Becuase the other Hidef format is Download.
I have heaps of TV shows in HD resolution, and they look fantastic on my 33" Standard def TV and my 43" Monitor (as my PC is my main media player)
Why I wont spend a cent on blue-ray is because I cant convert it to a more useful format. I'll just keep on downloading movies I want. Thanks Sony.
Running XBMC under Mint Linux on a 24" monitor in 1680x1024. Absolutely gorgeous.
Running XBMC on Unbuntu on my Aspire One Netbook in 1024x600. Absoutely gorgeous.
Running XBMC on my old chipped XBoxes (NZ$300 or less each now) and looks pretty good!
The best thing is the interface is the same/similar as on the old XBox (of which I have two, one for upstairs one for downstairs, both connected to 33" TVs) so even my 5-year-old can drive it.
I was going to pick up an old Mac Mini 1.8GHz model to replace one of the old XBoxes, but now I might just build an atom based uATX PC instead.
XBMC rocks!
With Windows installed, the students will be able to learn how to use Office to create documents and pay their MS tax.
With Sugar, thy might have a chance to learn how Operating Systems work, can change and compile their own if they want to, and a locked down OS miht have helped keep many common pieces of malware away.
I thought the OLPC was supposed to be a learning tool, not just another $100 netbook.
Maybe they should use an approach similar to Open SUSE, during the installation, there is an option to Accept all of the EULAs for the non free software that was chosen for the installation.
In corporate use, it is not up to our end users to accept or reject an EULA, it is up to us as the admin team to choose what software to deploy, license and accept for use.
1: Fixing more broken installations than I can remember. Working late at night on failed systems and recovering (or not as the case may be) data from disks that have failed. From this I learnt what is needed when the crap hits the spinning distribution device.
2: Leaning how to investigate, read manuals, tech notes and search for the information I need when faced with something I have never seen before.
3: Listening to advice.
4: Practice.
5: Practice
6: Practice.
Also no amount of book learning can really substitute for 20 years experiance.
Well, it might be worth US$20 for the default linux install and recovery disks, as I'll be saving on not needing to buy MS Office.
To get a windows box the way I like it, takes be about 2 hrs to install everything, remove the crapware, but then it is till only windows.
For linux, I already have a script to add the repos and install my favourite apps. Then I just change the theme to something other than Human and I'm good to go.
Hardy Heron takes me a little longer as I have to mess around with fusesmb where as Linux Mint (previous version) had fusesmb set up from the get go.
OK, I am now confused, the top windows XP one configured with the same hardware is only US$479
So the more expensive OS is obviously being given away for free?
How many are jsut going to therefore get the windows only one, blow it away and install ubuntu anyway.
Dell say, "well we offered linux and noone bought it", and MS will say, "look, people are happy buying XP based netbooks!"
Urgh!!
Sorry, just to update, I found you can configure options on the 'buntu model.
1GB RAM, and 16GB Flash, BLuetooth and 1.3Mpix camera for US$494
8)
Oh I hope we get them in New Zealand!
So why can I not buy the 16GB model with ubuntu? surely that would save $100 on the OS license?
Maybey after buying it I could return the Windows disks for a refund as I didn't accept the ULA?
It's a slippery slope, iTunes and DRM. Having 5 machines registered is pretty good, I have my wifes, my laptop and my PC at work registered. Anything I buy I can still burn to CD for the car, and I then rip it back as an MP3 anyway as I much prefer Amarok over iTunes as my library manager and PC media player of choice (mainly because I keep feeling I am being marketed to all the time on iTunes, where as Amarok just provides information on the songs and artists without trying to make a buck out of it, and iTunes is still somewhat flakey under WINE). The only annoyance is the extra time this takes and the few extra cents per disk, but I then at least have a backup 8). The problem is if I keep buying content at iTunes, they will say, "Hey, DRM works here. People are still buying content"
I would still much rather pay NZ$1.99 for an mp3 than a DRM encumbered AAC file. (but I'm sure you could knock off 99c if you didn't have to pay for the DRM infrastructure)
Now I wonder if I can do the same thing with a Mac Mini. I only want the hardware, not OSX as I plan to use it as a front end for Myth TV.
