Anyways, this chip would be perfect for some on the fly visulization applications. It could also find it's way into voice processing (IE, recognition circits). Really, it's a step in the direction to allow our really good computers today the eyes and ears they need to go the next step toward being more useful. I mean, what good is a 3 GHz processor for what we're currently doing on a desktop. Now, the 3 GHz processor would be alot more useful if it could have something like this optical chip to preprocess spoken word and then do something with it.
On the other hand, I can see climatology benifiting much from this. I mean, nowcasting is only so good. (short, 30-60 minute forcasts). Something like this could cut the edge off interpreting all the input from radar, IR, etc sources much more quickly.
Again, besides the potential benifits in interpreting data, one of the currently limiting factors in climatology research is the availbility of extensive data sets to train statitctical models. These sets can be created from a realitively small code base, and something like this optical chip would be ideal to code the model into and have it generate the output. Again, 8 hours on a fast machine now could be done in a few minutes.
Um.. I may be the only one, but I had to read the whole parent post twice before realizing that it wasn't talking about an advancement in "computer" memory.... Ooops.:)
If gas is CPU power. HP is RAM, etc. It's a pretty accurate discription. Java is an all-terrain vehicle of code (runs on multiple OS's well) which has lotts of flexibility, IE, towinr, storage, passanger space, etc.
It's not a volvo XC, or auidi quatro. It couldn't possibly hang through a world cross rally with the subaru's and the big "P" dogs.
I'd call it something like an 4-runner with a stick shift. When you need it, it's there. But... wait a minute. Sun doesn't think linx is worth the disk space anymore... Why am I pushing Java? Perl! It's got to be PERL!:)
My very first day on campus I went to pick up a parking decal. It was the "null" week where you can park in any legle spot w/o decal.
It took 15 minutes to get the decal and get back to my "legally" parked car and find a ticket on it. There was a white line to the left of the car, a white line in front of it, and a blacked out line to the right. And a row of about 6 more cars past mine to the right all parked between blacked out lines, they nailed evey one of them. I lost the petition.
Now, I also caryr a chain in my car just in case the PD's decide to lock the lots early with my car in one of them. I know it's just a matter of time.:)
I park in the farthest lot away from campus and bike to class/work etc. I've done this since starting at this college.
Durring football season, the lots on this side are locked off so that the Alumni can park their motorhomes. This is not supposed to happen until 5:00pm thursday, but the lots are usually locked by thurdday morning. I've got pictures of them locked on wednesday morning as well.
I also have pictures of a sign near the main parking garage indicating that it is full and that there are more spaces available at the "BP" lot. Which was at that time chained up.:) (Treating us like little kids is NOT funny. They will pay. )
And to avoid that "brown streak", I tilt the bike to the side about 20^\circ and lean the other way.. Works well for me. Fenders are evil: I had a bad experience with a rear fender and a wheelie exobition as a kid. And I ALWAYS strip off the kick stands... The're worse. When that spring fails and it goes down, you better hope you've got some mean skills.
Couple this with a horrendous parking situation. I work in the basement of the physics building next to a dorm, and all the sciece/math classrooms on campus. I usually have a 15-20 minute walk to look foward to each day. If I find a spot. Total opertunaty cost in time approaches 40 mintes to get to work. And I'm usually pissed when I get there due to all the freshmen and their SUV's. If I had a motorcycle, or could park right next to the building and there was no student traffic of people cutting through campus to find parking (where there isn't any), I can be there in less than 10 minutes.
Add to this the fact that the equations for this time analysis vary wildly through the day, and I have to go in at many different times through the week. Add to it that some parking lots are closed randomly from wednesday to thursday if there's a football game in the weekend. Add to this the other sprots events. And it florida...
Hence, I'm sitting at home on my laptop waiting for some backup ISO's to finish so I can burn them to the dvd-r I left in the drive when I was there yesturday... And people will be mad at me since I'm not "there" to help out. It doesn't look like I'm working.
It's these other things which are the problem. They don't fit into HR's calculations, since they are entirely external. I point you to "Chronopolis" J. G. Ballard... on clocks: "Isn't it obvious [why clocks are against the law]? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something." "Well?" "Then you can make him do it faster."
