Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
This is a bit of a loaded question. It comes with the slant that everybody who uses Windows is either ignorant and/or unaware of the alternatives or are forced to against their will. I'll play the devil's advocate and answer it, anyway. Not only do I have an MCSE and as my job support/manage a MS Server 2003/XP enviornment but I also have pretty vast experience with Solaris (from my college CS and Helpdesk years), Linux and FreeBSD. I consider myself very technical and could use any of them for the right purpose. I use Windows XP at work and on a desktop replacement laptop that I own and I run Gentoo and SUSE SLES 9 on my desktop PC. Here are my thoughts...
Windows XP "just works" (tm). It took me all of 4-5 hours to get it installed and all of the software I use set up the way I want it to be on my laptop and then I Ghosted the image to an external USB2 HD I picked up for cheap. If I want to make a substantial change in my setup/software load I revert to that image and bring it up to date with the change and re-ghost to have handy for insurance. If I have any issues at all, or my hard drive fails, I just revert to that image and in about 15 minutes and am ready to go as if it was the first day of my Windows install with no further effort or problems. Suspend to memory and disk just works. The wireless networking just works. As a matter of fact all of my hardware and drivers and software just works. I can play all of the latest games like Half-Life 2, Doom III and WoW without issue. I not only can run Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop and alot of commercial software that I know inside and out and paid for but I can run pretty much any open source software that I like through a usually good Windows port or through VMWare at the same time. I keep a pretty minimalistic FreeBSD install in VMWare 5 on the laptop for those times that I yearn for a Unix tool or shell for one task or another. I have not, in the year and a half I have had the laptop, ever had a crash or issue that caused me problems with my XP install. I have had many issues with Gentoo over the last year and a half. I always figure out how to fix them and enjoy working through the problems but I find that I would rather run Unix through VMWare under Windows to use my Unix tools than to run Windows and it's apps (which I need) over a Unix base that I find to be less certain a platform as far as changes or knowing that it will work perfectly on any given day.
So, in short, I really like Windows XP and prefer it to any other operating system for my day to day computing. This especially true with laptops when it comes to power management and suspending - areas where Linux and even more so FreeBSD are lacking. Though, like the saying goes, it is the devil that I know and it is best for me to stick with it since I have invested my time and money in it and know well how to keep it stable, secure and working properly. I keep up with the OSS OSes to stay up to date with the industry and my options and feel that I am making an informed decision.
I preface this with the disclaimer that if you have a large enough amount of unix/linux and Mac clients that you loose alot of the reasons for and functionality of AD.
When it comes down to it, in a Windows enviornment, Active Directory is second to none. With W2K3 they let you get much more fine-grained with your replication, site-links and routing than in 2K which caused some companies with many sites some slowness and issues (as some of the other posters have mentioned). It has gotten to the point where, when you have at least 2 servers for replication/redundancy, it is bulletproof, well understood, tested and trusted in the industry.
As with any other product you need to get the manuals and see the best practices for how MS would have you configure the tree, the sites and the security groups and permissions. I have seen people try to wing it because it has a GUI and the results are rather poor. Done right AD is a near flawless solution to the directory services problem. It lets you configure almost any setting on a 2K or XP workstation through Group Policy. It lets you implement a software deployment/management system (MS SMS) that will install/upgrade softare either on a user or a PC basis. It is cheaper than most of the other corporate solutions that lack this level of ease of control over the workstations.
People here talk about forced upgrades but I have clients still using NT4 domains, servers and workstations after 10 years and they have not been forced so that is rather BS. MS supports their solution and will keep it viable and steady far longer than many of these open source projects may well. It is something that, if your organization grows, it is easy to hire somebody to help maintain and interact with as it is the industry standard.
As a previous poster said, if you are a MS house already, just buy it already. If you are going to use Exhange even more so you need AD. It seems to be the clear choice.
Switched from Firefox to Opera recently
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Opera Free as in Beer
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have been a loyal user of the Mozilla Foundations efforts since early versions of the Mozilla client and straight through to the most recent version of Firefox. I have used their browser because I felt it was faster/safer/cleaner than IE and it has served me well in keeping spyware and adware free.
I had tried Opera years ago and it just didn't click with me. The ads were intrusive in some of the earlier versions and I ended up going right back to Mozilla. However, when Opera was doing their birthday bash code giveaway thing recently I tried it again. I have been impressed enough where I have switched to it as my primary browser. It is everything I want in a browser - small, fast, feature-filled and slick out of the box. This is particularly obvious on an older P3M laptop that I use where Opera is much faster than Firefox. I think that the feature that really drove me over the edge though is the password saving/form filling wand. It saves passwords that Firefox won't and it makes it one click to log into any web page or online banking site I use. I have yet to find a site it won't remember/prefill.
All in all I would suggest that anyone who doesn't understand what people see in Opera give it a try for a day or so and make an informed choice. What do you have to loose?
If there is anyone from Opera reading this I want to thank you for your wonderful browser. The newly free version is a great gift to the world and I, for one, am appreciative.