I wonder how much I can get back for returning the unopened copy of OSx 10.5?
The biggest problem I see is the 10% of our uses who want to do something unique, or different, like synch their iphone with outlook, or connect some non standard camera, and the latest tie in is MS Office Comunications suite. Great product, but guess what, the client for it only works in Windows, and the "standard" for its communications is completely customised so no other chat client will work with it.
This is also looking a t a school network form the wrong end. MS want you to use fat heavy clients filled with their software, fomr the OS , browser, plugins, silverlight, Outlook and the rest of Office etc. A School network might be better served by a light thin client, talking to more powerful centrally managed servers. You don't need to map drives and attach to print servers from every client, just the servers.
Our campus has 100 desktops, sitting idle most of the time. 20% might be in use at any one time, and then the biggest CPU user seems to be the AntiVirus client when they boot up and have to scan every file 8).
To do Citrix with this number of clients costs hundres of thousands of dollars. You can get 80% of the citrix functionality with X based terminals at a fraction of the cost.
If you still wanted to go proprietary, I love Suns Sunray terminals and Sun Global Desktop, and their smartcard logins. MS does not have to feature here unless ther is some productivity software you need on windows, and then you could use just a few windows terminal servers for this.
Or virtual dekstops etc. - you name it, it does not have to be a fat Windows client on every desk.
I know I could notlight my fire with my laptop. And until now, the newpaper has been the most cost effective way to consume news on the train or bus on my way home from work. That was until I got a caching browser on my phone, then I stopped buying the paper 8)
Luckily the local rags still deliver, so I still have fire-lighters at the end of the week.
Olympics coverage on the net is what you will get without neutrality. Content streamed in propietry formats, to paying customers on only certain premium providers. Hey, sounds like cell phone networks.
Just went with my wife to see it last night, but both late sessions were sold out so we saw Prince Caspian instead. As a trip out to the movies now costs NZ$15 each for a ticket, plus $10 for parking, $20 for munchies, and $20 an hr for babysitting, we won't be back in to see Batman now while it is in cinema release, so I guess I'll just download a rip when it comes out on DVD. 8)
We currently have 5 dial-quadcore ESX 3.0.1 hosts attached to a SAN, two others in our DMZ which are stand-alone, and were tossing up whether to get two more. This has now made it a no brainer as previously we had to way up the cost of an ESX dual cpu licence against buying 2 or three smaller servers. Now this means we just keep buying our standard server kit with stacks of RAM and just install ESXi anyway, even if it will only be one guest. We were about to purchase a New SAN and iSCSI was on the required feature list, so we'll probaby just add iSCSI cards into the mix for standard servers, and just purchase HA and DRS licences.
I've been using VMWare server at home now for over a year, and is perfect for servers which wont support ESX. I just use a console only install of Suse 10.2 as the host OS. Runs my 5 guest servers (SLES10 server for mail, iFolder server appliance downloaded from the VMare marketplace, ISPConfig for a web/dev server and OpenFiler for storage/NAS) just fine for home use on a 1.2 GHz AMD CPU with 4GB RAM.
I think it is also a point about whether you want to provide a tool for kids to learn about computers, and hwo to make them work, or just another PC to edit documents and browse the web on like good little trainie consumers.
I cut my PC teeth on breadboarded motorolla CPUs and hacking my z80 based spectrum. I also has an amiga and commodore 128 but I didn't use them except for games. However my speccy got to run a robot, interface with my lego, drive my fathers model railway (track moving trains, route them and set points etc)
I learnt about electronics, code, hacking, memory management and why not to bump the ram add on. The keayboard was terrible, so I built my own.
On my commodore I learnt how to wait for games to load on serial floppy disk. My Amiga got used for a little video editing and sound mixing, but again mostly games.
