Well, I don't work there, but Burlington coat factory has been doing the Linux thing on their desktops for 3 years, and they have 1250+ desktops running it.
I never really dug the natural/ergo keyboards. Part of it was I never learned to touch type, so the shape of the ergo keyboards is alien enough to really screw with my typing speed. When I type, my hands sort of float over the keyboard and move back and forth. I don't need to look at the keys, but I can't have my hands sitting still on a keyboard... And the old IBM keyboards are really nice for my typing style since I get such definite tactile feedback as I float around. But, to each their own. If the Ergo thing works for you, go for it! I notice, however, all the best input peripherals seem to get discontinued. The IBM clicky keyboards, the Microsoft natural, the Logitech mouseman (the curvy one that takes about a week to get used to), and the first Logitech Wingman Force. That was also a tank of a device. Still have mine...
It was my first foray into the PC market after spending the first 12 years (1980-92) in the Microcomputer arena. I started out with a CoCo 1, a Vic 20, then a TI99/4A, then a Coco2. In 1991 I was still using a Coco3, mainly just for dialing up to BBSs. I was working at a pizza restaurant and living in a crappy apartment at the time, and someone offered me a used AT for $150. I thought "what the hell", since I wanted to make the switch to something semi-current... And then after about a week of playing around with the AT, I wanted a 386-33 with a VGA card and a (gasp) IDE drive that I couldn't afford... And so it went. Now I am surrounded by Gigahertz + machines. I still have the Coco 3 in a box in the closet though. And I still use the AT's keyboard with a 5pin-PS/2 converter on my Palomino Athlon.
You know, the ones with the steel plates inside? I have 5 of them, 4 in storage, hopefully enough to last the rest of my life. The one I am typing this on is from my IBM AT that I got in 1992. Still going strong..... You can occasionally find them at garage sales(!) and swap meets and such. If you see one, grab it. It is really the best keyboard.
The other thing to watch out for with USB devices is that in a lot of cases they can kick your system between the legs, performance wise. A friend of mine picked up some USB speakers (this was more than a year ago, I don't recall which ones) that had built-in sound electronics (so you don't need a sound card) and was quite impessed with their sound on MP3 playback, and watching video, etc. Then he tried them out in Q3, and was impressed with the audio quality for about 10 seconds or so. That's when he noticed that his framerate had dropped more than 30%. He immediately took the speakers over to his sister's place and "traded" for her Soundblaster Live. Since she didn't use the box for much more than word processing, she liked the new speakers.
Well, if that's all you would ever use a PDA for, then the iPod might not be a bad idea. However, that's all I ever thought I'd use a PDA for when I participated in a beta test of some Palm software for a company I used to work for. At the end of it I was loading up all sorts of PalmOS apps to try them out. 5 years later, I have a Visor Deluxe that I use for addresses, tracking time on client projects, reading ebooks, I have maps of 2 cities I frequent on it, a bunch of little games (including a great chess game), a graphics drawing program, a project management program, and a database program. I guess my point is, I don't know how many people buy PDAs for the features listed on the side of the box, but that's only about 5% of the total experience, and if that's the only criteria you use to make your decision, than it's not the whole picture.
Why all scifi? What about a book about nanotechnology, or biochemistry? Or how about most of William Gibson's stuff? That's got almost nothing to do with space exploration. Would there be an agency to evaluate each and every piece of scifi-related material? And while a lot of people who read sci-fi might not think it's a bad idea, there are also a lot of other sci-fi fans (myself included) that think NASA is largely a joke these days, and private interests could probably do a better job, but that nasty gov'mint keeps NASA as the only credible space agency instead....
>>Ummm.. I can believe it. I'm 21 and have 6 years of experience.
So what you're saying is that you quit high school in grade 9 or 10? Who the hell would hire a high school dropout?
>>And no. I wont count any of the school/nonprofit admin work I did before I got my first "real job". If we did that it would be more like 10 years.
Oooh. You didn't even get to high school then....
