I'm maintaining a medium sized pool of laptops for Linux and Win users.
I was experimenting during the years with different brands and configurations (IBM, Dell, Gateway, HP, Toshiba, Macs, several noname brands - no Sony's and Compaq's though).
The overall impression is that mid-line Thinkpads are the most robust and trouble free by far. Some models of the A series are close to the perfect portable computer.
I was using mozilla 0.9.* on flavours of Redhat. There were no problems whatsoever with plugins written for netscape (flash, java, and several more). Even an exotic plugin written in mid 90s for some custom kerberos 4-to-5 authentication worked fine.
You have to just place the plugins in mozilla's plugin folder as opposed to netscape's plugin folder where they're sent by default by the installer.
I've heard reports that it started as early as 1988, others say 1992.
Those reports are related to an early convention that the name of the original netscape browser
launched in late 80s should be spelled "netscape" but pronounced "mozilla". That's a separate matter than the OS project Mozilla started in 1998.
That XP enables personal firewall by default that blocks ftp ports
This is moderated as funny, but I think it is very probable to contain some truth.
I've got my 5500 this morning and after charging the battery it was synchronizing in seconds with the XP desktop used by the secretaries (firewall disabled).
Otherwise the device looks reasonably small, nice, and fast to me. However, I didn't have time to test it seriously.
I bought it using only the technical specs and without being limited by price (didn't use my money). In other words I picked what I considered the absolute best, giving the fact that if I don't like this one I can buy another model at any time. So far I didn't find anything to disappoint me.
He, he, you need several times the number of admins per computer for a NT network than for an Unix one, so they should be cheap and their strong point should be the patience to wait during many and often computer reboots.
In my opinion, rushing it out is a good thing.
The software cannot be worse quality than Windozes, but this is not really important.
Anyways a commercial entity will not be able to provide good software. Keeping it longer should only inflate the price or the chances the company goes belly-up. Now you pay mostly for the hardware, which is the real value you should pay for.
The important thing is that since all the specifications are open it can generate a real culture and generate value around it, as happened many times in the past with open platforms.
And runing Linux gives it appeal to real potential developers who can make it happen.
So, I ordered one just to encourage the company
and I'll take the chances to junk it or to have the best PDA on the market after one year (well, the best to my standards which do not depend too much on being easy to click).
Were consumers demonstrably harmed by Microsoft? If so, how?
I lost months from my life waiting computers to reboot and re-installing Microsoft software.
They killed me with months earlier.
And so they did to hundreds of milion of people. Probably if you add the lifetime wasted by their products to their users you end up with Microsoft being worse than Hitler and even Stalin.
Hey buddy, I wish you would spend half of your life in communism, as I did. You would understand that Windows is closer to communism than anything else. Communism means monopoly of a few people who will sell you whatever they want, even bread with nails in the same package. If they cannot sell the nails, you want bread, you'll have to buy both.
And the quality of most PC commercial software
resmbles perfectly the quality of products in the old communist countries. When you complain about quality, the Microsoft marketer talk about their software as "consumer product" then they laugh, explain you that W9x is for stupid people who are not able to appreciate good software anyways, and try to convince you to upgrade to NT which is "professional". I heard this things before when you were invited to be member of the communist party.
On the other side, Open Source is about freedom to get whatever you want, if you are able to understand what you want. If not, communism is for you and you'll never feel it.
Well, I suppose I let myself a little bit carried away. This was not intended to be flamebait.
Even Netscape keeps on its pages tons of links to zdnet. All those are killing my netscape 4.76, but work fine with IE. They try to force me to use IE.
So what more can be said? It seems that Netscape tries to find a way to gracefully dive into the trashcan of the history...
Why should you need such an appliance to print
from Linux to an lpd-enabled printer?
I can understand the need from Windows, but from
Linux it makes no sense.
So the appliance is one more tax paid by "user friendly"
amateurs to conserve their noble laziness illusions.
Buddy, I've built myself and supervised building and repairing PCs, MACs, DECs, SUNs for almost a decade, using as well crappy components, first hand components, and mixtures of them. What you say here looks like an incompetent technical department, and not stupid support people.
I've never seen such coincidence where such a large number of hardware components fail in the same computer. Not even half. And not even in the late 90s Macintoshes. Boy, they must be really incompetent. Ground them up!