I cannot see a viable entry level box for learning on (and cheap enough to replace if an experiment fails) apart from the XO. I'm glad that sugar isn't perfect, because then my son & daughter might be able to have a go at learning how to fix it, rather than just post up more trash on facebook and twitter.
Putting XP on it fails to get the point of what the XO is for. It is very well designed, just not for Microsoft to run their apps on. If you want XP on an underpowered laptop, buy one second hand.
Ive given up on KDE, and gone to Gnome. I like some of the new KDE 4 based apps though, KRDC is brilliant, but I need to be able to use a proxy, and have mail apps that dont crash, so I'm still using KMail and aggregator from 3.5
It keeps them rare, and highly valued.
Just like macs.
I wanted to buy a mac mini, second hand.
The 2GHz Core2 duo has been on sale here in NZ for a year and are still NZ$1200 for the 2GB RAM model with the super drive.
They sell second hand for NZ$800 to NZ$900.
I can build a 2GHZ quadcore xpc shuttle for that money, but it still wont be as small as the mini 8(
I have an open source car.
I bought the instructions on how to build it, and I assembled it to the best of my ability.
However it does not have some of the common features of mainstream production cars. It has no roof, or airconditioning, no ABS or airbags.
However it does have a 500HP V8 in a chassis that weighs less than 1000KG and corners like it it is on rails. That is something that most mainstream cars don't have. I couldn't buy what I wanted, so I built my own.
Same with Linux. It does not have all of the nicieties of a propretry commercially supported OS, but I can install anything I want, attempt to build from insttructions stuff that isn't included in the distro.
So I think 2008 is the year of the common kit-car, nope, and I hope linux never gets dumbed down so much that it is easy enough for granma to install from scratch (I don't think Windows is either BTW) But if made too simple, there will be no scope for choice.
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Becuase the other Hidef format is Download. I have heaps of TV shows in HD resolution, and they look fantastic on my 33" Standard def TV and my 43" Monitor (as my PC is my main media player) Why I wont spend a cent on blue-ray is because I cant convert it to a more useful format. I'll just keep on downloading movies I want. Thanks Sony.
Running XBMC under Mint Linux on a 24" monitor in 1680x1024. Absolutely gorgeous. Running XBMC on Unbuntu on my Aspire One Netbook in 1024x600. Absoutely gorgeous. Running XBMC on my old chipped XBoxes (NZ$300 or less each now) and looks pretty good! The best thing is the interface is the same/similar as on the old XBox (of which I have two, one for upstairs one for downstairs, both connected to 33" TVs) so even my 5-year-old can drive it. I was going to pick up an old Mac Mini 1.8GHz model to replace one of the old XBoxes, but now I might just build an atom based uATX PC instead. XBMC rocks!
With Windows installed, the students will be able to learn how to use Office to create documents and pay their MS tax. With Sugar, thy might have a chance to learn how Operating Systems work, can change and compile their own if they want to, and a locked down OS miht have helped keep many common pieces of malware away. I thought the OLPC was supposed to be a learning tool, not just another $100 netbook.
Maybe they should use an approach similar to Open SUSE, during the installation, there is an option to Accept all of the EULAs for the non free software that was chosen for the installation. In corporate use, it is not up to our end users to accept or reject an EULA, it is up to us as the admin team to choose what software to deploy, license and accept for use.
1: Fixing more broken installations than I can remember. Working late at night on failed systems and recovering (or not as the case may be) data from disks that have failed. From this I learnt what is needed when the crap hits the spinning distribution device. 2: Leaning how to investigate, read manuals, tech notes and search for the information I need when faced with something I have never seen before. 3: Listening to advice. 4: Practice. 5: Practice 6: Practice. Also no amount of book learning can really substitute for 20 years experiance.
