I can't see any rhyme or reason to the sorting, which is fine I guess. It's kind of a messy list as has been pointed out before (Yes SKYPE, no IRC, Yes Cellphone, No VPN?). How about IM, TCP/IP, maybe instead of Skype, how about VOIP as a concept?
I think Canter and Siegel would have done their crap with or without Windows, so SPAM is another that wasn't courtesy of Microsoft. I'm thinking that Adware probably would have popped up for different platforms if, say, 99% of everyone was running a Mac at the time. Email Viruses though, that's sticky, anything that is so crazy about trying to tie kitchen-sink functionality into one app is asking to get burned. I guess by that logic, EMACS has been asking to get burned for 20+ years.
Would it then also be illegal in New Jersey for me to walk into a park, stand on a soap box (let's update it, milk crate [I mean, who's ever seen a soap box?]), and discuss my political beliefs with a bunch of strangers without providing my name and address to each of them, and collecting all of their contact information?
I think it might already be. Aside from the bold warnings on the side of every milk crate that it is like felony theft to remove it from the store, I believe I am required to carry proof of ID at all times in case a police officer comes and asks me to "show my papers".
I really don't like the way this is headed. When I started hearing laws that require one to carry positive proof of ID and produce it at any request from law enforcement, I started worrying. This isn't that different, and it's even more worrisome.
I went:
TI 99/4a
Atari 800
Atari 800xl (x2 or 3)
Atari 520ST which got frankenstein'd 10 ways from Sunday
Compaq 486sx/33, which got upgraded to an AMD 80Mhz 486
Then a bunch of homebuilts since then. I am most fond of the Atari 8bit and 16 bit machines. The 8-bit Atari's where where I spent the most time learning, and the 16-bit Ataris were my first launching for internet connectivity and BBS hosting.
Even with the Linux community being what it is, it still doesn't feel as much like a community as Atari fanatic groups I used to belong to. People had real passion about their platform back then and it was a point of pride to be able to hack your machine to do something nifty or out of spec.
The poor people that can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.com.
That's awfully elitist....
Very elitist, especially since the story summary indicates the site delisted was BMW.DE. I guess we add one name to the list of "poor people who can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.de".
I gotta admit it was a good troll, I didn't think twice, but I also know honest people who have really made that argument, and I was pretty much speechless because I had so many counter arguments. Yeah, I need to sleep more and post less.
If you split your IT staff, then no IT person from Marketing really would know what's happening in Development, or Accounting, or Procurement.
I would hate to see even a mid size (100-1000) user company go that route, since you would quickly have people putting devices on networks that no one knows about outside their department. A network cannot scale well without good, central management and a solid plan for growth. You can't have techs from 4 different departments deploying switches willy-nilly, creating VLANS that propagate through your enterprise, not to mention that the guy you have upgrading your harddrive or installing Photoshop on your machine is very often not the guy you want installing network hardware, building a sound fileserver or implementing security policy. Or even on more of a systems level, you'll have 5 guys each buying 500GB arrays from different vendors and with different manufacturers stuff. You'll have Netapp in Marketing, EMC in Accounts, Equilogix in Development, homebrew NAS in Customer Care, etc.
I CAN see the value in assigning, say, a dedicated desktop/internal support person to each department, to familiarize themselves with upcoming projects and keep up with trends to determine future needs for that department. But I would always want to have that person/group reporting back into a central IT structure to keep things rational.
I don't know how literally you meant that to be taken, but it seems that disbanding a core IT group and discontinuing central reporting and IT planning could get ugly in a hurry.
But it succeeded in getting people to see the name Steve Gibson on a website again. From the plagarizer of SynCookies, the father of Raw Sockets paranoia, comes a new wild and unfounded allegation, WMF bugs put there intentionally to let Microsoft SPY ON EVERYTHING YOU DO OMGWTF!
I can't believe people on the last thread actually took him seriously without looking at his past media whoring failed attempts at security analasis.
