Slashdot Mirror
"Good Enough" Computers Are the Future
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the PC World blog, Keir Thomas engages in some speculative thinking. Pretending to be writing from the year 2025, he describes a world of 'Good Enough computing,' wherein ultra-cheap PCs and notebooks (created to help end-users weather the 'Great Recession' of the early 21st century) are coupled to open source operating systems. This is possible because even the cheapest chips have all the power most people need nowadays. In what is effectively the present situation with netbooks writ large, he sees a future where Microsoft is priced out of the entire desktop operating system market and can't compete. It's a fun read that raises some interesting points."
iLife '09 already tries (and does a decent job, if the demos are to be believed) of categorizing your photos by setting and subject. It uses face recognition and any embedded GPS data in the image file from your camera to do so.
BTW, I'm not an Apple fanboy, and I'm pissed that's what was covered in their presentation Sunday that was supposed to be about how environmentally friendly their systems and manufacturing processes are.
GNOME?
Mounting my shared disk space from the university. Which I need to do frequently, as I don't have a printer, so I have to transfer all my papers over to the network space and then go to a lab to print. So in Windows, I have to type in the massive string that is whatever the hell the drive is I'm trying to mount (I don't even know it), then put in my username and password, and select a drive to mount it to, etc, etc. On Linux I just run a shell script and enter my password.
Though I suppose I could have both of them do automount, but I don't like automounting network disks like this...because if I'm not on the university's network, the system starts spewing error messages about not being able to find it. And as I leave the campus network at least once a week, and have multiple network disks that I mount, that would also be rather annoying.
I did wonder if it was something like that, but if you can create a bash script then you can also create a logon script: use something like
net use U: /del /del
net use P:
net use U: \\MY_SERVER\users
net use P: \\MY_other_server\public
in your Windows logon script then it will auto-mount the drives (without any annoying messages resulting from a persistent share not being able to find the network path when you're not on the Uni network). We use that kind of thing in our logon scripts at work.
(copied the script lines above from http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/WindowsNT/AdminTips/Logon/WindowsNTLoginScriptTricksandTips.html )
which is totally what she said