MS say you cant sell or preload XP, except in markets where vista can't complete or operate 8)
Well, it might be worth US$20 for the default linux install and recovery disks, as I'll be saving on not needing to buy MS Office. To get a windows box the way I like it, takes be about 2 hrs to install everything, remove the crapware, but then it is till only windows. For linux, I already have a script to add the repos and install my favourite apps. Then I just change the theme to something other than Human and I'm good to go. Hardy Heron takes me a little longer as I have to mess around with fusesmb where as Linux Mint (previous version) had fusesmb set up from the get go.
OK, I am now confused, the top windows XP one configured with the same hardware is only US$479 So the more expensive OS is obviously being given away for free? How many are jsut going to therefore get the windows only one, blow it away and install ubuntu anyway. Dell say, "well we offered linux and noone bought it", and MS will say, "look, people are happy buying XP based netbooks!" Urgh!!
Sorry, just to update, I found you can configure options on the 'buntu model. 1GB RAM, and 16GB Flash, BLuetooth and 1.3Mpix camera for US$494 8) Oh I hope we get them in New Zealand!
So why can I not buy the 16GB model with ubuntu? surely that would save $100 on the OS license? Maybey after buying it I could return the Windows disks for a refund as I didn't accept the ULA?
It's a slippery slope, iTunes and DRM. Having 5 machines registered is pretty good, I have my wifes, my laptop and my PC at work registered. Anything I buy I can still burn to CD for the car, and I then rip it back as an MP3 anyway as I much prefer Amarok over iTunes as my library manager and PC media player of choice (mainly because I keep feeling I am being marketed to all the time on iTunes, where as Amarok just provides information on the songs and artists without trying to make a buck out of it, and iTunes is still somewhat flakey under WINE). The only annoyance is the extra time this takes and the few extra cents per disk, but I then at least have a backup 8). The problem is if I keep buying content at iTunes, they will say, "Hey, DRM works here. People are still buying content" I would still much rather pay NZ$1.99 for an mp3 than a DRM encumbered AAC file. (but I'm sure you could knock off 99c if you didn't have to pay for the DRM infrastructure)
Now I wonder if I can do the same thing with a Mac Mini. I only want the hardware, not OSX as I plan to use it as a front end for Myth TV. I wonder how much I can get back for returning the unopened copy of OSx 10.5?
The biggest problem I see is the 10% of our uses who want to do something unique, or different, like synch their iphone with outlook, or connect some non standard camera, and the latest tie in is MS Office Comunications suite. Great product, but guess what, the client for it only works in Windows, and the "standard" for its communications is completely customised so no other chat client will work with it.
This is also looking a t a school network form the wrong end. MS want you to use fat heavy clients filled with their software, fomr the OS , browser, plugins, silverlight, Outlook and the rest of Office etc. A School network might be better served by a light thin client, talking to more powerful centrally managed servers. You don't need to map drives and attach to print servers from every client, just the servers. Our campus has 100 desktops, sitting idle most of the time. 20% might be in use at any one time, and then the biggest CPU user seems to be the AntiVirus client when they boot up and have to scan every file 8). To do Citrix with this number of clients costs hundres of thousands of dollars. You can get 80% of the citrix functionality with X based terminals at a fraction of the cost. If you still wanted to go proprietary, I love Suns Sunray terminals and Sun Global Desktop, and their smartcard logins. MS does not have to feature here unless ther is some productivity software you need on windows, and then you could use just a few windows terminal servers for this. Or virtual dekstops etc. - you name it, it does not have to be a fat Windows client on every desk.
I know I could notlight my fire with my laptop. And until now, the newpaper has been the most cost effective way to consume news on the train or bus on my way home from work. That was until I got a caching browser on my phone, then I stopped buying the paper 8) Luckily the local rags still deliver, so I still have fire-lighters at the end of the week.
Olympics coverage on the net is what you will get without neutrality. Content streamed in propietry formats, to paying customers on only certain premium providers. Hey, sounds like cell phone networks.
Ah, now I know why the highly cloacked and hard to see predator flashed his eyes every now and then. He was just taking a peek.
