KOST is a ClearChannel station, BTW. One more reason to hate the shit out of them. There's a particular Fear song that I'd love to request them play, but they'd never do it. Oh yeah, even if you don't actively choose the station, enough damn stores have their FM tuners set for it you can't help but hear them. GAH! Fuck KOST, Fuck Christmas, Fuck ClearChannel.
But if you want the coolest phones, you get T-Mobile. Of course, you'll never be able to make a call without the other party going "What? I can't understand you." but you'll ahve an awesome phone.
I don't know where you're from, but I'm guessing you're not in Southern California. Right now, T-Mobile has one of the best networks out here. It was like night and day when I moved from AT&T TDMA to T-Mobile GSM.
I don't know how things are going to be once Cingular and T-Mobile comb apart their networks, but right now with the continued interop agreement they seem to be doing just fine.
I am just damn glad I'm off AT&T's crappy network, away from their crappy customer non-service, and with the geekiest damn mobile phone company on the planet. The coolest phones is only the beginning. Discount 802.11b service at T-Mobile hotspots, very workable GPRS service, all you can eat data or 802.11b for $20/month. (if you want both it's $40) And also, I can travel to Europe and parts of Asia (not Japan alas) and use my own phone!
Oh yeah: Verizon has a very small local calling area. If I visited my buddies in Santa Barbara and used my phone on VZ I'd be getting hit with roaming charges. My local area with T-Mobile: The continental United States. VZ charges a bomb for nationwide service.
T-Mobile rocks. (No, I don't work for T-Mobile. I'm just a happy customer.)
# apt-get install mozilla or # apt-get install mozilla-firebird or both if you have the space.
There, does that solve the problem or what?
Xandros is Debian under the hood, and you don't need to use the Xandros repository.
BTW folks, for those willing to work a little to get their desktop running, the Debian Sarge Installer is pretty damn good. It's not click-and-drool easy yet, but it's good. And it's free as in beer, speech and freedom.
Whether you go the Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix hdx-install or pure Debian route, it's all Debian and it's all good. And if you don't like the customizations a given distro uses, then all you have to do is:
#apt-get update #apt-get dist-upgrade
and you can get to Pure Debian Sarge, Sid or even Woody from there.
Really, every distro should be like this. I'm talking to you, Mandrake. You hear me, Fedora? Achtung, SuSE! RPM is dead, babies. Long live apt/dselect and its gui children.
It will be so cool when Artsd is out of our misery.
KDE should go for a canonical ALSA solution, rather than playing Lone Ranger and building their own system. ALSA+Jack is good stuff. Way better than Arts. Arts only serves to hog the ALSA output and send you to the console to killall artsd.
One of the few places KDE sucks is with its audio architecture. They should consider killing noatun as well...lousy.
A better example of symbiotes in the body are the "friendly" bacteria we need to digest our food, a subset of which also keep Candida Albicans, the fungus that causes "yeast infections" and "oral thrush," in check.
One of these bacteria is e. Coli, which can actually be dangerous if it goes outside the boundaries of the colon. So actually not all of them are benign if they are out of their natural place.
The iSeries ThinkPads were actually rebadged Acer laptops. 100% designed and made in Taiwan. The only ThinkPad (at least until now) that IBM allowed someone else to design. That was a decision I thought they lived to regret.
My ThinkPad 600e was designed by IBM Research Triangle Centre in North Carolina, US. Its parts were pretty much all made in Japan. It was assembled at IBM's Maquiladora in Mexico.
If Lenovo can continue to have the Research Triangle guys designing for them, and they have good enough quality control to make sure they are built to IBM specs like they did in the Mexico plant, they could conceivably pull it off.
Still...pour out a little liquor (away from my ThinkPad if you please) for our dead homie, IBM Personal Systems Division.
For this to be completely useful, the player needs a SD slot. I recently coughed up the lordly sum of $30 to ComputerGeeks.Com for a cheap little MP3 player. It's built like crap, the voice recorder function isn't worth a tinker's damn, but it has two things in its favor: 1.) a usable FM tuner, and 2.) a SD slot.
If I want to access the 64MB of flash in the player itself, I have to use a proprietary Windows piece of software (Actually POS is a good acronym for the device's software) to get to it. However, I can use a USB SD reader/writer which is a certified USB Mass Storage Device under Linux to load the SD up with MP3s. It's a kludge, but not an offensive kludge.
