Anybody got quality concerns? I have never seen an LCD screen which colors come and crisp display come close to my CRT. And what I hate the most about LCD, its that the colors change with the angle of viewing; a little slight tint change when you move your head. Its very anoying. Some people say that this only occur with passive LCD screens, but then stores only sell passive LCD screens because I never saw an LCD without this tint changing effect.
They better substantially increase the quality of the displays before I buy one, and I hope keeping my CRT at work until the quality improves.
But, I agree that business might buy them for saving power, space and avoid the "bad" radiations emitted by CRTs.
As time goes by, more and more ports/connectors add up on my motherboards. When are we going to get ride of ps/2 buses, parallels and serial ports?
So now we would have:
bluetooth
parallel port
serial ports
Serial IDE
Parallel IDE
Firewire
ps2 buses
USB
-- Next ones are not on motherboards, but still...---
Analog joystick port (gameport)
VGA output
Audio ports
Ethernet
Am I missing a port? Keeping legacy ports does add cost on the systems...
I wish we could go by with firewire only. Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard... Only analog output like Video and Audio would remain. BTW, most motherboards do not come with Firewire on, but I bet there must be a few out there with it.
Well, there one little flaw with your reasoning...
If I recall corectly, 60% of US capital (or is it Canada's?) is owned by mutual funds, insurance funds, retirement funds, and the likes. Not the riches, but by the masses, directly and indirectly. So you are right to some point, but not totally. US society does benefit from profits made by its businesses.
And hiring indians is a form of exploitation at the avantage of the US. After all, they do the same work, but for 1/4 of the cost and they do not get the same benefits; their standard of living is lower than that of americans. Its sort of a legal form of slavery. But do not that I do not blame US for this. Every western countries do this, and I do not necessarly blame them either. Indians should ask for more and reinvest their profits into their society. Hopefully demand for Indian expertise will rise, supply and demand will go at their advantage and they will prosper over time, like it happened with Thailand which standard of living, while not like ours, has dramatically improved in the last decades.
Its not black and white. Economy (and politics) presents a pretty much gray picture.
I guess you guys miss the point. If the OS does the job, why upgrade. If it is still cost effective to support Win 3.11, the do so.
This might be the case for offices where employes have only one function, like entering customer data into computers. One piece of software only runs on them. It runs well, and because you are not changing the system, you save on costs.
There are many DOS machine still running out there... for the same reasons. If you let your equipement amortize the longer, the more profit you make.
But as I said, it all depends of the need/business. A software development firm will not last long with Win 3.11...;)
Can someone explain me why SCSI drives are more costly than IDE? I believe (I might be wrong) that many IDE and SCSI drives share the same mechanics and thus, its the electronics that change.
I can understand that 80's and 90's that SCSI electronics were expensive, but I would have expected that electronics prices would fall. How complex is a SCSI controller? Does it have a chip running at 600Mhz or something?!? (Guess not).
Any input about the reasons why SCSI $> IDE is welcomed.
The biggest problem with subscriptions is the value of the US currency. $5 US is not much for an american, but its $8 CDN, which gets high... And what about people of less developped countries like India? How can they afford US$ based subscriptions?
As more subscriptions are required, more will only US and rich countries citizens be able to access the information. Not to good for sharing information with the world...
Off course, javadoc, doxygen and such are required for inline comments within the code. But if you want to document the design at a high level and think about a word processor, and cost is not an issue, Framemaker is it.
Framemaker is the best word processor out there, far ahead of the others (at least, Word and WordPerfect). You can manipulate the document from command line, you can edit its mif version with an ascii editor, can generate xml, html, pdf, etc... This is a great tool for team work. In one of my previous project, each team (13) wrote a chapter (1 file per chapter). At build time, the makefile would extract all chapters, build the doc using framemaker command line tools (setup the version, pages, etc..) and update the website containing the documentation and the software automatically. Instruction to build the project: type "make" and all can be found on the website (assuming of course no compile error occured, which never happened.:))
Sadly, it is soo expensive that I do not use it since I left Nortel. I wish it would be open source...