That's nice of Dell!
I can tell you the same story, happened to me one year ago, but the VA name should be replaced with Dell(USA).
The ones who saved me are... gmmm... who really cares? I'm not paid to advertise for them, they are really tight with prices, and their hardware works but it is somehow crappy. So I cannot really recommend them.
Anyways, Dell didn't see a dime from my dept since then. And I didn't find yet the perfect computer provider.
Re:This is the wrong question
on
Linux Failover?
·
· Score: 1
On a lot of NICs, it's not that easy to figure out when it's having problems. Secondly, the second NIC is typically at a different hardware address, so you need to update the ARP cache of any machine sending to you. And, you have to figure out how to tell when the first NIC is working again.
Ifconfig can enforce whatever hardware address you want to any interface, so the issues 2 and 3 are trivial once the first is solved.
It seems that shortage of A socket motherboards determines high availability of Athlons. I hardly and unsuccesfully tried to buy an AT form factor mobo with such a socket in the last month or so... Finally I settled for a socket 1 mobo with the promise that I'll have a PIII for it in early June.
If the application is used for common tasks, you'll always have a good maintained replacement for the dumped package.
If it is a highly specialized application, shortly after geting used to it, the company will start customizing the sources, so no external maintainer will be needed.
So the "NO ACCOUNTABILITY" is a fake problem created by M$-type IT managers who do not understand what is the Open Source about. The Open Source software decreases the ability to hide their incompetence behind the poor quality of the software they buy using big money substracted from the shareholders' pocket.
I would guess that Podkletnov started trying to reproduce and amplify the results from the experiment of the Japanese guys. He hoped that the "superconductivity" will magnify the effect, and this is what he measured. What the heck, rocket science around.
The Japanese guys used a disk as a rotor of a motor in vacuum and under some very precisely controlled conditions. They measured the weight of that rotor. If the rotor is not spinning, or if it spinning in one direction, the weight is the same. If it spins in the other direction, the weight slightly decreases. Take a trip to the library. If you are interested by the subject, it will be worth the time.
In 1996, the experiments of a Russian scientist were jeered at by the physics world. Writing in the journal Physica C, Dr Yevgeny Podkletnov claimed that a spinning, superconducting disc lost some of its weight.
The subject was treated in '92 by some Japanese scientists, and a very interesting paper was published in Physical Review Letters.
No superconductivity, but a very well documented paper, with lots of details. Unfortunately I do not have the exact reference, and '92 is a guess. It was for sure published between '91-93.
Why don't they pay someone who knows what she is talkink about when treating a technical issue? The same question as about the computer-related topics... Probably they hoped that misused keywords as antigravity, hacker, superconductor, and Russian mad scientist will sell their story enough...
It seems that the shortage is in the ability to pay huge salaries for good work.
When I landed in US 4 years ago without knowing too much English, it took me 2 weeks to find work (in fact they found me). Since then, they kept raising my salary as craizy, so the headhunters run away in fear when I start talking about six digits. They don't want even to know the first digit.
And when you think that 5 years ago I was working hard, two jobs for 1k/year... altogether.
I have a friend who is a fan of Win2K. He discovered that there is a simple solution provided by M$ to all your Y2K problems, including the time degradation.
That's why the instalation is so easy: re-install it every other day and you'll have a wonderful system all the time. It takes more time to reboot after the crashes every few minutes than to just reinstall it and happily hit the keyboard for two day until it gets old again.
So my friend is very happy with his W2K and claims that he will never use anything else.
I'm using Linux from 92, it is the thing I like the best, and I'll keep using it forever. I wasn't ever deceived, and I don't care if it is on "crest of the wave" or not.
And since "these talented programmers leave school" they will use and develop what they already learned and liked, and they will steadily oppose the crappy software, open source or not.
The market share of M$oftish software basically reflects the competition between people with enough money to buy computers and people with enough time/desire to learn how to use them. As more and more "talented programmers leave school" the shift will become more and more visible. And it is nothing you can do about it.
AFAIK there used to be SMP even in the 2.0 kernels. The pthread-enabled programs used to run about 10 times slower than with the 2.2 kernels but, hey, it worked without any problems. On the other hand, I never managed to make NT see more than two processors from the 4 PPros available on that computer, so 4 processors on RH5.2 was better than 2 processors on NT.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm maintaining a medium sized pool of laptops for Linux and Win users.