I thought Steve Gibson had been thoroughly discredited, especially after his fiasco with Raw Sockets. HOLY CRAP, Windows is going to start giving you raw socket access, WE'RE all F'ING DOOMED. Old Register article comments. Even back then, I had a hard time listening to Gibson who seemed like too much of a self-promoter and snake-oil salesman.
I've never trusted that guy, and I'd like to see this independantly confirmed by, say, eEye or Counterpan, or someone with some honesty and conviction.
I have a G3/500 which I've upgraded to 512MB. I bought this second hand for $300 full in the knowledge that the battery was completely screwed, and it is. However since I never ever rely on batteries anyway, I'm totally happy. It's a 12" and much better suited to reading in bed or surfing from the couch than the HP behemoth I had been using. It's very quiet, surprisingly 1024x768 seems to be enough for me, and with utilities to allow for Virtual Desktops, etc, it is actually really useful.
I've had it about 8 months or so, and haven't had a single non-battery related problem with it.
Even the battery issue is managable. If I knock out the power cable, the battery immediately discharges to 0% charge, but the machine is suspended successfully, so when the power is plugged back in, bang the spacebar and it's back up.
Cool, I'm in Outlook 2k3 right now, what I want to do is create a folder that will show me the contents of both an Exchange folder and the relevant archive folder. What I'll do is create a whole third folder set that brings all that data into one place, so instead of having Inbox\folder and Archive\Inbox\Folder, I can just go to vFolder-Inbox\Folder and get the contents of both.
Bummer, it does not let you include content from "archive" folders in your "Search Folder". I assume this is what you were talking about above, I just found the function after reading that comment.
I run 3 headed at 2048x1536 at work, 2 at home. Please don't jam my browser fullscreen on me. I keep my browsers pretty wide too, maybe like 1800-ish by 1300-something, who knows, but it's more than big enough to view anything anyone wants to show me, if you resize my browser (either way, some people make it a little 800x600 postage stamp which is really annoying), I will close your site and never go back.
Unfortunately for me, my home monitors are dying, and it appears you can't buy a decent CRT anymore (Sony doesn't look like they make anything but LCDs, and I am a trinitron nazi, and I will not buy one of these used off eBay). So I guess it will back down to 1600x1200 soon. Still, the offer stands, if you would like me to kick your ass, please feel free to resize my window, or "design for res X". Gotta make that stuff scale.
I'm a day-to-day Evolution user. One of the things I like most is the speed with which it searches over very large folders. At one point or other, I moved my catchall address from my personal to a separate catchall.
I decided to try Thunderbird against this to see how it worked without jeopardizing my primary mail folders. It went badly. In a folder with about 70,000 mails in it, Thunderbird completely fried. Evolution would allow that and search it no problem. I don't generally have real folders with real mail in them that are that large, but it would have been nice to be able to search against it to see if there were any real messages in there too.
Oh yeah, and vFolders, game over, point, Evolution.
Useless in that I'd already had to use SuSE 10 to rebuild a server that I had to rebuild for various reasons. I had already had problems with RAID and stuff, but thought that overall it seemed slick. I liked the fact that they now offer ISO images, albeit ISO images with no Flash, etc.
The not-useless part was that the review got me to download and install FreeNX, which is crazy great. It's just as fast as Terminal Services, which I use constantly with RDesktop. I wish it could handle local virtual desktop changes, but it seems to flake out with multiple monitors in such a way that makes it convenient. It always spawns the client window in the "primary" montior, then if I go over to another screen, it freaks out and minimizes. That makes up for the fact that I can't figure out how to make it respect local keybindings.
SuSE 10 seems like a good product, and this is a good run-down of it.
What I took away was that they moved a bunch of servers, including the Checkpoint ones, to OpenBSD. They were then forced to move the firewalls back to Windows. However under the load of an actual security event (some virus), the Windows servers pinned at 100% CPU and they had to put additional OpenBSD servers in front of them to handle the real load and "firewall the firewalls". Evidently, from the scarce detail in the article, MS wasn't too happy about them taking away their business, so they conceded to run Checkpoint on MS servers, until it couldn't handle it.
