So of course it figures a new contender would come out. But all it took was one look at the $300 price tag (after rebate!) for the 20GB model to know I wouldn't be loooking any farther, no matter what. As another poster stated, for $300 I'd be buying an iPod. What drew me to the Nomad Zen NX was the price ($229 at Fry's for the 20GB model) and the reviews. There was a good article on "Ask Slashdot" that talked about the iPod vs. the Zen and I found that informative too. The controls on the Zen leave something to be desired, but it works and that's what really matters to me in the end. The awesome Notmad software from RedChair Software is very nice. It's not as necessary now that the Zen software has integration with Windows Explorer, but it's more fun to use. I've always disliked Creative's "over the top" applications; they're bloated and ugly.
This Dell unit would need to blow the doors off of the iPod to even be a contender... and that's not going to happen with MusicMatch as the front end (for me, anyway). Same reason the iPod wasn't a contender until they came out with iTunes for Windows; I really don't like MusicMatch software at all.
I've got an hour or so into my Mandrake 9.2 PowerPack installation. I had a number of things to do to make the dual-boot with Win2K work like I wanted, but everything is up and running now.
I've run Gnome in 9.2 so far. All of the applications I have tried work rather well. Sound works on the AC97 codec on-board, but playing Mp3 through XMMS gives some strange noises every 30 seconds or so... not sure what that's related to. I hate AC97 codecs under any OS, anyway.
I've seen Ximian XD2 running on RedHat 9.0, and I'm here to tell you it's BEAUTIFUL. Looking at Mandrake 9.2, it looks pretty good as well but to my eye isn't quite as polished as XD2. The fonts look very good in all of the main applications - Galeon, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Evolution. I don't know if they're using Xft under the hood or not but it certainly looks like it. Much better than in the past where getting any FreeType-compiled apps or anti-aliasing turned on required more hunting than I thought reasonable.
I didn't set up a printer this time as I have a new printer without a CUPS driver (and of course I never opened up a manual to see what emulation modes the printer supports) but that's worked for the last five releases so I'd assume it still works in 9.2.
I've been a Mandrake user/fan for a long time, and what I see looks as good or better than I would have expected. I will be using it on one of my systems at home for most of the things I do as I can be very comfortable and productive with it.
However, if the distro was installed on a new PC, I think the issue that the "average user" would run into is exactly what one poster mentioned; buy a new piece of hardware, especially a peripheral like a printer, and setting it up would potentially be rather difficult. The Windows installers often take care of all driver installation for you, so you never need to think about it. Even if there is a driver for say, a printer, using the Mandrake configuration tool can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated. But it's better than messing with the underlying config files, no doubt about that in my mind.
Anyway, the look & feel is very good and the PowerPack offers much better usability out of the box (okay, so I didn't get a box with my download) than previous releases. The point tools are getting to be VERY good, IMO.
While I won't bore everyone with the differences between MTBF, FIT rate and what those numbers actually mean in an integrated circuit, let me assure you that 40 years is NOT the lifetime of a CPU. A CPU is NOT an ASIC and it never will be treated like one.
Design rules and electrical checks are supposed to give a level of assurance that there won't be reliability problems down the road but they are not perfect. Every chip has a flaw that will render it inoperable at some point; worst-case, a PN junction will start looking like a resistor and that will be it for that chip. That is WAY down the road though, so likely another flaw will be a chip's downfall.
Random flaws are the most common. Some of these cause very early failure (known as "infant mortality" failures, unfortunately) but some take much longer to cause devices to fail. Not just he metal lines, although that is one mechanism; void migration, defects in the thin oxide of the transistors, contamination... the list is long. And each wafer lot coming out of the fab may have a different set of defects; newer technologies like 0.13u and 0.09u (aka 90nm) are not yielding well due to the process not being fully worked out. The chips that do make it out are likely not as good as the ones that will come later as a result.
Now I'm not saying that current CPUs are going to start popping like popcorn due to heavy usage; just that there is going to be a wide distribution of the time that they fail. A 30+ watt CPU running full-tilt on a setiathome application is just not going to last 40 years (ignoring the usual issues of other components of the system dying before then). High junction temperatures have just a huge impace upon chip lifetimes and CPUs have the highest junction temps. They are not rated for 40 years at 100% activity -- don't you think there's a reason for a one to three year warranty?
coupling the obsolescence cycle of computers with that of clothing. So when fashion trends come back around, you can't pull the clothes out of the back of the closet to wear again.
