliner seat arms and are much more convenient for scrolling than a touchpad or keys at that angle. Technically, the high-efficiency LED in them is a laser, but none of the paperwork says so which should help avoid the mindless legalist device-nazis - and if not, you can always shine it in their eyes and blind them to make them go away <d/g/r>.

It sucks power slightly faster (not an issue if you have armrest power available), but I can strap my laptop to the headrest of the seat in front (get aboard early and get the strap (I use dark matte grey CAT5) embedded into the headrest joint and essentially invisible before the seat's resident arrives), plug in a small USB keyboard and the abovementioned mouse to use it in reasonable comfort. If you could find a way to attach the laptop to the ceiling, you could probably even recline your own seat.

...then rest the front edge on your knees, oriented vertically and type with your hands raised. A bit hunt-and-peck at first but not as bad as you might think. Not radically different from this.

And get one of those matchbox-sized optical scrollwheel mice 'coz they work on airliner seat arms and are much more convenient for scrolling than a touchpad or keys at that angle. Technically, the high-efficiency LED in them is a laser, but none of the paperwork says so which should help avoid the mindless legalist device-nazis - and if not, you can always shine it in their eyes and blind them to make them go away <d/g/r>.

It sucks power slightly faster (not an issue if you have armrest power available), but I can strap my laptop to the headrest of the seat in front (get aboard early and get the strap (I use dark matte grey CAT5) embedded into the headrest joint and essentially invisible before the seat's resident arrives), plug in a small USB keyboard and the abovementioned mouse to use it in reasonable comfort. If you could find a way to attach the laptop to the ceiling, you could probably even recline your own seat.

...quit typing earlier in the day.

lappyvator.cyberknights.com.au

...lappivator.cyberknights.com.au, please let me know if you improve the design.

...money for a virus scanner, a firewall, and frequent call-outs to fix stuff which breaks at random, remove spyware which gets in despite the scanners... and so on.

Not near as bad as 9X/ME, but it's still there.

The only real reasons for wanting MS Windows these days are specific vertical market apps (e.g. PhotoShop), or games/edutainment. IPOF, PhotoShop 7 runs under WINE, too, which kind of enmootifies half of that point. I haven't tried later versions.

• Menus on each document window
• colour depths in the File/New dialog
• room for biiiig numbers in the colour depths
• more brushes

A pikachu? Gosh, I'm... I'm... underwhelmed. (-:

Mine's here. A bit large, a bit gaudy, but the missus likes it. (-:

FreeNX is for when it absolutely, positively, has to be double the speed. (-:

The NX protocol is essentially compressed and cached X; it talks to VNC, RDP and whetever else through its own proxy.

Mandrake 10.0 RPMs are here and here. The SRPMs will probably rebuild fine on 10.1 or 9.2 and are here and here.

FreeNX is for when it absolutely, positively, has to be double the speed. (-:

The NX protocol is essentially compressed and cached X; it talks to VNC, RDP and whetever else through its own proxy.

Mandrake 10.0 RPMs are here and here. The SRPMs will probably rebuild fine on 10.1 or 9.2 and are here and here.

FreeNX is for when it absolutely, positively, has to be double the speed. (-:

The NX protocol is essentially compressed and cached X; it talks to VNC, RDP and whetever else through its own proxy.

Mandrake 10.0 RPMs are here and here. The SRPMs will probably rebuild fine on 10.1 or 9.2 and are here and here.

FreeNX is for when it absolutely, positively, has to be double the speed. (-:

The NX protocol is essentially compressed and cached X; it talks to VNC, RDP and whetever else through its own proxy.

Mandrake 10.0 RPMs are here and here. The SRPMs will probably rebuild fine on 10.1 or 9.2 and are here and here.

WayBack has it.

I've also mirrored the source Just In Case (that's an ADSL link, you'd be better off downloading it directly from WayBack).