Is the infrastructure to transport Magnesium and Aluminum easier to implement than the infrastructure to transport Hydrogen? I guess an Aluminum tanker never left a huge smoking crater in the ground, but it seems like transport costs would be at least similar.
The Wright Brothers mistakenly tried to extend their patent to the physics of how a wing works. If they had stuck to "no one can make wing-warping control surfaces except us", then no one would have, and they'd still have their patent. Glenn Curtiss had the much better aileron system, which we still use today, the Wrights saw that they might be marginalized, and sued him like mad, and eventually the patent got revoked.
That's absolutely right. And the more I think about my knee-jerk original post, the more I disagree with myself. Primarily because I am unwilling to sit at my computer and make phone calls. If I were to use VOIP, I would want a phone that just plugs in and is treated like any other phone.
I already have to sysadmin my house, I'm on the verge of having to sysadmin my stereo or TV, and I refuse to sysadmin my phone.
If it uses standard IPSEC, then it would be indistiguishable from the "work-at-home" type folks logging into their office to get mail or whatever.
I've got several dozen concurrent calls travelling over VOIP as well, and we've found that for our purposes it was much better to just get point to point frames and bond them then to try and use VPNs for anything. But for an individual call, the IPSEC overhead shouldn't matter at all. And if it's just a "phony" IPSEC connection, the two machines could negotiate it quickly and in the clear if you want.
I was thinking also SSL with self-signed certs or some other faux-secure solution. In my mind it would again be alright since if you're calling someone, you probably know them enough to trust them, and if someone spoofs it, then you'll pretty much know that, "hey, that doesn't sound like my mom/sister/whoever".
Not that security should be ignored, but again, the analog phone argument comes up, and self-signed SSL is just as encrypted anyway, you just have to be able to trust the signor.
We need a free ad-hoc P2P VPN application. As the call is made, you make a temporary VPN to the remote end with some throwaway key that is agreed upon programmatically and encrypt all packets, when the call ends, it gets torn down. For VOIP calls the encryption wouldn't have to be great, but if we could run the call through even a single DES end-to-end VPN, that would take care of the phone companies terminating the calls.
Call quality can suffer over a VPN, but with a high-bandwidth connection, one call won't make a bit of difference, 20 or 30 calls might be a problem.
I'm not saying the encryption SHOULDN'T be great, but compared to a regular phone, I mean, I can stand outside your house and clip two alligator clips to the box and hear your regular phone calls...
There's a chance that you are cracked. I have an HP evo pizza box in front of me right now. P4 3.2Ghz hyperthreaded, with the built-in Intel POS graphics card, plus a dual head NVidia card (which 3d does work on), all 3 are at 2048x1536. Before that, I was running a Compaq Evo D515. My x86 laptop is an HP with an ATI card (no 3d, it's one of those botched abortion m200 Radeon cards for which there do not appear to be any 3D drivers), and I have a whitebox PC running two Radeons, both of which do work in 3d.
All of these run SuSE 9.0 to 9.2, flawlessly, with multi-month uptimes, except, you know, the laptop, because...well, because I also have a 12" iBook that I usually use instead...
There is also no problem with WiFi on the laptop, no problem (anymore) with Broadcom 1GB NICs in the EVO, which may be because the new EVO doesn't have the Broadcom card, I don't know.
I think the real problem is that XF86Config screws with people badly. I'll be the first to admit that initially getting things running is tough, and you have to fight through (in my case) SAX, or whatever X configurator you use. These often don't give you anywhere near what you're looking for in terms of res and color depth. I'm not saying users are dumb. I'm not saying I'm particulary clever. I am persistent though, and I agree that it shouldn't take a damn system admin to install a desktop OS and have video that works reliably at the end of it, however I don't think that HP is making an intentionally "un-workable" product in the hopes that Linux users will fail, in any of their product lines.
Please note, I have not seen an HP/Compaq consumer desktop machine in years and years, and hope never to have to again. While they sucked, they too should be capable of shoehorning whatever OS you want to in, but the situation there might be substantially more crappy.