You can say that the Linux browsers are backward compatible but I would like to see you take modern v ersions of Firefox or KDE and the like and build/install it on a distribution from 1999/2000. Can you imagine the library differences or the effort you would have with upgrading all of the RPMs in a version of RedHat from that era. Now, since you are charged for most of the commercial Linux distros when you are told to upgrade the distro for the sake of getting modern libraries you are in essence being told to upgrade to get a modern browser and modern versions of all of the software. This is totally ok but when MS wants to depricate their OSes in the same way you hear "they are charging $100 for just a browser upgrade." You are not paying just for a browser upgrade but an upgrade to all of the latest versions of everyting in the OS and you are paying for the security and bug fix updates for years and years. MS is a company and they put out a good product in modern windows and office that is worth paying for. I love and I use Linux but I get disgusted occasionally by such bias, double-standards and MS-can-do-no-right additude.
Given the wonderful job IBM has done promoting OS/2 and promoting Lotus SmartSuite and all of the other myriad products that have failed due to poor marketing and execution on their part I am not holding my breath that this boutique architecture will ever make it out of the outrageously expensive corportate data center. If you are going to be running Linux anyway I can't see that it is worth the price increase and the trouble to do it on Power. How many more Opteron boxes can you buy for the same money? How much easier of a time will you have getting it working and running the apps that you want?
There was alot there but let me respond to some of it.
I was aware that you couldn't sync it with Linux (which I run at home) but not about OSX which I agree is a bit of a bummer for those Macheads out there. Since I usually charge/sync it with my work PC (XP) and MS exchange that hasn't been an issue for me.
I let all of the apps install to the default location and install into System Memory and I have never had a problem. I use the storage card only for documents/music/videos/backups. I had a few of the issues you mentioned but I installed all my apps and on a freshly cleared device and then backed it up in that state with both ActiveSync and also the Dell included Backup application on the PDA. If I have any weird issues, which has been rare for me, it takes me all of a minute to restore the 25MB virgin system backup image on my storage card to get the PC back to the freshly installed state in the field. I look at this as the same way I treat XP machines problems ala Ghost. Build a nice image of your PDA and keep it handy for a quick fix.
As for memory management/app switching in the base OS I agree that is less than ideal. The OS doesn't close programs when you close them but instead leaves them open - behavior that I didn't expect. Dell bundles that switcher bar app which pretty much makes up for functionality that MS should have included to allow you to close apps and easily switch between them. Since Dell did that, though, it isn't a problem for me. When I use that to close out apps I am no longer using I don't run out of memory - and I usually have 4-5 apps open at a time.
As for MS porting their NT kernel/APIs to the PDA that is actually a good thing. Who wants to learn a different set of APIs and tools when they don't have to? Why rewrite something from scratch when you have a known and tested place to start from? If you want a PDA with the kind of functionalily we are using our PDAs for you need a modern OS - early PalmOS didn't even multitask etc. MS was ahead of the curve in realizing these are the things we would want to do. You arn't complaining here that these people are porting the linux kernel and many of it's libs to these devices so this isn't a negative if you don't hate MS's kernel and APIs - which you seem to.
I have a Dell Axim X30 and I could not be more impressed with MS's latest PDA OS offerings. The unit is cheap, light, fast, stable and with pretty respectable battery life. It has loads of impressive software availible for it. I had a Palm based PDA/Cellphone hybrid for two years and had gotten used to Grafiti - the Transcriber handwriting recognition that lets you just write whole sentances on the screen simply amazing and on an entirely different level. On top of normal note taking and scheduling I can view/edit word documents and excel spreadsheets. I can surf the web including secure online banking sites and check my email with a 802.11b wireless VPN connection. I can watch videos and play music. I can take over PCs using RDC or vnc and connect to them with ssh and ftp. I can read books and manuals in either the Adobe or MS e-book formats. I have never had a problem with any of these things - a testament to how well it has stood up to my extensive use.
From what I gather from the site Linux is nowhere near there on most, if not all, of these points. For your average user Linux might be there on the desktop, and it is my desktop OS, but it certainly is nowhere near there on the PDA. I enjoy tinkering with my PC OS but when it comes to my PDA it has to just work and it is for getting serious work done quickly. It is the device I turn to when all else fails to get the job done. This is one Linux user that is not going to be running Linux on his PDA. I think it is many years away from being close to functional in the way that I need it to be and the way MS's product is today. I give credit where it is due and MS is due it for their Windows Mobile OS.
No - the camera take a picture of the rear licence plate. The camera is positioned facing towards the booth about 10 feet back and at night you can see it flash forward at you in your rear view mirror. There is also one as you describe taking a picture of the occupants.
I live in Buffalo, NY and, with the drinking/gambling age being 19 in Canada and their dollar worth next to nothing in the last 90s, I spent a couple weekends a month for years going back and forth to Niagara Falls, Ontario to exercise these rights denied me. The Canadians, on the other hand, come down to the Buffalo area to escape their high GST sales taxes and higher Toronto prices just about as much as we go up there to party. The previous poster was right and this usually was just a formality where you had to name your citizenship and perhaps show them a driver's licence and have your licence plate to be photographed. I believe the automatic camera system that does this as you drive up does OCR and shows them your details in the booth but I have never been able to verify that.
