I use a Logitech Dual Optical at home for gaming and general computer stuff. The main advantage to me is that it tracks over ANYTHING, unlike my single sensor Logitech at work, which sometimes freaks out. My only complaint is that the buttons don't stretch all from side to side of the mouse, like the Boomslang. Those big buttons were the only reason I ever wanted one.
Believe me, it depends on the user. My coworker/roommate is a graphic designer by trade, and uses nothing but a trackball. And he is unstoppable in Strike Force =).
I've used ViewSonic's Viewpad 100 and 1000. The 1000 is sweet, since it is basically a PC in tablet form. Windows 2000 runs on it, and it is quick enough for most apps (600MHz Celeron I believe). The Viewpad 100 is sort of like an iPaq in tablet form, but it doesnt run PocketPC OS, so that is something to consider. I believe it runs the H/PC version of CE. And web browsing on an iPaq sucks, partly because it is underpowered. I would have to wonder how the Viewpad 100 would compare.
Then again, the Airpanel might be a better choice than the Viewpad 100, since you could run the apps on a Terminal Server, and not be hindered by trying to run IE on an ARM. Then again, you would have to consider the cost of the Windows Server license and Terminal Services licenses.
As far as security goes, I wonder if the OS on the ViewPad 100 and the Airpanel support VPN. The latest PocketPC OS has VPN functionality built in, allowing you to secure your wireless connection with PPTP.
So, to recap:
- ViewPad 1000 - Powerful, but pricey
- ViewPad 1000 - Affordable, but kinda slow?
- Airpanel - Licensing costs?
Good luck, sounds like an interesting experiment! =)
This got modded Insightful? What I wouldn't give for mod points right about now. IE is the slowest, buggiest browser I've used, second only to Netscape 4.x.
Mozilla RC1, on the other hand, renders pages almost as quick as Opera, starts up instantly if you enable QuickStart, and is more standards compliant than just about anything out there.
If you find browsing in anything than IE a pain, blame Microsoft for breaking the web.
Agreed. My company is in Orlando. I heard those ads on the radio a few months back. It didn't scare us too much, though, as we've completed several audits for Microsoft already.
I love how Microsoft touts their products as having a lower TCO than Linux, since "anyone" can administer Windows. Do they factor in lost man-hours due to audits? We aren't a big shop by any means, under 100 users, but because we have a site license we have to perform an audit every few months. This can take days for me and my co-worker to finish.
To be honest, when I was a kid I pirated software like mad. I didn't have any money, and neither did my mom, and I wasn't profiting from it by any stretch of the imagination. Now that I'm doing this for a living, I won't hesitate to buy software that I like. $15US for a handy shareware program is a pittance. I make it a point to encourage those around me to buy software too. I can see parallels with the music industry as well. Give people a chance to try it out, and sell the registration for a reasonable price, and you can't lose!
Strong arm tactics like those employed by the BSA and xxAAs turn people against you. Treat people like pirates and they will oblige. Make it more of an ethics issue, and maybe they will think twice next time they go to grab the latest version of Photoshop off Limewire.
Just played DOA3 on the XBox a few days ago, and I don't think it looks any better than Virtua Fighter 4 does.
I thought one of the big problems with the PS2 was poor anti-aliasing support. From what I've seen, the XBox is almost the same. But with all that massively parallel computer power in the Emotion Engine, couldn't programmers just "brute force" anti-aliasing? It's just a quick calulation and some more pixels, right?
Win2K and XP, the best versions of Windows to compare with a *nix, have the CTRL-ALT-DEL task manager. Simply take the app out, or explorer.exe. They hardly ever crash on a properly configured system anyway.
Sure, but kill explorer.exe and now systray won't work until you reboot, and explorer starts acting odd. Don't start with that "properly configured system" crap =).
Strange; my experience with IE is the exact opposite of yours, although I use Mozilla now (two words: tabbed browsing). Are you sure it's not, say, bad video (or other) drivers?