I read this as "Girl Processing" and was preparing a WTF? comment.
Internal parsing error reported.:)
I always thought the "single" processor paradigm has gone on way too long. I guess soon we'll be able to plug in multiple processors like we do ram.. But a question. (1/req)=(1/R1)+(1/r2)+(1/R3)... Wouldn't it make more sence to run them in series?:) (jk)
I don't think I can ever consider drinking HighLife, or any other such stuff. If I'm going cheap, I'll go dergies. If not, I'll go with Flying Dog, Sam Adams, or something non american.
It's ammazing how lack of the desire to spell correctly effects your moderations.:)
Yes, my spelling went to shit that day... I'd already typed a 3300 word post presentation draft of a fluids research paper that day. And spent 4 hours the night before working on some intro to electrical eng homework.
Thanks for the corrections. I'm not a pilsner fan, but love Belgian doubles to death!
ERROR:... I disagree, as I should with most of these. So here's my list:
MS Windows: Coors lite (win95) , Michilob Ultra, (win98), Miller Lite (winNT); High Life (WinXP) ; Kiri Irchih (yes, made by bud..:( ) (win2k) ; Bud (winXP)
Red Hat : Heinikin. (How Could they POSSIBLY say Guniess?!) Redhat isn't that good. And, there are a lot of people who can't stand the nectar of the gods (Guiness), but will guzzle heines all day.
Debian: guiness or bass, depending on install. Black and Tan also possible with the right spoon. This is the best there is:)
SuSe Weinstephaner. Warsteiner isn't quite good enough. Good old wholesome beer for a good wholesome linux.
Gentoo : home brew is probably right. Joshua's schtuff coupled with Silas's "The **it!" Good if you make it good. Annoying if you screw up the mix.
Slackware : Old Peculiar, if small install, go with John Courage. I think a Zipslack install may be like Corona with a lime.
Mac OS X: Corsendak, all the way. It needs the right glas, as found in their hardware.
Max OS pre-X : derges selections. Good beer; what you buy when you're poor.
SunOS: Hmmm...Grolsh. (Yes, the nearly ungrocabke flavor, jon.) Okay, if you like the taste. If you're really into sunos, and are used to having fscked up paths and no (-h).
OpenVMS: Urikel, a acidic pilsner.
*BSD: really freakin awsome mexican beer. Negro Modelo if it works. If you fsck up the install, it can get like dosX. Seguin Derecho!
That's because your boss's are voting NO... Cancels out, doesn't it.
I think in most of the Campus style CS repositories of jobs, boss's are just as overworked as the peons, but their boss's are the problem. EG: "Why can't I use outlook express while I'm in Texas?" CS: "Becasue that's bad, and opens us up to virii!" EG: "But it's just outlook, it's safe. It's made by Microsoft! It said it's more secure than ever. You vaule your job, don't you." CS: "Fine, use outlook. We'll open the port." EG: "Whatever." Wham! (This actually happened...a lot of us were under the impression that these ports were still being blocked. Then we found out otherwise.:) )
Yep. And it'll happen again, mid way through 2.6. 2.4 was the Kernel of Pain. (previous/. story). So I guess kernel 2.6 should be the kernel of redemption.:)
The other thing that happened before was lots of people saying the'd just installed "it" last night. Well, guess what. I actually did. Put 2.6.0test4 on a problematic nForce2 Asus board with 3 gigs of ram. we'll see if it handles the chipset any better.:)
I've been compiling kernels now for like 5 years.. and I've never been able to get a single 2.5.x kernel to compile, or run. It's been good to have a solid running 2.6 prekernel going now.
So THAT"s what happened to our oven racks, you lazy clod!:)
I should quote some radio manuals here: Kenwood TM-261 A (2 meter, 50 mobile rig.) "When operating mobile, do not attempt to configure your tranceiver while driveing because it is simply too dangerous."