Tens of thousands make this underage pilgrimage every weekend and I imagine you will see a huge number of passport applications in the area if this happens. Thankfully I will no longer have to wait in the traffic backups on the bridge this will create.
My understanding of the situation is this - the EU is saying that MS is exploiting it's desktop monopoly to sell servers since the client OSes do all these great things when coupled with a MS server they don't do with alternatives (ala Samba). Their solution is to make MS release enough code and/or protocols so as to allow competitors to recreate an Active Directory server and modern Domain Controller which will interoperate with the MS network client that is part of their desktop OSes.
I think the solution would be not to do what the EU is demanding but instead to point to the Novell type solution. Novell writes a client for Windows to alllow it to use an NDS Tree. That is MS's way out - do what the EU wants from that angle and make it really easy for a competitor to recreate all the functionality of AD with their own client/architecture/protocol hooked into the Windows desktop OS and basically tell the competitors to write their own implementation of a directory/file/print server client and server.
At the same time they should also release AD as a seperate product/service availible in both client and server varieties under a few OSes (Linux, MacOSX, etc). Basically tell them if they want something free they can write their own but if they want full AD functionality then they can run it anywhere but they will be buying it from MS. I think that is a fair and equitable solution. I would be interested to see what Samba could come up with if they were able to innovate their own solution to the problem instead of reverse-engineering the MS one.
In my experience Vonage has been amazing. I got the service after reading that I could take the box overseas and give it to a friend in Australia who I spend at least $100/month in long distance talking to. I figured it was worth a shot and got the service and tested it for a month or so here at home before I went down to visit. As long as I wasn't using a great deal of bandwidth at the time the call sound quality was great - and I received the linksys box which was supposedly the lesser option. I then took it with me when I went to visit Australia over the holidays and after getting a 240V Universal AC/DC adapter it worked without a hitch down there too - and behind two routers/NATs as well. My Australian friend now has a US local phone number and I have unlimited calling to them for $25/month saving me a fortune. If you have friends or family overseas who have any sort of broadband (she has a pretty limited speed DSL and it works fine) you will find this is the sort of innovation in technology that will really and truly make use of the internet to save you gobs and gobs of money.
From a country that can't adopt the metric system
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New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 1
Many of the same arguments could be made for the US adopting the metric system. I am sure that there are many applications that would be easier to code if we did. It would make alot of people's professions easier, would make us in sync with the rest of the world and would have saved certain Mars-bound space craft if we would have done it by now. Yet the US hasn't done it and likely never will. And that is a system of weights and measures that we have shown can be at odds with the rest of the world without too much trouble. Can you imagine some countries changing the calendar while others didn't? That sort of all or nothing proposition for changing something that is universal over the entire human race and has existed in it's current form for centuries with so little benefit is never going to happen.
On top of running your WEP encryption with a non-dictionary randomly generated key you should also be running a VPN through that and treating it as a insecure public connection. You might even want to make sure your interactions through sensitive material then be done with SSH/SecureFTP, or RSA for web pages, through the encypted tunnel through the encrypted wireless link. Of course, this is for anything sensitive like server administration or sensitive data transmission and might be overkill for some situations. But, if you don't go to these lengths, you shouldn't be sending data over wireless that you wouldn't want to get out.
I am sure this will be mentioned by others but as long as you are still telneting to reach your MUD then all of the text you type runs unencrypted through the net between you and the MUD server with just about as much security as email or unencrypted IM. Even if you did encrypt the communication I am one of the tinfoil hat types that believes that the government has those Billions of dollars worth of supercomputer for such a reason and if they REALLY wanted to read that conversation that they could. You might as well get used to the fact that you should never send something electronically that you wouldn't want the government to read or that would incriminate you. That is the only way that you will ever be 100% safe.
Contrary to what many here think, I believe that this is a good and reasonable decision. Right now they have an MS solution that is most likely near the end of life. They bought themselves a big discount and some time from MS by voicing their dissatisfaction and intent to look into open source so they might as well use it to provide a smooth transition while they wait for the opensource solution to come together and prove itself in the marketplace. I like Linux, and use it myself on the desktop when appropriate, but it still isn't a 100% solution and replacement for their desktop environment and it still hasn't proved itself in a comparable situation. Just think how the story would go if they tried to go to Linux prematurely and it failed and they had to go crawling back to MS. Can you imagine the press and the damage to Linux's reputation? This was by far the better thing for the Dutch, the better thing for Linux, and also a good thing for MS in the short term and gives them one last chance to prove their modern solution is superior to their previous generations and maybe good enough to take some of the reasons for a switch away. Given the progress on the desktop Linux front things might be alot different and more mature in two or three years and that OS and migration is the exposure that we want to give Linux. MS will also have a harder sell with Longhorn about that time. Just be patient and keep plugging along with development and testing and remember that when it comes to something this prominent and on this scale this we want to make a good first impression and not an embarrassing defeat.