To be honest, except for some wierdness with CS, the Nvidia drivers have been rock solid. I game under Win2K too, and can't recall it ever locking or crashing.
Are you sure you have DMA enabled on that?
No, not sure, but I was using it under Win2K, with the latest version of the drivers for my chipset. I've since replaced the machine with a laptop.
I should point out that my problem is with IE, not necessarily Win2K, which I think is Microsoft's best effort to date. IE is just horrible, and it irritates me to no end that I actually have to start it up just to check my bank account.
As for OS X, I've used it on a tiBook and my grandmother's G3 iMac which I just got her. It is simply the most gorgeous interface I have ever used. It is completely useable, even on a G3 with 256 meg of RAM. Certainly not as speedy as Mozilla is on my Wintel box though =)
And OS X might be the catalyst that gets me to buy a G4 tower. I bought an iPod last year and it was the best investment I ever made.
This always sounds like a compelling argument - right up until the point you realise for that 99% of people having X crash has the same end result as having the whole OS crash.
With Nvidia's latest binary drivers X has been rock solid for me. Crashes only because of KDE 3, and when it does, I zap it and 'startx' again. It really does work like a charm. I agree that Win2K is fairly stable, but my real beef is with IE.
I'd love to know which browser you are using that has IE's featureset that is faster and more relaible. I don't know of any.
Moz. ph34r.
Really, I wanted to like IE. It does support "everything" because "everything" caters to IE. It crashes on me constantly though, and on a brand spanking new machine. It is slow as a dog, accessing FTP sites hangs up ALL the IE windows. Need I go on?
Either you're lying or your hardware has serious issues with its Windows drivers.
Perhaps, but this is on a Dell Dimension with the latest IDE drivers from Dell's site. All this under Win2K.
Exactly. And if you're going to run a seriously crippled WM (by todays standards) just to get the same kind of speed that you get in Windows, then what's the point?
The point is that when an app or your windowing system crashes, it doesn't take the whole OS down with it. Ctrl+Alt+BkSpace, then startx again. Voila!
I have to use Windows here at work, and I hate every minute of it. IE sucks, period. It is slow, buggy, and unstable. IE6 has some cool functionality, but is even more buggy. Ever try burning a CD on an IDE CD-R under Windows? It brings my 1Ghz P3 to a crawl. The same PC under Linux, I can burn a CD with 3% processor usage, in X, and then browse and shell to my heart't content without a slowdown at all.
Frankly, if it weren't for Exchange, I would use Linux 24/7. Thank you Nvidia for good X drivers!
Yes, it's massively illegal. But what do you do about it when a VERY large percentage of the people that those laws serve (believe it or not, copyright law is there to serve the people, NOT the record companies) decide they're not going to abide by them anymore?
We didnt just up and decide to NOT honor copyright laws anymore. A technology came along that caught the music industry offguard, and apparently there are more lawyers than anything else in the entertainment industry, so they got their little law passed. At the expense of the consumer of course. VHS does little to prevent copying, besides using a technology that degrades the quality for EVERYONE (kind of like this lame CD access control stuff), but the movie industry is booming.
For a (fairly) liberal person, I tend to believe in letting the free market decide. Sure, I could rent a DVD, convert it to a VCD, and watch it to my hearts content on my DVD player. But the cost of DVDs is quite reasonable in my eyes, and I would just as soon pay 20 bucks for high quality video/sound and a nice case. The same could be said of the music industry, a couple years ago perhaps. Now they've pissed their customers off, and we all want them to die the long overdue death that's coming. At least that's how it is SUPPOSED to work. Think prohibition.
Right, because we all know that was great success. Just like the War on Drugs®.
They already have a "large format PDA" in the form of the ViewPad 100. I think it is similar to this device, just with a complete WinCE? We have some here where I work, along with some of the ViewPad 1000s, which are tablet form PCs. They are hella cool for just web browsing, and the 1000s have a built in camera for NetMeeting and such.