I was experimenting during the years with different brands and configurations (IBM, Dell, Gateway, HP, Toshiba, Macs, several noname brands - no Sony's and Compaq's though).
The overall impression is that mid-line Thinkpads are the most robust and trouble free by far. Some models of the A series are close to the perfect portable computer.
I was using mozilla 0.9.* on flavours of Redhat.
There were no problems whatsoever with plugins
written for netscape (flash, java, and several more). Even an exotic plugin written in mid 90s for some custom kerberos 4-to-5 authentication worked fine.
You have to just place the plugins in mozilla's plugin folder as opposed to netscape's plugin folder where they're sent by default by the installer.
Those reports are related to an early convention that the name of the original netscape browser launched in late 80s should be spelled "netscape" but pronounced "mozilla". That's a separate matter than the OS project Mozilla started in 1998.
This is moderated as funny, but I think it is very probable to contain some truth. I've got my 5500 this morning and after charging the battery it was synchronizing in seconds with the XP desktop used by the secretaries (firewall disabled).
Otherwise the device looks reasonably small, nice, and fast to me. However, I didn't have time to test it seriously.
I bought it using only the technical specs and without being limited by price (didn't use my money). In other words I picked what I considered the absolute best, giving the fact that if I don't like this one I can buy another model at any time. So far I didn't find anything to disappoint me.
I used LPRng long before it appeared in a Redhat distro because it was the only one I could hack to create a full size custom banner page.
This benefit is to me much more important than being able to customize trays or using PPDs.
I didn't try CUPS so far. Does it know to handle banner pages in a flexible way?
I didn't manage to crash mozilla since 0.9.3.
What's your site?
He, he, you need several times the number of admins per computer for a NT network than for an Unix one, so they should be cheap and their strong point should be the patience to wait during many and often computer reboots.
In my opinion, rushing it out is a good thing.
The software cannot be worse quality than Windozes, but this is not really important.
Anyways a commercial entity will not be able to provide good software. Keeping it longer should only inflate the price or the chances the company goes belly-up. Now you pay mostly for the hardware, which is the real value you should pay for.
The important thing is that since all the specifications are open it can generate a real culture and generate value around it, as happened many times in the past with open platforms.
And runing Linux gives it appeal to real potential developers who can make it happen.
So, I ordered one just to encourage the company
and I'll take the chances to junk it or to have the best PDA on the market after one year (well, the best to my standards which do not depend too much on being easy to click).
I lost months from my life waiting computers to reboot and re-installing Microsoft software. They killed me with months earlier.
And so they did to hundreds of milion of people. Probably if you add the lifetime wasted by their products to their users you end up with Microsoft being worse than Hitler and even Stalin.
to make get big banner hits on fake news posted on /. ???
Hey buddy, I wish you would spend half of your life in communism, as I did. You would understand that Windows is closer to communism than anything else. Communism means monopoly of a few people who will sell you whatever they want, even bread with nails in the same package. If they cannot sell the nails, you want bread, you'll have to buy both. And the quality of most PC commercial software resmbles perfectly the quality of products in the old communist countries. When you complain about quality, the Microsoft marketer talk about their software as "consumer product" then they laugh, explain you that W9x is for stupid people who are not able to appreciate good software anyways, and try to convince you to upgrade to NT which is "professional". I heard this things before when you were invited to be member of the communist party.
On the other side, Open Source is about freedom to get whatever you want, if you are able to understand what you want. If not, communism is for you and you'll never feel it.
Well, I suppose I let myself a little bit carried away. This was not intended to be flamebait.
Even Netscape keeps on its pages tons of links to zdnet. All those are killing my netscape 4.76, but work fine with IE. They try to force me to use IE.
So what more can be said? It seems that Netscape tries to find a way to gracefully dive into the trashcan of the history...
Of course it is not, but with Linux you do not need an additional piece of hardware to do it.
What you say is common sense, but it can be done inside any Linux "workstation" without spending too much from the processor/memory resources.
Why should you need such an appliance to print
from Linux to an lpd-enabled printer?
I can understand the need from Windows, but from
Linux it makes no sense.