Note, I never used Latex and Texinfo, so I am missing some experience with non WYSIWYG tools.
And how sound is the business plan? In days where ISPs go out of business or raise their high speed internet connection, why suddendly would the cable cies be able to provide such bandwith?
True, I pay for a flat fee for my ADSL connection while the movies would go for $3. Yet, if there is a lot of people switching from rentals to VOD, it will be a strain on the infrastructure.
And since rentals do not make much money already and they did not have to invest in technology, servers and the such, I wonder how with all the extra expenses technology asks for would these cable companies be able to make a profit.
...unless they dug out the dusty old internet business model "lets built it, get a lot of customers and someday it will pay itself" (yeah, right).
Ok. The title is harsh but I got your attention. How many are concerned about the financial situation of Ximian? I am concerned enought that I refuse to install Ximian on my server. I do have it installed on my workstation.
The problem with Ximian is that once you start updating your packages with it, your system becomes totally dependant on them. I have no problem with that as long as I believe that Ximian will remain around for a long time.
But what will happen if Ximian belly up? I'll be stuck with a machine which I cannot easily upgrade anymore. Yes, Gnome will continue, but somehow I will need to spend a weekend or two removing all the ximian stuff and installing pure Gnome if I ever want to upgrade and keep up with the evolution of the software.
Luckily, I have not subscribed to their RedHat upgrade service... That would be even a bigger mess.
Some might suggest that I re-install everything if such a day would come, but I do not like this idea since I tweaked my machine so much. Re-installing will not re-install my firewall config, apache, postgresql and many other tweaks I have brought to my system (I upgraded from RH4.0 to RH 7.1 since 1996 and you can imagine the number of tweaks I made).
The same logic would go for RedHat, but RedHat is financially sound and could possibly be a takeover target from IBM (I am currently kicking myself for not having purchased their stocks a few months ago; they are now a bit expensive). Maybe Ximian would become a takeover target also...
Here is a question. How would you feel if IBM would take over RedHat and Ximian and integrated both?
As for the subscription service, $9.95/month is even more expensive for non US citizens. Its over $15 CDN/month. Third world countries where Linux makes inroads will not be able to pay for such a service. Then again, there is no silver bullet because if Ximian would charge $1/month, their business plan would simply not cut it. Maybe Ximian should open a development shop in India to save costs.
So, M$ wants to give hardware and software to american schools... What about canadian schools and for that matter, schools in other countries?
I guess my gov will have to start its own monopolistic inquiry regarding M$.
I nice settlement would be M$ to give out money to open source groups, such as FSF. FSF procucts are available for all, not to a specific people.
But a true settlement would oblige any cie with more than $50M revenue to make public and document the formats of all data their software exchange/save. Data format should not be patentable and remain secret. How can one offer a competing product when you cannot or are not allowed to read legacy data? And who in their right mind will switch to a new system and abandon their valuable legacy data? A cie with 5000 documents in Word format will not switch to a word processor that cannot read and save them properly.
This is neat. Where did you find the FAQ? I searched on http://www.ximian.com and found some very basic FAQs on the product pages. Either I am totally lost or their FAQ is not well placed on their website. I do not find it on their support page.
Actually, you are the first doing this I have heard of. Thanks for the info. Did you lose any configuration? I suspect not, since configuration files are stored in your home directory, but I am asking just in case.
Ximian is great, except for one little detail, which prevents me to recommend it. From what I gathered in the monkey talk chat room and elsewhere is that once you install Ximian, you are mostly stuck with the current version of your distribution.
For instance, Ximian and Red Hat 7.1. Red carpet does not allow (at least I have not found any links) to upgrade to Red Hat 7.2. I was told that one must uninstall Ximian Gnome before upgrading to RH 7.2. That is not very user friendly. BTW, how does one uninstall Ximian Gnome? Anybody have the receipe for upgrading a system with Ximian installed? An easy receipe BTW? (Not manually identify and manually remove each rpms for instance).
