Are you by chance a TVR fan? Apparently when lambasted about the lack of ABS and Airbags on their sports cars, their favorite response is: Don't Crash.
I think some people tend to consider better than average car control or car recovery control to make them a good driver. Just being able to induce a car into a controlled slide or recover from one, doesn't make one a good driver. Aggression level and overall attentiveness come in to play a lot where driving is concerned. Overly aggressive drivers who may be able to avoid others, can sometimes tend to cause accidents themselves (they swoop in, cut somebody off who slams on their brakes, and unfortunately gets rearended by some dumbass 2 cars back who was tailgating).
I'd like to think I'm slightly above average, but nothing great. I'm one of the few of my generation to actually take Driver's Ed. I've also taken a defensive driving course, as well as a general car control course, an autocross driving school (more of the same really), and I've raced in a fair share of autocrosses. I'm also one of those people who's always interested in improving their driving skills, and make it a habbit to try to pay more attention to what my car is doing -- feel its movements through the controls.
That said, I would still only consider myself slightly better than average. You know what? I kind of like some of these driver aids. I love having ABS now. Yes, I can drive a car without ABS and learned how to brake at the threshold of tire lockup, but I love having it. It has saved me on at least one occasion where I had a driver pull out in front of me on a wet road. I've yet to drive a car with traction and/or yaw control in an environment where I could test the limits of those technologies, but I'm sure they work well too. I wouldn't want to race one of those cars, but that's the point really. These cars are designed for the road, and these technologies help people keep from having accidents.
One last note. I think everybody should be forced to learn to drive stick on an underpowered car. It really forces you to think about your environment more. You have to pay attention to that hill coming up (Do I need to downshift to make it up?). You pay more attention to the vehicles around you at stop lights (Am I going to roll back into the car behind me?). The reason 90% of people give for driving automatics is that they are lazy and/or want to relax. That's just the problem with our driving society here in the US: they aren't paying enough fucking attention.
What about compatibility with my existing Outlook.pst files. I have just about every email saved from ~1999 in my main.pst. It is pretty large these days. Now, I understand that Thunderbird does provide import tools, but I'm always afraid of something getting lost in the translation. Not to mention, it might take a while to import from a 1GB.pst file. It would be a heck of a lot easier if Thunderbird could just connect directly to my.pst file, but I don't see any mention of the concern in the Thunderbird FAQ.
Lastly, I see several comments asking about interoperability with Sunbird, and I concur. When the heck is it going to happen? I do use my Outlook calendar, and until I have an application that can completely replace Outlook, I don't really see the need to switch.
That said, Firefox is the bomb. I've yet to install 1.5, but I've been using Deer Park on my laptop for a while so I'm interested to see how FireFox 1.5 performs.
Well, you sir do get props in my book. As some people pointed out in the article about oil cooling a PC, sometimes you don't have to necessarily have a reason to do things - you just do them because they are fun. I like the looks of your project, even if it has lost some of its utility. That said, I think it might have been cooler to have left the Giger counter in its original yellowish/orangish/rust color for total effect. That said, the blue display would have contrasted with the overall design, so unless you could have come up with an acceptable way of turning the blue display yellow, the mod probably would have been for naught.
That's why he said not to install one. On a side note, most diesel engines in commercial vehicles do have glow plugs which will warm the combustion chambers up before attempting to start the engine. Diesel does apparently have to achieve a specific operating temperature before it will ignite from compression.
I became a fan of that stuff years ago. My first job was at Spencer Gifts where the used to sell Lava Lamps. The "Lava" basically consists of some kind of oil and some kind of wax. Well, inevitably when you work in retail somebody breaks something. I still remember the first time I had to clean up after a lava lamp I had a hard time getting the oil off of my hands until I remembered that I had left a can of Goop in my car from my last oil change. After I realized how good of a job it did, I always kept some in my car while I worked there, just in case.
That reminds me of a couple of years back when the first rumors about an X86 version of OSX started surfacing. I asked a friend of mine who interned at Apple about it, and his response was along the lines of "Well, that would be a pretty good exercise to help your programmers keep their skills current. And that's all I can say."
This reminds me of one facility I worked at. One day I'm on Dell's site doing something routine when I glance at my systems list and notice that our main server (DHCP, File, Helpdesk, and Backups) only had about 4 months left on its service contract. I fire off a quick email to my boss alerting him to what I discovered. I received a thanks, a pat on the head, and an "I'll tak care of this." The office had been through so many admin changes and contractors that we had absolutely no clue who the current admin contact for the server was, so we pretty much had zero chance of us receiving notice from Dell when the contract was over. No problem, though, we have plenty of time. I promptly forgot about the issue as the ball was now firmly in my boss's court.
