I think that outside of the cost, freedom and "chique factor" advantages to Sony for supporting StarOffice the essence of this is a tit-for-tat response to Microsoft releasing X-Box.
Unlike other OEMs, Microsoft can't push Sony around because Sony is involved in many other lucratice markets.
The Japanese (or indeed, Asian in general) technology maunfactures are getting into OpenSource (or other Microsoft alternatives) wherever they can, particularly with PDAs and embedded systems.
Europe and Australasia are overflowing with FOSS, particularly Linux.
Where is North America? Desktop and low-end server computing there looks to be destined to become like their wireless and mobile markets; stagnant and lagging behind the rest of the world.
So there you go, a couple of days isnt long to wait.
Actually it is. In London (which has about three times the population of Sydney) delivery is next day, which is impressive when you consider the generally poor customer service in the U.K.
Grocery shopping is now fun
on
Step 2, Groceries
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· Score: 2, Informative
Tesco UK have an ordering site optimised for PDAs and other small screen devices.
It's so easy to walk into the kitchen and see what I need, then order with an 802.11b enabled PDA.
While I generally agree with your post I must take issue with NFS sharing/usr/local, particularly in large multi-user environments.
One the surface it seems like a good idea, as system administration can upgrade binaries and libraries in one place (the NFS server) and the changes are instantly deployed to every other Unix workstation in the organisation.
However, just one of the things that can go wrong is this; if for some reason the NFS server is unavailable, all hell breaks loose - EVERY user has "/usr/local/bin" in their path (yes, even S5R4) and their sessions hang when the system goes looking for executables on a non-existent mount.
I inherited a network that did this, causing no end of difficulty and a major migration effort.
The best way to impress friends and co-workers
on
Zaurus 5600 Announced
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· Score: 2, Interesting
..is to walk into the server room, plug the Z's serial cable into the server that just died, press "on" and type "minicom" - while your co-worker is still looking at the "lilo:" prompt on his/her laptop.
Yes the serial cable blocks the physical keyboard drawer, but the software keyboard is more than adequete (I'm too scared to use graffiti as root on a production system.)
OCR errors mostly caused by poor scan quality
on
Just One Page a Day
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've just proofed four pages, a mix of modern English, quoted Cockney and religious babble (Jonah 4:13, 9 etc.)
OK it's only four pages, but the errors I've corrected so far have been when the scan has been poor and the OCR software has had to make a guess.
After reading the comments here Knoppix has just become my default Christmas gift to friends and family. The opportunity to quickly and easily expose new users to Linux without altering their current environment is a magnificent opportunity to "spread the gospel."
I'm planning to bundle the CD with two sheets of paper, one showing how to start and use it and explaing that it won't interfere with the ordinary function of the computer concerned and the other David McNabb's HDD install HOWTO.
Then in January I'm going to apply for a position in the marketing department of AOL, I'll have all the required skills:)
I haven't used Solaris on Intel since the free binary licence for Solaris 7, which I found to be quite sluggish and in many ways different from Solaris implementations for Sparc.
One solution to ready (not to mention cheap) access to a Sun platform is to purchase some of the cheap Sun hardware which another poster pointed out is readily available at places like Ebay. For the cost of X86 Solaris 9 you could pick up an Ultra-5 and download Solaris 9 Sparc for free.
Personally I went for an Ultra-30 with 760Mb of ram and a 21" Sun badged Sony Trinitron monitor for £GB500.
Sun sells tin, I don't expect to be paying for Solaris any time soon.
This is quite normal in democracies, the electorate tends to focus (and remember, come ballot time) legislation which was harmful to them personally rather than legislation that was beneficial. The end results are that incumbent political parties (the government) tend to have an uphill battle to win support in electoral campaigns and that it is unusal for a party (or coalition of parties) to stay in office for more that two terms.
I forgot to point out that using the cable precludes the use of the keyboard, because the connector is so large the keyboard 'draw' won't open, not because of any I/O conflict.