Read the article first, though. We all know bandwidth is artificially scarce. We all know the big phone companies ran their only competitors in the DSL market into the ground. This article affirms how much of a pain in the ass the CLEC will make it for anyone else to use their loops. Deregulation is bliss, isn't it?
If you didn't read the article, here is a choice quote:
"By far the biggest challenge faced by the Coop - a challenge that dwarfed any of the technical and financial challenges - was gaining access to subloops from Qwest under the Telecommunications Act of 1996," reads the homepage introduction. "The course of negotiations was such that the Coop found it necessary to file an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and subsequently found it necessary to pursue arbitration before the Colorado Public Service Commission."
Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to copyright holders? How do you propose we stem illegal distribution of copyrighted material, other than mandating that copy-thwarting be built into any device that can read the original work?
I know this is a radical idea, and doesnt have a snowball's chance in hell of happening, but how about learning something from every SlashBot's favorite whipping boy, Microsoft? Let the free market dictate who succeeds and who fails. Make it so cheap to buy a legit copy that the only people pirating are the same who NEVER WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE! If the recording industry dropped CD prices across the board to $9.99US and below, they wouldnt be able to keep the CDs on the shelves. Well, maybe a year ago this would be true. At this point, they've already shown their stubborness and alienated their customers.
We've been using a Win2K server as our VPN server up til now. It works well enough for the 3 to 4 people who use it regularly, plus my boss and myself. We've had some problems with DNS though. Sometimes when someone VPNs in it causes the server to resolve to the VPN client's IP, even though the DNS server is configured otherwise. Go figure...
Agreed. I've been playing with these new ViewSonic pen-based tablets. It is a cool gimmick, but only works well for web browsing. The handwriting recognition isnt the greatest, and kind of buggy at this point. Then again, I havent been using it for 15-some-odd years =)
Re:Great idea!
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yea, really.
Eds, you really shouldnt be posting a link to their FTP site. It encourages too many people to follow that link. Didnt we learn this lesson with kernel.org? Post a link to their mirror page.
Damn RealOne indeed. That RealOne crap takes over your machine, doesnt let you disable SmartCenter, and doesnt let you disable their gay little ads that popup everytime you start up. What's worse, I have an old version of RealPlayer installed, and in the past couple of months every piece of content I try to play just pops up a window telling me to upgrade to RealOne.
Thanks a ton Real. I cant wait to watch PressPlay fail miserably like all your other horrible products.
My experience with DOS & Windows dates back to when I was 7. As does my BASIC experience (TRS-80s and a TI-99). I dont claim that on my resume though, which reflects my professional experience.
He didnt claim it was professional experience, he just said he has been a Mac evangelist that long. Doesn't sound too extreme. For the record, I set up my middle school's Mac network while I was attending school there =).
I used a Sierra Wireless 1xRTT card at CTIA (they had deployed a 1xRTT cell there) which I believe is what Sprint's "3G" service is. It was disappointing to say the least. Took the person running the iPaq a few minutes to get it going, and it barely worked at that. To be honest, I think she was fudging even that much (as the next link she clicked on popped up a 'Page not found' error) and was just showing me a cached page. I'm not terribly impressed.
Also, the max data rate for these cards is 153.6Kbps, and that is divided up among all users in the cell. It will be interesting to see what "100Mbps" becomes when DoCoMo's 4G service comes out.
*shameless plug*My employer, based in Orlando, is developing a wireless product somewhat similar, that solves a lot of these problems. It is interesting in that the more users join the network, the better the connectivity for everyone (i.e. more potential routes). We have a test network set up near our headquarters, and I can go out anywhere within it and get high-speed internet access (limited only by the T1 backhaul).