Lately, since I updated to Kopete 3.4.2a, Kopete is randomly (randomly on a per-user basis, and even different instances of chats with users give different behavior), using "ICQ Email Express" in place of the remote username. Sometimes it is just within the chat window, often it also puts that in the title bar of the chat window so I have no idea who I'm talking to except though context.
This does not happen just in chats with ICQ users, but also with AIM users, but not all AIM users 100% of the time. I haven't been successful googling for an answer to this yet.
I also now have an ICQ Email Express user in my Buddy list, which I can delete, but which doesn't help me. I think it just converted one of my actual "buddies" to that.
Usability reasons are largely why my wife hates the Gimp. She makes her living on Photoshop, but I use the Gimp for all my random junk. One weekend I decided to try her out on it and her experiences were like this:
-- Dialogs were inconsistent and many times didn't properly explain their function (filters)
-- Layers are handled 'quaintly'. No layer grouping, which takes it totally out of the running for her day-to-day stuff. She will often have documents with 100+ layers, grouped and folder-ized.
Those were two of her biggest compaints, most of the others were "this feels different from Photoshop", which you can't do anything about. But the large compaints were all layer and user interface related.
She didn't care about CMYK because she wasn't doing anything destined for print, but that would have killed her too.
Most of my personal beefs have to do with palettes that get behind other objects (like my workspace) and I have to track them down. But I'm not an artist.
Most of her compaints exist in previous versions of Photoshop too, to be fair, but if I even joked about "hey, why don't I install Photoshop 6 for you on that new machine", well, I wouldn't eat for a month.
The experience of trying to get her to use Gimp for a day scared me off of ever trying to get her using Inkscape or any of the other vector stuff, even for 5 minutes, instead of Illustrator.
Usability lab testing can only mean good things for this project, I hope a lot of good comes of it!
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see any rhyme or reason to the sorting, which is fine I guess. It's kind of a messy list as has been pointed out before (Yes SKYPE, no IRC, Yes Cellphone, No VPN?). How about IM, TCP/IP, maybe instead of Skype, how about VOIP as a concept?
Right there on page 2. AT&T WaveLAN.
I don't think these are in any particular order, otherwise I'd think webservers and browsers would have rated a tad higher.
I think Canter and Siegel would have done their crap with or without Windows, so SPAM is another that wasn't courtesy of Microsoft. I'm thinking that Adware probably would have popped up for different platforms if, say, 99% of everyone was running a Mac at the time. Email Viruses though, that's sticky, anything that is so crazy about trying to tie kitchen-sink functionality into one app is asking to get burned. I guess by that logic, EMACS has been asking to get burned for 20+ years.
Would it then also be illegal in New Jersey for me to walk into a park, stand on a soap box (let's update it, milk crate [I mean, who's ever seen a soap box?]), and discuss my political beliefs with a bunch of strangers without providing my name and address to each of them, and collecting all of their contact information?
I think it might already be. Aside from the bold warnings on the side of every milk crate that it is like felony theft to remove it from the store, I believe I am required to carry proof of ID at all times in case a police officer comes and asks me to "show my papers".
I really don't like the way this is headed. When I started hearing laws that require one to carry positive proof of ID and produce it at any request from law enforcement, I started worrying. This isn't that different, and it's even more worrisome.
I went:
TI 99/4a
Atari 800
Atari 800xl (x2 or 3)
Atari 520ST which got frankenstein'd 10 ways from Sunday
Compaq 486sx/33, which got upgraded to an AMD 80Mhz 486
Then a bunch of homebuilts since then. I am most fond of the Atari 8bit and 16 bit machines. The 8-bit Atari's where where I spent the most time learning, and the 16-bit Ataris were my first launching for internet connectivity and BBS hosting.
Even with the Linux community being what it is, it still doesn't feel as much like a community as Atari fanatic groups I used to belong to. People had real passion about their platform back then and it was a point of pride to be able to hack your machine to do something nifty or out of spec.
The poor people that can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.com.
That's awfully elitist....
Very elitist, especially since the story summary indicates the site delisted was BMW.DE. I guess we add one name to the list of "poor people who can't figure out that the BMW web site is www.bmw.de".