About 5 months later, I'm again on Dell's site looking for some documentation or some drivers or something when I notice that the contract on the server had never been renewed. I talked to my boss and he went into "Oh Shit!" mode. If the server failed, the closest thing we had to a backup plan was an old P3 Dell Optiplex desktop running SuSE and DHCP server, the absolute minimum we needed in order to remain partially operational. I set it up about a year prior when I was the sole IT person on site and was worried about covering my ass in the case of a disaster, but the box had remained off for the better part of the last 10 months, ever since my new boss came in.
Anyway, boss told me to get on the phone with Dell ASAP and obtain quotes for renewing the 4 hour on site gold contract for another year and another 2 years. I forget the numbers now, but do remember they were on the order of 4 figures. My boss takes the nubmers to the CFO who calls me up and asks me if I'm sure the numbers are right and asks my boss if we really need this support contract. My response was something on the lines of "Do you really think we'd be asking you to spend this kind of money if we didn't need it? If this server goes down we are dead in the water, will have to pay out the wazoo to get it fixed in a timely manner, and that timely manner definitely will not be within 4 hours." The order was signed and we had our support back lickity-split.
Anyway, what I always try to do, when I'm in a position to make these sorts of decisions, is keep at least one backup server on site that could fill any other server's role. Unfortunately, getting a request like that through the budget isn't always easy, but it is money well spent. If a server goes down, you spend 30 minutes troubleshooting it. If you don't have success, you prepare the backup server and have somebody else call Dell on the dead server. Keeping spares is the only true way to ensure minimal downtime due to hardware failure.
Really, I wonder where the market for such devices is. I personally have one of the earliest (to my knowledge) eBook readers to come to market, the Rocket eBook. (Link to review of one: http://www.atpm.com/6.05/rocketebook.shtml) I'll admit that at first I really liked it. I'm a gadget freak, and the eBook reader was a lot of fun, especially back in ~1998, 1999 when such concepts and devices were still new. Furthermore, Nuvomedia (or whomever actually manufactured and designed the devices) did a good job with the software allowing you to underline/highlight words and IIRC even take notes in the "margins." They also provided a built in dictionary in case you didn't know what a word meant. Oh, and they provided the software to convert from several different formats to their eBook format, meaning you could download books from Project Gutenburg for reading on your eBook reader.
That said, after the initial newness wore off, I realized that I still prefered the eBook's dead tree counterpart. There's just something about the whole experience of turning the pages yourself. Not to mention, a paper book seems much easier on the eyes, although I will admit that LCD technology has progressed quite a bit since those days. Weight and size was another factor against the eBook. I know that Sony's eBook is going to be smaller, but I have a hard time figuring out, subjectively, just how heavy 250g is.
Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out just who out there wants to spend so much more time staring at another screen. For me, that's part of the whole experience of reading a book - it's partly a way for me to get away from technology for a bit.
Personally, I would consider downloading eBooks for books you already own a little more morally auspicious than downloading mp3s for music you already own. The first question I have is whether or not fair use rights apply to dead tree books. I'm pretty certain they do (and believe they should), but I have seen stranger things in the legal world.
The other consideration is the ammount of time and effort that would be involved were you to copy your dead tree book youself. Copying a CD or DVD to a digital format is really pretty trivial and the hardware to do so is relatively cheap. It just requires the right software, some spare CPU cycles and very little of your time. Copying a book... well, that tends to be a little more labor intensive. As I see it, you have 2 options there. One, you can sit in front of your scanner and manually copy the book page by page; a method which takes a considerable ammount of your time. Or you could unbind the book and feed it into a dual sided scanner with an ADF hopper. I'm not too sure how much a scanner with those capabilities would cost you, but I imagine it would be more than even the typical DVD drive these days. Furthremore, you will also need software which can correctly parse the correct page order, preferably during the OCR step.
The point is, for the average consumer, copying a book to digital format is a much more expensive process both in terms of invested hardware and invested time.
Actually, I love the idea of restore disks. I get a lot of my users asking me how to remove spyware from their home computers. For a while I tried telling them to download AdAware and SpyBot, but that was apparently too difficult of a concept for them to grasp. So, now I just tell them to save all of their documents to CD/Diskette/USB Drive/RTR/Punch Card, put in the restore disk, and not to install any programs over the internet. Sure they will get infected again, but since most of them aren't even willing to cook me dinner or buy me a case of beer for my help, I really don't consider it my problem to solve.