If you with a straight face can say that a 1.7Ghz Pentium M Dothan (Which is the speed eqivilant of about an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ or Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz - see link below) is slower than a 1.33 Ghz G4 then it shows then I don't think we even can have an intelligent conversation because you, sir, are a zealot. Not to mention your iBook's RAM is only 266Mgz vs the 333Mgz stuff in the Inspiron. You can argue Apple on aesthetics but, with the possible exception of the dual-proc G5 tower, you certainly can't on performance and raw power - especially with their notebooks.
I recently had the good fortune to catch a deal on a Dell Inspiron 8600. There was this amazing near 50% off deal Dell ran for a day or two where a laptop costing at least $1500 you could get for as low as $750 (check out http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041019-4330.html for details).
So, for about $1000 I got a 1.7Ghz Pentium M Dothan with 512 MB ram, a DVD burner, a 15" wide aspect screen, bluetooth, 802.11g, 40 gig HD (upgraded it to a Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM), a second battery that can be swapped out for the DVD burner, a ATI Radeon 9600 w/128M and a 3 year warranty. This laptop and the Pentium M amazed me, with the two batteries I get over 6 hours battery life under normal usage. It even can run all of the latest games better than most new desktops.
Everything about this compares favorably to a $3000 PowerBook, if not exceeding it - especially in CPU performance, and it was 1/3 the price and 3 times the warrenty. It may have not been the case a year or two ago but Intel really closed the gap with the Pentium M/Centrino and battery life and form factor are now more than comparable with Apple at lower prices and better options.
I do own an 20GB iPod, by the way, and I love it. I have no desire to by a Mac, though, so this iPod to Mac conversion doesn't hold true in my case at least.
Just recently I had a quite old desktop (3 years or so) with barely any salvagable parts for an upgrade. I was faced with either building a new machine or buying a laptop. I also, being a big Linux/FreeBSD/Unix user and fan, was actually considering getting either an Apple desktop or laptop. I did my homework and searched around and weighed all of my options and settled on a Dell Inspiron 8600 w/1.7Ghz Dothan with 802.11 b/g and ATI 9600 graphics.
I had a bit of buyer's remorse waiting for it to get here even though I spent less on it than I did when I build my last desktop. I was worried a laptop couldn't take the place of a desktop that I could build much more cheaply but I was truely amazed. It compares favorably in every way with desktops in performance while giving me the sort of portability that in Intel based systems was previously unheard of. I get over 4 hours to a battery on this thing and a well under 10 pound travel weight when I want to take it with me. I remember when Apple had a huge lead in the battery life game with the G3/G4 vs the Mobile P3/P4 and that lead has completely eroded. Intel actually made a processor that uses less power without sacrificing much in the way of performance to get it.
I have moved completely to this laptop for all of my computing needs and it has the best of everything with seemingly no comprimise. I know that technology has progressed in the desktop scene as well but compared to the kind of freedom that we have been given in mobility with the increased performance and battery life coupled with wireless networking in the sort of package offered in the new Centrino notebook they don't compare. These notebooks are the sort of progress that changes the way we use a computer and work while being soo stark and beautiful a contrast and change that it truly feels that we have joined 21st century computing in a revolutionary feeling desktops just don't give. I for one will never by another desktop after a couple months with this laptop and suggest that rather than looking to the Pentium M as a desktop chip, as there are far cheaper for the purpose, you should take the plunge and buy a notebook with one and experience the quiet and the performance along with the portability and form factor change that can cut the wires and set you free.
The big thing behind this, besides the fact that all the cell carriers bill differently and it would be a bit of a nightmare to know how much it would cost from a landline or a competeing cell phone, is the fact that we don't have enough area codes. Unlike the European phone system we don't have enough area codes here for a cell phone number to be an obviously different dial than a land phone. My cell number is in the same area code (716) as all other cell phones and landlines in Western New York from all wireless and landline carriers. A few of the really large cities can afford to seperate them, but the vast majority of Americans are in the same situation. In order to get enough area codes for that we would have had to completely redesign the entire phone system for all of North America (Canada piggy backs on our system) to accomodate it. I really don't mind our pricing. It is really straighforward, when I am on the phone for X number of minutes I have X number of minutes deducted from my plan. For $45/month I get 600 minutes during the day and 4000 minutes nights and weekends with free roaming and long distance nation wide, and I can also use those same minutes to get on the internet on my PDA Smartphone or laptop with no additional charge. I have enough minutes where I never hit the limit so I don't care that people call me. And, since I call them on their phones too, what goes around comes around. What you call a complicated billing scheme I call the most simple and obvoius solution to our particular locale and situation.
I have been looking on the net and can't find a transcript of Job's keynote. I was interested to see whether they were going to announce an update to the TiBook where they were going to include the new Mobility Radeon 9000 sometime in the near future.
I have been thinking about buying a Ti PowerBook, what would be my first Apple. I have noticed they seem to put the latest and greatest from ATI in them. Up until this that was the Rage Mobility 7500, what is currently shipping in them. I can wait 3-4 months before buying it. What are the chances that they will have a new revision of the PowerBook with one of these by then?
The website says that it is an ideal location because it is 100 miles from a major population center, Las Vegas. There is a whole lot of nothing out west and I would think we could do better than 100 miles away from a big city. I personally wouldn't be too keen on having the nuclear waste for the whole country being dumped an hour and a half away.
