In the MacOS 10.3 days, I briefly switched my work machine from Mail.app over to Thunderbird. However, with the MacOS 10.4 upgrade (and Spotlight integration), I went back to Mail.app. These days, I'd seriously consider Thunderbird again *if* it integrated with Apple's address book and callendar iApps (and hopefully spotlight as well). I'm sorry, but I don't need all my schedule/contact info in several different places.
Mail.app on the other hand, does a very nice job with its basic set of features, but entirely ignores anything beyond that. (which is one of the reasons I went from Safari back to Firefox when Firefox 1.5 came out and fixed all the "quirks" that Firefox 1.0 used to have on MacOS)
I guess I just cheat, by running my own IMAP server;-)
Still, it's great to have, especially after my school's CompSci department's IMAP server got me hooked.
I really like what I can do with Cyrus IMAP, though, especially with the sieve server-side filtering. Really nice to have my mail-filter rules independent of my mail client too.
This reminds me of a certain class of hardware, which includes such things as older fiber/fibre-anything (cables, cards, FC hard drives, FDDI gear), older (and sometimes not so old) real-UNIX gear (Sun, IBM RS/6000, SGI, etc.)
Basically, within this class, you have vendors that either list their price as "Call", or have prices so high you're certain they're not selling ANYTHING. After all, it is impossible to justify their prices even in the context of new equipment prices. Meanwhile, you have places like eBay (or less-flashy vendors you heard about by word-of-mouth) selling the same stuff for pocketchange.
For example, try looking for fiber patch cables, FC hard drives, or Sun Enterprise system boards (for older systems). You'll see what I'm talking about.
This reminds me of what I had to sit through in college... They called them "studio classes". While it worked real well for certain types of classes, I think the *only* reason they didn't realize it sucked for Physics was because many students already had a strong background from highschool. (I was at an engineering school.)
Each class had the following format: - TA reviews last night's homework - Professor gives a brief lecture - Take the on-line pre-lab quiz - Do the lab, which involves working in groups to do a bunch of stuff and collect a bunch of data. Often, you only had time to complete 2/3 of the lab. - Take the on-line post-lab quiz
Homework was completed online where you had to calculate exact answers and put them into a web-based system.
Not only did I learn nothing with this method, but I had a much harder time since I didn't have a very good Physics teacher in high school. You spend so much time in the "grind" of completing each class, that you don't even have time to actually LEARN anything from the class. Heck, it was a few class periods before I even LEARNED THE NAMES of my friggin group members!
Have you ever seen the average "start menu" of an average Windows machine? Once I go to "Programs", I get a list that fills the screen (or scrolls on newer versions) of vendor names! Makes it almost impossible to find ANYTHING unless you already know what piece of software you're looking for! The only way to get a usable programs menu in Windows is to completely reorganize it manually.
The only reason you don't see TiVo offering you anything interesting is because you havn't used TiVo. Heck, even TiVo's "speculative recording" is enough to get me addicted. I can't say how many times I want to watch some TV, but nothing good is on (or it's not a show-start time), and TiVo just happened to record something that was on last night when I was doing something else.
Also, I think some of the BrightHouse DVRs (not all, thankfully), can't properly "record all episodes of this show, but do not record reruns". (something TiVo calls "Season Pass", and has done correctly from day 1)
TiVo also has other value-added features I may not use as much, given the channels I watch. For example, during some commercials and/or show promos, it'll show an indicator where you can press a remote button to schedule a recording of that show, or get an additional preview/info segment.
Additionally, TiVo is always expanding their Internet-based add-ons which even include internet radio and some Yahoo! account hooks on the latest revisions.
As I recently got a trial BrightHouse DVR when I switched my cable service from Adelphia, I had to make the choice again myself. In the end, I could sum up my opinion in the following sentence:
"The BrightHouse DVR may have better hardware than the TiVo, but the TiVo has MUCH BETTER software".
With this new Series3 box, it looks like the hardware will now be fixed as well.