I have a pair of gloves designed specifically for working on cars. The brand name is "Mechanix" I think. They have a thin leather on the palm and fingers, then a neoprene-like stretchy material on the back. Great for working on exhaust stuff, or anything on a turbo car for that matter =). They are washable too! Cost me $20US from iPd, a Volvo-oriented performance company.
Used to be that way down here (Roadrunner Central Florida). After that whole Code Red 1/2 fiasco, which brought RR to its knees, they started blocking port 80. Thanks MIcrosoft! Goodbye personal webpage!
My next worry is that when RR's contract with TWC runs out that I will be forced to use *gack* AOL.
As the systems administrator I get the pleasure of maintaining the PVCS server. All the developers do is bitch about how horrible a system it is. It is slow (server it is on is hideously over-spec'ed), almost unbearably so on Linux (although we think it might be related to NFS Maestro), and everyone who has worked with CVS seems to think it is much much better.
From what I have read it tends to be slow due to how it accesses the PVCS archives. It doesnt just check out the file and copy it to a work directory on your computer, rather it is constantly hitting the server. Here is a good document on PVCS' shortcomings (albeit with a slight bias, since it came from a competitors website): http://www.perforce.com/perforce/pvcs.html
There are some Perl scripts out there to transition PVCS to CVS, and I think I found links on the WinCVS homepage. I believe that is the direction we will be headed soon.
Also, PVCS is awfully pricey for what I consider to be a subpar product.
I have seen some of the Open H323 stuff in action, and it looks pretty good. Compatible with Netmeeting too. A developer at work contributes to it, and is developing a VoIP app for us. I've actually dialed a coworkers cell phone from an iPaq with a WiFi card, with good voice quality.
Anyhow, more on topic, the OpenH323 stuff is coming along, and is quite usuable in its current form. Not sure about the video support at the moment, but I'm sure a quick look at their website would help!
Slashdot Mirror
I use a Logitech Dual Optical at home for gaming and general computer stuff. The main advantage to me is that it tracks over ANYTHING, unlike my single sensor Logitech at work, which sometimes freaks out. My only complaint is that the buttons don't stretch all from side to side of the mouse, like the Boomslang. Those big buttons were the only reason I ever wanted one.
Believe me, it depends on the user. My coworker/roommate is a graphic designer by trade, and uses nothing but a trackball. And he is unstoppable in Strike Force =).
Practice makes perfect after all!
I would second the above suggestion.
I've used ViewSonic's Viewpad 100 and 1000. The 1000 is sweet, since it is basically a PC in tablet form. Windows 2000 runs on it, and it is quick enough for most apps (600MHz Celeron I believe). The Viewpad 100 is sort of like an iPaq in tablet form, but it doesnt run PocketPC OS, so that is something to consider. I believe it runs the H/PC version of CE. And web browsing on an iPaq sucks, partly because it is underpowered. I would have to wonder how the Viewpad 100 would compare.
Then again, the Airpanel might be a better choice than the Viewpad 100, since you could run the apps on a Terminal Server, and not be hindered by trying to run IE on an ARM. Then again, you would have to consider the cost of the Windows Server license and Terminal Services licenses.
As far as security goes, I wonder if the OS on the ViewPad 100 and the Airpanel support VPN. The latest PocketPC OS has VPN functionality built in, allowing you to secure your wireless connection with PPTP.
So, to recap:
- ViewPad 1000 - Powerful, but pricey
- ViewPad 1000 - Affordable, but kinda slow?
- Airpanel - Licensing costs?
Good luck, sounds like an interesting experiment! =)
Liar.
This got modded Insightful? What I wouldn't give for mod points right about now. IE is the slowest, buggiest browser I've used, second only to Netscape 4.x.
Mozilla RC1, on the other hand, renders pages almost as quick as Opera, starts up instantly if you enable QuickStart, and is more standards compliant than just about anything out there.
If you find browsing in anything than IE a pain, blame Microsoft for breaking the web.