"Hey, cool tie! Oh, waitaminute... it's ancient. It only has a 133MHz StrongARM processor. How droll."
We're a networking systems company and we were standardized on Sun systems until a couple of years ago. What changed? We added Linux x86 to the mix. Why? Speed gains in the 2x range for simulation, synthesis and timing analysis of our ASICs. Oh yeah, and the boxes were (back then) $2K instead of $10K for similar configurations (yeah, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, but I'm talking application performance not system capability/capacity at the moment). A few years ago we bought several 4500s with 8 CPUs/20GB memory and they are still in use today, although are eschewed by the engineers except for high-capacity jobs the x86 boxes can't handle.
And this is where Sun *still* shines. We've run benchmarks on multi-CPU x86 boxes up through the latest Xeons and we're underwhelmed to say the least. Unfortunately, the code we run is optimized for the P3 architecture and just doesn't run that well on P4. Also, the memory architecture sucks compared to Sun; a second job running on one of those Xeon systems brings the performance of the first job WAY down (not due to CPU switching; we used a special kernel that eliminated most of that). This does NOT happen on our 4-year old Sun systems. Itanium systems are insane expensive (more than an equivalent Sun system these days) and Opteron is just becoming available from tier-1 OEMs. We'll look at the Opteron as soon as we can get our paws on one, believe me.
And if you're talking large memory footprints, Sun is just about the only way to go for our applications. We just bought a new Sun system for our high-end jobs that need gigs of memory. The old 4500s are still working but they're a bit slow.
Our future is bound to include Sun for the forseeable future, but the Opteron systems may reduce how many Sun systems we buy in the future. If Sun could make a profit on such a reduced volume (high-end servers instead of desktops, mid-range and high-end servers together) it would be great. But it's hard to be in a low-volume business and maintain profits; I suspect they won't survive in their current incarnation.
My main point (you didn't know I had one, did you?) is that there are some things that Sun does *very* well and they have no real peer. Oh, you can talk about IBM or HP, but will my EDA applications run there? Nope, so it's a moot point. The installed based gives Sun the edge there, even if their system architecture could be shown to be lacking with respect to those vendors.
I hope StarOffice gives them a leg up on the desktop, be it on Sun hardware or otherwise. It's a solid product; just wish they had brought it out a couple of years ago in its present form.
Well, why did he want Blue Oyster Cult to talk to him in the first place?
- Leo
I'm still reading Cryptonomicon...
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
and I'm only on page 200 or so after a couple of weeks (due to many silly reasons like kids and job). So it's with reluctance I succumb to the desire to read yet another (not to say there are too many) of Stephenson's books.
I enjoyed "Diamond Age" quite a bit and started in on "Cryptonomicon" shortly after finishing it, but I have to say that the characters are so complex in this book that I have trouble keeping their background straight. I do feel that once in awhile he (Stephenson) takes the character for a ride but forgets to take us along, too. That's not to say that I don't enjoy the stories; far from it. I think he's able to create quite a tapestry in his stories, and I just can't remember all of the individual threads (much like real life).
Looking forward to reading this novel when I finish "Cryptonomicon" several weeks from now.:-/
I'm a Mandrake user and club member, and I don't like it. It doesn't seem likely to increase revenue sufficiently to warrant upsetting their faithful user base. It "cheapens" the distro in my mind, even though I know the underlying open source code isn't any different.
Most people who know how to download and burn the ISOs are probably savvy enough to remove the ads, though; I'll reserve final judgement until I see how invasive the ads appear to be. As others have pointed out, Mandrake has kept the ISOs available for free by not polluting the distro with commercial/non-free software, which is to their credit.
As one of the people who purchased the expensive version of WP Office 2000 for Linux directly from Corel (about $175 IIRC) almost purely to show support for their Linux endeavors, I hope they can revisit this product. With the 2-3 years passage since they made it available, Wine has improved so markedly that I would hope many of the issues of the program needing an update of some RPMs to work on newer distros would go away (or at least be greatly reduced). And frankly, they need a better multi-platform GUI toolkit. The one they were using was, well, kinda cheesy IMHO. Not that OpenOffice.org is all THAT much better, but it is a bit better.