You people just don't realize that the draw of TiVo is really their value-added stuff that even the cable-company DVRs don't have. Also, once you get used to the TiVo, you feel like you're *missing something* on other offerings.
First, TiVo *just works*, and it works well for everything it is supposed to do. No tweaking required.
Second, the cable-company DVRs don't support home networking (while MythTV would, of course), and it is very nice to have TiVos in multiple rooms, or be able to play MP3s on TiVo, transfer stuff around, or use other value-added Internet-enabled "stuff" they're constantly adding.
Third, other options only record "exactly what you tell them to", and nothing more. While this may seem ok, one gets very easily addicted to TiVo's tendency to also record things it thinks you might want to watch (and sometimes do), but havn't explicitly told it to record.
Oh, and you can also do nifty things like schedule recordings over the internet, and even check the available recording list on your TiVo remotely.
(Ok, MythTV can do some of these things, but from the demos I saw, it required far too much "tweaking" for me to feel comfortable "trusting" it to always get my shows reliably recorded, and recorded without reruns and such. I actually do also have a MythTV box, but I use it for playing computer-stored video files and running game emulators.)
Regardless, that doesn't mean people should be driving without signaling. (I think I heard a rumor that it may be illegal again, but not sure there.)
I also hate those people who always warble about your rear, and lane-shift without so much as a second thought at the first indication that you might slow down. While I obviously don't wish anyone else to get hurt on the road, I've often-times wanted a hypothetical situation where one of those a-holes was hovering on my rear, I tapped the breaks just long enough for my brakelight to blink, and they lane-shifted straight into another car or a concrete barrier.
And these days, it seems the post-football-game slot has the following order... Simpsons...some show I don't care about... Family Guy American Dad
I have my TiVo set to record the 3 above-mentioned shows. As such, when the game runs long, I usually just get Family Guy spread across two recordings. Then I hop on a BitTorrent search engine and dig up the other two shows. Thankfully I've got an HTPC, so I can still watch 'em on the TV.
It would be really neat if TiVo were capable of changing its scheduling around long-running football games and other interruptions, but I really don't know how it would get the data to be able to do so.
I wish "failing to signal" was treated more seriously as a road offense, or at least noticed more often. If I had a nickel for every time I saw someone lane-shift without signalling, I'd be rich.
Around here (central Florida), I've observed the following common road habits: 1) Turn signals are optional, and often not used when lane-shifting. When they are used, half the time its some nimwit tourist on I-4 who forgot to turn off the signal when originally getting onto the highway. 2) When a light first turns from Yellow to Red, 2 more cars are allowed through. (at least there's enough of a delay before on-coming traffic starts, that I havn't seen a side-smash personally)
Of course a few months ago I was rear-ended (totalling my car, which was probably due for replacement anyways) while in a LEFT TURN LANE sitting at a FULL STOP. Thankfully I was just *about* to turn, and thus the on-coming lanes were clear, and I thus wasn't side-smashed after the rear-ending.
I think the most important thing to remember is that while you should follow the rules, you can never expect anyone else to. So always be on the look-out, and start to figure out common behaviors of other drivers where you live so you can predict them better.
Of course speed limits are another interesting thing... (which you should follow *officially* and while taking driving tests, but are governed by different rules in reality) It seems like a speed limit is determined by the following process: 1) Do a traffic study of the road, and figure out what speed everyone should be driving. 2) Subtract 5-10 MPH from that number 3) Post signs As such, everyone always drives 5-10MPH over the limit (seems like I see 10MPH much more often for *good* drivers, and even more for reckless ones), and you don't realize it is "speeding".
I've also noticed two major classes of SUV drivers:
1) Men who drive like jack-asses who always "must pass you" (regardless of your speed, or how fast they eventually want to be going themselves) and generally are a danger to the road. (Originally, this was most of them.)