I've had people walk up to Mandrake machines, use them for a day, and walk away not realising that it wasn't MS-Windows. If I switched those boxes to XPDE instead of KDE and did a little tweaking, I'm sure it would be easy to fool ten times as many people - if that was my aim.

I was using my laptop (running Mandrake Linux) at a private function last week, and a 10yob I know came up, looked oddly at the screen for a few minutes, then asked "Which Windows are you using?" It took about 15 minutes and much repetition to mostly-convince him that it wasn't running MS-Windows at all, but rather KDE on Linux. This is the level of ignorance we face. This kid knows his own machine inside out, as well as a non-programmer possibly could, but had no clue that anything other than MS-Windows ever existed.

Both Mandrake and SuSE do the font thing well, including different aliasing at different sizes.

I haven't seriously tried other distros for a while but seem to remember some of the Debian-based distros (Gentoo, Knoppix) being happy out of the box nowadays, and probably Lin{spire,dows,insertsuffixhere} but that has other issues you don't want to have to deal with.

If you use the download edition of Mandrake, set it up with the Contribs as a URPMI source, and manually pull down a few things (Flash player, Win32 CoDecs and the like) from the Penguin Liberation Front sites. Using PLF wide throttle is a bit risky, but cherry-picking only extras instead of replacing standard packages as well seems to work well. I've also tacked together a few extras of my own here, but that's a skinny DSL line; please don't melt it down.

...with fixed Apache config, my main site (Linux-centric) shows 53.3% Moz (incl FF), 26.2% MSIE, 12.6% Konq, 3.5% NS, 1.6% Opera, 0.9% Safari and the balance bots and singletons including two hits from an "Avant Browser".

Another non-techie site on the same machine shows 63.4% MSIE, 21.3% Moz, 6.5% NS and the balance in bots. Mind you, it does have a badge advocating Firefox and an IE-only message urging an upgrade of the visitor's browsing experience.

Try mine (non-IE users, tell your browser to lie about its ID if you want to see what he sees).

They don't require registration, you can change your PC's configuration as much as you like, and they have a few free applications thrown in as well!

Drop this into /usr/share/services/useragentstrings and you can conveniently select it from Konqueror's "Tools/Change Browser Identification" menu at once. In 51 different languages. (-:

If you like melting webmaster brain cells, use this instead.

My mailserver used to answer as a "Commodore 64 (with anti-spam cartridge)".

Drop this into /usr/share/services/useragentstrings and you can conveniently select it from Konqueror's "Tools/Change Browser Identification" menu at once. In 51 different languages. (-:

If you like melting webmaster brain cells, use this instead.

My mailserver used to answer as a "Commodore 64 (with anti-spam cartridge)".

I also replace the default IE homepage with http://news.google.com.au/ (guess which country I live in) on any new MS-Windows install. The bandwidth is lower, the news more useful and there are more tools one click away.

Does Yahoo translate? I use Google links on my corporate pages to do that. Do they offer a calculator or conversions? All of the stuff in the "missing Google manual"? As a search engine, Yahoo isn't in the same class.

As to Yahoo's photo galleries, they have some fairly severe limits. On the other hand, a Google search for a stock ticker will take you to Yahoo's finance pages. Each has something to offer, so I'm glad they both exist.

If you do sufficiently lock a computer down to prevent this, you often break some functionality (yes, even in Linux).

Admittedly, KDE is a fairly heavy WM, but the users like it.

Dunno about block, as such, but point your IE (or suitable UserAgent string) here and compare it with (say) Konqueror or FireFox.

Tip for Konq users: Tools, Change Browser Identification, any of the first 8. Afterwards: T, CBI, Default Identification.

I have seen protest sites blocking IE (you get a popup and then a redirect to mozilla.org).

Have a thousand words. That was Mandrake 9.2 a few months ago, no extra software besides the app.

The GIMP 2.0 doesn't do any of those things for me. I'm using it under Mandrake Linux 10.0 in several places.

The GIMP 2.0pre3 also doesn't do those things on my wife's machine (Mandrake 9.2).