I kept WPO on my laptop up through Mandrake 9.0, but that's the end of the line. Better or not, I've thrown my support behind OpenOffice.org. Being able to use the same program on Windows, Linux, Solaris and OSX (well, in that horrible X11 flavor currently) makes it deserving of support. I have filed at least one bug report and while it took some time, it was eventually fixed and I got an email about it. I don't know of any company other than some EDA firms with that kind of service.
But I digress... I do want to see Corel do well; their office suite could still help make Linux a reasonable choice for a Desktop OS for more corporate environments. This, as has been stated more times than any of us could count, would be a good thing.
Yup, same deal for me under Mandrake 9.0 AND Solaris 5.8; tried to install the newer version of Perl. I did exactly what another poster recommended to get Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and::WriteExcel onto my Linux system -- use another Perl module.src.rpm as a template and change the few things needed to "rpm -ba" the new module. Really pretty dang easy, and since none of these distro folks can agree where things should live (LSB notwithstanding) pretty much necessary to get things in the right place.
For Solaris, I ended up having the sysadmin get the modules installed; trying to do it in a local area always got me the new version of Perl.
SCO's actions boil down to "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, even if it's not, but it is because I say so." So this is completely consistent of them. It would be more shocking to find that they didn't use Samba in their OpenServer product, frankly.
Exactly what I thought when I read that sentence. Look, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and I need no other reason to be displeased them as a company at this time. You may keep your quips to yourself, if you don't mind; they don't add anything to the newsworthiness of this story (or lack thereof).
More likely, the virus writers will close the hole themselves to protect the newly infected system. I predict this will become standard operating procedure in short order, and we'll be reading about it on Slashdot shortly thereafter.
"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners."
ROFL... thank you for that! Hadn't heard that one before.
Not that I'm rabid anti-Microsoft or anything, but it made me laugh out loud and I had to explain to my co-workers (not my boss, thankfully) what I was laughing about.
I had an experience at Fry's recently that changed my view somewhat. I had purchased one of those ECS K7S5A Pro mobos with a bare Athlon CPU. I've set up the K7S5A a few times before so I know what to expect. This one had some serious problems, and rather than do some CPU swapping to see if it was the mobo or CPU I just took the whole thing back.
The person I dealt with didn't ask me what was wrong; he just printed off a return/restock label and proceeded to give me a refund. I said, "Uh, there's something wrong with this particular combo. It had [description of actual failure mode] and should be tested before returning it to stock." He then printed out a different label indicating testing required and put it in the other bin. I asked him what they'd do and he said it would indeed get tested.
I had forgotten to bring in the cables that came with the bundle, tho; took that in the next day and found the same guy who did the return. His jaw literally dropped when he realized I came back in just for this; he thanked me profusely and went over to his supervisor to show him and point me out (I had already walked away). I thought for a minute they were going to hoist me on their shoulders and parade me around the store.
So I think Fry's has created a problem with its liberal return policy; people must just want them to take the stuff back, so they don't volunteer any information that might endanger that. If so, I lament this "lowering of the bar". I just did what I thought was right, and clearly that's not what most people do. Bummer.
I have the Maha C204F charger and I love it. It has been *very* gentle to my batteries. I have had the best luck with the 1800mAh Powerex batteries, but I see they have the 2200mAh available now as well.
I can't recommend NiMH batteries highly enough for high-drain devices like digital cameras; they last longer than alkaline in such applications. But for low-drain devices like remotes, I disagree with some of the posters' suggestions to use them. They self-discharge at a much greater rate than alkaline and are unsuitable for such applications (unless you like finding dead batteries in your remote every few weeks... been there, done that).
Please note that it's getting much easier to recycle the non-rechargable batteries now; I save mine up and take them to the local transfer station where they gladly accept them for recycling. Probably not as common in areas with lower population densities, tho.
Most plastic (would say "all" but I'm not 100% sure 'bout that) doesn't recycle all that well. Something breaks down in the process such that the resulting plastic isn't as good as that newly produced. So most plastic ends up being reused in ways such as insulating filler for pillows and jackets. I know plastic soda bottles are used for that purpose; can computer plastics be used in a similar manner?
