Even a 4MB video card is typically capable of resolutions like 1280x960, 1280x1024, or 1600x1200, just not using 24-bit color, but even 15-bit or 16-bit color is fine for most desktop usage.
Games might require more, but games are not typical desktop apps.
Why not? Operating systems like OS/2, QNXRtP, Win95, Win98, BeOS Pro R5, Mandrake 8.2 with various window managers including KDE 2.2, and even Windows 2000 run fairly well in 64MB of RAM at 1280x1024 on on my current PPro hardware (4MB Matrox MGA Millenium).
The problem with modern distros isn't the graphics, or even UI feature -- it's the code bloat present in the desktop/GUI being used.
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Use Links instead from the console. Some variants support both SSL and Javascript.
I could have ridden my bike for a while while living up in the Twin Cities (very different road development and much mellower drivers), but here it really wouldn't work very well. The roads don't seemed designed for bikes or pedestrian traffic at all, and folks here are a lot more aggressive when it comes to slow objects blocking their precious traffic lanes.
We don't even have a cafeteria on site. Or even sandwich vending machines. I get to pack my own sandwiches for lunch, which I don't mind, but it shows that some companies are a far cry from providing things like fitness facilities. Of course, we rent the office space that we're using, so that is part of the reason behind the nature of the facilities, also.
My wife works at the corporate headquarters for a fairly large company, and they have all kinds of nice things including an excercise room, but they have more employees in that one building than my employer has worldwide. That could be part of it, too.:-)
Remember that the actual creators of the GIF format (CompuServe) decided to use the LZW data compression algorithm (which was patented at the time by Unisys, and which Unisys was actively enforcing and charging money for in other markets) without permission.
Yes, the folks at Unisys were dicks about it (they weren't initially, but they were later on), and for that alone they deserve most of the flack they get, but they didn't create the problem in the first place -- they were simply enforcing a patent that they has a past history of actively enforcing (as the folks at CIS should have known).
Unisys deserves to get hammered, but CompuServe caused the problem in the first place, and it seems strange to me they are always ignored by Burn All GIFs fanatics...
It's worse than that -- if you're using Opera, the Xerox flash ad code jumps the page forward to an empty page containing just the ad... so Slashdot is unreadable with Opera if one of these ads is up -- just an empty page with one ad on it.
That's what I was seeing in Firefox, too. Annoying!!!!!
While it's true that user stupidity is a main factor, it's also true that a stupid person with a loaded pistol will usually do less damage if the pistol has a working safety.:-)
It's even better if the pistol has a combination trigger lock known only to the GunAdmin, but that's probably only likely in corporate or schoolastic settings...
Silly person. LZW covered a lot more than just CompuServe's image format. Just ask the various communications companies that paid for the use of LZW before CIS decided to use the algorithm w/o permission...
Re:I buy a lot of older/refurb equipment online.
on
Tech on the Cheap?
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· Score: 1
I typically have only six or seven boxes running at a time these days, but the electricity cost is surprisingly little. $30/month? I don't know for sure.
Right now I'm usually running the following on the LAN:
On Hitachi 21" monitor via KVM:
1 Compaq ProLiant 2500
1 IBM IntelliStation model 6899
2 Compaq Deskpro 6200s (a third is currently in surgery).
1 Micron PPro tower
1 HP Laptop on docking station
On IBM 17" monitor:
1 IBM IntelliStation model 6899 (firewall)
For a while when I was unemployed I'd keep things powered off at night and power them up in the morning, but I didn't see that much change in my electricity bills so I stopped doing that. Because of network filesystem mounting dependencies I had to power them up in a specific sequence, which made life interesting when I did things out of order.:-)
Since we had an fairly large ocean between us and both theaters of the actual war, there was a fairly strong incentive to remain isolationist and let the warmongers in Europe run their course. Not that we didn't help Britain quite a bit materially well before then, but at that point it wasn't US citizens who were being killed by the Axis forces (for the most part).
We'd already helped to save Europe's ass once in the Great War (WWI), and there wasn't a lot of eagerness to go through that again.
Of course, most of the isolationist attitudes changed when Japan decided to invite us into the war in a somewhat questionable manner by bombing the crap out of our main naval base at Pearl Harbor, and since Germany was an ally of Japan...
That said, however, an awful lot of American bombs fell on Dresden and elsewhere.
I buy a lot of older/refurb equipment online.
on
Tech on the Cheap?