I installed Zeta (http://www.yellowtab.com/ the project that continues the old BeOS, and it has to be the simplest install I've ever done. After the initial prompts about language, regional settings and partition location, I didn't have to touch the installer again until the very end when it asks me if I want to install the boot loader. This is much preferable to Windows where it asks you the regional settings questions halfway through the install, thereby interrupting the process.
After the install, the PC restarts and after the quickest OS load I think I've ever seen, I'm up and running. My biggest complaint: there's no support for the i845 onboard video. I was surprised since it's such a popular chipset, but at least Zeta immediately pops up a message telling you its running in software mode and providing a very helpful "more information" link. But, that brings me to the next point I want to make: new hardware installation was a breeze. I slapped in an old TNT2 or Geforce or something (I honestly don't remember what it is, other than Nvidia), turned the PC on, and was using the new hardware immediately after the OS boot. There was none of the usual "Windows has found new hardware! What should Windows do now!?" type stuff. It. Just. Worked.
The downside from a newbie perspective: the NIC is disabled by default. Also, after I enabled the NIC, I never could get it to behave properly with DHCP. I had the same issue with my 3Com works-in-every-OS-since-Windows-95 10/100 card. So, I did have to configure my NIC manually, but at least their tool for this is much better than using ifconfig.
All in all, aside from the NIC configuration, I would have to claim that installing Zeta was much, much easier than any other OS I've installed. It's been a while since I've used BeOS, but IIRC installing software was extremely easy on it as well, although the base install comes with most everything a new computer user would need. Too bad there's not a native OpenOffice port, and the OS comes with Abiword instead. But, since Zeta does come with the GCC tools, I plan to find out how well OpenOffice compiles on the OS.
If a novice was forced to install both, I'd bet $100 that they'd get Linux installed properly first. A Linux install comes with most necessary drivers/software that you'll need. A novice Windows user would _never_ find the drivers needed for even an OEM system, like a Sony or HP, where all the drivers are centralized on one site, let alone searching out the drivers from each manufacturer. Linux installs are much easier than XP installs.
That is a bold claim. I happen to have an extra PC that could demonstrate some of the problems associated with installing Linux. It has some not-uncommon hardware: SB Live!, Voodoo3 3000 PCI, and Linksys LNE100TX. Unfortunately, the last time I attempted a SuSE install on it, I ran into a world of trouble. First of all Yast2 didn't like how I wanted to set up the displays on the PC. You see, the PC has onboard video as well as the V3. Now, the V3 is set to boot as primary in BIOS, but the BIOS has no way to turn off the onboard video, so it too is active. Well, Yast2 decides that I must want dual displays and that the onboard HAS to be the primary display. I think I eventually gave up using Yast2 for display setup and just edited the.conf manually. The second problem I had was with the NIC. Linux did detect and install drivers for it (it's old enough that the Tulip drivers work - newer revisions of the LNE100TX require different drivers), but for some reason it wouldn't take an IP from my router. I'm sure I could have used Yast2 to manually set an IP, but I didn't even bother and used ifconfig instead. Now, I have some experience with linux and am a little more technically inclined than the average user. I can't imagine what they would have done to get it working.
For comparison's sake, I also performed a fresh install of 2k before installing SuSE. Here's how the problems were resolved: Windows recognized the Voodoo3 as primary, and did NOT attempt to automatically extend my desktop to the secondary monitor. I went into device manager and disabled the device manually, but that step was not necessary for funcationality of the PC. Windows 2K did not have the drivers for the LNE100TX, so I did have to download those from Linksys's website. I'm not sure if you can get the tulip.c source for the linux drivers there, though.
Lastly, one more gripe about Linux on my laptop. Excluding the Wireless NIC issues (I think the drivers are now a part of the kernel, and Windows doesn't have them natively either), I am not impressed with the driver for the touchpad/eraser mouse combo. My eraser mouse is defective and constantly pulls up and to the left. It's not a problem with Windows since I can just check a box and disable it. In Linux... well I don't use Linux on the laptop anymore becuase I couldn't find a single way to disable it which also didn't disable the use of the touchpad.
You claim that a user would have an easier time installing Linux, and that might be true if they are using a box with 100% Linux compatible hardware. The fact is, most novice users installing it from scratch would probably be installing it on their OEM Dell or Gateway or HP machine and would run in to all sort of problems.
I hear ya there. Between HIPPA and SOX, several of my friends in IT in the healthcare industry report their data storage needs increasing exponentially. I know they've made a difference in my office, but not as much as some of my friends. In short, what these laws have done is make people afraid to delete anything. I think the storage companies need to show some gratitude to Enron et. al.