Anyway, until this is resolved, plastic will not be recycled as much as we'd all like. I for one hope that someone finds a way to prevent the degradation.
Double sided printing should increase the accuracy: Now each strip has about 4 edges of information to help sort them by, even if you do have to account for flipping the strip over.
From the posting:
The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned.
The gluing part would seem to make this difficult to implement, although I agree in principle about the additional correspondence points once you have both sides scanned.
Meanwhile two terroists decide they don't care about the "smart technology" and blow the avionics in the cockpit to hell after locking on a course straight for the heart of --insert national treasure here--.
Right, except that the same avionics that implement the soft wall features also *fly* the airplane. No avionics means no auto pilot and the plane is just gonna fall out of the sky.
I've owned two HP inkjets (DJ500 and one of their "Professional Series" units that did a lot of the processing on the computer CPU) and most recently I've been using a Canon BJC-6000. The HP units had the print head in the cartridges, the Canon does not. Guess which ones clogged up consistently? Yup, you guessed it -- HP. Both of 'em. The Canon hasn't given one iota of trouble, and we only print occasionally. Change the individual ink cartridges when necessary, clean the print head if you must (it comes out). Very well designed.
Canon fixed the "if the print head gets clogged you're screwed" problem by making that a replacable item as well. You can buy a new one for not too much money with a new set of individual ink cartridges. It's a great system and I've not been disappointed in any way. In fact, I just ordered a new i950 for photo printing due to this experience.
I don't even look at HP printers any longer. Oh, and I agree with another person who wrote that the Epson 740 was junk; my dad's clogged up like no ones business and basically couldn't be fixed. No more Epson printers either, methinks.
So the pilots don't like the sound of the system. I imagine they were against fly-by-wire until it had some real-world proof that it worked as well. But since fly-by-wire is already a software-heavy system, I would think this would be an incremental change compared to the switchover from hydraulic systems to fly-by-wire.
I guess the pilots don't see it that way. I can see both sides of the argument, though. Of course, a one-line statement that the pilots don't like it isn't exactly something I'd take to a Congressional hearing as proof of something...
Sorry, I can't help but feel that this is overstated. Isn't it more reasonable to say that you choose to use Windows rather than face the alternative? I would assume the alternatives would be to not do things the same way you do them today under Windows, or to use software on another operating system that's not as full-featured as that running under Windows. Perhaps taking an anti-Microsoft stance at work would require that you seek another job (although licensing applies to you differently as an employee than as an individual user, so perhaps that would be a bit extreme).
If your situation truly requires you to use Windows (and I mean this in terms of "you'll use your livelihood if you don't use Windows"), I still believe you're in the minority. I would think it more reasonable to say that most people would need to learn how to use a new OS and applications but find it to be too much trouble. Whether you consider that simply a judgement call ("I don't think Microsoft's licensing is all that draconian") or just plain apathy is up to you. But I just don't believe the overwhelming majority of us are truly "forced" to use Windows.
My situation: I use Windows 2000 at work, on one system at home, but run Linux on four other systems plus Mac OS X on an old 8500. And many of my Windows applications are open-source programs such as OpenOffice, Mozilla, Privoxy, Vim, etc. so I interoperate with Windows users pretty well. No, not perfectly, but certainly close enough. I could stop using Windows at work and not miss it, including VPN access from home.
My experience (and that of many of my friends) leads me to believe that even if you fit into the category of being truly "forced" to use Windows, your situation is more the exception than the rule.
Does your impression date back to the early Powermacs? I mean really, I'm pretty good at taking the motherboard out of my 8500 to put in some memory and I can tolerate the "scrunch" sound of putting the case cover back on (caused by copper EMI gasket at bottom of case) but elegant it ain't. Lots more not to like on that design, but it's pretty well-known so I won't belabor the point.
OTOH, I am pleased to have a 500MHz G3 upgrade card in the machine. I do hope Apple continues to have such user-friendly upgrade paths available on the new machines.