And yes, you can use PhotoShop (at least v7.0) under WINE (that shot under the Jan2004 release pulled from Cooker and recompiled for 9.2).

standard WINE (Jan2004 release), not CrossOver, under Mandrake Linux 9.2, no native DLLs.

...at least, has done for me for months now. See this proof-of-concept screenshot of 7.0 running under Mandrake Linux 9.2 with the January 2004 WINE SRPMs out of Cooker, rebuilt on the 9.2 system.

However, if you've used GIMP 2.0, there are very few reasons left for "I absolutely have to use PhotoShop". If you're doing 48-bit colour, maybe, but FilmGIMP does that already. Dunno what happened the fonts, maybe the OS X version of X11 doesn't render them very well. They seem to be fine under Mandrake Linux, but OTOH Mandrake do patch XFS for light hinting. It loads files very fast, but I think the dialog box from which you do this is very... dated. I'd bet most of Joe's problems stem from having to unlearn PhotoShopisms rather than them being missing from The GIMP.

Plenty good enough to get started with, WYSIWYG and all. Produces much nicer HTML if started in HTML mode rather than writer mode, but even so in writer mode, it's chalk-and-cheese better than the abominations MS-Word spits out.

My own website, while hardly a paragon of usability or graphic design, is mostly built on OOW-edited HTML that's been fed to a gawk script which rips off the head and tail, replacing them with PHP calls to generic top-and-tail scripts which do the preamble, headings, menu, links-here, translation form (thanks Google) etc.

This makes consistency much easier, it's quick to edit stuff up (I use Linux, but that remains true even on MS Windows) and massaging MS-Word docs and the like to suit (precious few of those on my site but I do this elsewhere too) is fairly straightforward, although I usually have sed discuss some of the resulting HTML's shortcomings up close and personal before feeding it to the top-and-tailer. You'll notice that all of the W3C buttons work.

If I've just got to add an item to a menu or whatever, simple little tasks, it's vim all the way, and of course for a larger, more complex site I'd take a completely different approach.

Microsoft's Office XML sucks. It comes in two flavours, one with everything useful stripped out and one up to the eyeballs in bizarre XML attributes and binary crap.

What I do with the HTML editor on my own site is edit the doc up in OOWriter, then shove it through a filter which "tops and tails" it, leaving the essence of it to be framed by a brace of PHP scripts. The scripts add headers, footers, banners, some geek stuff (translate, linked-to, validate) and common styles. I agree that it's not DreamWeaver, not a website designer, but for actually editing up pages it's night-vs-day better than Word or any other WP I've seen.

I think the effect you're after is demonstrated by this one-page presentation (also in MS format). All I did was right-click the text objects (on their borders so the object itself is being referred to, not the text in the object), choose effects, and pick an effect for them. You can do this en bloc as well.

I think the effect you're after is demonstrated by this one-page presentation (also in MS format). All I did was right-click the text objects (on their borders so the object itself is being referred to, not the text in the object), choose effects, and pick an effect for them. You can do this en bloc as well.

You can key a search directly from it, and that way I get a ten-second newsburst every time I start a browser.

I also have Google translation buttons on my corporate pages. Handy si usted sabe hablar solamente espanol (oder Deutscher).

They also get points for backing away from a public offering and the potential for all of that money in favour of doing things properly.

Yes, XP is a big step forward when compared to '98 (let's not mention ME).

No, it is not secure, robust or flexible enough for my computer work.

If I absolutely had to use MS-Windows, it would be 2003 but even here I spend too much time fighting the OS to try to acheive (or even find the controls for) what I can achieve with a one-liner in Linux.

As to compiling from source, who are you trying to kid? I'm installing KDE 3.2.1 binaries in about 20 minutes (when it finishes downloading) and that was a one-liner, too. Yes, it could have been point and click if I didn't find typing faster than mousing through menus.

In fact, there is even a Linux utility which automatically finds and installs (and then runs) a program for you on the fly if you try to run it and it's not installed. I'm not personally comfortable with this idea, but in terms of automation, it's hard to beat.