Actually NY has gotten much more high tech with their new licences, more so than most states. All photos are now digital, they have a very complicated bar code with quite a bit of information encoded, and they have many many simple and effective anti-forgery technologies. They have symbols which appear under blacklight, microprint, and my personal favorite a very unique texture that has the interesting property that when you bend it in half and rub the front of the card together it has a sandy feel down the middle. Any body with one, try it. The first time I saw a lady at the casino make sure I had a vaid licence I was surprised to see her bend it in half as well as use the blacklight. They also have bar code readers to test validity at many alchohol stores, and the valid ones will alert them if the person is underage.
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This is a bit of a loaded question. It comes with the slant that everybody who uses Windows is either ignorant and/or unaware of the alternatives or are forced to against their will. I'll play the devil's advocate and answer it, anyway. Not only do I have an MCSE and as my job support/manage a MS Server 2003/XP enviornment but I also have pretty vast experience with Solaris (from my college CS and Helpdesk years), Linux and FreeBSD. I consider myself very technical and could use any of them for the right purpose. I use Windows XP at work and on a desktop replacement laptop that I own and I run Gentoo and SUSE SLES 9 on my desktop PC. Here are my thoughts...
Windows XP "just works" (tm). It took me all of 4-5 hours to get it installed and all of the software I use set up the way I want it to be on my laptop and then I Ghosted the image to an external USB2 HD I picked up for cheap. If I want to make a substantial change in my setup/software load I revert to that image and bring it up to date with the change and re-ghost to have handy for insurance. If I have any issues at all, or my hard drive fails, I just revert to that image and in about 15 minutes and am ready to go as if it was the first day of my Windows install with no further effort or problems. Suspend to memory and disk just works. The wireless networking just works. As a matter of fact all of my hardware and drivers and software just works. I can play all of the latest games like Half-Life 2, Doom III and WoW without issue. I not only can run Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop and alot of commercial software that I know inside and out and paid for but I can run pretty much any open source software that I like through a usually good Windows port or through VMWare at the same time. I keep a pretty minimalistic FreeBSD install in VMWare 5 on the laptop for those times that I yearn for a Unix tool or shell for one task or another. I have not, in the year and a half I have had the laptop, ever had a crash or issue that caused me problems with my XP install. I have had many issues with Gentoo over the last year and a half. I always figure out how to fix them and enjoy working through the problems but I find that I would rather run Unix through VMWare under Windows to use my Unix tools than to run Windows and it's apps (which I need) over a Unix base that I find to be less certain a platform as far as changes or knowing that it will work perfectly on any given day.
So, in short, I really like Windows XP and prefer it to any other operating system for my day to day computing. This especially true with laptops when it comes to power management and suspending - areas where Linux and even more so FreeBSD are lacking. Though, like the saying goes, it is the devil that I know and it is best for me to stick with it since I have invested my time and money in it and know well how to keep it stable, secure and working properly. I keep up with the OSS OSes to stay up to date with the industry and my options and feel that I am making an informed decision.
Only one man would dare give me the raspberry... LONESTAR!!!
I preface this with the disclaimer that if you have a large enough amount of unix/linux and Mac clients that you loose alot of the reasons for and functionality of AD.
When it comes down to it, in a Windows enviornment, Active Directory is second to none. With W2K3 they let you get much more fine-grained with your replication, site-links and routing than in 2K which caused some companies with many sites some slowness and issues (as some of the other posters have mentioned). It has gotten to the point where, when you have at least 2 servers for replication/redundancy, it is bulletproof, well understood, tested and trusted in the industry.
As with any other product you need to get the manuals and see the best practices for how MS would have you configure the tree, the sites and the security groups and permissions. I have seen people try to wing it because it has a GUI and the results are rather poor. Done right AD is a near flawless solution to the directory services problem. It lets you configure almost any setting on a 2K or XP workstation through Group Policy. It lets you implement a software deployment/management system (MS SMS) that will install/upgrade softare either on a user or a PC basis. It is cheaper than most of the other corporate solutions that lack this level of ease of control over the workstations.
People here talk about forced upgrades but I have clients still using NT4 domains, servers and workstations after 10 years and they have not been forced so that is rather BS. MS supports their solution and will keep it viable and steady far longer than many of these open source projects may well. It is something that, if your organization grows, it is easy to hire somebody to help maintain and interact with as it is the industry standard.
As a previous poster said, if you are a MS house already, just buy it already. If you are going to use Exhange even more so you need AD. It seems to be the clear choice.
I have been a loyal user of the Mozilla Foundations efforts since early versions of the Mozilla client and straight through to the most recent version of Firefox. I have used their browser because I felt it was faster/safer/cleaner than IE and it has served me well in keeping spyware and adware free.
I had tried Opera years ago and it just didn't click with me. The ads were intrusive in some of the earlier versions and I ended up going right back to Mozilla. However, when Opera was doing their birthday bash code giveaway thing recently I tried it again. I have been impressed enough where I have switched to it as my primary browser. It is everything I want in a browser - small, fast, feature-filled and slick out of the box. This is particularly obvious on an older P3M laptop that I use where Opera is much faster than Firefox. I think that the feature that really drove me over the edge though is the password saving/form filling wand. It saves passwords that Firefox won't and it makes it one click to log into any web page or online banking site I use. I have yet to find a site it won't remember/prefill.
