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Well you can trust my site, of course it's me telling you this, so I don't know if that invalidates the recommendation.

I created The Jem Report as a safe haven for people who want to learn more about computers. I was so dissatisfied with the crappy reviews I saw on other sites that I felt I could do better writing my own. I also wanted to have forums that weren't regularly trolled and flamed by people who didn't hold themselves accountable for their own words.

I don't know if it's a "success" by any particular standard, but I think it does well. I have fun writing articles and people seem to get a lot of good information from them.

Microsoft may turn a blind eye to home user "piracy." I recently wrote an article on this:

Remember a few weeks ago when the Win2000 source was leaked? Microsoft went balls-to-the-wall to crack down on its distribution over P2P networks and other means. If it has the capability to do this, why hasn't it cracked down on the illegal distribution of binary copies of Windows an Office? That's the big question, and until it remains without a reasonable answer, my guess is that Microsoft doesn't care about home user piracy because it encourages upgrade sales down the road and increases its installed base.

And you're not on the forums on The Jem Report? For shame!

But yeah, it is a little odd finding locals on the wide world of Slashdot, isn't it?

Yeah, I'll have a very good review up later this week on The Jem Report, and I'll be testing in FreeBSD and GNU/Linux as well as Windows. I'll have some very interesting (possibly /.-worthy) things to write about if all of my testing goes as planned.

And... most importantly, I will be using retail product, not pre-release samples like all of the reviews posted above. That means you get the real review, not prototype results.

I wrote an AMD64 article a while ago... something a little simpler, for those not so technically-minded:

Someone said above that there are no good AMD64 OSes... bullshit... SuSE 9.0 AMD64 is more than usable, and FreeBSD 5.2 AMD64 is almost perfect; in fact I'm typing this from Mozilla Firebird on FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE AMD64 right now.

Better reviews of keyboards and mice can be found here:

Keyboard reviews

Mouse reviews

Better reviews of keyboards and mice can be found here:

Keyboard reviews

Mouse reviews

I wrote this months ago using newer hardware and comparing RAID arrays as well:

Comparing Hard Drives

It was really meant to be a comparison of brands, RAID vs single drives, and SCSI vs. IDE. At the time SATA wasn't out yet and I couldn't get any SATA drives to add to the comparison later.

You might not be able to change Adobe, but Macromedia has a web-based product activation feedback form here:

http://infopoll.net/live/surveys/s22559.htm

And the new Studio MX 2004 is also more pricey, buggy, and restrictive than Studio MX was.

OK, so I'm new to all this BSD stuff. Skimming the page for the promised screenies I saw this image that says "WARNING: kernel contains GPL contaminated ext2fs filesystem." Am I missing something? Is this that "BSD is free-er than thou" I've heard about?

Those frisky BSD users, always giving linux a hard time. Maybe they should just remove linux compatibility if the GPL is so evil. :P

funny link

...is they ALL look like default crap! Man this one looks like it was taken from a 1999 default installation of Storm Linux!

Pretty it up, make it look nice, put some makeup on it, THEN and ONLY then send it off on it's first official date to properly get banged in the back seat of a make believe car by a FreeBSD geek.

Oh... yeah... those are some breathtaking fuckin' screenshots all right... I gotta get me some of this shit now.

Don't forget a "make depends" for when you crap your pants watching the majesty that is -- CONSOLE WINDOW

BTW, here is a good comparison of TextMaker and a bunch of other word processors.

Firewire is SLOW.

Only the fastest IDE drives can outpace a 400Mb/s firewire link, and then, if you want, hook up an Oxford 922 based Firewire 800 box and you'll have plenty of headroom.

There is a huge difference between RC2 and RC4 -- big enough that your Word problem will probably go away. In my Comparing Word Processors article I found .DOC conversion errors in RC3 and they were really horrible. But RC4 converts to and from .DOC just as well as StarOffice 7 as far as I can tell. I mean I converted about five fairly eclectic files and they all looked as they did in Word.

There's no speed difference between OpenOffice 1.1 and StarOffice 7 as far as I can tell. You can't really use a watch to measure the startup time because there are just too many factors involved, like CPU and hard drive cache. When I said that StarOffice 7 was twice as fast as its predecessor I was talking about StarOffice 6, which would be equivalent to OO.org 1.03, which we all know is intolerably slow and inefficient.

StarOffice doesn't necessarily claim to be a PDF creation tool -- it merely has the ability to export a document into a properly formatted PDF. I wish it did have more PDF tools, but that would probably make it more expensive with the Adobe licensing, etc.

In the review, a screenshot of Star Writer show a blantant attempt by the author to plug his more *ahem* creative writing.

I sure hope Star Office can use anti-aliased fonts.

ValourX, the author of the review, also has a comprehensive comparison of word processors, and here OpenOffice doesn't fare so well. The author seems much more impressed with TextMaker for Linux.

ValourX, the author of the review, also has a comprehensive comparison of word processors, and here OpenOffice doesn't fare so well. The author seems much more impressed with TextMaker for Linux.

Why would someone use Solaris instead of Linux? How about the fact that Linux is not fully UNIX compliant, while Solaris is, and the original slashdot article linked to this here.

You may think "so what?" but you probably haven't realized that the software [many of] these servers are running is specifically designed to run on UNIX, and not necessarily compatible with Linux.

Valour writes "The Jem Report has just published an in-depth review....

Valour/Jem, I don't understand why you are hiding the fact that YOU ARE Valour, and YOU ARE the OWNER and writer of TheJemReport.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that valour@herotale.com is the same person as valour@thejemreport.com - it's on the front page of your site.

If it's karma-whoring, go ahead, because that's not uncommon on Slashdot, but why pretend that you aren't submitting your own review by writing the submission in the third person?

Now let's re-write that first line:

Valour [THAT'S ME!!!!!!] writes "The Jem Report [THAT'S MY SITE!!!!!!] has just published an in-depth review and installation guide for the new Iwill ZPC, a cool little Pentium4 ultra small formfactor PC. There have been similar designs in the past, but nothing with this kind of power."

:)

For those who just want to see it, check out this pic among many others at the actual review, instead of the IWILL site. Also check out the installation guide

For those who just want to see it, check out this pic among many others at the actual review, instead of the IWILL site. Also check out the installation guide