I see a lot of people tout Free AVG on/. How up to date does Free AVG stay? The biggest concern that I have with using and recommending an open source AV product is how often the virus definitions may or may not be updated. It has been my experience in the past that development work on F/OSS can sometimes procede more slowly than commercial software, and I'm wondering if these extended timetables also apply to AVG's virus definitions. Is their definition update response time at all comparable to the big commercial vendors?
Yup, and there's no way to turn the "friendly" reminder off. Add to that the fact that, I've had some cases where uninstalling Norton seemed to trigger various other unrelated issues on the PC, and I'm not a huge Norton fan. I wasn't too pleased with LiveUpdate anyway -- why do I have to enter a username and password when I want to update the software itself, shouldn't that come down via the same channels as the definitions?
I probably ran without virus protection for about 6 months until I was informed by a superior that due to the nature of our corporate license agreement with McAfee and the circumstances regarding the use of my personal PC for business purposes, I was allowed to install our corporate version of McAfee. It seems to provide adequate protection, although I have to admit that my network isn't exactly the most fertile test ground for its capabilities. It's caught a few on my laptop, though. (It was more or less the community PC for all of my friends when they came over, including the less internet savvy ones.)
This may not be your cup of tea, but I "conjured" a similar solution via VNC. I would just connect from my primary desktop PC to my secondary via VNC and do everything I needed to on that PC, while looking at the non-laggy view on the secondary monitor on the corner of my desk. When I got done, I'd just look back at my primary PC, minimize VNC, and go about my business.
Hmm... with my Cingular phone I just get a text message reminder of the minutes periodically. I also get a verbal reminder that I'm low on minutes when I try to make a call. That said, I just tried to check my minutes and found that my minutes had "expired". What the crap is up with that? It's not like minutes go bad and you have to refrigerate them after opening. I only had a couple of dollars left, but that still angers me that I paid for something that I never had the opportunity to use.
Actually, your arguments about wheels in nature bring me back to an issue I was pondering yesterday. I finally sat down and watched Firefly (all 15 episodes) yesterday, and as is my nature, I started trying to pick apart the show, especially regarding the use of "old technology" interspersed with "new technology". Chiefly, if they can fly between planets, why are they using horses for transportation and not some other sort of conveyance. What you say about wheels not being much use if there are no freeways comes very close to summing up my eventual conclusion on the issue. Without a good, mostly flat surface, wheels really aren't much use. One of the biggest reasons horses were probably so popular with the settlers in the show was due to their ability to handle rough terrain. They can do things that cars can't do, such as step over obstacles and dynamically adjust their footing in order to find the best traction in low tracion situations. Quite simply, wheels are extremely convenient in developed areas, but there probably weren't a whole lot of areas like that until the last couple of thousand of years or so.
(As an aside, the other primary reasons that I can see for using horses on a remote planet have to do with the "maintenance" and "fuel" problems. You can fuel your horses with a much more easily harvested fuel that is also renewable. As for maintenance, well they either maintain themselves, or they get turned into glue. Not to mention, there's the added benefit of having the conveyances themselves design and construct next years model, thereby leaving the entire process up to the true experts.)
Heck. I remember wondering how I was going to fill up a 400MB drive. I then remember filling it up and purchasing a (parallel port driven) Zip drive to increase my capacity. But I remember the most was my experiment to play Doom off the Zip drive. That was an interesting experience with gameplay measured in seconds per frame instead of frames per second.
Ahhh... those were the days. Now I have a 400GB RAID array and am still wondering what I can delete/burn to DVD in order to free up space.
BTW - its soooo much easier here in Europe than it is in the US when it comes to cell phones. I tried to get a cell phone for my sister for Xmas and found that I would have to enter into a contract with any number of companies that serviced the area she lives in. Even the "prepaid" phones like Virgin had this issue.
You know, that's funny. I decided to purchase a prepaid phone after evacuating New Orleans. The whole 504 area code was so screwed up that I was lucky to receive a phone call. (We can thank our telcos for not properly protecting their switches from the imminent flood disaster that New Orleans was sure to have.) Anyway, getting back to the point. I really don't remember having to enter into a contract with them. Yeah sure, they wanted my address and various other information, but I don't remember having to sign any sort of contract perse. I just bought a cheap GSM phone and the prepaid $50 card and went to town. I could be wrong, but I really don't remember signing anything other than the credit card receipt.
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...anyone who knows how to drive shouldn't crash.
Are you by chance a TVR fan? Apparently when lambasted about the lack of ABS and Airbags on their sports cars, their favorite response is: Don't Crash.