It's just funny wording, but kind of stupid, as it defined operating mobile as being in a car, and thus tells you essentially not to use it.:)
This is a paraphrase from the Windows 2000 Professional Book from MS that we have. "It may take anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour for some things to work when computers are brought on and off the network. For this time, you may get messages which are inaccurate, indicating a computer is not available, when it actually is. Again, this may take from 15 minutes to well over an hour." Of course, to them this is probably a feature!.:) As a general rule, I never test a change in any samba or windows share until an hour has passed from its implimentation. Then I reboot the windows client if it even looks like it isn't working after that time.
It's really brought down the stress level with dealing with MS shares. With ot without samba .:)
This is a little different. Elementry school dorks are stealing their lunches. The kindergardeners are getting in good punches. Soon, we're going to send in the diaper wearing users who accidentatly bought lindows computers from walmart.
"You're certainly correct that Microsoft missed this buffer overflow. But guess what, Samba recently had a buffer overflow that they missed for years. Think about how many people had access to that source code. It happens, and it happens to everyone. I'd hate to let you in on this deep, dark secret, but people NOBODY is perfect, and software is hard. Patch it and move on."
It's all an issue of the fact that they haven't been "patching it" and moving on. And yes there is one "exception" to running code outside a users shell. But the over abundance of "one ways" for windows is avbsolutly staggering! It's like you said that all cars can potentially have car accidents, so there fore all cars are approximatly just as safe as any other. This is point blank wrong. Windows is the equivialent of a motorcycle on a 3 meter diameter front wheel that was made by dogdge (ie, everything designed for 100k, cheap bolts which are too small, lots of similar parts which were never fully designed in the first place and plastic covers on everything.) In linux, you get an approximate volvo which can be turned into a turbo brick, but you also get to pick the tires and what gas you put in it. Yes, the motor cycle may beat you off the line, but it statistically, it's gonna crash more and worse.
At least the sprit is refreshing. And this really may help in the long run. It would have saved me about 4 hours this week going around manually to machines. I don't have time to develop a network wide patching system/vnc setup and secure it, so I've got to do everything by hand.
I'm assuming thi'll make it into AVG et al in a few days...
FAR too bloated for general use. I use: 1. Leatherman Wave. Perfect mix of screwdriver sizes. 2. SuperRescue cd. 3. Debian 2.2r5 and 3.0 r1 CD's. 4. linux boot cd and floppy with hash editors for windows passwords. 5. Box'o'sckrews. 6. Mess'o'cables. 7. Pint'o'Guniess
Cien porciento! I think you've hit it. Part of the whole point here is that intelligence and knowledge is the determining factor. Someone can get messed up on Apsrin too! And there are legal foods which are worse for a person than beer. A good ale/wine/beet has its place at times. Some of the US populations seems to be hung up about never drinking becasue of thoughts of all those rowdy college students drunk as skunks driveing around in cars their daddy's bought them. And then there are college students, drunk as skunks, becasue their parents told them "Alcohol BAD, don't DRINk anything." rather than, "Alcohol can be bad, but it has some health benefits. If you drink too much, however, you can fry you liver..."
Ah well, I really need an ale right now, but will contain myself with a cuppa of coffee.
For me, working with MS products is a bit of a sacrifice: I sacrifice my integrity and control to conform to something that "everyone" uses.
Case example. I spent over 3 hours yesturday at the helm of a win2k box which I built from components working on a Power Point presentation in Office XP with three other people. I didn't get it to crash, but I ran into so many little quirks which slowed us down.
1. Three Mathtype equations were displayed in *MIRROR* print some how. Litterally! I deleted them and pulled a fresh set of the three out of another Doc. 2. When pasting them one at a time, I'd resize the first one, and lo and behold, as I pasted the second one, the first one moved and suddenly grew back to it's original size, even though I hadn't touched it. Same thing happened with the third. 3. At least 15 times, the font would randomly change size for no reason, causing a major portion of the page to get messed up. 4. Bullet behavior was extremely randomized and would automagically indent, or would shift text without indenting. As there's supposed to be a space after a bullet before text, this got worse.
I had to open the document twice in Open Office, make font changes/bullet fixes, and then put it back in Power Point to get it right.