This system upgrade is the one serious piece missing, which for the moment prevents me to recommend Ximian to others. And by ricochet, I cannot recommend Ximian's Evolution.
Sincerely,
Hans Deragon
What is the afghan's people perception?
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 5, Funny
You failed to ask the most important questions!;)
What is the perception of the afghan's people about the US intervention? Do they feel that the sacrifice of innocents (accidents/mistakes on US forces part, but none less deadly) justify their new freedom? Do they feel that westerners should continue to use force to try to democratize Afghanistan? Or should the coalition now leave from their point of view?
I saw on TV an Afghan who lost 8 members of his family to US bombs. Yet, he had one message for the US forces: aim better. He did not asked to stop. Others though were very angry against the US after loosing some family member.
I want to know what the people of Afghanistan wants. I see some demonstrations in western countries asking for the bombings to stop. I say, that we might at least hear what the Afghan have to say. If they believe that the bombings are worthwhile, who are we to ask to stop these actions?
BTW, have you some websites/forums to suggest where we could directly interact with Afghanistan people? I would really like to have a few exchanges with some of them.
Real concept PC would be rackmount for home.
on
Concept PC 2001
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My wish for a PC is to be rackmount at home, in the basement. Keyboards, mouses, CDROMs and Monitors are dispersed in the house. Since the CPU is in the basement, the fan noise would not be a problem in the main appartements. Quiet, slick terminals across your home... Imagine...
Note that rackmount of a 5U unit at least. I want the same upgrade possibilities as I have with my mid tower. The CPU unit does not need to be slim; costs consideration must come before space or even noise (to a limit of course).
I notice that the Xbox has a fan... How much noise does this box generate? What is the impact of this noise in a living room?
I am looking a way to reduce noise on my home computer. Downclocking the CPU and such so I can remove fans. Does anybody know of an external powersupply with no fan on it (bigger foot print for dissipating heat)? A bit like the C64 power supply?
I tried Winamp. Its not beta, its alpha.
I got it playing an mp3, but many features
do not work/work well.
However, when it played, it played my mp3 much
better than xmms. For some reason, my mp3
has a sort of "skip" sound at some point.
Under Xmms, it plays loud. Under Winamp and
mpg123, the "skip" is muted. You can hear
it, but its much less intrusive.
BTW, what can cause these "skips" to occur?
Bad riping?
How does this Hot Swap IDE tray works? I mean,
you do need the software on Windows and Linux
to get HDs to swap out.
Who is the manufacturer? What is his web site?
I am curious and would like to know more. I have
IDE racks, but there are not hot swapable.
Since we are on the topic, I wonder what new
browswer/email client I could use that would
exist and work on both MS Windows and Linux.
Currently, I use Netscape 4.7. It is shitty,
but on my Linux partition, I have simlinks
to my vfat partition for the bookmarks and my
email.
This allows me to access both my bookmarks and
emails on the two OS, without any hassle of
importing/exporting. I dual boot. For me,
this is a very important feature and which
forces me to stick with what I have. I am
convinced that there are better alternative
on each OS, but I REALLY need to have access
to my email and bookmarks on both OS.
Is Mozilla going to work the same way under
MS-Windows and Linux? Are the configuration
files, bookmarks and email mailboxes be
the same?
I would like to find a web site where I could
transfer money from my bank account to someone
else account. This someone else could be anybody
in the world.
They say we leave in an electronic world, yet I can only transfer money between my accounts on my bank's web site. Still cannot transfer $2.49 to my friends account to pay half the video rent...
There is a lot of stuff (features) missing on the Internet.
Ciao
Hans
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody got quality concerns? I have never seen an LCD screen which colors come and crisp display come close to my CRT. And what I hate the most about LCD, its that the colors change with the angle of viewing; a little slight tint change when you move your head. Its very anoying. Some people say that this only occur with passive LCD screens, but then stores only sell passive LCD screens because I never saw an LCD without this tint changing effect.