Look. Here is the deal. One (1) year of experience is defined as working 40 hour weeks for 50 weeks of the year (with 2 for vacation). If you worked 4 summers, great! That would be 8 weeks * 4 = 32 weeks work, for a total of 3/5 of a year experience. If you work part time over the weekends while going to school, great. Use the same formula, or say that it was part time, and give a bit of detail on it. But please do NOT tell me when I am interviewing you for a junior sysadmin role that you have these "years of experience". Because you do not. I don't count the "years" I spent futzing away from 1979 to 1990 (before I entered the workplace full time) as "experience". We just canned a guy here at the office not too long ago who was 20 and had "years of experience". He was energetic, enthusiastic and tried doing things at 100mph to impress everyone. Unfortunately, the formula of "good, fast, cheap, pick any two" always applies, and he was fast and cheap. Because of his lack of experience, almost every project he started to do would either take him 10 times longer to do than he first estimated, or would just not work the way he designed it at all. Add to that the fact that he was always trying to multitask to impress everyone and a lot of things he's jump up and say "I'll take that on" just got left by the wayside, and you can see we had little recourse. He's not a bad guy, just inexperienced. Hopefully this will temper his enthusiasm a little bit and make him a little more diligent and methodical in his next job.
Re:Jeez, where should I start ranting?
on
Make Way for Fiber
·
· Score: 1
These people want to be paid because the fiber was laid alongside of tracks, in ditches - "subsurface" - which is not stated as part of the rights originally sold to the railroad companies by the owners, only "surface" rights.
I don't think it's the people who owned/leased the land that are the problem here. From what I can see, this is a problem that should not exist but for the scheming of one lawyer firm. Before the lawyer decided to specialize in these kinds of cases and start a class action suit (since most class action suits are not initiated by plaintiffs, but rather lawyers who think "Hey! I can probably round up a bunch of people to be plaintiffs against xxx over yyy"), I don't believe anyone gave it much thought at all. As far as the landowners who sold the right of ways to the railroads were concerned, that land was bought and paid for and the RR could do whatever they liked with it. As far as the RR's were concerned, much the same.
But here comes a lawyer digging up a technicality on subsurface rights. What exactly constitutes "subsurface"? What if Amtrak decided to put in a bullet train and needed to drive anchors 8 feet down to secure the track properly? Or came up with a magnetic induction system to run electric trains with a buried power cable (Not really efficient so it wouldn't happen, but...) Both of these scenarios, while fantastic and incredibly unlikely, show how the Right of way agreements can run afoul of the subsurface rights while only conducting railway construction, which is why the rights were purchased to begin with!
Wow! Don't you people remember Doom? It was around well before '96, since I remember we played that on the network at the office at Modatech Systems, and that company hasn't been around since 94.
Since the P4 needs a new power supply, not that old outdated ATX stuff:). And if you're buying a new power supply, you're probably getting a new case too, since that's what most people I know always do when getting a new P/S, since they want to use their old stuff for something else.
This started back in July. Essentally what prompted the whole thing was a story that ran in the Vancouver Sun about the outrage of a parent who bought Resident Evil for their young child. Never mind the fact that the parent is an idiot, not even reading the box. So said parent screams at his MLA, not much happens, then parent tells the newspaper, and the next thing you know, the Attorney General, Andrew Petter (who in a previous cabinet position in government brought the BC populace what he claimed was a "surplus" budget that turned out to be almost a billion in the hole) is yelling from the rooftops. Letters are then published in the papers from similar clueless parents about how they didn't realize the games they bought their children were violent (guess the SNIPER RIFLE on the box wasn't enough of a clue), and there ought to be a law to protect the children. And since the NDP (ruling party in BC... for now...) currently has the lowest party approval rating in provincial history after fucking up almost everything they touch (horrible overspending, the former premier stepped down after the police raided his house over crooked licensing, stealing money from charities, the Carrier Lumber fiasco, bad land deals, etc.), they see this in light of the Columbine thing and others as having "great optics". They're now a party that's going to Protect Your Children. Becuase the only people who will suffer under this are the video game retailers. And there can't be more than a handful of votes there anyway...