Undoubtedly an iPod Flash would be, in itself, a USB2/Firewire Mass Storage Device. If Apple brings out an iPod Flash with a SD slot (I'd even settle for an XD slot, despite the fact that this semi-proprietary flash format pisses me off) then I am there to buy one. Big time.
This might be the surprise for next month's Macworld San Francisco. An iPod iCanAfford. Stay tuned.
Anyone think of Arthur from "The Tick" (the cool animated series, not the lame live-action sitcom) in his moth suit when looking at the leg mech device?
Actually most of the 1st tier venders sub-contract their laptop manufacturing to firms like Twinhead, Quanta, Compal, Mitac, Arima, Inventec & Vecta in Taiwan & often these firms will sell exactly the same laptops out the backdoor with generic branding, & I wouldn't be surprised if IBM does sell their Thinkpads at significantly higher price than the equilivent generics off the same production lines (some 1st tiers sign exclusivity clauses on their designs & have had to sack their contractors & hired others because they were caught selling identical generics 'out the back door'), but I'm talking about a markup that not even attempting to be competitive on price.
No, you've got it wrong. IBM might sub-contract to these offshore companies, but they still design ThinkPads in house. The only time they subcontracted design was with the Acer-designed and built i-series, and they lived to regret that boneheaded decision.
Right now, all the current ThinkPads are built to IBM specs. Anyone that buys the IBM Personal Systems division isn't going to care about the ThinkPad legacy as IBM Personal Systems did. Basically this means death for the ThinkPad as we know it.
My question: who sold Sam Palmisano the crack he was smoking when he made this decision? Darl McBride???
Exactly. eBay is your friend when you are looking for the little CMOS batteries. Or live dangerously and roll your own...it's a little 1.5v "coin" battery with leads and a plug soldered onto it.
This is depressing news. As far as I'm concerned, there are IBM and Apple laptops and then there's everything else. The i-series ThinkPads (not to be confused with Apple iBooks) that were designed and built by Acer and badged as ThinkPads might give a clue as to what will happen if a Chinese or Taiwanese company buys IBM's personal systems division...those sucked.
I'm going to keep my 600e going until it literally falls apart. I'm also going to keep my eyes peeled for a T41 or a T42...those are "t3h r0x0r" and work extremely well under Linux.
KDE 3.3.1 is stable enough to where I'm relying on it on my ThinkPad. Sid is your friend. Gotta love the improved Konqui.
Oh yeah, and KDE has none of these problems that people are reporting with GNOME. Snappy performance on a Pentium II Mobile 400MHz. I daresay even snappier than the install of Windows 2000 SP4 on the other partition.
There is no reason why people running personal Debian desktop systems shouldn't liberally add Sid packages to their system. What Debian.Org calls "unstable" is actually ready for prime time on non-critical machines.
If you run a critical server, go with Woody aka Stable. If you can live a little on the edge with your server, run Sarge/Testing/Release Candidate. If you are setting up a desktop for Grandma, use Sarge with no Sid packages. For everyone else, live on the edge, baby! ^_^
Check out what these guys are doing:
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
An open-source system that runs on commodity hardware, with an encrypted, anonymous ballot. Definite paper trail to allow for recounts. Why there isn't a clamor to get this off the ground is beyond me. A similar system has been working in Australia for years.
This would be a truly bitchen little file server/print server. If the system boots from a read-only CF, but uses an external USB2 drive as the shareable space and home for the print queue, it would be splendid.
You really don't need that much horsepower to serve files/print queues. Hell, a 486 can do that without breaking a sweat.
It also removes macros. Sometimes it is a pain, because those macros are needed in an MS Office document, particularly in Excel. But if those macros are either corrupt or infected with a Macro Virus, losing the macros is actually A Good Thing. (tm)
Last year, the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival sent the band Saccharine Trust an elaborate Excel spreadsheet which provided an overview of the schedule for the entire weekend's performances at Camber Sands in the UK.
Joe Baiza had Office 98 for Mac running on his iMac. No joy opening the spreadsheet. He then sent the spreadsheet to Chris Stein, the band's bassist, (No, not the Blondie guitarist! Same name, different guy...) who tried to open it in Office XP. Again, no joy.
I get the spreadsheet sent to me. I open it in OO.o. Success! I saved the document first as an OO.o native format file, then resaved the native OO.o file as an.XLS. I sent it back to Joe and Chris, and voila! They could open it too!
I'll have you know that NOTHING got screwed up in the formatting. Maybe a few weird calculations used by the ATP folks got messed up, but the guys in ST didn't need them. All they needed was the time that ST needed to go on, and also the times for some of the other bands on the schedule the guys wanted to see. OO.o rules.