They better substantially increase the quality of the displays before I buy one, and I hope keeping my CRT at work until the quality improves.
But, I agree that business might buy them for saving power, space and avoid the "bad" radiations emitted by CRTs.
As time goes by, more and more ports/connectors add up on my motherboards. When are we going to get ride of ps/2 buses, parallels and serial ports?
So now we would have:
bluetooth
parallel port
serial ports
Serial IDE
Parallel IDE
Firewire
ps2 buses
USB
-- Next ones are not on motherboards, but still...---
Analog joystick port (gameport)
VGA output
Audio ports
Ethernet
Am I missing a port? Keeping legacy ports does add cost on the systems...
I wish we could go by with firewire only. Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard... Only analog output like Video and Audio would remain. BTW, most motherboards do not come with Firewire on, but I bet there must be a few out there with it.
Nice, but the site should provide mirrored fonts. The letters themselves are not mirrored, so they look weird when looking trough a mirror.
Well, there one little flaw with your reasoning...
If I recall corectly, 60% of US capital (or is it Canada's?) is owned by mutual funds, insurance funds, retirement funds, and the likes. Not the riches, but by the masses, directly and indirectly. So you are right to some point, but not totally. US society does benefit from profits made by its businesses.
And hiring indians is a form of exploitation at the avantage of the US. After all, they do the same work, but for 1/4 of the cost and they do not get the same benefits; their standard of living is lower than that of americans. Its sort of a legal form of slavery. But do not that I do not blame US for this. Every western countries do this, and I do not necessarly blame them either. Indians should ask for more and reinvest their profits into their society. Hopefully demand for Indian expertise will rise, supply and demand will go at their advantage and they will prosper over time, like it happened with Thailand which standard of living, while not like ours, has dramatically improved in the last decades.
Its not black and white. Economy (and politics) presents a pretty much gray picture.
I guess you guys miss the point. If the OS does the job, why upgrade. If it is still cost effective to support Win 3.11, the do so.
;)
This might be the case for offices where employes have only one function, like entering customer data into computers. One piece of software only runs on them. It runs well, and because you are not changing the system, you save on costs.
There are many DOS machine still running out there... for the same reasons. If you let your equipement amortize the longer, the more profit you make.
But as I said, it all depends of the need/business. A software development firm will not last long with Win 3.11...
Can someone explain me why SCSI drives are more costly than IDE? I believe (I might be wrong) that many IDE and SCSI drives share the same mechanics and thus, its the electronics that change.
I can understand that 80's and 90's that SCSI electronics were expensive, but I would have expected that electronics prices would fall. How complex is a SCSI controller? Does it have a chip running at 600Mhz or something?!? (Guess not).
Any input about the reasons why SCSI $> IDE is welcomed.
They charge for submitting a URL. $30.00US for the first one. That could impeed on the search engine's success.
m l
References:
http://static.wc.ask.com/docs/addjeeves/Submit.ht
http://ask.ineedhits.com/
The biggest problem with subscriptions is the value of the US currency. $5 US is not much for an american, but its $8 CDN, which gets high... And what about people of less developped countries like India? How can they afford US$ based subscriptions?
As more subscriptions are required, more will only US and rich countries citizens be able to access the information. Not to good for sharing information with the world...
Off course, javadoc, doxygen and such are required for inline comments within the code. But if you want to document the design at a high level and think about a word processor, and cost is not an issue, Framemaker is it.
:))
Framemaker is the best word processor out there, far ahead of the others (at least, Word and WordPerfect). You can manipulate the document from command line, you can edit its mif version with an ascii editor, can generate xml, html, pdf, etc... This is a great tool for team work. In one of my previous project, each team (13) wrote a chapter (1 file per chapter). At build time, the makefile would extract all chapters, build the doc using framemaker command line tools (setup the version, pages, etc..) and update the website containing the documentation and the software automatically. Instruction to build the project: type "make" and all can be found on the website (assuming of course no compile error occured, which never happened.