2) Women who drive like large road obstructions and are probably a danger because they motivate everyone to want to pass them, and many people are probably careless at how they pass cars in front of them. (Today, I see plenty of these as well)
In other words, two drastically different driver styles, and you now never know what to predict from SUV drivers. In the end, it seems like SUVs have basically replaced the mini-van for many people, and the station wagon (which you could actually see around) is essentially obsolete.
At least with pick-up trucks, people generally buy them because they actually want a utilitarian vehicle. (even if they don't always use them as such)
Well, the Military used to be heavily standards-focused. While they may still be in some areas, these days they tend to prefer "giving the contractor flexibility" since providing "design direction" isn't what the gov't is supposed to be doing anymore. So today they may place less of an emphasis as they used to. Of course "interoperability" is another big buzzword, so they probably still do focus on standards for system-to-system interfaces.
I would also argue that not all Walmart stores are created equally, or have the same customer bases. For example, the Walmarts in upstate NY (where I went to college) were generally decent have-everything stores with a decent customer base. On the flip-side, the Wallmart where I live now has far more "trash" customers, a horrible parking lot, and is always a dump and a royal pain to get to unless its the middle of the night. In fact, I dislike it so much that I'll more readily go to Target (also bad parking lot, but more "decent" customer base, even if the selection isn't as good) or other stores.
People who are near the Walmarts full of "human trash" customers tend to get a skewed impression of the stores. While people near the Walmarts with "decent folk" customers also get a differently skewed impression. Which one is more prevalent? I'm really not sure.
Hehe... I used to run a machine that drew 800W. Of course that actually wasn't bad at all, when you consider what sort of machine it was...
Sun Enterprise 4000 8 x UltraSPARC-II processors 2GB RAM (in 32MB DIMMs, so *a lot of sticks*) (CPUs and RAM spread across 4 CPU/Memory boards) 2 hard drives 2 I/O boards (ethernet, SCSI, fibre channel, etc.) CD-ROM drive, tape drive 3-4 x 300W power supplies 184W "peripheral" power supply (for the cdrom drive, tape drive, some extra backplane voltages)
So for all that, 800W is actually pretty good.
I eventually replaced that with a Sun Blade 1000 (workstation turned into a server) that only draws 300W (power supply rated for 925W, I think).
Meanwhile, my file server (2 x P3, 6 drives, cd-rom, tape, lots of cards, fancy redundant power supply) only uses about 230W.
Oh, and my Athlon64 Whizbanger desktop (/w a TruPower 550W supply) uses under 200W.
Yes, having a Kill-a-Watt is really nice for figuring this all out:)
(even told me that my managed ethernet switches use more power than I thought)
While we keep getting faster downstream bandwidth (up to 5Mbps on RoadRunner at home now), providers are still stingy as all hell on the upstream. (got 384Kbps now, just as bad as when I had 1.5Mbps downstream ADSL)
Everyone is always advertising faster speeds, only focusing on increases in the downstream, but no one is ever trying to advertise faster upstream speeds.
Highly asymmetric internet connections (and the proliferation of NAT, to some degree) are leading to a very one-way Internet. Its all about "access to content", and never "peer-to-peer networking". I can download files from major sites very quickly, but sending files outside of my residence takes forever. Heck, video conferencing probably isn't that usable either without strict QoS controls and loads of compression.
This is especially frustrating as the prices for more and more high-speed highly-asymmetric connections keep falling, but the price for even low-speed symmetric connections are staying around the same. It gets very annoying at work, because I'm in a small office that cannot justify anything more than ADSL. So whenever anyone sends an e-mail with attachments, it takes forever and causes latency on everyone else's connections to go through the roof. (Yes, I know this can be fixed with traffic shaping like I do at home. No, I don't have the ability to do that here since I'm not the IT admin.)
It won't be able to receive new mail. However, you will still have full access to all the mail you did receive when the connection was up. This can be very useful if you're "on the go".
I couldn't agree more with that suggestion. For my mail server, I run IMAP (specifically Cyrus IMAPD) with server-side filtering rules (using sieve). These rules basically filter things caught by spamassassin and messages from mailing lists into their appropriate mail folters.