I have a Palm m125. It is great...does everything I want it to do and nothing I don't want it to do. I would have stuck with the m100 I had before I got this one, but the SD/MMC slot was a very compelling addition.
Basically everyone is thinking way too new when they think about PalmOS. Basically PalmOS is most comparable to MacOS 6.x with Multifinder switching. Which is not surprising considering that Palm was originally created by Mac refugees. Up until PalmOS 5, that was the point it was stuck at.
If you want an accurate view of where the PalmOS is now, think a little older than 9. Think Taligent, Blue Box, Red(Pink) Box and the shift from 6 to 7. Cobalt is basically like Apple making the jump from 7.1 to X. No 7.5.x, no 8.x, no 9.x.
Add to this the jump from the Dragonball proc to the ARM, and you can see in just what kind of a world of hurt Palm is in right now. Netcraft confirms it: Palm is dying.
All that's going on is that the 2.7 development kernel is going to be starting. This is the kernel that is going to be the future 2.8 kernel.
This IS NOT a fork like "I'm going to take my ball and play elsewhere and fork the project." This is "OK, there's a compelling reason to fork off a development kernel, let's do it."
You might want to try Mozilla instead of FireFox. I have noticed a weird bug with FF that sends CPU use up through the roof and behavior that reminds me of a memory leak. Yes, I have reported the bug. Moz doesn't do this, oddly enough.
BTW: this n00b bashing has got to stop. This is the kind of attitude that kept me away from Debian for the longest time. Rather than being defensive, be helpful. Otherwise Mozilla/FF's loss is closed source browsers' gain. (Yes, I'm talking about Opera and IE.)
Slashdot Mirror
KOST is a ClearChannel station, BTW. One more reason to hate the shit out of them. There's a particular Fear song that I'd love to request them play, but they'd never do it. Oh yeah, even if you don't actively choose the station, enough damn stores have their FM tuners set for it you can't help but hear them. GAH! Fuck KOST, Fuck Christmas, Fuck ClearChannel.
Sentaku! Sentaku!
(Well, a washing machine with arms, in this case...)
But if you want the coolest phones, you get T-Mobile. Of course, you'll never be able to make a call without the other party going "What? I can't understand you." but you'll ahve an awesome phone.
I don't know where you're from, but I'm guessing you're not in Southern California. Right now, T-Mobile has one of the best networks out here. It was like night and day when I moved from AT&T TDMA to T-Mobile GSM.
I don't know how things are going to be once Cingular and T-Mobile comb apart their networks, but right now with the continued interop agreement they seem to be doing just fine.
I am just damn glad I'm off AT&T's crappy network, away from their crappy customer non-service, and with the geekiest damn mobile phone company on the planet. The coolest phones is only the beginning. Discount 802.11b service at T-Mobile hotspots, very workable GPRS service, all you can eat data or 802.11b for $20/month. (if you want both it's $40) And also, I can travel to Europe and parts of Asia (not Japan alas) and use my own phone!
Oh yeah: Verizon has a very small local calling area. If I visited my buddies in Santa Barbara and used my phone on VZ I'd be getting hit with roaming charges. My local area with T-Mobile: The continental United States. VZ charges a bomb for nationwide service.
T-Mobile rocks. (No, I don't work for T-Mobile. I'm just a happy customer.)
# apt-get install mozilla
or
# apt-get install mozilla-firebird
or both if you have the space.
There, does that solve the problem or what?
Xandros is Debian under the hood, and you don't need to use the Xandros repository.
BTW folks, for those willing to work a little to get their desktop running, the Debian Sarge Installer is pretty damn good. It's not click-and-drool easy yet, but it's good. And it's free as in beer, speech and freedom.
Whether you go the Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix hdx-install or pure Debian route, it's all Debian and it's all good. And if you don't like the customizations a given distro uses, then all you have to do is:
#apt-get update
#apt-get dist-upgrade
and you can get to Pure Debian Sarge, Sid or even Woody from there.
Really, every distro should be like this. I'm talking to you, Mandrake. You hear me, Fedora? Achtung, SuSE! RPM is dead, babies. Long live apt/dselect and its gui children.
It will be so cool when Artsd is out of our misery.
KDE should go for a canonical ALSA solution, rather than playing Lone Ranger and building their own system. ALSA+Jack is good stuff. Way better than Arts. Arts only serves to hog the ALSA output and send you to the console to killall artsd.