Agreed. My company is in Orlando. I heard those ads on the radio a few months back. It didn't scare us too much, though, as we've completed several audits for Microsoft already.
I love how Microsoft touts their products as having a lower TCO than Linux, since "anyone" can administer Windows. Do they factor in lost man-hours due to audits? We aren't a big shop by any means, under 100 users, but because we have a site license we have to perform an audit every few months. This can take days for me and my co-worker to finish.
To be honest, when I was a kid I pirated software like mad. I didn't have any money, and neither did my mom, and I wasn't profiting from it by any stretch of the imagination. Now that I'm doing this for a living, I won't hesitate to buy software that I like. $15US for a handy shareware program is a pittance. I make it a point to encourage those around me to buy software too. I can see parallels with the music industry as well. Give people a chance to try it out, and sell the registration for a reasonable price, and you can't lose!
Strong arm tactics like those employed by the BSA and xxAAs turn people against you. Treat people like pirates and they will oblige. Make it more of an ethics issue, and maybe they will think twice next time they go to grab the latest version of Photoshop off Limewire.
Just played DOA3 on the XBox a few days ago, and I don't think it looks any better than Virtua Fighter 4 does.
I thought one of the big problems with the PS2 was poor anti-aliasing support. From what I've seen, the XBox is almost the same. But with all that massively parallel computer power in the Emotion Engine, couldn't programmers just "brute force" anti-aliasing? It's just a quick calulation and some more pixels, right?
Win2K and XP, the best versions of Windows to compare with a *nix, have the CTRL-ALT-DEL task manager. Simply take the app out, or explorer.exe. They hardly ever crash on a properly configured system anyway.
Sure, but kill explorer.exe and now systray won't work until you reboot, and explorer starts acting odd. Don't start with that "properly configured system" crap =).
Strange; my experience with IE is the exact opposite of yours, although I use Mozilla now (two words: tabbed browsing). Are you sure it's not, say, bad video (or other) drivers?
To be honest, except for some wierdness with CS, the Nvidia drivers have been rock solid. I game under Win2K too, and can't recall it ever locking or crashing.
Are you sure you have DMA enabled on that?
No, not sure, but I was using it under Win2K, with the latest version of the drivers for my chipset. I've since replaced the machine with a laptop.
I should point out that my problem is with IE, not necessarily Win2K, which I think is Microsoft's best effort to date. IE is just horrible, and it irritates me to no end that I actually have to start it up just to check my bank account.
As for OS X, I've used it on a tiBook and my grandmother's G3 iMac which I just got her. It is simply the most gorgeous interface I have ever used. It is completely useable, even on a G3 with 256 meg of RAM. Certainly not as speedy as Mozilla is on my Wintel box though =)
And OS X might be the catalyst that gets me to buy a G4 tower. I bought an iPod last year and it was the best investment I ever made.
This always sounds like a compelling argument - right up until the point you realise for that 99% of people having X crash has the same end result as having the whole OS crash.
With Nvidia's latest binary drivers X has been rock solid for me. Crashes only because of KDE 3, and when it does, I zap it and 'startx' again. It really does work like a charm. I agree that Win2K is fairly stable, but my real beef is with IE.
I'd love to know which browser you are using that has IE's featureset that is faster and more relaible. I don't know of any.
Moz. ph34r.
Really, I wanted to like IE. It does support "everything" because "everything" caters to IE. It crashes on me constantly though, and on a brand spanking new machine. It is slow as a dog, accessing FTP sites hangs up ALL the IE windows. Need I go on?
Either you're lying or your hardware has serious issues with its Windows drivers.
Perhaps, but this is on a Dell Dimension with the latest IDE drivers from Dell's site. All this under Win2K.
Exactly. And if you're going to run a seriously crippled WM (by todays standards) just to get the same kind of speed that you get in Windows, then what's the point?
The point is that when an app or your windowing system crashes, it doesn't take the whole OS down with it. Ctrl+Alt+BkSpace, then startx again. Voila!