You want to console into boxes in the data centre with your PDA, so that you avoid waiting for a laptop (that you had to carry) to boot before you can fix something. I do this with the Zaurus, it's add-on serial cable, a couple of converters and Minicom.
The serial cable doesn't need to be attached to the docking station - on one end is the Sharp proprietary USB/Serial/Whatever connector thingy that plugs in to the bottom of the unit and the other is standard 9 pin which you can convert to whatver console port you're connecting to.
Re:It would need to have a really cool case....
on
Sun To Sell Linux PCs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think that there's more to it than that; Sun thinks (and I agree) that it is natural migration for someone that uses Linux as a desktop to purchase Sun kit when they have a computing task that requires an industrial strength solution.
Add to that that I expect that Sun will be looking to "blur the lines" somewhat between Sun-Linux and Solaris - I wouldn't be at all surprised to see migration tools and cross-over applications as part of the Sun distribution - don't forget that Solaris has had "lxrun" for as long as I can remember.
You may not be aware that Sun has donated 200 developers to the Gnome project (i.e. they are Sun employees who work exclusively on Gnome) and that Sun is standardising Gnome as the desktop of choice on Solaris.
I'm running Gnome 2.0b2 on Solaris 9 here at home and have to say that I am extremely happy with it.
The Rino 120 looks great as it has the capacity to store uploaded maps from CD-rom. I do this with the Garmin 3+ and it is extremely handy when travelling, however I am disappointed that Garmin haven't provided more than 8meg of storage. On a recent trek I wanted to load all of South America and Cuba into the Garmin 3+ (which also has 8meg) only to find that it wouldn't all fit, so I ended up dropping three our four contries. This lead to some hassles along the way.
(Note to Garmin: There's no point providing detailed city and topographical maps for countries like Cuba that confiscate GPS's at the border, then, because you have a GPS with detailed local maps, search all of your gear and interrogate you.)
In terms of the exchange of positional information (I see this as being somewhat akin to the peerpeer aspects of Bluetooth) this is an awesome feature, particularly if you're four days into a hike in the Andes, the weather is closing in and you're wondering where the hell your girlfriend is.
This sort of nonsensical Microsoft propaganda has no place on/. - yet it's frequency is increasing.
I don't want to wade through bullshit posts that have been bought and paid for by Redmond, please censor them or provide me with the ability to filter out this noise.
Getting a Z-Com 802.11b CF card working with my Zaurus was thde first thing I did. You can find my HOWTO on the dev2dev forum at
http://developer.sharpsec.com (free reg req.)
I am using the unit day in and day out as my PDA (web, contacts, email, addressbook, whatever) as well as using the underlying *nix functionality for stuff like systems and network support when I am moving around the office or, in fact, sitting at the pub around the corner having a pint.
This device is out-of-this-world-cool and I suggest that every Network/Sys Admin should put it on their Christmas gift list.
Having used it for a couple of weeks and watched the incredible pace at which software is ported to it I have to say that it is everything that I need as an IT professional in a PDA right now and it is only going to get better.
I seriously doubt that PDA's running anything but Linux will have any market share in twelve months,there is simply no way Palm or embedded Windows can keep up with this thing. End users will appreciate the stability, speed and vast amount of software, while the I.T. people will appreciate the awesome flexibility and functionality.
walking around right now with a linux PDA that is a significantly higher spec than my first Linux desktop is a thrill and having it connected most of the time to the 'net at 11mb/s is the icing on the cake.
Yeah, and Osama Bin Laden was secretly encoding hidden messages to his supporters in his broadcasts, so the U.S. Governmebt had to encourage broadcasters
to censor them.
Often the money was loaned to despots at the urging of the United States because they happened to be anti communist. The democratic governments that eventaully surplanted the dictators inherited the debt.
Yet another in the long series of crimes in the 3rd world that the American people should answer for.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that outside of the cost, freedom and "chique factor" advantages to Sony for supporting StarOffice the essence of this is a tit-for-tat response to Microsoft releasing X-Box.
Unlike other OEMs, Microsoft can't push Sony around because Sony is involved in many other lucratice markets.