One of the few places KDE sucks is with its audio architecture. They should consider killing noatun as well...lousy.
A better example of symbiotes in the body are the "friendly" bacteria we need to digest our food, a subset of which also keep Candida Albicans, the fungus that causes "yeast infections" and "oral thrush," in check.
One of these bacteria is e. Coli, which can actually be dangerous if it goes outside the boundaries of the colon. So actually not all of them are benign if they are out of their natural place.
The iSeries ThinkPads were actually rebadged Acer laptops. 100% designed and made in Taiwan. The only ThinkPad (at least until now) that IBM allowed someone else to design. That was a decision I thought they lived to regret.
My ThinkPad 600e was designed by IBM Research Triangle Centre in North Carolina, US. Its parts were pretty much all made in Japan. It was assembled at IBM's Maquiladora in Mexico.
If Lenovo can continue to have the Research Triangle guys designing for them, and they have good enough quality control to make sure they are built to IBM specs like they did in the Mexico plant, they could conceivably pull it off.
Still...pour out a little liquor (away from my ThinkPad if you please) for our dead homie, IBM Personal Systems Division.
For this to be completely useful, the player needs a SD slot. I recently coughed up the lordly sum of $30 to ComputerGeeks.Com for a cheap little MP3 player. It's built like crap, the voice recorder function isn't worth a tinker's damn, but it has two things in its favor: 1.) a usable FM tuner, and 2.) a SD slot.
If I want to access the 64MB of flash in the player itself, I have to use a proprietary Windows piece of software (Actually POS is a good acronym for the device's software) to get to it. However, I can use a USB SD reader/writer which is a certified USB Mass Storage Device under Linux to load the SD up with MP3s. It's a kludge, but not an offensive kludge.
Undoubtedly an iPod Flash would be, in itself, a USB2/Firewire Mass Storage Device. If Apple brings out an iPod Flash with a SD slot (I'd even settle for an XD slot, despite the fact that this semi-proprietary flash format pisses me off) then I am there to buy one. Big time.
This might be the surprise for next month's Macworld San Francisco. An iPod iCanAfford. Stay tuned.
Apple: Black turtlenecks and Levi's (don't forget the Birkenstocks)
No, more like:
IBM: Denim workshirts embroidered with the IBM logo, dark blue jeans.
You've got the Jobs uniform down, however.
IBM: Atlanta (ewww) Apple: Cupertino (ewww)
No, IBM is in Armonk, NY.
They're both stubborn. Your point is?
Anyone think of Arthur from "The Tick" (the cool animated series, not the lame live-action sitcom) in his moth suit when looking at the leg mech device?
All it needs is operational moth wings.
Countrywide Mortgage Company is a Notes house too.
Actually most of the 1st tier venders sub-contract their laptop manufacturing to firms like Twinhead, Quanta, Compal, Mitac, Arima, Inventec & Vecta in Taiwan & often these firms will sell exactly the same laptops out the backdoor with generic branding, & I wouldn't be surprised if IBM does sell their Thinkpads at significantly higher price than the equilivent generics off the same production lines (some 1st tiers sign exclusivity clauses on their designs & have had to sack their contractors & hired others because they were caught selling identical generics 'out the back door'), but I'm talking about a markup that not even attempting to be competitive on price.
No, you've got it wrong. IBM might sub-contract to these offshore companies, but they still design ThinkPads in house. The only time they subcontracted design was with the Acer-designed and built i-series, and they lived to regret that boneheaded decision.
Right now, all the current ThinkPads are built to IBM specs. Anyone that buys the IBM Personal Systems division isn't going to care about the ThinkPad legacy as IBM Personal Systems did. Basically this means death for the ThinkPad as we know it.
My question: who sold Sam Palmisano the crack he was smoking when he made this decision? Darl McBride???
Exactly. eBay is your friend when you are looking for the little CMOS batteries. Or live dangerously and roll your own...it's a little 1.5v "coin" battery with leads and a plug soldered onto it.
This is depressing news. As far as I'm concerned, there are IBM and Apple laptops and then there's everything else. The i-series ThinkPads (not to be confused with Apple iBooks) that were designed and built by Acer and badged as ThinkPads might give a clue as to what will happen if a Chinese or Taiwanese company buys IBM's personal systems division...those sucked.
I'm going to keep my 600e going until it literally falls apart. I'm also going to keep my eyes peeled for a T41 or a T42...those are "t3h r0x0r" and work extremely well under Linux.