Was that tongue in cheek? You say that like that doesn't happen now. Anyone remember Stac Electronics? Makers of the only hard drive doubling software that *DIDN'T* corrupt your hard drive?
What happened to them? M$ stole their source (didn't even bother reverse-engineering it), modified (broke) it, and gave the world DoubleSpace, early versions of which were prone to wreck hard drives.
Anyway, Stac was pissed, they went to court, and M$ dragged it out for over a year and a half, eventually lost and had to cough up several million to them. However, that didn't matter to M$ since that was only a puny percentage of their profits, but to Stac, their market share was decimated since DoubleSpace was included in every MSDOS from 6 on up. The award ran the company for about a year, but they were a "bunch of Talented People (tm)" that were a one trick pony, and since nobody wanted to buy their trick anymore, they dried up and blew away. So don't tell me that copyright protection in its current form stops the Big Companies from taking things they really want. All it does is give them a little bee sting as they do it.
However, just like DOS and all of the other spawns of evil from Redmond, where's the lion's share of the software? Right. That's why I have a Visor Deluxe. And that's why I also have a Windows box as well. I don't LIKE Windows, but I can't yet play Tribes and BGII on Linux...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't work there, but Burlington coat factory has been doing the Linux thing on their desktops for 3 years, and they have 1250+ desktops running it.
http://www.aaxnet.com/news/L990407.html
http://www.redhat.com/marketplace/dell/5.html
I never really dug the natural/ergo keyboards. Part of it was I never learned to touch type, so the shape of the ergo keyboards is alien enough to really screw with my typing speed. When I type, my hands sort of float over the keyboard and move back and forth. I don't need to look at the keys, but I can't have my hands sitting still on a keyboard... And the old IBM keyboards are really nice for my typing style since I get such definite tactile feedback as I float around.
But, to each their own. If the Ergo thing works for you, go for it! I notice, however, all the best input peripherals seem to get discontinued. The IBM clicky keyboards, the Microsoft natural, the Logitech mouseman (the curvy one that takes about a week to get used to), and the first Logitech Wingman Force. That was also a tank of a device. Still have mine...
It was my first foray into the PC market after spending the first 12 years (1980-92) in the Microcomputer arena. I started out with a CoCo 1, a Vic 20, then a TI99/4A, then a Coco2. In 1991 I was still using a Coco3, mainly just for dialing up to BBSs. I was working at a pizza restaurant and living in a crappy apartment at the time, and someone offered me a used AT for $150. I thought "what the hell", since I wanted to make the switch to something semi-current... And then after about a week of playing around with the AT, I wanted a 386-33 with a VGA card and a (gasp) IDE drive that I couldn't afford... And so it went. Now I am surrounded by Gigahertz + machines. I still have the Coco 3 in a box in the closet though. And I still use the AT's keyboard with a 5pin-PS/2 converter on my Palomino Athlon.
You know, the ones with the steel plates inside? I have 5 of them, 4 in storage, hopefully enough to last the rest of my life. The one I am typing this on is from my IBM AT that I got in 1992. Still going strong..... You can occasionally find them at garage sales(!) and swap meets and such. If you see one, grab it. It is really the best keyboard.
The other thing to watch out for with USB devices is that in a lot of cases they can kick your system between the legs, performance wise. A friend of mine picked up some USB speakers (this was more than a year ago, I don't recall which ones) that had built-in sound electronics (so you don't need a sound card) and was quite impessed with their sound on MP3 playback, and watching video, etc. Then he tried them out in Q3, and was impressed with the audio quality for about 10 seconds or so. That's when he noticed that his framerate had dropped more than 30%. He immediately took the speakers over to his sister's place and "traded" for her Soundblaster Live. Since she didn't use the box for much more than word processing, she liked the new speakers.
Some of their choices, and nominations for that matter sucked. Even NOMINATING Britney Spears, come on!