Slashdot Mirror
So of course it figures a new contender would come out. But all it took was one look at the $300 price tag (after rebate!) for the 20GB model to know I wouldn't be loooking any farther, no matter what. As another poster stated, for $300 I'd be buying an iPod. What drew me to the Nomad Zen NX was the price ($229 at Fry's for the 20GB model) and the reviews. There was a good article on "Ask Slashdot" that talked about the iPod vs. the Zen and I found that informative too. The controls on the Zen leave something to be desired, but it works and that's what really matters to me in the end. The awesome Notmad software from RedChair Software is very nice. It's not as necessary now that the Zen software has integration with Windows Explorer, but it's more fun to use. I've always disliked Creative's "over the top" applications; they're bloated and ugly.
This Dell unit would need to blow the doors off of the iPod to even be a contender... and that's not going to happen with MusicMatch as the front end (for me, anyway). Same reason the iPod wasn't a contender until they came out with iTunes for Windows; I really don't like MusicMatch software at all.
- Leo
I've got an hour or so into my Mandrake 9.2 PowerPack installation. I had a number of things to do to make the dual-boot with Win2K work like I wanted, but everything is up and running now.
I've run Gnome in 9.2 so far. All of the applications I have tried work rather well. Sound works on the AC97 codec on-board, but playing Mp3 through XMMS gives some strange noises every 30 seconds or so... not sure what that's related to. I hate AC97 codecs under any OS, anyway.
I've seen Ximian XD2 running on RedHat 9.0, and I'm here to tell you it's BEAUTIFUL. Looking at Mandrake 9.2, it looks pretty good as well but to my eye isn't quite as polished as XD2. The fonts look very good in all of the main applications - Galeon, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Evolution. I don't know if they're using Xft under the hood or not but it certainly looks like it. Much better than in the past where getting any FreeType-compiled apps or anti-aliasing turned on required more hunting than I thought reasonable.
I didn't set up a printer this time as I have a new printer without a CUPS driver (and of course I never opened up a manual to see what emulation modes the printer supports) but that's worked for the last five releases so I'd assume it still works in 9.2.
I've been a Mandrake user/fan for a long time, and what I see looks as good or better than I would have expected. I will be using it on one of my systems at home for most of the things I do as I can be very comfortable and productive with it.
However, if the distro was installed on a new PC, I think the issue that the "average user" would run into is exactly what one poster mentioned; buy a new piece of hardware, especially a peripheral like a printer, and setting it up would potentially be rather difficult. The Windows installers often take care of all driver installation for you, so you never need to think about it. Even if there is a driver for say, a printer, using the Mandrake configuration tool can be a bit daunting to the uninitiated. But it's better than messing with the underlying config files, no doubt about that in my mind.
Anyway, the look & feel is very good and the PowerPack offers much better usability out of the box (okay, so I didn't get a box with my download) than previous releases. The point tools are getting to be VERY good, IMO.
Good job, Mandrake.
- Leo
While I won't bore everyone with the differences between MTBF, FIT rate and what those numbers actually mean in an integrated circuit, let me assure you that 40 years is NOT the lifetime of a CPU. A CPU is NOT an ASIC and it never will be treated like one.
Design rules and electrical checks are supposed to give a level of assurance that there won't be reliability problems down the road but they are not perfect. Every chip has a flaw that will render it inoperable at some point; worst-case, a PN junction will start looking like a resistor and that will be it for that chip. That is WAY down the road though, so likely another flaw will be a chip's downfall.
Random flaws are the most common. Some of these cause very early failure (known as "infant mortality" failures, unfortunately) but some take much longer to cause devices to fail. Not just he metal lines, although that is one mechanism; void migration, defects in the thin oxide of the transistors, contamination... the list is long. And each wafer lot coming out of the fab may have a different set of defects; newer technologies like 0.13u and 0.09u (aka 90nm) are not yielding well due to the process not being fully worked out. The chips that do make it out are likely not as good as the ones that will come later as a result.
Now I'm not saying that current CPUs are going to start popping like popcorn due to heavy usage; just that there is going to be a wide distribution of the time that they fail. A 30+ watt CPU running full-tilt on a setiathome application is just not going to last 40 years (ignoring the usual issues of other components of the system dying before then). High junction temperatures have just a huge impace upon chip lifetimes and CPUs have the highest junction temps. They are not rated for 40 years at 100% activity -- don't you think there's a reason for a one to three year warranty?
- Leo
coupling the obsolescence cycle of computers with that of clothing. So when fashion trends come back around, you can't pull the clothes out of the back of the closet to wear again.