Should I have to pay for "updates" to the software? Shoudl I pay for Mathtype? I prefer Lyx. It doesn't make stupid guesses about what I mean.
No problems on debian stable... I'd just moved the backup server to 2.6.0-test1 for "testing" and two days later found out I had one day to backup all of our systems PRONTO for a poweroutage for the entire weekend.
Video is a little twitchy if you're running an ATI board and a KVM switch. (It wigs out on first switch.) Other than that, it's fast and rock solid. USB-2.0 works with an external drive.
I wrote 9 DVD's with it and copied 30 G's over to a usb drive without a problem. 4 of the 9 DVD's were backups from over a network.
Can't wait to throw test2 on the box.
Oh, one wierd clock error, but it didn't crash anything out.
We're getting about twice as many color pages out of both printers (that we're keeping) , and have cut out outsourced printing down to nearly zero. Since the Deskjet was so poor, most people would end up printing multiple copied of each thing to try to get it "better".
Now, since they have to think about using both printers, one for a draft and another for a color final, -or- a b&w laserjet for draft and finishing with the 4600, they tend to make less mistakes. Everyone's happy with it, and I haven't gotten any more complaints about the deskjet.
This printer is really rock solid, fast, and heavy as hell.
Yeah... But.. in windows, the machine manages to hang on the simpliest of errors by other programs. And what probably causes those hangs in the 3rd part vendors? Some of those undocumented hooks into the api which haven't been secured/stabilized/coded correctly at MS. At least in linux/BSD/UNIX you usually know what happened, and have a chance of fixing it. I can deal with popup errors, I just want to still be able to work, damn it! It just comes down to what's best for how one works. And how much one is willing to sacrifice for security and stability. Every OS balances between these three pilars. MS can't seem to get all three legs to balance on the floor.:) And now they want us to pay for the wood filler.:)
Slashdot Mirror
give them $500 and an ipod each. :)
So does my iBook G3. :)
:)
Anyways, this chip would be perfect for some on the fly visulization applications. It could also find it's way into voice processing (IE, recognition circits). Really, it's a step in the direction to allow our really good computers today the eyes and ears they need to go the next step toward being more useful. I mean, what good is a 3 GHz processor for what we're currently doing on a desktop. Now, the 3 GHz processor would be alot more useful if it could have something like this optical chip to preprocess spoken word and then do something with it.
On the other hand, I can see climatology benifiting much from this. I mean, nowcasting is only so good. (short, 30-60 minute forcasts). Something like this could cut the edge off interpreting all the input from radar, IR, etc sources much more quickly.
Again, besides the potential benifits in interpreting data, one of the currently limiting factors in climatology research is the availbility of extensive data sets to train statitctical models. These sets can be created from a realitively small code base, and something like this optical chip would be ideal to code the model into and have it generate the output. Again, 8 hours on a fast machine now could be done in a few minutes.
Okay, I'm over it.
Um.. I may be the only one, but I had to read the whole parent post twice before realizing that it wasn't talking about an advancement in "computer" memory. ... Ooops. :)
If gas is CPU power. HP is RAM, etc. It's a pretty accurate discription. Java is an all-terrain vehicle of code (runs on multiple OS's well) which has lotts of flexibility, IE, towinr, storage, passanger space, etc.
:)
It's not a volvo XC, or auidi quatro. It couldn't possibly hang through a world cross rally with the subaru's and the big "P" dogs.
I'd call it something like an 4-runner with a stick shift. When you need it, it's there. But... wait a minute. Sun doesn't think linx is worth the disk space anymore... Why am I pushing Java? Perl! It's got to be PERL!
Thank linus for this cup of coffee...
My very first day on campus I went to pick up a parking decal. It was the "null" week where you can park in any legle spot w/o decal.
:)
It took 15 minutes to get the decal and get back to my "legally" parked car and find a ticket on it. There was a white line to the left of the car, a white line in front of it, and a blacked out line to the right. And a row of about 6 more cars past mine to the right all parked between blacked out lines, they nailed evey one of them. I lost the petition.