I have to use Windows here at work, and I hate every minute of it. IE sucks, period. It is slow, buggy, and unstable. IE6 has some cool functionality, but is even more buggy. Ever try burning a CD on an IDE CD-R under Windows? It brings my 1Ghz P3 to a crawl. The same PC under Linux, I can burn a CD with 3% processor usage, in X, and then browse and shell to my heart't content without a slowdown at all.
Frankly, if it weren't for Exchange, I would use Linux 24/7. Thank you Nvidia for good X drivers!
And then don't complain when your civil services go to hell (police response, road conditions, school quality)
That's right! Haven't you ever played SimCity? =)
Yes, it's massively illegal. But what do you do about it when a VERY large percentage of the people that those laws serve (believe it or not, copyright law is there to serve the people, NOT the record companies) decide they're not going to abide by them anymore?
We didnt just up and decide to NOT honor copyright laws anymore. A technology came along that caught the music industry offguard, and apparently there are more lawyers than anything else in the entertainment industry, so they got their little law passed. At the expense of the consumer of course. VHS does little to prevent copying, besides using a technology that degrades the quality for EVERYONE (kind of like this lame CD access control stuff), but the movie industry is booming.
For a (fairly) liberal person, I tend to believe in letting the free market decide. Sure, I could rent a DVD, convert it to a VCD, and watch it to my hearts content on my DVD player. But the cost of DVDs is quite reasonable in my eyes, and I would just as soon pay 20 bucks for high quality video/sound and a nice case. The same could be said of the music industry, a couple years ago perhaps. Now they've pissed their customers off, and we all want them to die the long overdue death that's coming.
At least that's how it is SUPPOSED to work. Think prohibition.
Right, because we all know that was great success. Just like the War on Drugs®.
They already have a "large format PDA" in the form of the ViewPad 100. I think it is similar to this device, just with a complete WinCE? We have some here where I work, along with some of the ViewPad 1000s, which are tablet form PCs. They are hella cool for just web browsing, and the 1000s have a built in camera for NetMeeting and such.
Read the article first, though. We all know bandwidth is artificially scarce. We all know the big phone companies ran their only competitors in the DSL market into the ground. This article affirms how much of a pain in the ass the CLEC will make it for anyone else to use their loops. Deregulation is bliss, isn't it?
If you didn't read the article, here is a choice quote:
"By far the biggest challenge faced by the Coop - a challenge that dwarfed any of the technical and financial challenges - was gaining access to subloops from Qwest under the Telecommunications Act of 1996," reads the homepage introduction. "The course of negotiations was such that the Coop found it necessary to file an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and subsequently found it necessary to pursue arbitration before the Colorado Public Service Commission."
Doesn't that pose an immediate danger to copyright holders? How do you propose we stem illegal distribution of copyrighted material, other than mandating that copy-thwarting be built into any device that can read the original work?
I know this is a radical idea, and doesnt have a snowball's chance in hell of happening, but how about learning something from every SlashBot's favorite whipping boy, Microsoft? Let the free market dictate who succeeds and who fails. Make it so cheap to buy a legit copy that the only people pirating are the same who NEVER WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE! If the recording industry dropped CD prices across the board to $9.99US and below, they wouldnt be able to keep the CDs on the shelves. Well, maybe a year ago this would be true. At this point, they've already shown their stubborness and alienated their customers.
Sorry RIAA, you made your bed, now lie in it.
Great info on using Windows 2000/XP with FreeS/WAN here: http://vpn.ebootis.de/.
We've been using a Win2K server as our VPN server up til now. It works well enough for the 3 to 4 people who use it regularly, plus my boss and myself. We've had some problems with DNS though. Sometimes when someone VPNs in it causes the server to resolve to the VPN client's IP, even though the DNS server is configured otherwise. Go figure...