On the client side, I can use whatever the heck I want. I use KMail on my desktop, Mail.app on my laptop (it's a PowerBook), pine when I ssh in remotely, and RoundCube for Webmail (new AJAX thing, still heavily development/featureless, but very nice and clean look/feel).
It is so nice that my e-mail is not tied to my e-mail client in any way, shape, or form.:-)
How about Zope? Wouldn't that at least somewhat quality as a web application container for Python? (even if it is more application-specific than something like Tomcat)
Which is the exact issue that probably motivates a lot of software and movie/music piracy, especially among teenagers and college students...
You basically have a choice: "Equipment" or "Media". You cannot use one without the other. You really cannot afford both, if you want decent equipment. You have to buy the equipment, unless you want to commit a flagrant criminal act. So the choice often is to buy the equipment (or get it as a gift), and pirate the media.
It's even worse with some laptops, where you don't even have the ability to do a clean reinstall. Someone here had a Toshiba tablet PC laptop, and she's always annoyed by all the crapped up gunk that Toshiba puts into Windows. She's even said that its probably the cause of nearly all her problems with the machine. Only issue is that she can't do a clean re-install, because Microsoft licenses the tablet version of Windows to OEMs in a manner such that they can make very platform-specific customizations, and doesn't sell it as a standalone and compatable product. As such, to get the tablet features, she has to use the Toshiba-packaged crapped-up version.
I wonder if this problem has gotten better or worse over the years... (as I remember the days of "Packard Bell Navigator" and *shudder*)
I still remember back around late middle-school/early high-school (when I fixed people's computers as a side-job). I had my custom build and nicely configured 486DX2-66, and my upgrade cycle was offset by a year or two from many people in my area. So all these people I knew had just upgraded to new Pentium-based machines, which on-paper were probably better than mine by a long way. (of course they were also mostly store-bought crap) In any case, these machines were all so overloaded with gunk that in actual use, my measly 486 was *much* faster and thrashed *much* less often.
(Yes, this was all in the early/middle Win9X days... Back then my only Linux tinkerings was a brief flirtation with SLS, and eventually some version of Slackware that came in a Linux book I bought.)
Of course my 486 only had 8MB of RAM, which was pretty sweet when I first got it (most friends had machines with 4MB, and our previous family machine had 2MB). Heck, I even had a friend who had a 386DX-40 with 4MB who managed to tweak Win95 so well that he could usably run several programs on it at the same time. Ahh, those where the days, when tweaking and squeezing every last ounce out of one's desktop was a big factor that separated the geeks from the average luser. (and when the accelerated XFree86 x server actually had *faster* graphics than Windows)
OSX actually does expose a lot of systems administration things to the command line. Only problem is that Apple only does this on the "server" version of their OS, and as such we've never seen such commands on our "desktop" versions. You'll have to dig up Apple documentation for the details.
Another thing I really like about Linux is how it caused a resurgance of interest in UNIX-based software development. Oh, and the kindling of the popular conception that you shouldn't have to pay $$$ just to be able to write software for the platform.
One other annoyance with the older commercial UNIX'es, even when they ran on x86, was the software developer mentality of "This is the UNIX version, therefore we must charge much more than we do for the DOS version of the product."
I wonder how many people bought separate DOS-based PCs because it was cheaper/eaiser than getting the versions of their software that would run on that single UNIX machine with terminals all over the office...
If you oversimply the GUI interface, then you are limiting yourself to basically two user groups: "grandma" and "the ubergeek who can drop to the shell and do it all there"
The problem is that for MANY windows users (who actually know how to use Windows), this paradigm is *useless*. They need a useful and configurable GUI that actually exposes all the options, and would be able to FIGURE IT OUT. (while "dropping to the shell and poking at config files" would probably still baffle them)
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In the MacOS 10.3 days, I briefly switched my work machine from Mail.app over to Thunderbird. However, with the MacOS 10.4 upgrade (and Spotlight integration), I went back to Mail.app. These days, I'd seriously consider Thunderbird again *if* it integrated with Apple's address book and callendar iApps (and hopefully spotlight as well). I'm sorry, but I don't need all my schedule/contact info in several different places.