I gotta admit it was a good troll, I didn't think twice, but I also know honest people who have really made that argument, and I was pretty much speechless because I had so many counter arguments. Yeah, I need to sleep more and post less.
/.:
... "Hell damn fart!" -- Bart, "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace"
As for unbridled vehement reckless abandon to
"Crap, boobs, crap"
If you split your IT staff, then no IT person from Marketing really would know what's happening in Development, or Accounting, or Procurement.
I would hate to see even a mid size (100-1000) user company go that route, since you would quickly have people putting devices on networks that no one knows about outside their department. A network cannot scale well without good, central management and a solid plan for growth. You can't have techs from 4 different departments deploying switches willy-nilly, creating VLANS that propagate through your enterprise, not to mention that the guy you have upgrading your harddrive or installing Photoshop on your machine is very often not the guy you want installing network hardware, building a sound fileserver or implementing security policy. Or even on more of a systems level, you'll have 5 guys each buying 500GB arrays from different vendors and with different manufacturers stuff. You'll have Netapp in Marketing, EMC in Accounts, Equilogix in Development, homebrew NAS in Customer Care, etc.
I CAN see the value in assigning, say, a dedicated desktop/internal support person to each department, to familiarize themselves with upcoming projects and keep up with trends to determine future needs for that department. But I would always want to have that person/group reporting back into a central IT structure to keep things rational.
I don't know how literally you meant that to be taken, but it seems that disbanding a core IT group and discontinuing central reporting and IT planning could get ugly in a hurry.
But it succeeded in getting people to see the name Steve Gibson on a website again. From the plagarizer of SynCookies, the father of Raw Sockets paranoia, comes a new wild and unfounded allegation, WMF bugs put there intentionally to let Microsoft SPY ON EVERYTHING YOU DO OMGWTF!
I can't believe people on the last thread actually took him seriously without looking at his past media whoring failed attempts at security analasis.
Steve Gibson is the Bob Lazar of the security field, only wackier.
People still listen to this guy?
I thought Steve Gibson had been thoroughly discredited, especially after his fiasco with Raw Sockets. HOLY CRAP, Windows is going to start giving you raw socket access, WE'RE all F'ING DOOMED. Old Register article comments. Even back then, I had a hard time listening to Gibson who seemed like too much of a self-promoter and snake-oil salesman.
I've never trusted that guy, and I'd like to see this independantly confirmed by, say, eEye or Counterpan, or someone with some honesty and conviction.
I have a G3/500 which I've upgraded to 512MB. I bought this second hand for $300 full in the knowledge that the battery was completely screwed, and it is. However since I never ever rely on batteries anyway, I'm totally happy. It's a 12" and much better suited to reading in bed or surfing from the couch than the HP behemoth I had been using. It's very quiet, surprisingly 1024x768 seems to be enough for me, and with utilities to allow for Virtual Desktops, etc, it is actually really useful.
I've had it about 8 months or so, and haven't had a single non-battery related problem with it.
Even the battery issue is managable. If I knock out the power cable, the battery immediately discharges to 0% charge, but the machine is suspended successfully, so when the power is plugged back in, bang the spacebar and it's back up.
Cool, I'm in Outlook 2k3 right now, what I want to do is create a folder that will show me the contents of both an Exchange folder and the relevant archive folder. What I'll do is create a whole third folder set that brings all that data into one place, so instead of having Inbox\folder and Archive\Inbox\Folder, I can just go to vFolder-Inbox\Folder and get the contents of both.
Bummer, it does not let you include content from "archive" folders in your "Search Folder". I assume this is what you were talking about above, I just found the function after reading that comment.
Hello me, it's ME again....
Now Steve's Sweating BULLETS.
I run 3 headed at 2048x1536 at work, 2 at home. Please don't jam my browser fullscreen on me. I keep my browsers pretty wide too, maybe like 1800-ish by 1300-something, who knows, but it's more than big enough to view anything anyone wants to show me, if you resize my browser (either way, some people make it a little 800x600 postage stamp which is really annoying), I will close your site and never go back.