I think some people tend to consider better than average car control or car recovery control to make them a good driver. Just being able to induce a car into a controlled slide or recover from one, doesn't make one a good driver. Aggression level and overall attentiveness come in to play a lot where driving is concerned. Overly aggressive drivers who may be able to avoid others, can sometimes tend to cause accidents themselves (they swoop in, cut somebody off who slams on their brakes, and unfortunately gets rearended by some dumbass 2 cars back who was tailgating).
I'd like to think I'm slightly above average, but nothing great. I'm one of the few of my generation to actually take Driver's Ed. I've also taken a defensive driving course, as well as a general car control course, an autocross driving school (more of the same really), and I've raced in a fair share of autocrosses. I'm also one of those people who's always interested in improving their driving skills, and make it a habbit to try to pay more attention to what my car is doing -- feel its movements through the controls.
That said, I would still only consider myself slightly better than average. You know what? I kind of like some of these driver aids. I love having ABS now. Yes, I can drive a car without ABS and learned how to brake at the threshold of tire lockup, but I love having it. It has saved me on at least one occasion where I had a driver pull out in front of me on a wet road. I've yet to drive a car with traction and/or yaw control in an environment where I could test the limits of those technologies, but I'm sure they work well too. I wouldn't want to race one of those cars, but that's the point really. These cars are designed for the road, and these technologies help people keep from having accidents.
One last note. I think everybody should be forced to learn to drive stick on an underpowered car. It really forces you to think about your environment more. You have to pay attention to that hill coming up (Do I need to downshift to make it up?). You pay more attention to the vehicles around you at stop lights (Am I going to roll back into the car behind me?). The reason 90% of people give for driving automatics is that they are lazy and/or want to relax. That's just the problem with our driving society here in the US: they aren't paying enough fucking attention.
What about compatibility with my existing Outlook .pst files. I have just about every email saved from ~1999 in my main .pst. It is pretty large these days. Now, I understand that Thunderbird does provide import tools, but I'm always afraid of something getting lost in the translation. Not to mention, it might take a while to import from a 1GB .pst file. It would be a heck of a lot easier if Thunderbird could just connect directly to my .pst file, but I don't see any mention of the concern in the Thunderbird FAQ.
Lastly, I see several comments asking about interoperability with Sunbird, and I concur. When the heck is it going to happen? I do use my Outlook calendar, and until I have an application that can completely replace Outlook, I don't really see the need to switch.
That said, Firefox is the bomb. I've yet to install 1.5, but I've been using Deer Park on my laptop for a while so I'm interested to see how FireFox 1.5 performs.
Well, you sir do get props in my book. As some people pointed out in the article about oil cooling a PC, sometimes you don't have to necessarily have a reason to do things - you just do them because they are fun. I like the looks of your project, even if it has lost some of its utility. That said, I think it might have been cooler to have left the Giger counter in its original yellowish/orangish/rust color for total effect. That said, the blue display would have contrasted with the overall design, so unless you could have come up with an acceptable way of turning the blue display yellow, the mod probably would have been for naught.
Hah! I have you both beat! I'm going to retrofit my iPod into my house! I think that with a little work and skill I just might be able to make it fit.
That's why he said not to install one. On a side note, most diesel engines in commercial vehicles do have glow plugs which will warm the combustion chambers up before attempting to start the engine. Diesel does apparently have to achieve a specific operating temperature before it will ignite from compression.
I became a fan of that stuff years ago. My first job was at Spencer Gifts where the used to sell Lava Lamps. The "Lava" basically consists of some kind of oil and some kind of wax. Well, inevitably when you work in retail somebody breaks something. I still remember the first time I had to clean up after a lava lamp I had a hard time getting the oil off of my hands until I remembered that I had left a can of Goop in my car from my last oil change. After I realized how good of a job it did, I always kept some in my car while I worked there, just in case.
That reminds me of a couple of years back when the first rumors about an X86 version of OSX started surfacing. I asked a friend of mine who interned at Apple about it, and his response was along the lines of "Well, that would be a pretty good exercise to help your programmers keep their skills current. And that's all I can say."
My boss, on the other hand, likes to go to Tiger Direct and buy the cheapest crap they have on the shelf.
:(
The accout I currently work on recently (today) cited Tiger Direct as another approved reseller from whom we may order equipment.
Today is a sad day for me.
This reminds me of one facility I worked at. One day I'm on Dell's site doing something routine when I glance at my systems list and notice that our main server (DHCP, File, Helpdesk, and Backups) only had about 4 months left on its service contract. I fire off a quick email to my boss alerting him to what I discovered. I received a thanks, a pat on the head, and an "I'll tak care of this." The office had been through so many admin changes and contractors that we had absolutely no clue who the current admin contact for the server was, so we pretty much had zero chance of us receiving notice from Dell when the contract was over. No problem, though, we have plenty of time. I promptly forgot about the issue as the ball was now firmly in my boss's court.