Mail.app on the other hand, does a very nice job with its basic set of features, but entirely ignores anything beyond that. (which is one of the reasons I went from Safari back to Firefox when Firefox 1.5 came out and fixed all the "quirks" that Firefox 1.0 used to have on MacOS)
I guess I just cheat, by running my own IMAP server ;-)
Still, it's great to have, especially after my school's CompSci department's IMAP server got me hooked.
I really like what I can do with Cyrus IMAP, though, especially with the sieve server-side filtering. Really nice to have my mail-filter rules independent of my mail client too.
This reminds me of a certain class of hardware, which includes such things as older fiber/fibre-anything (cables, cards, FC hard drives, FDDI gear), older (and sometimes not so old) real-UNIX gear (Sun, IBM RS/6000, SGI, etc.)
Basically, within this class, you have vendors that either list their price as "Call", or have prices so high you're certain they're not selling ANYTHING. After all, it is impossible to justify their prices even in the context of new equipment prices. Meanwhile, you have places like eBay (or less-flashy vendors you heard about by word-of-mouth) selling the same stuff for pocketchange.
For example, try looking for fiber patch cables, FC hard drives, or Sun Enterprise system boards (for older systems). You'll see what I'm talking about.
This reminds me of what I had to sit through in college... They called them "studio classes". While it worked real well for certain types of classes, I think the *only* reason they didn't realize it sucked for Physics was because many students already had a strong background from highschool. (I was at an engineering school.)
Each class had the following format:
- TA reviews last night's homework
- Professor gives a brief lecture
- Take the on-line pre-lab quiz
- Do the lab, which involves working in groups to do a bunch of stuff and collect a bunch of data. Often, you only had time to complete 2/3 of the lab.
- Take the on-line post-lab quiz
Homework was completed online where you had to calculate exact answers and put them into a web-based system.
Not only did I learn nothing with this method, but I had a much harder time since I didn't have a very good Physics teacher in high school. You spend so much time in the "grind" of completing each class, that you don't even have time to actually LEARN anything from the class. Heck, it was a few class periods before I even LEARNED THE NAMES of my friggin group members!
Have you ever seen the average "start menu" of an average Windows machine? Once I go to "Programs", I get a list that fills the screen (or scrolls on newer versions) of vendor names! Makes it almost impossible to find ANYTHING unless you already know what piece of software you're looking for! The only way to get a usable programs menu in Windows is to completely reorganize it manually.
The only reason you don't see TiVo offering you anything interesting is because you havn't used TiVo. Heck, even TiVo's "speculative recording" is enough to get me addicted. I can't say how many times I want to watch some TV, but nothing good is on (or it's not a show-start time), and TiVo just happened to record something that was on last night when I was doing something else.
Also, I think some of the BrightHouse DVRs (not all, thankfully), can't properly "record all episodes of this show, but do not record reruns". (something TiVo calls "Season Pass", and has done correctly from day 1)
TiVo also has other value-added features I may not use as much, given the channels I watch. For example, during some commercials and/or show promos, it'll show an indicator where you can press a remote button to schedule a recording of that show, or get an additional preview/info segment.
Additionally, TiVo is always expanding their Internet-based add-ons which even include internet radio and some Yahoo! account hooks on the latest revisions.
As I recently got a trial BrightHouse DVR when I switched my cable service from Adelphia, I had to make the choice again myself. In the end, I could sum up my opinion in the following sentence:
"The BrightHouse DVR may have better hardware than the TiVo, but the TiVo has MUCH BETTER software".
With this new Series3 box, it looks like the hardware will now be fixed as well.