Now, I also caryr a chain in my car just in case the PD's decide to lock the lots early with my car in one of them. I know it's just a matter of time.
I park in the farthest lot away from campus and bike to class/work etc. I've done this since starting at this college.
:) (Treating us like little kids is NOT funny. They will pay. )
Durring football season, the lots on this side are locked off so that the Alumni can park their motorhomes. This is not supposed to happen until 5:00pm thursday, but the lots are usually locked by thurdday morning. I've got pictures of them locked on wednesday morning as well.
I also have pictures of a sign near the main parking garage indicating that it is full and that there are more spaces available at the "BP" lot. Which was at that time chained up.
And to avoid that "brown streak", I tilt the bike to the side about 20^\circ and lean the other way.. Works well for me. Fenders are evil: I had a bad experience with a rear fender and a wheelie exobition as a kid. And I ALWAYS strip off the kick stands... The're worse. When that spring fails and it goes down, you better hope you've got some mean skills.
Couple this with a horrendous parking situation. I work in the basement of the physics building next to a dorm, and all the sciece/math classrooms on campus. I usually have a 15-20 minute walk to look foward to each day. If I find a spot. Total opertunaty cost in time approaches 40 mintes to get to work. And I'm usually pissed when I get there due to all the freshmen and their SUV's. If I had a motorcycle, or could park right next to the building and there was no student traffic of people cutting through campus to find parking (where there isn't any), I can be there in less than 10 minutes.
Add to this the fact that the equations for this time analysis vary wildly through the day, and I have to go in at many different times through the week. Add to it that some parking lots are closed randomly from wednesday to thursday if there's a football game in the weekend. Add to this the other sprots events. And it florida...
Hence, I'm sitting at home on my laptop waiting for some backup ISO's to finish so I can burn them to the dvd-r I left in the drive when I was there yesturday... And people will be mad at me since I'm not "there" to help out. It doesn't look like I'm working.
It's these other things which are the problem. They don't fit into HR's calculations, since they are entirely external. I point you to "Chronopolis" J. G. Ballard... on clocks:
"Isn't it obvious [why clocks are against the law]? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something."
"Well?"
"Then you can make him do it faster."
You mean, like, the're not giving it to someone at microsoft this time? What's going on here. :)
I read this as "Girl Processing" and was preparing a WTF? comment.
:)
... Wouldn't it make more sence to run them in series? :) (jk)
Internal parsing error reported.
I always thought the "single" processor paradigm has gone on way too long. I guess soon we'll be able to plug in multiple processors like we do ram.. But a question.
(1/req)=(1/R1)+(1/r2)+(1/R3)
"WinXP isn't cheap, and isn't that good." Agreed.
:)
I don't think I can ever consider drinking HighLife, or any other such stuff. If I'm going cheap, I'll go dergies. If not, I'll go with Flying Dog, Sam Adams, or something non american.
It's ammazing how lack of the desire to spell correctly effects your moderations.
Yes, my spelling went to shit that day... I'd already typed a 3300 word post presentation draft of a fluids research paper that day. And spent 4 hours the night before working on some intro to electrical eng homework.
Thanks for the corrections. I'm not a pilsner fan, but love Belgian doubles to death!
ERROR:... I disagree, as I should with most of these. So here's my list:
:)
:)
MS Windows: Coors lite (win95) , Michilob Ultra, (win98), Miller Lite (winNT); High Life (WinXP) ; Kiri Irchih (yes, made by bud..:( ) (win2k) ; Bud (winXP)
Red Hat : Heinikin. (How Could they POSSIBLY say Guniess?!) Redhat isn't that good. And, there are a lot of people who can't stand the nectar of the gods (Guiness), but will guzzle heines all day.
Debian: guiness or bass, depending on install. Black and Tan also possible with the right spoon. This is the best there is
SuSe Weinstephaner. Warsteiner isn't quite good enough. Good old wholesome beer for a good wholesome linux.
Gentoo : home brew is probably right. Joshua's schtuff coupled with Silas's "The **it!" Good if you make it good. Annoying if you screw up the mix.
Slackware : Old Peculiar, if small install, go with John Courage. I think a Zipslack install may be like Corona with a lime.