Just went with my wife to see it last night, but both late sessions were sold out so we saw Prince Caspian instead. As a trip out to the movies now costs NZ$15 each for a ticket, plus $10 for parking, $20 for munchies, and $20 an hr for babysitting, we won't be back in to see Batman now while it is in cinema release, so I guess I'll just download a rip when it comes out on DVD. 8)
We currently have 5 dial-quadcore ESX 3.0.1 hosts attached to a SAN, two others in our DMZ which are stand-alone, and were tossing up whether to get two more. This has now made it a no brainer as previously we had to way up the cost of an ESX dual cpu licence against buying 2 or three smaller servers. Now this means we just keep buying our standard server kit with stacks of RAM and just install ESXi anyway, even if it will only be one guest. We were about to purchase a New SAN and iSCSI was on the required feature list, so we'll probaby just add iSCSI cards into the mix for standard servers, and just purchase HA and DRS licences. I've been using VMWare server at home now for over a year, and is perfect for servers which wont support ESX. I just use a console only install of Suse 10.2 as the host OS. Runs my 5 guest servers (SLES10 server for mail, iFolder server appliance downloaded from the VMare marketplace, ISPConfig for a web/dev server and OpenFiler for storage/NAS) just fine for home use on a 1.2 GHz AMD CPU with 4GB RAM.
A pitty because I guess it would just dissappear if given to 100 million chinese kids.
I think it is also a point about whether you want to provide a tool for kids to learn about computers, and hwo to make them work, or just another PC to edit documents and browse the web on like good little trainie consumers. I cut my PC teeth on breadboarded motorolla CPUs and hacking my z80 based spectrum. I also has an amiga and commodore 128 but I didn't use them except for games. However my speccy got to run a robot, interface with my lego, drive my fathers model railway (track moving trains, route them and set points etc) I learnt about electronics, code, hacking, memory management and why not to bump the ram add on. The keayboard was terrible, so I built my own. On my commodore I learnt how to wait for games to load on serial floppy disk. My Amiga got used for a little video editing and sound mixing, but again mostly games. I cannot see a viable entry level box for learning on (and cheap enough to replace if an experiment fails) apart from the XO. I'm glad that sugar isn't perfect, because then my son & daughter might be able to have a go at learning how to fix it, rather than just post up more trash on facebook and twitter. Putting XP on it fails to get the point of what the XO is for. It is very well designed, just not for Microsoft to run their apps on. If you want XP on an underpowered laptop, buy one second hand.
Ive given up on KDE, and gone to Gnome. I like some of the new KDE 4 based apps though, KRDC is brilliant, but I need to be able to use a proxy, and have mail apps that dont crash, so I'm still using KMail and aggregator from 3.5
You need instructions for lego?? I think I only made what was on the front of the box a couple of times 8)
It keeps them rare, and highly valued. Just like macs. I wanted to buy a mac mini, second hand. The 2GHz Core2 duo has been on sale here in NZ for a year and are still NZ$1200 for the 2GB RAM model with the super drive. They sell second hand for NZ$800 to NZ$900. I can build a 2GHZ quadcore xpc shuttle for that money, but it still wont be as small as the mini 8(
I have an open source car. I bought the instructions on how to build it, and I assembled it to the best of my ability. However it does not have some of the common features of mainstream production cars. It has no roof, or airconditioning, no ABS or airbags. However it does have a 500HP V8 in a chassis that weighs less than 1000KG and corners like it it is on rails. That is something that most mainstream cars don't have. I couldn't buy what I wanted, so I built my own. Same with Linux. It does not have all of the nicieties of a propretry commercially supported OS, but I can install anything I want, attempt to build from insttructions stuff that isn't included in the distro. So I think 2008 is the year of the common kit-car, nope, and I hope linux never gets dumbed down so much that it is easy enough for granma to install from scratch (I don't think Windows is either BTW) But if made too simple, there will be no scope for choice.