"Hey, cool tie! Oh, waitaminute... it's ancient. It only has a 133MHz StrongARM processor. How droll."
- Leo
We're a networking systems company and we were standardized on Sun systems until a couple of years ago. What changed? We added Linux x86 to the mix. Why? Speed gains in the 2x range for simulation, synthesis and timing analysis of our ASICs. Oh yeah, and the boxes were (back then) $2K instead of $10K for similar configurations (yeah, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, but I'm talking application performance not system capability/capacity at the moment). A few years ago we bought several 4500s with 8 CPUs/20GB memory and they are still in use today, although are eschewed by the engineers except for high-capacity jobs the x86 boxes can't handle.
And this is where Sun *still* shines. We've run benchmarks on multi-CPU x86 boxes up through the latest Xeons and we're underwhelmed to say the least. Unfortunately, the code we run is optimized for the P3 architecture and just doesn't run that well on P4. Also, the memory architecture sucks compared to Sun; a second job running on one of those Xeon systems brings the performance of the first job WAY down (not due to CPU switching; we used a special kernel that eliminated most of that). This does NOT happen on our 4-year old Sun systems. Itanium systems are insane expensive (more than an equivalent Sun system these days) and Opteron is just becoming available from tier-1 OEMs. We'll look at the Opteron as soon as we can get our paws on one, believe me.
And if you're talking large memory footprints, Sun is just about the only way to go for our applications. We just bought a new Sun system for our high-end jobs that need gigs of memory. The old 4500s are still working but they're a bit slow.
Our future is bound to include Sun for the forseeable future, but the Opteron systems may reduce how many Sun systems we buy in the future. If Sun could make a profit on such a reduced volume (high-end servers instead of desktops, mid-range and high-end servers together) it would be great. But it's hard to be in a low-volume business and maintain profits; I suspect they won't survive in their current incarnation.
My main point (you didn't know I had one, did you?) is that there are some things that Sun does *very* well and they have no real peer. Oh, you can talk about IBM or HP, but will my EDA applications run there? Nope, so it's a moot point. The installed based gives Sun the edge there, even if their system architecture could be shown to be lacking with respect to those vendors.
I hope StarOffice gives them a leg up on the desktop, be it on Sun hardware or otherwise. It's a solid product; just wish they had brought it out a couple of years ago in its present form.
- Leo
they told me that the BOC wouldn't talk to me
Well, why did he want Blue Oyster Cult to talk to him in the first place?
- Leo
and I'm only on page 200 or so after a couple of weeks (due to many silly reasons like kids and job). So it's with reluctance I succumb to the desire to read yet another (not to say there are too many) of Stephenson's books.
:-/
I enjoyed "Diamond Age" quite a bit and started in on "Cryptonomicon" shortly after finishing it, but I have to say that the characters are so complex in this book that I have trouble keeping their background straight. I do feel that once in awhile he (Stephenson) takes the character for a ride but forgets to take us along, too. That's not to say that I don't enjoy the stories; far from it. I think he's able to create quite a tapestry in his stories, and I just can't remember all of the individual threads (much like real life).
Looking forward to reading this novel when I finish "Cryptonomicon" several weeks from now.
- Leo
Sheesh... didn't notice the link in the news item. Mea culpa.
- Leo
See the notice on the Mandrake site.
I'm a Mandrake user and club member, and I don't like it. It doesn't seem likely to increase revenue sufficiently to warrant upsetting their faithful user base. It "cheapens" the distro in my mind, even though I know the underlying open source code isn't any different.
Most people who know how to download and burn the ISOs are probably savvy enough to remove the ads, though; I'll reserve final judgement until I see how invasive the ads appear to be. As others have pointed out, Mandrake has kept the ISOs available for free by not polluting the distro with commercial/non-free software, which is to their credit.
- Leo
As one of the people who purchased the expensive version of WP Office 2000 for Linux directly from Corel (about $175 IIRC) almost purely to show support for their Linux endeavors, I hope they can revisit this product. With the 2-3 years passage since they made it available, Wine has improved so markedly that I would hope many of the issues of the program needing an update of some RPMs to work on newer distros would go away (or at least be greatly reduced). And frankly, they need a better multi-platform GUI toolkit. The one they were using was, well, kinda cheesy IMHO. Not that OpenOffice.org is all THAT much better, but it is a bit better.