Mac OS X: Corsendak, all the way. It needs the right glas, as found in their hardware.
Max OS pre-X : derges selections. Good beer; what you buy when you're poor.
SunOS: Hmmm...Grolsh. (Yes, the nearly ungrocabke flavor, jon.) Okay, if you like the taste. If you're really into sunos, and are used to having fscked up paths and no (-h).
OpenVMS: Urikel, a acidic pilsner.
*BSD: really freakin awsome mexican beer. Negro Modelo if it works. If you fsck up the install, it can get like dosX. Seguin Derecho!
SCO: Draino.
That's because your boss's are voting NO... Cancels out, doesn't it.
:) )
I think in most of the Campus style CS repositories of jobs, boss's are just as overworked as the peons, but their boss's are the problem.
EG: "Why can't I use outlook express while I'm in Texas?"
CS: "Becasue that's bad, and opens us up to virii!"
EG: "But it's just outlook, it's safe. It's made by Microsoft! It said it's more secure than ever. You vaule your job, don't you."
CS: "Fine, use outlook. We'll open the port."
EG: "Whatever."
Wham! (This actually happened...a lot of us were under the impression that these ports were still being blocked. Then we found out otherwise.
Yep. And it'll happen again, mid way through 2.6. 2.4 was the Kernel of Pain. (previous /. story). So I guess kernel 2.6 should be the kernel of redemption. :)
:)
The other thing that happened before was lots of people saying the'd just installed "it" last night. Well, guess what. I actually did. Put 2.6.0test4 on a problematic nForce2 Asus board with 3 gigs of ram. we'll see if it handles the chipset any better.
I've been compiling kernels now for like 5 years.. and I've never been able to get a single 2.5.x kernel to compile, or run. It's been good to have a solid running 2.6 prekernel going now.
Best,
So THAT"s what happened to our oven racks, you lazy clod! :)
:)
I should quote some radio manuals here:
Kenwood TM-261 A (2 meter, 50 mobile rig.)
"When operating mobile, do not attempt to configure your tranceiver while driveing because it is simply too dangerous."
It's just funny wording, but kind of stupid, as it defined operating mobile as being in a car, and thus tells you essentially not to use it.
This is a paraphrase from the Windows 2000 Professional Book from MS that we have. :) As a general rule, I never test a change in any samba or windows share until an hour has passed from its implimentation. Then I reboot the windows client if it even looks like it isn't working after that time.
:)
"It may take anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour for some things to work when computers are brought on and off the network. For this time, you may get messages which are inaccurate, indicating a computer is not available, when it actually is. Again, this may take from 15 minutes to well over an hour."
Of course, to them this is probably a feature!.
It's really brought down the stress level with dealing with MS shares. With ot without samba .
This is a little different. Elementry school dorks are stealing their lunches. The kindergardeners are getting in good punches. Soon, we're going to send in the diaper wearing users who accidentatly bought lindows computers from walmart.
"You're certainly correct that Microsoft missed this buffer overflow. But guess what, Samba recently had a buffer overflow that they missed for years. Think about how many people had access to that source code. It happens, and it happens to everyone. I'd hate to let you in on this deep, dark secret, but people NOBODY is perfect, and software is hard. Patch it and move on."
It's all an issue of the fact that they haven't been "patching it" and moving on. And yes there is one "exception" to running code outside a users shell. But the over abundance of "one ways" for windows is avbsolutly staggering! It's like you said that all cars can potentially have car accidents, so there fore all cars are approximatly just as safe as any other. This is point blank wrong. Windows is the equivialent of a motorcycle on a 3 meter diameter front wheel that was made by dogdge (ie, everything designed for 100k, cheap bolts which are too small, lots of similar parts which were never fully designed in the first place and plastic covers on everything.) In linux, you get an approximate volvo which can be turned into a turbo brick, but you also get to pick the tires and what gas you put in it. Yes, the motor cycle may beat you off the line, but it statistically, it's gonna crash more and worse.
my 3.14159 centavos.