Sadly, it is soo expensive that I do not use it since I left Nortel. I wish it would be open source...
Note, I never used Latex and Texinfo, so I am missing some experience with non WYSIWYG tools.
So, when are we going to see the first animation completely (100%) done by computer? 10, 20 years from now?
What? Toy Story was the first? No... the voices were those of actors. We need computer generated voices and sound effects to win this award.
And how sound is the business plan? In days where ISPs go out of business or raise their high speed internet connection, why suddendly would the cable cies be able to provide such bandwith?
True, I pay for a flat fee for my ADSL connection while the movies would go for $3. Yet, if there is a lot of people switching from rentals to VOD, it will be a strain on the infrastructure.
And since rentals do not make much money already and they did not have to invest in technology, servers and the such, I wonder how with all the extra expenses technology asks for would these cable companies be able to make a profit.
...unless they dug out the dusty old internet business model "lets built it, get a lot of customers and someday it will pay itself" (yeah, right).
Agreed, except for home servers... which also are use as workstations by the residents... ;)
Ciao
Hans Deragon
Ok. The title is harsh but I got your attention. How many are concerned about the financial situation of Ximian? I am concerned enought that I refuse to install Ximian on my server. I do have it installed on my workstation.
The problem with Ximian is that once you start updating your packages with it, your system becomes totally dependant on them. I have no problem with that as long as I believe that Ximian will remain around for a long time.
But what will happen if Ximian belly up? I'll be stuck with a machine which I cannot easily upgrade anymore. Yes, Gnome will continue, but somehow I will need to spend a weekend or two removing all the ximian stuff and installing pure Gnome if I ever want to upgrade and keep up with the evolution of the software.
Luckily, I have not subscribed to their RedHat upgrade service... That would be even a bigger mess.
Some might suggest that I re-install everything if such a day would come, but I do not like this idea since I tweaked my machine so much. Re-installing will not re-install my firewall config, apache, postgresql and many other tweaks I have brought to my system (I upgraded from RH4.0 to RH 7.1 since 1996 and you can imagine the number of tweaks I made).
The same logic would go for RedHat, but RedHat is financially sound and could possibly be a takeover target from IBM (I am currently kicking myself for not having purchased their stocks a few months ago; they are now a bit expensive). Maybe Ximian would become a takeover target also...
Here is a question. How would you feel if IBM would take over RedHat and Ximian and integrated both?
As for the subscription service, $9.95/month is even more expensive for non US citizens. Its over $15 CDN/month. Third world countries where Linux makes inroads will not be able to pay for such a service. Then again, there is no silver bullet because if Ximian would charge $1/month, their business plan would simply not cut it. Maybe Ximian should open a development shop in India to save costs.
So, M$ wants to give hardware and software to american schools... What about canadian schools and for that matter, schools in other countries?
I guess my gov will have to start its own monopolistic inquiry regarding M$.
I nice settlement would be M$ to give out money to open source groups, such as FSF. FSF procucts are available for all, not to a specific people.
But a true settlement would oblige any cie with more than $50M revenue to make public and document the formats of all data their software exchange/save. Data format should not be patentable and remain secret. How can one offer a competing product when you cannot or are not allowed to read legacy data? And who in their right mind will switch to a new system and abandon their valuable legacy data? A cie with 5000 documents in Word format will not switch to a word processor that cannot read and save them properly.
This is neat. Where did you find the FAQ? I searched on http://www.ximian.com and found some very basic FAQs on the product pages. Either I am totally lost or their FAQ is not well placed on their website. I do not find it on their support page.
Thanks,
Hans Deragon
Actually, you are the first doing this I have heard of. Thanks for the info. Did you lose any configuration? I suspect not, since configuration files are stored in your home directory, but I am asking just in case.
Hans Deragon
Greetings.