Unfortunately for me, my home monitors are dying, and it appears you can't buy a decent CRT anymore (Sony doesn't look like they make anything but LCDs, and I am a trinitron nazi, and I will not buy one of these used off eBay). So I guess it will back down to 1600x1200 soon. Still, the offer stands, if you would like me to kick your ass, please feel free to resize my window, or "design for res X". Gotta make that stuff scale.
I'm a day-to-day Evolution user. One of the things I like most is the speed with which it searches over very large folders. At one point or other, I moved my catchall address from my personal to a separate catchall.
I decided to try Thunderbird against this to see how it worked without jeopardizing my primary mail folders. It went badly. In a folder with about 70,000 mails in it, Thunderbird completely fried. Evolution would allow that and search it no problem. I don't generally have real folders with real mail in them that are that large, but it would have been nice to be able to search against it to see if there were any real messages in there too.
Oh yeah, and vFolders, game over, point, Evolution.
Useless in that I'd already had to use SuSE 10 to rebuild a server that I had to rebuild for various reasons. I had already had problems with RAID and stuff, but thought that overall it seemed slick. I liked the fact that they now offer ISO images, albeit ISO images with no Flash, etc.
The not-useless part was that the review got me to download and install FreeNX, which is crazy great. It's just as fast as Terminal Services, which I use constantly with RDesktop. I wish it could handle local virtual desktop changes, but it seems to flake out with multiple monitors in such a way that makes it convenient. It always spawns the client window in the "primary" montior, then if I go over to another screen, it freaks out and minimizes. That makes up for the fact that I can't figure out how to make it respect local keybindings.
SuSE 10 seems like a good product, and this is a good run-down of it.
What I took away was that they moved a bunch of servers, including the Checkpoint ones, to OpenBSD. They were then forced to move the firewalls back to Windows. However under the load of an actual security event (some virus), the Windows servers pinned at 100% CPU and they had to put additional OpenBSD servers in front of them to handle the real load and "firewall the firewalls". Evidently, from the scarce detail in the article, MS wasn't too happy about them taking away their business, so they conceded to run Checkpoint on MS servers, until it couldn't handle it.
Is the infrastructure to transport Magnesium and Aluminum easier to implement than the infrastructure to transport Hydrogen? I guess an Aluminum tanker never left a huge smoking crater in the ground, but it seems like transport costs would be at least similar.
The Wright Brothers mistakenly tried to extend their patent to the physics of how a wing works. If they had stuck to "no one can make wing-warping control surfaces except us", then no one would have, and they'd still have their patent. Glenn Curtiss had the much better aileron system, which we still use today, the Wrights saw that they might be marginalized, and sued him like mad, and eventually the patent got revoked.
That's absolutely right. And the more I think about my knee-jerk original post, the more I disagree with myself. Primarily because I am unwilling to sit at my computer and make phone calls. If I were to use VOIP, I would want a phone that just plugs in and is treated like any other phone.
I already have to sysadmin my house, I'm on the verge of having to sysadmin my stereo or TV, and I refuse to sysadmin my phone.
If it uses standard IPSEC, then it would be indistiguishable from the "work-at-home" type folks logging into their office to get mail or whatever.
I've got several dozen concurrent calls travelling over VOIP as well, and we've found that for our purposes it was much better to just get point to point frames and bond them then to try and use VPNs for anything. But for an individual call, the IPSEC overhead shouldn't matter at all. And if it's just a "phony" IPSEC connection, the two machines could negotiate it quickly and in the clear if you want.
I was thinking also SSL with self-signed certs or some other faux-secure solution. In my mind it would again be alright since if you're calling someone, you probably know them enough to trust them, and if someone spoofs it, then you'll pretty much know that, "hey, that doesn't sound like my mom/sister/whoever".
Not that security should be ignored, but again, the analog phone argument comes up, and self-signed SSL is just as encrypted anyway, you just have to be able to trust the signor.