About 5 months later, I'm again on Dell's site looking for some documentation or some drivers or something when I notice that the contract on the server had never been renewed. I talked to my boss and he went into "Oh Shit!" mode. If the server failed, the closest thing we had to a backup plan was an old P3 Dell Optiplex desktop running SuSE and DHCP server, the absolute minimum we needed in order to remain partially operational. I set it up about a year prior when I was the sole IT person on site and was worried about covering my ass in the case of a disaster, but the box had remained off for the better part of the last 10 months, ever since my new boss came in.
Anyway, boss told me to get on the phone with Dell ASAP and obtain quotes for renewing the 4 hour on site gold contract for another year and another 2 years. I forget the numbers now, but do remember they were on the order of 4 figures. My boss takes the nubmers to the CFO who calls me up and asks me if I'm sure the numbers are right and asks my boss if we really need this support contract. My response was something on the lines of "Do you really think we'd be asking you to spend this kind of money if we didn't need it? If this server goes down we are dead in the water, will have to pay out the wazoo to get it fixed in a timely manner, and that timely manner definitely will not be within 4 hours." The order was signed and we had our support back lickity-split.
Anyway, what I always try to do, when I'm in a position to make these sorts of decisions, is keep at least one backup server on site that could fill any other server's role. Unfortunately, getting a request like that through the budget isn't always easy, but it is money well spent. If a server goes down, you spend 30 minutes troubleshooting it. If you don't have success, you prepare the backup server and have somebody else call Dell on the dead server. Keeping spares is the only true way to ensure minimal downtime due to hardware failure.
Really, I wonder where the market for such devices is. I personally have one of the earliest (to my knowledge) eBook readers to come to market, the Rocket eBook. (Link to review of one: http://www.atpm.com/6.05/rocketebook.shtml) I'll admit that at first I really liked it. I'm a gadget freak, and the eBook reader was a lot of fun, especially back in ~1998, 1999 when such concepts and devices were still new. Furthermore, Nuvomedia (or whomever actually manufactured and designed the devices) did a good job with the software allowing you to underline/highlight words and IIRC even take notes in the "margins." They also provided a built in dictionary in case you didn't know what a word meant. Oh, and they provided the software to convert from several different formats to their eBook format, meaning you could download books from Project Gutenburg for reading on your eBook reader.
That said, after the initial newness wore off, I realized that I still prefered the eBook's dead tree counterpart. There's just something about the whole experience of turning the pages yourself. Not to mention, a paper book seems much easier on the eyes, although I will admit that LCD technology has progressed quite a bit since those days. Weight and size was another factor against the eBook. I know that Sony's eBook is going to be smaller, but I have a hard time figuring out, subjectively, just how heavy 250g is.
Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out just who out there wants to spend so much more time staring at another screen. For me, that's part of the whole experience of reading a book - it's partly a way for me to get away from technology for a bit.
Personally, I would consider downloading eBooks for books you already own a little more morally auspicious than downloading mp3s for music you already own. The first question I have is whether or not fair use rights apply to dead tree books. I'm pretty certain they do (and believe they should), but I have seen stranger things in the legal world.
The other consideration is the ammount of time and effort that would be involved were you to copy your dead tree book youself. Copying a CD or DVD to a digital format is really pretty trivial and the hardware to do so is relatively cheap. It just requires the right software, some spare CPU cycles and very little of your time. Copying a book... well, that tends to be a little more labor intensive. As I see it, you have 2 options there. One, you can sit in front of your scanner and manually copy the book page by page; a method which takes a considerable ammount of your time. Or you could unbind the book and feed it into a dual sided scanner with an ADF hopper. I'm not too sure how much a scanner with those capabilities would cost you, but I imagine it would be more than even the typical DVD drive these days. Furthremore, you will also need software which can correctly parse the correct page order, preferably during the OCR step.
The point is, for the average consumer, copying a book to digital format is a much more expensive process both in terms of invested hardware and invested time.
Actually, I love the idea of restore disks. I get a lot of my users asking me how to remove spyware from their home computers. For a while I tried telling them to download AdAware and SpyBot, but that was apparently too difficult of a concept for them to grasp. So, now I just tell them to save all of their documents to CD/Diskette/USB Drive/RTR/Punch Card, put in the restore disk, and not to install any programs over the internet. Sure they will get infected again, but since most of them aren't even willing to cook me dinner or buy me a case of beer for my help, I really don't consider it my problem to solve.