All in all I would suggest that anyone who doesn't understand what people see in Opera give it a try for a day or so and make an informed choice. What do you have to loose?
If there is anyone from Opera reading this I want to thank you for your wonderful browser. The newly free version is a great gift to the world and I, for one, am appreciative.
You can say that the Linux browsers are backward compatible but I would like to see you take modern v ersions of Firefox or KDE and the like and build/install it on a distribution from 1999/2000. Can you imagine the library differences or the effort you would have with upgrading all of the RPMs in a version of RedHat from that era. Now, since you are charged for most of the commercial Linux distros when you are told to upgrade the distro for the sake of getting modern libraries you are in essence being told to upgrade to get a modern browser and modern versions of all of the software. This is totally ok but when MS wants to depricate their OSes in the same way you hear "they are charging $100 for just a browser upgrade." You are not paying just for a browser upgrade but an upgrade to all of the latest versions of everyting in the OS and you are paying for the security and bug fix updates for years and years. MS is a company and they put out a good product in modern windows and office that is worth paying for. I love and I use Linux but I get disgusted occasionally by such bias, double-standards and MS-can-do-no-right additude.
Given the wonderful job IBM has done promoting OS/2 and promoting Lotus SmartSuite and all of the other myriad products that have failed due to poor marketing and execution on their part I am not holding my breath that this boutique architecture will ever make it out of the outrageously expensive corportate data center. If you are going to be running Linux anyway I can't see that it is worth the price increase and the trouble to do it on Power. How many more Opteron boxes can you buy for the same money? How much easier of a time will you have getting it working and running the apps that you want?
There was alot there but let me respond to some of it.
I was aware that you couldn't sync it with Linux (which I run at home) but not about OSX which I agree is a bit of a bummer for those Macheads out there. Since I usually charge/sync it with my work PC (XP) and MS exchange that hasn't been an issue for me.
I let all of the apps install to the default location and install into System Memory and I have never had a problem. I use the storage card only for documents/music/videos/backups. I had a few of the issues you mentioned but I installed all my apps and on a freshly cleared device and then backed it up in that state with both ActiveSync and also the Dell included Backup application on the PDA. If I have any weird issues, which has been rare for me, it takes me all of a minute to restore the 25MB virgin system backup image on my storage card to get the PC back to the freshly installed state in the field. I look at this as the same way I treat XP machines problems ala Ghost. Build a nice image of your PDA and keep it handy for a quick fix.
As for memory management/app switching in the base OS I agree that is less than ideal. The OS doesn't close programs when you close them but instead leaves them open - behavior that I didn't expect. Dell bundles that switcher bar app which pretty much makes up for functionality that MS should have included to allow you to close apps and easily switch between them. Since Dell did that, though, it isn't a problem for me. When I use that to close out apps I am no longer using I don't run out of memory - and I usually have 4-5 apps open at a time.
As for MS porting their NT kernel/APIs to the PDA that is actually a good thing. Who wants to learn a different set of APIs and tools when they don't have to? Why rewrite something from scratch when you have a known and tested place to start from? If you want a PDA with the kind of functionalily we are using our PDAs for you need a modern OS - early PalmOS didn't even multitask etc. MS was ahead of the curve in realizing these are the things we would want to do. You arn't complaining here that these people are porting the linux kernel and many of it's libs to these devices so this isn't a negative if you don't hate MS's kernel and APIs - which you seem to.
I have a Dell Axim X30 and I could not be more impressed with MS's latest PDA OS offerings. The unit is cheap, light, fast, stable and with pretty respectable battery life. It has loads of impressive software availible for it. I had a Palm based PDA/Cellphone hybrid for two years and had gotten used to Grafiti - the Transcriber handwriting recognition that lets you just write whole sentances on the screen simply amazing and on an entirely different level. On top of normal note taking and scheduling I can view/edit word documents and excel spreadsheets. I can surf the web including secure online banking sites and check my email with a 802.11b wireless VPN connection. I can watch videos and play music. I can take over PCs using RDC or vnc and connect to them with ssh and ftp. I can read books and manuals in either the Adobe or MS e-book formats. I have never had a problem with any of these things - a testament to how well it has stood up to my extensive use.
From what I gather from the site Linux is nowhere near there on most, if not all, of these points. For your average user Linux might be there on the desktop, and it is my desktop OS, but it certainly is nowhere near there on the PDA. I enjoy tinkering with my PC OS but when it comes to my PDA it has to just work and it is for getting serious work done quickly. It is the device I turn to when all else fails to get the job done. This is one Linux user that is not going to be running Linux on his PDA. I think it is many years away from being close to functional in the way that I need it to be and the way MS's product is today. I give credit where it is due and MS is due it for their Windows Mobile OS.