So the appliance is one more tax paid by "user friendly"
amateurs to conserve their noble laziness illusions.
Buddy, I've built myself and supervised building and repairing PCs, MACs, DECs, SUNs for almost a decade, using as well crappy components, first hand components, and mixtures of them. What you say here looks like an incompetent technical department, and not stupid support people.
I've never seen such coincidence where such a large number of hardware components fail in the same computer. Not even half. And not even in the late 90s Macintoshes. Boy, they must be really incompetent. Ground them up!
That's nice of Dell! ... gmmm ... who really cares? I'm not paid to advertise for them, they are really tight with prices, and their hardware works but it is somehow crappy. So I cannot really recommend them.
I can tell you the same story, happened to me one year ago, but the VA name should be replaced with Dell(USA).
The ones who saved me are
Anyways, Dell didn't see a dime from my dept since then. And I didn't find yet the perfect computer provider.
Ifconfig can enforce whatever hardware address you want to any interface, so the issues 2 and 3 are trivial once the first is solved.
It seems that shortage of A socket motherboards determines high availability of Athlons. I hardly and unsuccesfully tried to buy an AT form factor mobo with such a socket in the last month or so... Finally I settled for a socket 1 mobo with the promise that I'll have a PIII for it in early June.
If the application is used for common tasks, you'll always have a good maintained replacement for the dumped package.
If it is a highly specialized application, shortly after geting used to it, the company will start customizing the sources, so no external maintainer will be needed.
So the "NO ACCOUNTABILITY" is a fake problem created by M$-type IT managers who do not understand what is the Open Source about.
The Open Source software decreases the ability to hide their incompetence behind the poor quality of the software they buy using big money substracted from the shareholders' pocket.
I would guess that Podkletnov started trying to reproduce and amplify the results from the experiment of the Japanese guys. He hoped that the "superconductivity" will magnify the effect, and this is what he measured. What the heck, rocket science around.
The Japanese guys used a disk as a rotor of a motor in vacuum and under some very precisely controlled conditions. They measured the weight of that rotor. If the rotor is not spinning, or if it spinning in one direction, the weight is the same. If it spins in the other direction, the weight slightly decreases. Take a trip to the library. If you are interested by the subject, it will be worth the time.
The subject was treated in '92 by some Japanese scientists, and a very interesting paper was published in Physical Review Letters.
No superconductivity, but a very well documented paper, with lots of details. Unfortunately I do not have the exact reference, and '92 is a guess. It was for sure published between '91-93.
Why don't they pay someone who knows what she is talkink about when treating a technical issue? The same question as about the computer-related topics... Probably they hoped that misused keywords as antigravity, hacker, superconductor, and Russian mad scientist will sell their story enough...
It seems that the shortage is in the ability to pay huge salaries for good work.
When I landed in US 4 years ago without knowing too much English, it took me 2 weeks to find work (in fact they found me). Since then, they kept raising my salary as craizy, so the headhunters run away in fear when I start talking about six digits. They don't want even to know the first digit.
And when you think that 5 years ago I was working hard, two jobs for 1k/year... altogether.
I have a friend who is a fan of Win2K. He discovered that there is a simple solution provided by M$ to all your Y2K problems, including the time degradation.
That's why the instalation is so easy: re-install it every other day and you'll have a wonderful system all the time. It takes more time to reboot after the crashes every few minutes than to just reinstall it and happily hit the keyboard for two day until it gets old again.
So my friend is very happy with his W2K and claims that he will never use anything else.
I'm using Linux from 92, it is the thing I like the best, and I'll keep using it forever. I wasn't ever deceived, and I don't care if it is on "crest of the wave" or not.
And since "these talented programmers leave school" they will use and develop what they already learned and liked, and they will steadily oppose the crappy software, open source or not.
The market share of M$oftish software basically reflects the competition between people with enough money to buy computers and people with enough time/desire to learn how to use them. As more and more "talented programmers leave school" the shift will become more and more visible. And it is nothing you can do about it.
AFAIK there used to be SMP even in the 2.0 kernels.
The pthread-enabled programs used to run about 10 times slower than with the 2.2 kernels but, hey, it worked without any problems.
On the other hand, I never managed to make NT see more than two processors from the 4 PPros available on that computer, so 4 processors on RH5.2 was better than 2 processors on NT.