You people just don't realize that the draw of TiVo is really their value-added stuff that even the cable-company DVRs don't have. Also, once you get used to the TiVo, you feel like you're *missing something* on other offerings.
First, TiVo *just works*, and it works well for everything it is supposed to do. No tweaking required.
Second, the cable-company DVRs don't support home networking (while MythTV would, of course), and it is very nice to have TiVos in multiple rooms, or be able to play MP3s on TiVo, transfer stuff around, or use other value-added Internet-enabled "stuff" they're constantly adding.
Third, other options only record "exactly what you tell them to", and nothing more. While this may seem ok, one gets very easily addicted to TiVo's tendency to also record things it thinks you might want to watch (and sometimes do), but havn't explicitly told it to record.
Oh, and you can also do nifty things like schedule recordings over the internet, and even check the available recording list on your TiVo remotely.
(Ok, MythTV can do some of these things, but from the demos I saw, it required far too much "tweaking" for me to feel comfortable "trusting" it to always get my shows reliably recorded, and recorded without reruns and such. I actually do also have a MythTV box, but I use it for playing computer-stored video files and running game emulators.)
Regardless, that doesn't mean people should be driving without signaling.
(I think I heard a rumor that it may be illegal again, but not sure there.)
I also hate those people who always warble about your rear, and lane-shift without so much as a second thought at the first indication that you might slow down. While I obviously don't wish anyone else to get hurt on the road, I've often-times wanted a hypothetical situation where one of those a-holes was hovering on my rear, I tapped the breaks just long enough for my brakelight to blink, and they lane-shifted straight into another car or a concrete barrier.
And these days, it seems the post-football-game slot has the following order... ...some show I don't care about...
Simpsons
Family Guy
American Dad
I have my TiVo set to record the 3 above-mentioned shows. As such, when the game runs long, I usually just get Family Guy spread across two recordings. Then I hop on a BitTorrent search engine and dig up the other two shows. Thankfully I've got an HTPC, so I can still watch 'em on the TV.
It would be really neat if TiVo were capable of changing its scheduling around long-running football games and other interruptions, but I really don't know how it would get the data to be able to do so.
I wish "failing to signal" was treated more seriously as a road offense, or at least noticed more often. If I had a nickel for every time I saw someone lane-shift without signalling, I'd be rich.
Around here (central Florida), I've observed the following common road habits:
1) Turn signals are optional, and often not used when lane-shifting. When they are used, half the time its some nimwit tourist on I-4 who forgot to turn off the signal when originally getting onto the highway.
2) When a light first turns from Yellow to Red, 2 more cars are allowed through. (at least there's enough of a delay before on-coming traffic starts, that I havn't seen a side-smash personally)
Of course a few months ago I was rear-ended (totalling my car, which was probably due for replacement anyways) while in a LEFT TURN LANE sitting at a FULL STOP. Thankfully I was just *about* to turn, and thus the on-coming lanes were clear, and I thus wasn't side-smashed after the rear-ending.
I think the most important thing to remember is that while you should follow the rules, you can never expect anyone else to. So always be on the look-out, and start to figure out common behaviors of other drivers where you live so you can predict them better.
Of course speed limits are another interesting thing... (which you should follow *officially* and while taking driving tests, but are governed by different rules in reality)
It seems like a speed limit is determined by the following process:
1) Do a traffic study of the road, and figure out what speed everyone should be driving.
2) Subtract 5-10 MPH from that number
3) Post signs
As such, everyone always drives 5-10MPH over the limit (seems like I see 10MPH much more often for *good* drivers, and even more for reckless ones), and you don't realize it is "speeding".
I've also noticed two major classes of SUV drivers:
1) Men who drive like jack-asses who always "must pass you" (regardless of your speed, or how fast they eventually want to be going themselves) and generally are a danger to the road. (Originally, this was most of them.)