Agreed. I've been playing with these new ViewSonic pen-based tablets. It is a cool gimmick, but only works well for web browsing. The handwriting recognition isnt the greatest, and kind of buggy at this point. Then again, I havent been using it for 15-some-odd years =)
Yea, really.
Eds, you really shouldnt be posting a link to their FTP site. It encourages too many people to follow that link. Didnt we learn this lesson with kernel.org? Post a link to their mirror page.
Damn RealOne indeed. That RealOne crap takes over your machine, doesnt let you disable SmartCenter, and doesnt let you disable their gay little ads that popup everytime you start up. What's worse, I have an old version of RealPlayer installed, and in the past couple of months every piece of content I try to play just pops up a window telling me to upgrade to RealOne.
Thanks a ton Real. I cant wait to watch PressPlay fail miserably like all your other horrible products.
Bah!
My experience with DOS & Windows dates back to when I was 7. As does my BASIC experience (TRS-80s and a TI-99). I dont claim that on my resume though, which reflects my professional experience.
He didnt claim it was professional experience, he just said he has been a Mac evangelist that long. Doesn't sound too extreme. For the record, I set up my middle school's Mac network while I was attending school there =).
I used a Sierra Wireless 1xRTT card at CTIA (they had deployed a 1xRTT cell there) which I believe is what Sprint's "3G" service is. It was disappointing to say the least. Took the person running the iPaq a few minutes to get it going, and it barely worked at that. To be honest, I think she was fudging even that much (as the next link she clicked on popped up a 'Page not found' error) and was just showing me a cached page. I'm not terribly impressed.
Also, the max data rate for these cards is 153.6Kbps, and that is divided up among all users in the cell. It will be interesting to see what "100Mbps" becomes when DoCoMo's 4G service comes out.
In Orlando, eh?
*shameless plug*My employer, based in Orlando, is developing a wireless product somewhat similar, that solves a lot of these problems. It is interesting in that the more users join the network, the better the connectivity for everyone (i.e. more potential routes). We have a test network set up near our headquarters, and I can go out anywhere within it and get high-speed internet access (limited only by the T1 backhaul).
I have a pair of gloves designed specifically for working on cars. The brand name is "Mechanix" I think. They have a thin leather on the palm and fingers, then a neoprene-like stretchy material on the back. Great for working on exhaust stuff, or anything on a turbo car for that matter =). They are washable too! Cost me $20US from iPd, a Volvo-oriented performance company.
Used to be that way down here (Roadrunner Central Florida). After that whole Code Red 1/2 fiasco, which brought RR to its knees, they started blocking port 80. Thanks MIcrosoft! Goodbye personal webpage!
My next worry is that when RR's contract with TWC runs out that I will be forced to use *gack* AOL.
As the systems administrator I get the pleasure of maintaining the PVCS server. All the developers do is bitch about how horrible a system it is. It is slow (server it is on is hideously over-spec'ed), almost unbearably so on Linux (although we think it might be related to NFS Maestro), and everyone who has worked with CVS seems to think it is much much better.
From what I have read it tends to be slow due to how it accesses the PVCS archives. It doesnt just check out the file and copy it to a work directory on your computer, rather it is constantly hitting the server. Here is a good document on PVCS' shortcomings (albeit with a slight bias, since it came from a competitors website): http://www.perforce.com/perforce/pvcs.html
There are some Perl scripts out there to transition PVCS to CVS, and I think I found links on the WinCVS homepage. I believe that is the direction we will be headed soon.
Also, PVCS is awfully pricey for what I consider to be a subpar product.
I have seen some of the Open H323 stuff in action, and it looks pretty good. Compatible with Netmeeting too. A developer at work contributes to it, and is developing a VoIP app for us. I've actually dialed a coworkers cell phone from an iPaq with a WiFi card, with good voice quality.
Anyhow, more on topic, the OpenH323 stuff is coming along, and is quite usuable in its current form. Not sure about the video support at the moment, but I'm sure a quick look at their website would help!