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· Score: 3, Informative
There's no need to stay cutting edge unless you're really into the latest games or you feel a need to keep ahead of everyone else. I was that way once, but a period of extended unemployment caused me to reevaluate that attitude.:-)
I've actually been very happy using older PCs at home for years. Not only do I purchase most of my PCs and related peripherals on eBay, but I have a whole series of other sites I hit on a regular basis for various techie supplies and misc items (www.ubid.com, www.compgeeks.com, www.cyberguys.com, www.pcsurplusonline.com, etc.).
My Palm PDAs are all older (two Palm m105's, one IIIc) with the exception of my Fossil/Abacus WristPDA (which at US$49 on eBay was the least expensive of the lot). My digital camera is still a refurb Casio QV3000EX I picked up on uBid five years ago for half its retail price. The last piece of hardware I purchased was a new 16-port 10BaseT/100BaseTX auto-sensing switch for US$22 at CompGeeks. It seems to work fine. The second-to-last one was a refurb 8-port Belkin OmniView Pro KVM (F1D108-OSD-B) which I absolutely love. Cost: US$70 including 8 new 10-foot cables from a nice guy on eBay.
If you do the research, learn what what you actually need instead of what you want, and spend a little bit of time looking around, you can find a lot of good stuff for very little money.
It's my understanding that some commercial aircraft types are currently required to perform an automatic landing on a periodic basis just to make sure the system is functioning correctly.
Since there are humans in the cockpit who can override at any time, the risk is negligible.
I'm referring to the years from MS-DOS 1.0 through MS-DOS 6.0 (1981 through 1993).
Most of the heavy DOS users I know were in the days from MS-DOS 3.3 (32MB disk partitions) though MS-DOS 5.0 (the best one MS released, IMO), and a lot of us replaced COMMAND.COM with 4DOS.COM maaaany years before MS-DOS 6.0 was released.:-)
I had also moved to OS/2 by then, but it still had a COMMAND.COM in its VDMs (which I replaced almost immediately with 4DOS).
In my experience, the step Microsoft took which kept people from migrating to OS/2 was not the introduction of Windows NT, but rather their near-continuous press releases about their up and coming mainstream 32-bit OS (Windows 95) originally known as "Chicago."
Windows 3.1 was popular, and Windows NT did ensure that people knew that a real 32-bit API ("the future") existed, but the press releases about "Chicago" were tantalizing enough that a lot of people were willing to wait until its release (even it meant waiting for a couple of years) rather than move in any other direction.
I know that my workplace moved to Windows 95 right away when it came out and didn't move to Windows NT at all until version 4 was released with the Win96-like desktop. Until Win95, though, their desktops were populated with Windows for Workgroups 3.1
NT might have been a victory of sorts in that it brought the Win32 API to life in a way that was hard to ignore and demonstrated that it worked, but I think crediting NT for slowing OS/2 adoption is a bit much. Yes, it did that to a small extent, but most shops and users who moved to NT in its first two years tended to be hard-core MS shops to begin with (and thus were folks who would never see OS/2 as a viable solution).
In my mind, the main thing which really hurt OS/2 (besides anticipation for Win95) was the same thing which makes Linux a tough sell: a lack of preloads. Yes, it had a relative lack of native apps (a lack of MS Office hurt, and the withdrawal of WordPerfect 6.0 late in its beta process was also a painful chapter), but its ability to run 16-bit software was good enough to cover that in many people's eyes. But the need to explicitly obtain it and do an installation was too much for many businesses to consider. They liked preloaded OSes.
There is no TECHNICAL reason MS can't do this, just ideological and business reasons.
Absolutely. Otherwise they'd simply use their newly acquired VirtualPC technology to juggle multiple NT kernels, DOS machines, etc., on top of a clean-room next-generation kernel and be done with it. We have the horsepower now, so there are no technical excuses.
Imagine that -- a new OS with legacy DOS, Win16, and Win32 support and everything. But it's too much to ask for something like that from a multi-billion-dollar corporation...
No. Windows NT sold far fewer copies than OS/2, and it was a marketing failure for most of its first three years.
It wasn't until Windows 95 was released that 32-bit applications started arriving, and that started to improve NT's popularity, but until then it was a fairly specialized OS used by relatively few hobbyists and forward-looking businesses.
The 32-bit Windows API is what eventually drove the dagger into OS/2's heart, but NT wasn't the driving force. The driving force was the ubiquity of Windows 95 installations and preloads.
Slashdot Mirror
Even a 4MB video card is typically capable of resolutions like 1280x960, 1280x1024, or 1600x1200, just not using 24-bit color, but even 15-bit or 16-bit color is fine for most desktop usage.
Games might require more, but games are not typical desktop apps.