The Japanese (or indeed, Asian in general) technology maunfactures are getting into OpenSource (or other Microsoft alternatives) wherever they can, particularly with PDAs and embedded systems.
Europe and Australasia are overflowing with FOSS, particularly Linux.
Where is North America? Desktop and low-end server computing there looks to be destined to become like their wireless and mobile markets; stagnant and lagging behind the rest of the world.
Sorry for replying as an Anonymous Coward
:)
That's perfectly alright, no need to apologise Ann Coulter, Slashdot user #614889
No, though I think that there are good arguments for integrating a barcode scanner into PDAs.
So there you go, a couple of days isnt long to wait.
Actually it is. In London (which has about three times the population of Sydney) delivery is next day, which is impressive when you consider the generally poor customer service in the U.K.
Tesco UK have an ordering site optimised for PDAs and other small screen devices.
It's so easy to walk into the kitchen and see what I need, then order with an 802.11b enabled PDA.
While I generally agree with your post I must take issue with NFS sharing /usr/local, particularly in large multi-user environments.
One the surface it seems like a good idea, as system administration can upgrade binaries and libraries in one place (the NFS server) and the changes are instantly deployed to every other Unix workstation in the organisation.
However, just one of the things that can go wrong is this; if for some reason the NFS server is unavailable, all hell breaks loose - EVERY user has "/usr/local/bin" in their path (yes, even S5R4) and their sessions hang when the system goes looking for executables on a non-existent mount.
I inherited a network that did this, causing no end of difficulty and a major migration effort.
..is to walk into the server room, plug the Z's serial cable into the server that just died, press "on" and type "minicom" - while your co-worker is still looking at the "lilo:" prompt on his/her laptop.
Yes the serial cable blocks the physical keyboard drawer, but the software keyboard is more than adequete (I'm too scared to use graffiti as root on a production system.)
I've just proofed four pages, a mix of modern English, quoted Cockney and religious babble (Jonah 4:13, 9 etc.)
OK it's only four pages, but the errors I've corrected so far have been when the scan has been poor and the OCR software has had to make a guess.
After reading the comments here Knoppix has just become my default Christmas gift to friends and family. The opportunity to quickly and easily expose new users to Linux without altering their current environment is a magnificent opportunity to "spread the gospel."
:)
I'm planning to bundle the CD with two sheets of paper, one showing how to start and use it and explaing that it won't interfere with the ordinary function of the computer concerned and the other David McNabb's HDD install HOWTO.
Then in January I'm going to apply for a position in the marketing department of AOL, I'll have all the required skills
I haven't used Solaris on Intel since the free binary licence for Solaris 7, which I found to be quite sluggish and in many ways different from Solaris implementations for Sparc.
One solution to ready (not to mention cheap) access to a Sun platform is to purchase some of the cheap Sun hardware which another poster pointed out is readily available at places like Ebay. For the cost of X86 Solaris 9 you could pick up an Ultra-5 and download Solaris 9 Sparc for free.
Personally I went for an Ultra-30 with 760Mb of ram and a 21" Sun badged Sony Trinitron monitor for £GB500.
Sun sells tin, I don't expect to be paying for Solaris any time soon.
Your robot looks completely cool. Wow.
Any chance you could give us an overview of the software?
This is quite normal in democracies, the electorate tends to focus (and remember, come ballot time) legislation which was harmful to them personally rather than legislation that was beneficial. The end results are that incumbent political parties (the government) tend to have an uphill battle to win support in electoral campaigns and that it is unusal for a party (or coalition of parties) to stay in office for more that two terms.
I forgot to point out that using the cable precludes the use of the keyboard, because the connector is so large the keyboard 'draw' won't open, not because of any I/O conflict.
I use the software keyboard or HR recognition.
You want to console into boxes in the data centre with your PDA, so that you avoid waiting for a laptop (that you had to carry) to boot before you can fix something. I do this with the Zaurus, it's add-on serial cable, a couple of converters and Minicom.