I installed Zeta (http://www.yellowtab.com/ the project that continues the old BeOS, and it has to be the simplest install I've ever done. After the initial prompts about language, regional settings and partition location, I didn't have to touch the installer again until the very end when it asks me if I want to install the boot loader. This is much preferable to Windows where it asks you the regional settings questions halfway through the install, thereby interrupting the process.
After the install, the PC restarts and after the quickest OS load I think I've ever seen, I'm up and running. My biggest complaint: there's no support for the i845 onboard video. I was surprised since it's such a popular chipset, but at least Zeta immediately pops up a message telling you its running in software mode and providing a very helpful "more information" link. But, that brings me to the next point I want to make: new hardware installation was a breeze. I slapped in an old TNT2 or Geforce or something (I honestly don't remember what it is, other than Nvidia), turned the PC on, and was using the new hardware immediately after the OS boot. There was none of the usual "Windows has found new hardware! What should Windows do now!?" type stuff. It. Just. Worked.
The downside from a newbie perspective: the NIC is disabled by default. Also, after I enabled the NIC, I never could get it to behave properly with DHCP. I had the same issue with my 3Com works-in-every-OS-since-Windows-95 10/100 card. So, I did have to configure my NIC manually, but at least their tool for this is much better than using ifconfig.
All in all, aside from the NIC configuration, I would have to claim that installing Zeta was much, much easier than any other OS I've installed. It's been a while since I've used BeOS, but IIRC installing software was extremely easy on it as well, although the base install comes with most everything a new computer user would need. Too bad there's not a native OpenOffice port, and the OS comes with Abiword instead. But, since Zeta does come with the GCC tools, I plan to find out how well OpenOffice compiles on the OS.
If a novice was forced to install both, I'd bet $100 that they'd get Linux installed properly first. A Linux install comes with most necessary drivers/software that you'll need. A novice Windows user would _never_ find the drivers needed for even an OEM system, like a Sony or HP, where all the drivers are centralized on one site, let alone searching out the drivers from each manufacturer. Linux installs are much easier than XP installs.
.conf manually. The second problem I had was with the NIC. Linux did detect and install drivers for it (it's old enough that the Tulip drivers work - newer revisions of the LNE100TX require different drivers), but for some reason it wouldn't take an IP from my router. I'm sure I could have used Yast2 to manually set an IP, but I didn't even bother and used ifconfig instead. Now, I have some experience with linux and am a little more technically inclined than the average user. I can't imagine what they would have done to get it working.
That is a bold claim. I happen to have an extra PC that could demonstrate some of the problems associated with installing Linux. It has some not-uncommon hardware: SB Live!, Voodoo3 3000 PCI, and Linksys LNE100TX. Unfortunately, the last time I attempted a SuSE install on it, I ran into a world of trouble. First of all Yast2 didn't like how I wanted to set up the displays on the PC. You see, the PC has onboard video as well as the V3. Now, the V3 is set to boot as primary in BIOS, but the BIOS has no way to turn off the onboard video, so it too is active. Well, Yast2 decides that I must want dual displays and that the onboard HAS to be the primary display. I think I eventually gave up using Yast2 for display setup and just edited the
For comparison's sake, I also performed a fresh install of 2k before installing SuSE. Here's how the problems were resolved: Windows recognized the Voodoo3 as primary, and did NOT attempt to automatically extend my desktop to the secondary monitor. I went into device manager and disabled the device manually, but that step was not necessary for funcationality of the PC. Windows 2K did not have the drivers for the LNE100TX, so I did have to download those from Linksys's website. I'm not sure if you can get the tulip.c source for the linux drivers there, though.
Lastly, one more gripe about Linux on my laptop. Excluding the Wireless NIC issues (I think the drivers are now a part of the kernel, and Windows doesn't have them natively either), I am not impressed with the driver for the touchpad/eraser mouse combo. My eraser mouse is defective and constantly pulls up and to the left. It's not a problem with Windows since I can just check a box and disable it. In Linux... well I don't use Linux on the laptop anymore becuase I couldn't find a single way to disable it which also didn't disable the use of the touchpad.
You claim that a user would have an easier time installing Linux, and that might be true if they are using a box with 100% Linux compatible hardware. The fact is, most novice users installing it from scratch would probably be installing it on their OEM Dell or Gateway or HP machine and would run in to all sort of problems.
I beleive the proper term is a Clue-by-four.
I hear ya there. Between HIPPA and SOX, several of my friends in IT in the healthcare industry report their data storage needs increasing exponentially. I know they've made a difference in my office, but not as much as some of my friends. In short, what these laws have done is make people afraid to delete anything. I think the storage companies need to show some gratitude to Enron et. al.