Why not? Operating systems like OS/2, QNXRtP, Win95, Win98, BeOS Pro R5, Mandrake 8.2 with various window managers including KDE 2.2, and even Windows 2000 run fairly well in 64MB of RAM at 1280x1024 on on my current PPro hardware (4MB Matrox MGA Millenium).
The problem with modern distros isn't the graphics, or even UI feature -- it's the code bloat present in the desktop/GUI being used.
Use Links instead from the console. Some variants support both SSL and Javascript.
Sorry, I'm not suicidal. :-)
I could have ridden my bike for a while while living up in the Twin Cities (very different road development and much mellower drivers), but here it really wouldn't work very well. The roads don't seemed designed for bikes or pedestrian traffic at all, and folks here are a lot more aggressive when it comes to slow objects blocking their precious traffic lanes.
We don't even have a cafeteria on site. Or even sandwich vending machines. I get to pack my own sandwiches for lunch, which I don't mind, but it shows that some companies are a far cry from providing things like fitness facilities. Of course, we rent the office space that we're using, so that is part of the reason behind the nature of the facilities, also.
:-)
My wife works at the corporate headquarters for a fairly large company, and they have all kinds of nice things including an excercise room, but they have more employees in that one building than my employer has worldwide. That could be part of it, too.
Remember that the actual creators of the GIF format (CompuServe) decided to use the LZW data compression algorithm (which was patented at the time by Unisys, and which Unisys was actively enforcing and charging money for in other markets) without permission.
Yes, the folks at Unisys were dicks about it (they weren't initially, but they were later on), and for that alone they deserve most of the flack they get, but they didn't create the problem in the first place -- they were simply enforcing a patent that they has a past history of actively enforcing (as the folks at CIS should have known).
Unisys deserves to get hammered, but CompuServe caused the problem in the first place, and it seems strange to me they are always ignored by Burn All GIFs fanatics...
It's worse than that -- if you're using Opera, the Xerox flash ad code jumps the page forward to an empty page containing just the ad ... so Slashdot is unreadable with Opera if one of these ads is up -- just an empty page with one ad on it.
That's what I was seeing in Firefox, too. Annoying!!!!!
While it's true that user stupidity is a main factor, it's also true that a stupid person with a loaded pistol will usually do less damage if the pistol has a working safety. :-)
It's even better if the pistol has a combination trigger lock known only to the GunAdmin, but that's probably only likely in corporate or schoolastic settings...
I've never heard about it, but I've READ things off and on about CTOS for years. :-)
Here are a couple of nice sites about it for the curious...
Silly person. LZW covered a lot more than just CompuServe's image format. Just ask the various communications companies that paid for the use of LZW before CIS decided to use the algorithm w/o permission...
I typically have only six or seven boxes running at a time these days, but the electricity cost is surprisingly little. $30/month? I don't know for sure.
:-)
Right now I'm usually running the following on the LAN:
On Hitachi 21" monitor via KVM:
1 Compaq ProLiant 2500
1 IBM IntelliStation model 6899
2 Compaq Deskpro 6200s (a third is currently in surgery).
1 Micron PPro tower
1 HP Laptop on docking station
On IBM 17" monitor:
1 IBM IntelliStation model 6899 (firewall)
On Hitachi 17" monitor:
1 No-name Athlon 1100 box
Additional stuff:
1 8-port Belkin KVM switch
1 16-port 10/100 network switch
1 250GB Buffalo LinkStation fileserver
1 Cablemodem
For a while when I was unemployed I'd keep things powered off at night and power them up in the morning, but I didn't see that much change in my electricity bills so I stopped doing that. Because of network filesystem mounting dependencies I had to power them up in a specific sequence, which made life interesting when I did things out of order.
Wow... That Xerox ad is about the most obnoxious thing I've ever seen. It gets in the way of damn near everything!!
Since we had an fairly large ocean between us and both theaters of the actual war, there was a fairly strong incentive to remain isolationist and let the warmongers in Europe run their course. Not that we didn't help Britain quite a bit materially well before then, but at that point it wasn't US citizens who were being killed by the Axis forces (for the most part).
We'd already helped to save Europe's ass once in the Great War (WWI), and there wasn't a lot of eagerness to go through that again.
Of course, most of the isolationist attitudes changed when Japan decided to invite us into the war in a somewhat questionable manner by bombing the crap out of our main naval base at Pearl Harbor, and since Germany was an ally of Japan...
That said, however, an awful lot of American bombs fell on Dresden and elsewhere.
Multiple hardware platforms. They've never made an MS Office for another software platform running on non-specialized x86 hardware.
That didn't stop us in Germany...