The serial cable doesn't need to be attached to the docking station - on one end is the Sharp proprietary USB/Serial/Whatever connector thingy that plugs in to the bottom of the unit and the other is standard 9 pin which you can convert to whatver console port you're connecting to.
I think that there's more to it than that; Sun thinks (and I agree) that it is natural migration for someone that uses Linux as a desktop to purchase Sun kit when they have a computing task that requires an industrial strength solution.
Add to that that I expect that Sun will be looking to "blur the lines" somewhat between Sun-Linux and Solaris - I wouldn't be at all surprised to see migration tools and cross-over applications as part of the Sun distribution - don't forget that Solaris has had "lxrun" for as long as I can remember.
You may not be aware that Sun has donated 200 developers to the Gnome project (i.e. they are Sun employees who work exclusively on Gnome) and that Sun is standardising Gnome as the desktop of choice on Solaris.
I'm running Gnome 2.0b2 on Solaris 9 here at home and have to say that I am extremely happy with it.
One day at dawn while calling my grandmother on my GSM cellphone it displayed this message;
"ANZAC Ceremony"
Every other day of the year the cell site identifies itself as "ANZAC Cove."
I would guess that Galipoli is the most remote cell site on earth. Thank you Turkish Telecom.
Where did you get 2400 bps from?
802.11b supports a maximum transmission of 11 mb/s and scales down to around 1 mb/s at distance.
The Rino 120 looks great as it has the capacity to store uploaded maps from CD-rom. I do this with the Garmin 3+ and it is extremely handy when travelling, however I am disappointed that Garmin haven't provided more than 8meg of storage. On a recent trek I wanted to load all of South America and Cuba into the Garmin 3+ (which also has 8meg) only to find that it wouldn't all fit, so I ended up dropping three our four contries. This lead to some hassles along the way.
(Note to Garmin: There's no point providing detailed city and topographical maps for countries like Cuba that confiscate GPS's at the border, then, because you have a GPS with detailed local maps, search all of your gear and interrogate you.)
In terms of the exchange of positional information (I see this as being somewhat akin to the peerpeer aspects of Bluetooth) this is an awesome feature, particularly if you're four days into a hike in the Andes, the weather is closing in and you're wondering where the hell your girlfriend is.
This sort of nonsensical Microsoft propaganda has no place on /. - yet it's frequency is increasing.
I don't want to wade through bullshit posts that have been bought and paid for by Redmond, please censor them or provide me with the ability to filter out this noise.
It's bigger than a Palm and roughly the same size as an Ipaq when the keyboard is stowed.
It fits comfortably into my hand and I carry it around in my pocket.
Getting a Z-Com 802.11b CF card working with my Zaurus was thde first thing I did. You can find my HOWTO on the dev2dev forum at http://developer.sharpsec.com (free reg req.) I am using the unit day in and day out as my PDA (web, contacts, email, addressbook, whatever) as well as using the underlying *nix functionality for stuff like systems and network support when I am moving around the office or, in fact, sitting at the pub around the corner having a pint. This device is out-of-this-world-cool and I suggest that every Network/Sys Admin should put it on their Christmas gift list. Having used it for a couple of weeks and watched the incredible pace at which software is ported to it I have to say that it is everything that I need as an IT professional in a PDA right now and it is only going to get better. I seriously doubt that PDA's running anything but Linux will have any market share in twelve months,there is simply no way Palm or embedded Windows can keep up with this thing. End users will appreciate the stability, speed and vast amount of software, while the I.T. people will appreciate the awesome flexibility and functionality. walking around right now with a linux PDA that is a significantly higher spec than my first Linux desktop is a thrill and having it connected most of the time to the 'net at 11mb/s is the icing on the cake.
Yeah, and Osama Bin Laden was secretly encoding hidden messages to his supporters in his broadcasts, so the U.S. Governmebt had to encourage broadcasters
to censor them.
Developer Kits including the PDA are $US 200
Often the money was loaned to despots at the urging of the United States because they happened to be anti communist. The democratic governments that eventaully surplanted the dictators inherited the debt.
Yet another in the long series of crimes in the 3rd world that the American people should answer for.