I kept WPO on my laptop up through Mandrake 9.0, but that's the end of the line. Better or not, I've thrown my support behind OpenOffice.org. Being able to use the same program on Windows, Linux, Solaris and OSX (well, in that horrible X11 flavor currently) makes it deserving of support. I have filed at least one bug report and while it took some time, it was eventually fixed and I got an email about it. I don't know of any company other than some EDA firms with that kind of service.
But I digress... I do want to see Corel do well; their office suite could still help make Linux a reasonable choice for a Desktop OS for more corporate environments. This, as has been stated more times than any of us could count, would be a good thing.
- Leo
Yup, same deal for me under Mandrake 9.0 AND Solaris 5.8; tried to install the newer version of Perl. I did exactly what another poster recommended to get Spreadsheet::ParseExcel and ::WriteExcel onto my Linux system -- use another Perl module .src.rpm as a template and change the few things needed to "rpm -ba" the new module. Really pretty dang easy, and since none of these distro folks can agree where things should live (LSB notwithstanding) pretty much necessary to get things in the right place.
For Solaris, I ended up having the sysadmin get the modules installed; trying to do it in a local area always got me the new version of Perl.
Love them perl modules, though!
- Leo
SCO's actions boil down to "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, even if it's not, but it is because I say so." So this is completely consistent of them. It would be more shocking to find that they didn't use Samba in their OpenServer product, frankly.
- Leo
Exactly what I thought when I read that sentence. Look, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and I need no other reason to be displeased them as a company at this time. You may keep your quips to yourself, if you don't mind; they don't add anything to the newsworthiness of this story (or lack thereof).
Thank you.
- Leo
More likely, the virus writers will close the hole themselves to protect the newly infected system. I predict this will become standard operating procedure in short order, and we'll be reading about it on Slashdot shortly thereafter.
- Leo
"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners."
ROFL... thank you for that! Hadn't heard that one before.
Not that I'm rabid anti-Microsoft or anything, but it made me laugh out loud and I had to explain to my co-workers (not my boss, thankfully) what I was laughing about.
- Leo
I had an experience at Fry's recently that changed my view somewhat. I had purchased one of those ECS K7S5A Pro mobos with a bare Athlon CPU. I've set up the K7S5A a few times before so I know what to expect. This one had some serious problems, and rather than do some CPU swapping to see if it was the mobo or CPU I just took the whole thing back.
The person I dealt with didn't ask me what was wrong; he just printed off a return/restock label and proceeded to give me a refund. I said, "Uh, there's something wrong with this particular combo. It had [description of actual failure mode] and should be tested before returning it to stock." He then printed out a different label indicating testing required and put it in the other bin. I asked him what they'd do and he said it would indeed get tested.
I had forgotten to bring in the cables that came with the bundle, tho; took that in the next day and found the same guy who did the return. His jaw literally dropped when he realized I came back in just for this; he thanked me profusely and went over to his supervisor to show him and point me out (I had already walked away). I thought for a minute they were going to hoist me on their shoulders and parade me around the store.
So I think Fry's has created a problem with its liberal return policy; people must just want them to take the stuff back, so they don't volunteer any information that might endanger that. If so, I lament this "lowering of the bar". I just did what I thought was right, and clearly that's not what most people do. Bummer.
- Leo
Thomas Distributing
I have the Maha C204F charger and I love it. It has been *very* gentle to my batteries. I have had the best luck with the 1800mAh Powerex batteries, but I see they have the 2200mAh available now as well.
I can't recommend NiMH batteries highly enough for high-drain devices like digital cameras; they last longer than alkaline in such applications. But for low-drain devices like remotes, I disagree with some of the posters' suggestions to use them. They self-discharge at a much greater rate than alkaline and are unsuitable for such applications (unless you like finding dead batteries in your remote every few weeks... been there, done that).
Please note that it's getting much easier to recycle the non-rechargable batteries now; I save mine up and take them to the local transfer station where they gladly accept them for recycling. Probably not as common in areas with lower population densities, tho.
Cheers,
- Leo
Most plastic (would say "all" but I'm not 100% sure 'bout that) doesn't recycle all that well. Something breaks down in the process such that the resulting plastic isn't as good as that newly produced. So most plastic ends up being reused in ways such as insulating filler for pillows and jackets. I know plastic soda bottles are used for that purpose; can computer plastics be used in a similar manner?