At least the sprit is refreshing. And this really may help in the long run. It would have saved me about 4 hours this week going around manually to machines. I don't have time to develop a network wide patching system/vnc setup and secure it, so I've got to do everything by hand.
I'm assuming thi'll make it into AVG et al in a few days...
FAR too bloated for general use. I use:
1. Leatherman Wave. Perfect mix of screwdriver sizes.
2. SuperRescue cd.
3. Debian 2.2r5 and 3.0 r1 CD's.
4. linux boot cd and floppy with hash editors for windows passwords.
5. Box'o'sckrews.
6. Mess'o'cables.
7. Pint'o'Guniess
Cien porciento! I think you've hit it. Part of the whole point here is that intelligence and knowledge is the determining factor. Someone can get messed up on Apsrin too! And there are legal foods which are worse for a person than beer. A good ale/wine/beet has its place at times. Some of the US populations seems to be hung up about never drinking becasue of thoughts of all those rowdy college students drunk as skunks driveing around in cars their daddy's bought them. And then there are college students, drunk as skunks, becasue their parents told them "Alcohol BAD, don't DRINk anything." rather than, "Alcohol can be bad, but it has some health benefits. If you drink too much, however, you can fry you liver ..."
Ah well, I really need an ale right now, but will contain myself with a cuppa of coffee.
For me, working with MS products is a bit of a sacrifice: I sacrifice my integrity and control to conform to something that "everyone" uses.
Case example. I spent over 3 hours yesturday at the helm of a win2k box which I built from components working on a Power Point presentation in Office XP with three other people. I didn't get it to crash, but I ran into so many little quirks which slowed us down.
1. Three Mathtype equations were displayed in *MIRROR* print some how. Litterally! I deleted them and pulled a fresh set of the three out of another Doc.
2. When pasting them one at a time, I'd resize the first one, and lo and behold, as I pasted the second one, the first one moved and suddenly grew back to it's original size, even though I hadn't touched it. Same thing happened with the third.
3. At least 15 times, the font would randomly change size for no reason, causing a major portion of the page to get messed up.
4. Bullet behavior was extremely randomized and would automagically indent, or would shift text without indenting. As there's supposed to be a space after a bullet before text, this got worse.
I had to open the document twice in Open Office, make font changes/bullet fixes, and then put it back in Power Point to get it right.
Should I have to pay for "updates" to the software? Shoudl I pay for Mathtype? I prefer Lyx. It doesn't make stupid guesses about what I mean.
No problems on debian stable... I'd just moved the backup server to 2.6.0-test1 for "testing" and two days later found out I had one day to backup all of our systems PRONTO for a poweroutage for the entire weekend.
Video is a little twitchy if you're running an ATI board and a KVM switch. (It wigs out on first switch.) Other than that, it's fast and rock solid. USB-2.0 works with an external drive.
I wrote 9 DVD's with it and copied 30 G's over to a usb drive without a problem. 4 of the 9 DVD's were backups from over a network.
Can't wait to throw test2 on the box.
Oh, one wierd clock error, but it didn't crash anything out.
We're getting about twice as many color pages out of both printers (that we're keeping) , and have cut out outsourced printing down to nearly zero. Since the Deskjet was so poor, most people would end up printing multiple copied of each thing to try to get it "better".
Now, since they have to think about using both printers, one for a draft and another for a color final, -or- a b&w laserjet for draft and finishing with the 4600, they tend to make less mistakes. Everyone's happy with it, and I haven't gotten any more complaints about the deskjet.
This printer is really rock solid, fast, and heavy as hell.
best,
Yeah... But.. in windows, the machine manages to hang on the simpliest of errors by other programs. And what probably causes those hangs in the 3rd part vendors? Some of those undocumented hooks into the api which haven't been secured/stabilized/coded correctly at MS. At least in linux/BSD/UNIX you usually know what happened, and have a chance of fixing it. I can deal with popup errors, I just want to still be able to work, damn it! It just comes down to what's best for how one works. And how much one is willing to sacrifice for security and stability. Every OS balances between these three pilars. MS can't seem to get all three legs to balance on the floor. :) And now they want us to pay for the wood filler. :)