I like the Case Western variant of the odds of finding women better - "The odds are bad and the goods are worse"
No - the camera take a picture of the rear licence plate. The camera is positioned facing towards the booth about 10 feet back and at night you can see it flash forward at you in your rear view mirror. There is also one as you describe taking a picture of the occupants.
Tens of thousands make this underage pilgrimage every weekend and I imagine you will see a huge number of passport applications in the area if this happens. Thankfully I will no longer have to wait in the traffic backups on the bridge this will create.
I think the solution would be not to do what the EU is demanding but instead to point to the Novell type solution. Novell writes a client for Windows to alllow it to use an NDS Tree. That is MS's way out - do what the EU wants from that angle and make it really easy for a competitor to recreate all the functionality of AD with their own client/architecture/protocol hooked into the Windows desktop OS and basically tell the competitors to write their own implementation of a directory/file/print server client and server.
At the same time they should also release AD as a seperate product/service availible in both client and server varieties under a few OSes (Linux, MacOSX, etc). Basically tell them if they want something free they can write their own but if they want full AD functionality then they can run it anywhere but they will be buying it from MS. I think that is a fair and equitable solution. I would be interested to see what Samba could come up with if they were able to innovate their own solution to the problem instead of reverse-engineering the MS one.
In my experience Vonage has been amazing. I got the service after reading that I could take the box overseas and give it to a friend in Australia who I spend at least $100/month in long distance talking to. I figured it was worth a shot and got the service and tested it for a month or so here at home before I went down to visit. As long as I wasn't using a great deal of bandwidth at the time the call sound quality was great - and I received the linksys box which was supposedly the lesser option. I then took it with me when I went to visit Australia over the holidays and after getting a 240V Universal AC/DC adapter it worked without a hitch down there too - and behind two routers/NATs as well. My Australian friend now has a US local phone number and I have unlimited calling to them for $25/month saving me a fortune. If you have friends or family overseas who have any sort of broadband (she has a pretty limited speed DSL and it works fine) you will find this is the sort of innovation in technology that will really and truly make use of the internet to save you gobs and gobs of money.
Many of the same arguments could be made for the US adopting the metric system. I am sure that there are many applications that would be easier to code if we did. It would make alot of people's professions easier, would make us in sync with the rest of the world and would have saved certain Mars-bound space craft if we would have done it by now. Yet the US hasn't done it and likely never will. And that is a system of weights and measures that we have shown can be at odds with the rest of the world without too much trouble. Can you imagine some countries changing the calendar while others didn't? That sort of all or nothing proposition for changing something that is universal over the entire human race and has existed in it's current form for centuries with so little benefit is never going to happen.
On top of running your WEP encryption with a non-dictionary randomly generated key you should also be running a VPN through that and treating it as a insecure public connection. You might even want to make sure your interactions through sensitive material then be done with SSH/SecureFTP, or RSA for web pages, through the encypted tunnel through the encrypted wireless link. Of course, this is for anything sensitive like server administration or sensitive data transmission and might be overkill for some situations. But, if you don't go to these lengths, you shouldn't be sending data over wireless that you wouldn't want to get out.
I am sure this will be mentioned by others but as long as you are still telneting to reach your MUD then all of the text you type runs unencrypted through the net between you and the MUD server with just about as much security as email or unencrypted IM. Even if you did encrypt the communication I am one of the tinfoil hat types that believes that the government has those Billions of dollars worth of supercomputer for such a reason and if they REALLY wanted to read that conversation that they could. You might as well get used to the fact that you should never send something electronically that you wouldn't want the government to read or that would incriminate you. That is the only way that you will ever be 100% safe.
Contrary to what many here think, I believe that this is a good and reasonable decision. Right now they have an MS solution that is most likely near the end of life. They bought themselves a big discount and some time from MS by voicing their dissatisfaction and intent to look into open source so they might as well use it to provide a smooth transition while they wait for the opensource solution to come together and prove itself in the marketplace. I like Linux, and use it myself on the desktop when appropriate, but it still isn't a 100% solution and replacement for their desktop environment and it still hasn't proved itself in a comparable situation. Just think how the story would go if they tried to go to Linux prematurely and it failed and they had to go crawling back to MS. Can you imagine the press and the damage to Linux's reputation? This was by far the better thing for the Dutch, the better thing for Linux, and also a good thing for MS in the short term and gives them one last chance to prove their modern solution is superior to their previous generations and maybe good enough to take some of the reasons for a switch away. Given the progress on the desktop Linux front things might be alot different and more mature in two or three years and that OS and migration is the exposure that we want to give Linux. MS will also have a harder sell with Longhorn about that time. Just be patient and keep plugging along with development and testing and remember that when it comes to something this prominent and on this scale this we want to make a good first impression and not an embarrassing defeat.
If you with a straight face can say that a 1.7Ghz Pentium M Dothan (Which is the speed eqivilant of about an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ or Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz - see link below) is slower than a 1.33 Ghz G4 then it shows then I don't think we even can have an intelligent conversation because you, sir, are a zealot. Not to mention your iBook's RAM is only 266Mgz vs the 333Mgz stuff in the Inspiron. You can argue Apple on aesthetics but, with the possible exception of the dual-proc G5 tower, you certainly can't on performance and raw power - especially with their notebooks.