Anyway, until this is resolved, plastic will not be recycled as much as we'd all like. I for one hope that someone finds a way to prevent the degradation.
- Leo
Double sided printing should increase the accuracy: Now each strip has about 4 edges of information to help sort them by, even if you do have to account for flipping the strip over.
From the posting:
The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned.
The gluing part would seem to make this difficult to implement, although I agree in principle about the additional correspondence points once you have both sides scanned.
- Leo
This strange cartilaginous fish uses its long snout to scan over the seafloor for the electrical impulses of its prey that bury in the muddy seafloor
Sounds kinda like "squiddy" from The Matrix.
- Leo
Right, except that the same avionics that implement the soft wall features also *fly* the airplane. No avionics means no auto pilot and the plane is just gonna fall out of the sky.
Not that this is a good outcome, either...
-Leo
I've owned two HP inkjets (DJ500 and one of their "Professional Series" units that did a lot of the processing on the computer CPU) and most recently I've been using a Canon BJC-6000. The HP units had the print head in the cartridges, the Canon does not. Guess which ones clogged up consistently? Yup, you guessed it -- HP. Both of 'em. The Canon hasn't given one iota of trouble, and we only print occasionally. Change the individual ink cartridges when necessary, clean the print head if you must (it comes out). Very well designed.
Canon fixed the "if the print head gets clogged you're screwed" problem by making that a replacable item as well. You can buy a new one for not too much money with a new set of individual ink cartridges. It's a great system and I've not been disappointed in any way. In fact, I just ordered a new i950 for photo printing due to this experience.
I don't even look at HP printers any longer. Oh, and I agree with another person who wrote that the Epson 740 was junk; my dad's clogged up like no ones business and basically couldn't be fixed. No more Epson printers either, methinks.
- Leo
So the pilots don't like the sound of the system. I imagine they were against fly-by-wire until it had some real-world proof that it worked as well. But since fly-by-wire is already a software-heavy system, I would think this would be an incremental change compared to the switchover from hydraulic systems to fly-by-wire.
I guess the pilots don't see it that way. I can see both sides of the argument, though. Of course, a one-line statement that the pilots don't like it isn't exactly something I'd take to a Congressional hearing as proof of something...
- Leo
Sorry, I can't help but feel that this is overstated. Isn't it more reasonable to say that you choose to use Windows rather than face the alternative? I would assume the alternatives would be to not do things the same way you do them today under Windows, or to use software on another operating system that's not as full-featured as that running under Windows. Perhaps taking an anti-Microsoft stance at work would require that you seek another job (although licensing applies to you differently as an employee than as an individual user, so perhaps that would be a bit extreme).
If your situation truly requires you to use Windows (and I mean this in terms of "you'll use your livelihood if you don't use Windows"), I still believe you're in the minority. I would think it more reasonable to say that most people would need to learn how to use a new OS and applications but find it to be too much trouble. Whether you consider that simply a judgement call ("I don't think Microsoft's licensing is all that draconian") or just plain apathy is up to you. But I just don't believe the overwhelming majority of us are truly "forced" to use Windows.
My situation: I use Windows 2000 at work, on one system at home, but run Linux on four other systems plus Mac OS X on an old 8500. And many of my Windows applications are open-source programs such as OpenOffice, Mozilla, Privoxy, Vim, etc. so I interoperate with Windows users pretty well. No, not perfectly, but certainly close enough. I could stop using Windows at work and not miss it, including VPN access from home.
My experience (and that of many of my friends) leads me to believe that even if you fit into the category of being truly "forced" to use Windows, your situation is more the exception than the rule.
- Leo
Does your impression date back to the early Powermacs? I mean really, I'm pretty good at taking the motherboard out of my 8500 to put in some memory and I can tolerate the "scrunch" sound of putting the case cover back on (caused by copper EMI gasket at bottom of case) but elegant it ain't. Lots more not to like on that design, but it's pretty well-known so I won't belabor the point.
OTOH, I am pleased to have a 500MHz G3 upgrade card in the machine. I do hope Apple continues to have such user-friendly upgrade paths available on the new machines.
- Leo