I see a lot of people tout Free AVG on /. How up to date does Free AVG stay? The biggest concern that I have with using and recommending an open source AV product is how often the virus definitions may or may not be updated. It has been my experience in the past that development work on F/OSS can sometimes procede more slowly than commercial software, and I'm wondering if these extended timetables also apply to AVG's virus definitions. Is their definition update response time at all comparable to the big commercial vendors?
Yup, and there's no way to turn the "friendly" reminder off. Add to that the fact that, I've had some cases where uninstalling Norton seemed to trigger various other unrelated issues on the PC, and I'm not a huge Norton fan. I wasn't too pleased with LiveUpdate anyway -- why do I have to enter a username and password when I want to update the software itself, shouldn't that come down via the same channels as the definitions?
I probably ran without virus protection for about 6 months until I was informed by a superior that due to the nature of our corporate license agreement with McAfee and the circumstances regarding the use of my personal PC for business purposes, I was allowed to install our corporate version of McAfee. It seems to provide adequate protection, although I have to admit that my network isn't exactly the most fertile test ground for its capabilities. It's caught a few on my laptop, though. (It was more or less the community PC for all of my friends when they came over, including the less internet savvy ones.)
This may not be your cup of tea, but I "conjured" a similar solution via VNC. I would just connect from my primary desktop PC to my secondary via VNC and do everything I needed to on that PC, while looking at the non-laggy view on the secondary monitor on the corner of my desk. When I got done, I'd just look back at my primary PC, minimize VNC, and go about my business.
Hmm... with my Cingular phone I just get a text message reminder of the minutes periodically. I also get a verbal reminder that I'm low on minutes when I try to make a call. That said, I just tried to check my minutes and found that my minutes had "expired". What the crap is up with that? It's not like minutes go bad and you have to refrigerate them after opening. I only had a couple of dollars left, but that still angers me that I paid for something that I never had the opportunity to use.
Actually, your arguments about wheels in nature bring me back to an issue I was pondering yesterday. I finally sat down and watched Firefly (all 15 episodes) yesterday, and as is my nature, I started trying to pick apart the show, especially regarding the use of "old technology" interspersed with "new technology". Chiefly, if they can fly between planets, why are they using horses for transportation and not some other sort of conveyance. What you say about wheels not being much use if there are no freeways comes very close to summing up my eventual conclusion on the issue. Without a good, mostly flat surface, wheels really aren't much use. One of the biggest reasons horses were probably so popular with the settlers in the show was due to their ability to handle rough terrain. They can do things that cars can't do, such as step over obstacles and dynamically adjust their footing in order to find the best traction in low tracion situations. Quite simply, wheels are extremely convenient in developed areas, but there probably weren't a whole lot of areas like that until the last couple of thousand of years or so.
(As an aside, the other primary reasons that I can see for using horses on a remote planet have to do with the "maintenance" and "fuel" problems. You can fuel your horses with a much more easily harvested fuel that is also renewable. As for maintenance, well they either maintain themselves, or they get turned into glue. Not to mention, there's the added benefit of having the conveyances themselves design and construct next years model, thereby leaving the entire process up to the true experts.)
Heck. I remember wondering how I was going to fill up a 400MB drive. I then remember filling it up and purchasing a (parallel port driven) Zip drive to increase my capacity. But I remember the most was my experiment to play Doom off the Zip drive. That was an interesting experience with gameplay measured in seconds per frame instead of frames per second.
Ahhh... those were the days. Now I have a 400GB RAID array and am still wondering what I can delete/burn to DVD in order to free up space.
BTW - its soooo much easier here in Europe than it is in the US when it comes to cell phones. I tried to get a cell phone for my sister for Xmas and found that I would have to enter into a contract with any number of companies that serviced the area she lives in. Even the "prepaid" phones like Virgin had this issue.
You know, that's funny. I decided to purchase a prepaid phone after evacuating New Orleans. The whole 504 area code was so screwed up that I was lucky to receive a phone call. (We can thank our telcos for not properly protecting their switches from the imminent flood disaster that New Orleans was sure to have.) Anyway, getting back to the point. I really don't remember having to enter into a contract with them. Yeah sure, they wanted my address and various other information, but I don't remember having to sign any sort of contract perse. I just bought a cheap GSM phone and the prepaid $50 card and went to town. I could be wrong, but I really don't remember signing anything other than the credit card receipt.
You forgot System of a Down's "Steal this Album", er, album. I mean, who can blame the consumer when it's the band itself telling them to steal it?