We need a free ad-hoc P2P VPN application. As the call is made, you make a temporary VPN to the remote end with some throwaway key that is agreed upon programmatically and encrypt all packets, when the call ends, it gets torn down. For VOIP calls the encryption wouldn't have to be great, but if we could run the call through even a single DES end-to-end VPN, that would take care of the phone companies terminating the calls.
Call quality can suffer over a VPN, but with a high-bandwidth connection, one call won't make a bit of difference, 20 or 30 calls might be a problem.
I'm not saying the encryption SHOULDN'T be great, but compared to a regular phone, I mean, I can stand outside your house and clip two alligator clips to the box and hear your regular phone calls...
There's a chance that you are cracked. I have an HP evo pizza box in front of me right now. P4 3.2Ghz hyperthreaded, with the built-in Intel POS graphics card, plus a dual head NVidia card (which 3d does work on), all 3 are at 2048x1536. Before that, I was running a Compaq Evo D515. My x86 laptop is an HP with an ATI card (no 3d, it's one of those botched abortion m200 Radeon cards for which there do not appear to be any 3D drivers), and I have a whitebox PC running two Radeons, both of which do work in 3d.
All of these run SuSE 9.0 to 9.2, flawlessly, with multi-month uptimes, except, you know, the laptop, because...well, because I also have a 12" iBook that I usually use instead...
There is also no problem with WiFi on the laptop, no problem (anymore) with Broadcom 1GB NICs in the EVO, which may be because the new EVO doesn't have the Broadcom card, I don't know.
I think the real problem is that XF86Config screws with people badly. I'll be the first to admit that initially getting things running is tough, and you have to fight through (in my case) SAX, or whatever X configurator you use. These often don't give you anywhere near what you're looking for in terms of res and color depth. I'm not saying users are dumb. I'm not saying I'm particulary clever. I am persistent though, and I agree that it shouldn't take a damn system admin to install a desktop OS and have video that works reliably at the end of it, however I don't think that HP is making an intentionally "un-workable" product in the hopes that Linux users will fail, in any of their product lines.
Please note, I have not seen an HP/Compaq consumer desktop machine in years and years, and hope never to have to again. While they sucked, they too should be capable of shoehorning whatever OS you want to in, but the situation there might be substantially more crappy.
Lately, since I updated to Kopete 3.4.2a, Kopete is randomly (randomly on a per-user basis, and even different instances of chats with users give different behavior), using "ICQ Email Express" in place of the remote username. Sometimes it is just within the chat window, often it also puts that in the title bar of the chat window so I have no idea who I'm talking to except though context.
/rant
This does not happen just in chats with ICQ users, but also with AIM users, but not all AIM users 100% of the time. I haven't been successful googling for an answer to this yet.
I also now have an ICQ Email Express user in my Buddy list, which I can delete, but which doesn't help me. I think it just converted one of my actual "buddies" to that.
Dumb.
Usability reasons are largely why my wife hates the Gimp. She makes her living on Photoshop, but I use the Gimp for all my random junk. One weekend I decided to try her out on it and her experiences were like this:
-- Dialogs were inconsistent and many times didn't properly explain their function (filters)
-- Layers are handled 'quaintly'. No layer grouping, which takes it totally out of the running for her day-to-day stuff. She will often have documents with 100+ layers, grouped and folder-ized.
Those were two of her biggest compaints, most of the others were "this feels different from Photoshop", which you can't do anything about. But the large compaints were all layer and user interface related.
She didn't care about CMYK because she wasn't doing anything destined for print, but that would have killed her too.
Most of my personal beefs have to do with palettes that get behind other objects (like my workspace) and I have to track them down. But I'm not an artist.
Most of her compaints exist in previous versions of Photoshop too, to be fair, but if I even joked about "hey, why don't I install Photoshop 6 for you on that new machine", well, I wouldn't eat for a month.
The experience of trying to get her to use Gimp for a day scared me off of ever trying to get her using Inkscape or any of the other vector stuff, even for 5 minutes, instead of Illustrator.
Usability lab testing can only mean good things for this project, I hope a lot of good comes of it!