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http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=21
I recently had the good fortune to catch a deal on a Dell Inspiron 8600. There was this amazing near 50% off deal Dell ran for a day or two where a laptop costing at least $1500 you could get for as low as $750 (check out http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041019-4330 .html for details).
So, for about $1000 I got a 1.7Ghz Pentium M Dothan with 512 MB ram, a DVD burner, a 15" wide aspect screen, bluetooth, 802.11g, 40 gig HD (upgraded it to a Hitachi 60GB 7200RPM), a second battery that can be swapped out for the DVD burner, a ATI Radeon 9600 w/128M and a 3 year warranty. This laptop and the Pentium M amazed me, with the two batteries I get over 6 hours battery life under normal usage. It even can run all of the latest games better than most new desktops.
Everything about this compares favorably to a $3000 PowerBook, if not exceeding it - especially in CPU performance, and it was 1/3 the price and 3 times the warrenty. It may have not been the case a year or two ago but Intel really closed the gap with the Pentium M/Centrino and battery life and form factor are now more than comparable with Apple at lower prices and better options.
I do own an 20GB iPod, by the way, and I love it. I have no desire to by a Mac, though, so this iPod to Mac conversion doesn't hold true in my case at least.
I had a bit of buyer's remorse waiting for it to get here even though I spent less on it than I did when I build my last desktop. I was worried a laptop couldn't take the place of a desktop that I could build much more cheaply but I was truely amazed. It compares favorably in every way with desktops in performance while giving me the sort of portability that in Intel based systems was previously unheard of. I get over 4 hours to a battery on this thing and a well under 10 pound travel weight when I want to take it with me. I remember when Apple had a huge lead in the battery life game with the G3/G4 vs the Mobile P3/P4 and that lead has completely eroded. Intel actually made a processor that uses less power without sacrificing much in the way of performance to get it.
I have moved completely to this laptop for all of my computing needs and it has the best of everything with seemingly no comprimise. I know that technology has progressed in the desktop scene as well but compared to the kind of freedom that we have been given in mobility with the increased performance and battery life coupled with wireless networking in the sort of package offered in the new Centrino notebook they don't compare. These notebooks are the sort of progress that changes the way we use a computer and work while being soo stark and beautiful a contrast and change that it truly feels that we have joined 21st century computing in a revolutionary feeling desktops just don't give. I for one will never by another desktop after a couple months with this laptop and suggest that rather than looking to the Pentium M as a desktop chip, as there are far cheaper for the purpose, you should take the plunge and buy a notebook with one and experience the quiet and the performance along with the portability and form factor change that can cut the wires and set you free.
The big thing behind this, besides the fact that all the cell carriers bill differently and it would be a bit of a nightmare to know how much it would cost from a landline or a competeing cell phone, is the fact that we don't have enough area codes. Unlike the European phone system we don't have enough area codes here for a cell phone number to be an obviously different dial than a land phone. My cell number is in the same area code (716) as all other cell phones and landlines in Western New York from all wireless and landline carriers. A few of the really large cities can afford to seperate them, but the vast majority of Americans are in the same situation. In order to get enough area codes for that we would have had to completely redesign the entire phone system for all of North America (Canada piggy backs on our system) to accomodate it.
I really don't mind our pricing. It is really straighforward, when I am on the phone for X number of minutes I have X number of minutes deducted from my plan. For $45/month I get 600 minutes during the day and 4000 minutes nights and weekends with free roaming and long distance nation wide, and I can also use those same minutes to get on the internet on my PDA Smartphone or laptop with no additional charge. I have enough minutes where I never hit the limit so I don't care that people call me. And, since I call them on their phones too, what goes around comes around. What you call a complicated billing scheme I call the most simple and obvoius solution to our particular locale and situation.
I have been looking on the net and can't find a transcript of Job's keynote. I was interested to see whether they were going to announce an update to the TiBook where they were going to include the new Mobility Radeon 9000 sometime in the near future.
I have been thinking about buying a Ti PowerBook, what would be my first Apple. I have noticed they seem to put the latest and greatest from ATI in them. Up until this that was the Rage Mobility 7500, what is currently shipping in them. I can wait 3-4 months before buying it. What are the chances that they will have a new revision of the PowerBook with one of these by then?
The website says that it is an ideal location because it is 100 miles from a major population center, Las Vegas. There is a whole lot of nothing out west and I would think we could do better than 100 miles away from a big city. I personally wouldn't be too keen on having the nuclear waste for the whole country being dumped an hour and a half away.
Actually NY has gotten much more high tech with their new licences, more so than most states. All photos are now digital, they have a very complicated bar code with quite a bit of information encoded, and they have many many simple and effective anti-forgery technologies. They have symbols which appear under blacklight, microprint, and my personal favorite a very unique texture that has the interesting property that when you bend it in half and rub the front of the card together it has a sandy feel down the middle. Any body with one, try it. The first time I saw a lady at the casino make sure I had a vaid licence I was surprised to see her bend it in half as well as use the blacklight. They also have bar code readers to test validity at many alchohol stores, and the valid ones will alert them if the person is underage.