Sic transit gloria mundi...[sigh]
KDE 3.3.1 is stable enough to where I'm relying on it on my ThinkPad. Sid is your friend. Gotta love the improved Konqui.
Oh yeah, and KDE has none of these problems that people are reporting with GNOME. Snappy performance on a Pentium II Mobile 400MHz. I daresay even snappier than the install of Windows 2000 SP4 on the other partition.
There is no reason why people running personal Debian desktop systems shouldn't liberally add Sid packages to their system. What Debian.Org calls "unstable" is actually ready for prime time on non-critical machines.
If you run a critical server, go with Woody aka Stable. If you can live a little on the edge with your server, run Sarge/Testing/Release Candidate. If you are setting up a desktop for Grandma, use Sarge with no Sid packages. For everyone else, live on the edge, baby! ^_^
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/.
An open-source system that runs on commodity hardware, with an encrypted, anonymous ballot. Definite paper trail to allow for recounts. Why there isn't a clamor to get this off the ground is beyond me. A similar system has been working in Australia for years.
I did! They were suitably impressed.
This would be a truly bitchen little file server/print server. If the system boots from a read-only CF, but uses an external USB2 drive as the shareable space and home for the print queue, it would be splendid.
You really don't need that much horsepower to serve files/print queues. Hell, a 486 can do that without breaking a sweat.
It also removes macros. Sometimes it is a pain, because those macros are needed in an MS Office document, particularly in Excel. But if those macros are either corrupt or infected with a Macro Virus, losing the macros is actually A Good Thing. (tm)
.XLS. I sent it back to Joe and Chris, and voila! They could open it too!
Last year, the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival sent the band Saccharine Trust an elaborate Excel spreadsheet which provided an overview of the schedule for the entire weekend's performances at Camber Sands in the UK.
Joe Baiza had Office 98 for Mac running on his iMac. No joy opening the spreadsheet. He then sent the spreadsheet to Chris Stein, the band's bassist, (No, not the Blondie guitarist! Same name, different guy...) who tried to open it in Office XP. Again, no joy.
I get the spreadsheet sent to me. I open it in OO.o. Success! I saved the document first as an OO.o native format file, then resaved the native OO.o file as an
I'll have you know that NOTHING got screwed up in the formatting. Maybe a few weird calculations used by the ATP folks got messed up, but the guys in ST didn't need them. All they needed was the time that ST needed to go on, and also the times for some of the other bands on the schedule the guys wanted to see. OO.o rules.
Lycos is notorious for distributing a spyware program called SideSearch.
..."Home taping is killing music"...heh heh heh...
I have a Palm m125. It is great...does everything I want it to do and nothing I don't want it to do. I would have stuck with the m100 I had before I got this one, but the SD/MMC slot was a very compelling addition.
Basically everyone is thinking way too new when they think about PalmOS. Basically PalmOS is most comparable to MacOS 6.x with Multifinder switching. Which is not surprising considering that Palm was originally created by Mac refugees. Up until PalmOS 5, that was the point it was stuck at.
If you want an accurate view of where the PalmOS is now, think a little older than 9. Think Taligent, Blue Box, Red(Pink) Box and the shift from 6 to 7. Cobalt is basically like Apple making the jump from 7.1 to X. No 7.5.x, no 8.x, no 9.x.
Add to this the jump from the Dragonball proc to the ARM, and you can see in just what kind of a world of hurt Palm is in right now. Netcraft confirms it: Palm is dying.
Folks...don't freak!
All that's going on is that the 2.7 development kernel is going to be starting. This is the kernel that is going to be the future 2.8 kernel.
This IS NOT a fork like "I'm going to take my ball and play elsewhere and fork the project." This is "OK, there's a compelling reason to fork off a development kernel, let's do it."
Breathe, folks. Breathe.
You might want to try Mozilla instead of FireFox. I have noticed a weird bug with FF that sends CPU use up through the roof and behavior that reminds me of a memory leak. Yes, I have reported the bug. Moz doesn't do this, oddly enough.
BTW: this n00b bashing has got to stop. This is the kind of attitude that kept me away from Debian for the longest time. Rather than being defensive, be helpful. Otherwise Mozilla/FF's loss is closed source browsers' gain. (Yes, I'm talking about Opera and IE.)
You might want to go back to Mozilla then. Oddly enough, I have observed Mozilla being less prone to this kind of behavior than FireFox.
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=70665& cat=CAR
I was able to carry two laptops (A ThinkPad and a PowerBook) in my rolling bag. You have to put a second sleeve in there, but it works.