2) Women who drive like large road obstructions and are probably a danger because they motivate everyone to want to pass them, and many people are probably careless at how they pass cars in front of them. (Today, I see plenty of these as well)
In other words, two drastically different driver styles, and you now never know what to predict from SUV drivers. In the end, it seems like SUVs have basically replaced the mini-van for many people, and the station wagon (which you could actually see around) is essentially obsolete.
At least with pick-up trucks, people generally buy them because they actually want a utilitarian vehicle. (even if they don't always use them as such)
Well, the Military used to be heavily standards-focused. While they may still be in some areas, these days they tend to prefer "giving the contractor flexibility" since providing "design direction" isn't what the gov't is supposed to be doing anymore. So today they may place less of an emphasis as they used to. Of course "interoperability" is another big buzzword, so they probably still do focus on standards for system-to-system interfaces.
I would also argue that not all Walmart stores are created equally, or have the same customer bases. For example, the Walmarts in upstate NY (where I went to college) were generally decent have-everything stores with a decent customer base. On the flip-side, the Wallmart where I live now has far more "trash" customers, a horrible parking lot, and is always a dump and a royal pain to get to unless its the middle of the night. In fact, I dislike it so much that I'll more readily go to Target (also bad parking lot, but more "decent" customer base, even if the selection isn't as good) or other stores.
People who are near the Walmarts full of "human trash" customers tend to get a skewed impression of the stores. While people near the Walmarts with "decent folk" customers also get a differently skewed impression. Which one is more prevalent? I'm really not sure.
Hehe... I used to run a machine that drew 800W. Of course that actually wasn't bad at all, when you consider what sort of machine it was...
:)
Sun Enterprise 4000
8 x UltraSPARC-II processors
2GB RAM (in 32MB DIMMs, so *a lot of sticks*)
(CPUs and RAM spread across 4 CPU/Memory boards)
2 hard drives
2 I/O boards (ethernet, SCSI, fibre channel, etc.)
CD-ROM drive, tape drive
3-4 x 300W power supplies
184W "peripheral" power supply (for the cdrom drive, tape drive, some extra backplane voltages)
So for all that, 800W is actually pretty good.
I eventually replaced that with a Sun Blade 1000 (workstation turned into a server) that only draws 300W (power supply rated for 925W, I think).
Meanwhile, my file server (2 x P3, 6 drives, cd-rom, tape, lots of cards, fancy redundant power supply) only uses about 230W.
Oh, and my Athlon64 Whizbanger desktop (/w a TruPower 550W supply) uses under 200W.
Yes, having a Kill-a-Watt is really nice for figuring this all out
(even told me that my managed ethernet switches use more power than I thought)
While we keep getting faster downstream bandwidth (up to 5Mbps on RoadRunner at home now), providers are still stingy as all hell on the upstream. (got 384Kbps now, just as bad as when I had 1.5Mbps downstream ADSL)
Everyone is always advertising faster speeds, only focusing on increases in the downstream, but no one is ever trying to advertise faster upstream speeds.
Highly asymmetric internet connections (and the proliferation of NAT, to some degree) are leading to a very one-way Internet. Its all about "access to content", and never "peer-to-peer networking". I can download files from major sites very quickly, but sending files outside of my residence takes forever. Heck, video conferencing probably isn't that usable either without strict QoS controls and loads of compression.
This is especially frustrating as the prices for more and more high-speed highly-asymmetric connections keep falling, but the price for even low-speed symmetric connections are staying around the same. It gets very annoying at work, because I'm in a small office that cannot justify anything more than ADSL. So whenever anyone sends an e-mail with attachments, it takes forever and causes latency on everyone else's connections to go through the roof. (Yes, I know this can be fixed with traffic shaping like I do at home. No, I don't have the ability to do that here since I'm not the IT admin.)
It won't be able to receive new mail. However, you will still have full access to all the mail you did receive when the connection was up. This can be very useful if you're "on the go".
I couldn't agree more with that suggestion.
:-)
For my mail server, I run IMAP (specifically Cyrus IMAPD) with server-side filtering rules (using sieve). These rules basically filter things caught by spamassassin and messages from mailing lists into their appropriate mail folters.