My wife uses Linux and she's not exactly the world's greatest computer literate. My 4yo boy uses it too, even though he has no sensible understanding of what's really happening. Unlike MS-Windows, I can pretty much instantly lock down his desktop using the kiosk features.

I'm happy for you and your uptime, but I'm afraid it's atypical except in carefully managed environments. The norm on a home PC is to have XP do something weird about daily, and lock up every few days (that is, ten times better than '98). My wife doesn't bookmark stuff, she just minimises the browser window, and those minimised sessions typically stay there for weeks. She doesn't save as she goes, either, and didn't even know that OpenOffice.org had crash recovery until a power failure last week (hadn't saved that document in about a week).

However, this is still almost majoring on the minors. I don't have to sweat about licenses, spyware, viruses or a zillion and one other "parking meter" nuisances. Those alone make it worthwhile using Linux.

If I need to run an MS-Windows-only app (which is one of two remaining gripes with using Linux: hello software manufacturers, port now before a FOSS app arises to blow your market away - the other being indifferent interest from hardware manufacturers), it can often be done.

...pile of snow at the end of the carpark and all (he says, looking out the window at approx 30degC blue skies), perhaps (and I haven't redone this for hires yet, I started with the GrokLaw one) the DoD could fix that for them at the same time as resolving any outstanding licence issues with their new Linux cluster?

"OK, so you want to come at this the hard way? No problem." (-:

It works kinda sorta under WINE. Note that the first link is over a year old, and that a lot of things (e.g. PhotoShop) have started working really well in the last few snapshots.

I'd pay $750 for Photoshop if it ran on Linux, rather than the warez'd copy I'm using right now.

From the CyberKnights page:

"...we are currently exploring workable methods for becoming big while remaining small...

Well, you could always dredge up some code you wrote years ago, grep through an OSS source tree until you find a partial match and then issue ridiculous demands for outrageously expensive licenses...

...during the interview reported in this BYTE article. You can see here that Microsoft have updated the later builds of MS-Windows 2003 to reflect this.

Most of them are 15-21V input, even if the battery inside is nominally 12V. Even the ones that are 12V really do mean 12V, will stop charging at 11.5V and blow up at 14V (not uncommon in a car to see swings 8-15V, spikes to zero and x00V).

Andrew's going to sucker-punch me for mentioning this, but there's an Australian company about a month away from releasing a large-sandwich-sized PC which can conceptually have it's own internal 12V LA battery (really LA, or SLAC) for UPS-like effects and so you can wire your car battery into that spot in the circuit. A 12V screen might be another story but if you're reinventing the empeg that doesn't matter. The PC sucks about 15W flat tack, less for the slower totally-fanless versions.

The company is only interested in selling wholesale so bookmark this link (which doesn't exist yet) and I'll whack a page up there with details when they're available (look at end March, mid April).

BTW, the next Konqueror allows you to bookmark a link without visiting it. Message to IE: feature by feature, we're gunna eat'cher. (-:

After all, anything written by a group called "The Cyberknights" has GOT to the authoritative!

The "group" in question is a business. Perhaps it's a slightly flippant name for a business, but given that I've done business with GODGames, Two Men and Truck Moving, and a host of other businesses with silly names, I don't hold it against them too much. No, they're not the most polished looking company, but having worked for a number of small businesses it's very typical. Most of the local consulting companies here look for less professional.

His educated reference to Star Trek really helped me to understand the situation, and make an informed decision.

I trust that Microsoft's educated reference to the classic video game Pac-Man helped your decision making process just as well? How about labelling the GPL, a license that only affects you if you chose to let it, as viral? Labelling Linux as a cancer? Implying that the GPL is un-american?

Just because the document lacks the the meaningless business jargon of typical whitepapers doesn't invalidate it. It certainly doesn't justify your smear tactic of suggesting that the author is twelve and not worthy of consideration.

http://cyberknights.com.au/articles/true-value-of- linux.html