Ximian is great, except for one little detail, which prevents me to recommend it. From what I gathered in the monkey talk chat room and elsewhere is that once you install Ximian, you are mostly stuck with the current version of your distribution.
For instance, Ximian and Red Hat 7.1. Red carpet does not allow (at least I have not found any links) to upgrade to Red Hat 7.2. I was told that one must uninstall Ximian Gnome before upgrading to RH 7.2. That is not very user friendly. BTW, how does one uninstall Ximian Gnome? Anybody have the receipe for upgrading a system with Ximian installed? An easy receipe BTW? (Not manually identify and manually remove each rpms for instance).
This system upgrade is the one serious piece missing, which for the moment prevents me to recommend Ximian to others. And by ricochet, I cannot recommend Ximian's Evolution.
Sincerely,
Hans Deragon
You failed to ask the most important questions! ;)
What is the perception of the afghan's people about the US intervention? Do they feel that the sacrifice of innocents (accidents/mistakes on US forces part, but none less deadly) justify their new freedom? Do they feel that westerners should continue to use force to try to democratize Afghanistan? Or should the coalition now leave from their point of view?
I saw on TV an Afghan who lost 8 members of his family to US bombs. Yet, he had one message for the US forces: aim better. He did not asked to stop. Others though were very angry against the US after loosing some family member.
I want to know what the people of Afghanistan wants. I see some demonstrations in western countries asking for the bombings to stop. I say, that we might at least hear what the Afghan have to say. If they believe that the bombings are worthwhile, who are we to ask to stop these actions?
BTW, have you some websites/forums to suggest where we could directly interact with Afghanistan people? I would really like to have a few exchanges with some of them.
My wish for a PC is to be rackmount at home, in the basement. Keyboards, mouses, CDROMs and Monitors are dispersed in the house. Since the CPU is in the basement, the fan noise would not be a problem in the main appartements. Quiet, slick terminals across your home... Imagine...
Note that rackmount of a 5U unit at least. I want the same upgrade possibilities as I have with my mid tower. The CPU unit does not need to be slim; costs consideration must come before space or even noise (to a limit of course).
I notice that the Xbox has a fan... How much noise does this box generate? What is the impact of this noise in a living room?
I am looking a way to reduce noise on my home computer. Downclocking the CPU and such so I can remove fans. Does anybody know of an external powersupply with no fan on it (bigger foot print for dissipating heat)? A bit like the C64 power supply?
I tried Winamp. Its not beta, its alpha.
I got it playing an mp3, but many features
do not work/work well.
However, when it played, it played my mp3 much
better than xmms. For some reason, my mp3
has a sort of "skip" sound at some point.
Under Xmms, it plays loud. Under Winamp and
mpg123, the "skip" is muted. You can hear
it, but its much less intrusive.
BTW, what can cause these "skips" to occur?
Bad riping?
How does this Hot Swap IDE tray works? I mean, you do need the software on Windows and Linux to get HDs to swap out. Who is the manufacturer? What is his web site? I am curious and would like to know more. I have IDE racks, but there are not hot swapable.
Currently, I use Netscape 4.7. It is shitty, but on my Linux partition, I have simlinks to my vfat partition for the bookmarks and my email.
This allows me to access both my bookmarks and emails on the two OS, without any hassle of importing/exporting. I dual boot. For me, this is a very important feature and which forces me to stick with what I have. I am convinced that there are better alternative on each OS, but I REALLY need to have access to my email and bookmarks on both OS.
Is Mozilla going to work the same way under MS-Windows and Linux? Are the configuration files, bookmarks and email mailboxes be the same?
Anybody else with the same dilemna?
I would like to find a web site where I could transfer money from my bank account to someone else account. This someone else could be anybody in the world. They say we leave in an electronic world, yet I can only transfer money between my accounts on my bank's web site. Still cannot transfer $2.49 to my friends account to pay half the video rent... There is a lot of stuff (features) missing on the Internet. Ciao Hans