There's no need to stay cutting edge unless you're really into the latest games or you feel a need to keep ahead of everyone else. I was that way once, but a period of extended unemployment caused me to reevaluate that attitude. :-)
I've actually been very happy using older PCs at home for years. Not only do I purchase most of my PCs and related peripherals on eBay, but I have a whole series of other sites I hit on a regular basis for various techie supplies and misc items (www.ubid.com, www.compgeeks.com, www.cyberguys.com, www.pcsurplusonline.com, etc.).
My Palm PDAs are all older (two Palm m105's, one IIIc) with the exception of my Fossil/Abacus WristPDA (which at US$49 on eBay was the least expensive of the lot). My digital camera is still a refurb Casio QV3000EX I picked up on uBid five years ago for half its retail price. The last piece of hardware I purchased was a new 16-port 10BaseT/100BaseTX auto-sensing switch for US$22 at CompGeeks. It seems to work fine. The second-to-last one was a refurb 8-port Belkin OmniView Pro KVM (F1D108-OSD-B) which I absolutely love. Cost: US$70 including 8 new 10-foot cables from a nice guy on eBay.
If you do the research, learn what what you actually need instead of what you want, and spend a little bit of time looking around, you can find a lot of good stuff for very little money.
It's my understanding that some commercial aircraft types are currently required to perform an automatic landing on a periodic basis just to make sure the system is functioning correctly.
Since there are humans in the cockpit who can override at any time, the risk is negligible.
I'm referring to the years from MS-DOS 1.0 through MS-DOS 6.0 (1981 through 1993).
:-)
Most of the heavy DOS users I know were in the days from MS-DOS 3.3 (32MB disk partitions) though MS-DOS 5.0 (the best one MS released, IMO), and a lot of us replaced COMMAND.COM with 4DOS.COM maaaany years before MS-DOS 6.0 was released.
I had also moved to OS/2 by then, but it still had a COMMAND.COM in its VDMs (which I replaced almost immediately with 4DOS).
In my experience, the step Microsoft took which kept people from migrating to OS/2 was not the introduction of Windows NT, but rather their near-continuous press releases about their up and coming mainstream 32-bit OS (Windows 95) originally known as "Chicago."
Windows 3.1 was popular, and Windows NT did ensure that people knew that a real 32-bit API ("the future") existed, but the press releases about "Chicago" were tantalizing enough that a lot of people were willing to wait until its release (even it meant waiting for a couple of years) rather than move in any other direction.
I know that my workplace moved to Windows 95 right away when it came out and didn't move to Windows NT at all until version 4 was released with the Win96-like desktop. Until Win95, though, their desktops were populated with Windows for Workgroups 3.1
NT might have been a victory of sorts in that it brought the Win32 API to life in a way that was hard to ignore and demonstrated that it worked, but I think crediting NT for slowing OS/2 adoption is a bit much. Yes, it did that to a small extent, but most shops and users who moved to NT in its first two years tended to be hard-core MS shops to begin with (and thus were folks who would never see OS/2 as a viable solution).
In my mind, the main thing which really hurt OS/2 (besides anticipation for Win95) was the same thing which makes Linux a tough sell: a lack of preloads. Yes, it had a relative lack of native apps (a lack of MS Office hurt, and the withdrawal of WordPerfect 6.0 late in its beta process was also a painful chapter), but its ability to run 16-bit software was good enough to cover that in many people's eyes. But the need to explicitly obtain it and do an installation was too much for many businesses to consider. They liked preloaded OSes.
Once again the moderators show no sense of humor... Grow up...
...Blizzard is gonna start suing its own customers for displaying copies of protected game images on their PC monitors...
Absolutely. Otherwise they'd simply use their newly acquired VirtualPC technology to juggle multiple NT kernels, DOS machines, etc., on top of a clean-room next-generation kernel and be done with it. We have the horsepower now, so there are no technical excuses.
Imagine that -- a new OS with legacy DOS, Win16, and Win32 support and everything. But it's too much to ask for something like that from a multi-billion-dollar corporation...
You can see the list of OASIS members here:
http://www.oasis-open.org/about/
No. Windows NT sold far fewer copies than OS/2, and it was a marketing failure for most of its first three years.
It wasn't until Windows 95 was released that 32-bit applications started arriving, and that started to improve NT's popularity, but until then it was a fairly specialized OS used by relatively few hobbyists and forward-looking businesses.
The 32-bit Windows API is what eventually drove the dagger into OS/2's heart, but NT wasn't the driving force. The driving force was the ubiquity of Windows 95 installations and preloads.
It makes more sense to some of us than GNU/Linux.