On the client side, I can use whatever the heck I want. I use KMail on my desktop, Mail.app on my laptop (it's a PowerBook), pine when I ssh in remotely, and RoundCube for Webmail (new AJAX thing, still heavily development/featureless, but very nice and clean look/feel).
It is so nice that my e-mail is not tied to my e-mail client in any way, shape, or form.
How about Zope? Wouldn't that at least somewhat quality as a web application container for Python? (even if it is more application-specific than something like Tomcat)
Which is the exact issue that probably motivates a lot of software and movie/music piracy, especially among teenagers and college students...
You basically have a choice: "Equipment" or "Media".
You cannot use one without the other.
You really cannot afford both, if you want decent equipment.
You have to buy the equipment, unless you want to commit a flagrant criminal act.
So the choice often is to buy the equipment (or get it as a gift), and pirate the media.
It's even worse with some laptops, where you don't even have the ability to do a clean reinstall. Someone here had a Toshiba tablet PC laptop, and she's always annoyed by all the crapped up gunk that Toshiba puts into Windows. She's even said that its probably the cause of nearly all her problems with the machine. Only issue is that she can't do a clean re-install, because Microsoft licenses the tablet version of Windows to OEMs in a manner such that they can make very platform-specific customizations, and doesn't sell it as a standalone and compatable product. As such, to get the tablet features, she has to use the Toshiba-packaged crapped-up version.
I wonder if this problem has gotten better or worse over the years... (as I remember the days of "Packard Bell Navigator" and *shudder*)
I still remember back around late middle-school/early high-school (when I fixed people's computers as a side-job). I had my custom build and nicely configured 486DX2-66, and my upgrade cycle was offset by a year or two from many people in my area. So all these people I knew had just upgraded to new Pentium-based machines, which on-paper were probably better than mine by a long way. (of course they were also mostly store-bought crap) In any case, these machines were all so overloaded with gunk that in actual use, my measly 486 was *much* faster and thrashed *much* less often.
(Yes, this was all in the early/middle Win9X days... Back then my only Linux tinkerings was a brief flirtation with SLS, and eventually some version of Slackware that came in a Linux book I bought.)
Of course my 486 only had 8MB of RAM, which was pretty sweet when I first got it (most friends had machines with 4MB, and our previous family machine had 2MB). Heck, I even had a friend who had a 386DX-40 with 4MB who managed to tweak Win95 so well that he could usably run several programs on it at the same time. Ahh, those where the days, when tweaking and squeezing every last ounce out of one's desktop was a big factor that separated the geeks from the average luser. (and when the accelerated XFree86 x server actually had *faster* graphics than Windows)
OSX actually does expose a lot of systems administration things to the command line. Only problem is that Apple only does this on the "server" version of their OS, and as such we've never seen such commands on our "desktop" versions. You'll have to dig up Apple documentation for the details.
Actually, it is possible to run an OSX server (Xserve anyways) with a pure serial console, believe it or not.
Another thing I really like about Linux is how it caused a resurgance of interest in UNIX-based software development. Oh, and the kindling of the popular conception that you shouldn't have to pay $$$ just to be able to write software for the platform.
One other annoyance with the older commercial UNIX'es, even when they ran on x86, was the software developer mentality of "This is the UNIX version, therefore we must charge much more than we do for the DOS version of the product."
I wonder how many people bought separate DOS-based PCs because it was cheaper/eaiser than getting the versions of their software that would run on that single UNIX machine with terminals all over the office...
If you oversimply the GUI interface, then you are limiting yourself to basically two user groups: "grandma" and "the ubergeek who can drop to the shell and do it all there"
The problem is that for MANY windows users (who actually know how to use Windows), this paradigm is *useless*. They need a useful and configurable GUI that actually exposes all the options, and would be able to FIGURE IT OUT. (while "dropping to the shell and poking at config files" would probably still baffle them)