Well, if that's all you would ever use a PDA for, then the iPod might not be a bad idea. However, that's all I ever thought I'd use a PDA for when I participated in a beta test of some Palm software for a company I used to work for. At the end of it I was loading up all sorts of PalmOS apps to try them out. 5 years later, I have a Visor Deluxe that I use for addresses, tracking time on client projects, reading ebooks, I have maps of 2 cities I frequent on it, a bunch of little games (including a great chess game), a graphics drawing program, a project management program, and a database program.
I guess my point is, I don't know how many people buy PDAs for the features listed on the side of the box, but that's only about 5% of the total experience, and if that's the only criteria you use to make your decision, than it's not the whole picture.
Why all scifi? What about a book about nanotechnology, or biochemistry? Or how about most of William Gibson's stuff? That's got almost nothing to do with space exploration. Would there be an agency to evaluate each and every piece of scifi-related material?
And while a lot of people who read sci-fi might not think it's a bad idea, there are also a lot of other sci-fi fans (myself included) that think NASA is largely a joke these days, and private interests could probably do a better job, but that nasty gov'mint keeps NASA as the only credible space agency instead....
>>Ummm.. I can believe it. I'm 21 and have 6 years of experience.
So what you're saying is that you quit high school in grade 9 or 10? Who the hell would hire a high school dropout?
>>And no. I wont count any of the school/nonprofit admin work I did before I got my first "real job". If we did that it would be more like 10 years.
Oooh. You didn't even get to high school then....
Look. Here is the deal. One (1) year of experience is defined as working 40 hour weeks for 50 weeks of the year (with 2 for vacation). If you worked 4 summers, great! That would be 8 weeks * 4 = 32 weeks work, for a total of 3/5 of a year experience. If you work part time over the weekends while going to school, great. Use the same formula, or say that it was part time, and give a bit of detail on it. But please do NOT tell me when I am interviewing you for a junior sysadmin role that you have these "years of experience". Because you do not. I don't count the "years" I spent futzing away from 1979 to 1990 (before I entered the workplace full time) as "experience". We just canned a guy here at the office not too long ago who was 20 and had "years of experience". He was energetic, enthusiastic and tried doing things at 100mph to impress everyone. Unfortunately, the formula of "good, fast, cheap, pick any two" always applies, and he was fast and cheap. Because of his lack of experience, almost every project he started to do would either take him 10 times longer to do than he first estimated, or would just not work the way he designed it at all. Add to that the fact that he was always trying to multitask to impress everyone and a lot of things he's jump up and say "I'll take that on" just got left by the wayside, and you can see we had little recourse. He's not a bad guy, just inexperienced. Hopefully this will temper his enthusiasm a little bit and make him a little more diligent and methodical in his next job.
These people want to be paid because the fiber was laid alongside of tracks, in ditches - "subsurface" - which is not stated as part of the rights originally sold to the railroad companies by the owners, only "surface" rights. I don't think it's the people who owned/leased the land that are the problem here. From what I can see, this is a problem that should not exist but for the scheming of one lawyer firm. Before the lawyer decided to specialize in these kinds of cases and start a class action suit (since most class action suits are not initiated by plaintiffs, but rather lawyers who think "Hey! I can probably round up a bunch of people to be plaintiffs against xxx over yyy"), I don't believe anyone gave it much thought at all. As far as the landowners who sold the right of ways to the railroads were concerned, that land was bought and paid for and the RR could do whatever they liked with it. As far as the RR's were concerned, much the same. But here comes a lawyer digging up a technicality on subsurface rights. What exactly constitutes "subsurface"? What if Amtrak decided to put in a bullet train and needed to drive anchors 8 feet down to secure the track properly? Or came up with a magnetic induction system to run electric trains with a buried power cable (Not really efficient so it wouldn't happen, but...) Both of these scenarios, while fantastic and incredibly unlikely, show how the Right of way agreements can run afoul of the subsurface rights while only conducting railway construction, which is why the rights were purchased to begin with!
Wow! Don't you people remember Doom? It was around well before '96, since I remember we played that on the network at the office at Modatech Systems, and that company hasn't been around since 94.
Since the P4 needs a new power supply, not that old outdated ATX stuff :). And if you're buying a new power supply, you're probably getting a new case too, since that's what most people I know always do when getting a new P/S, since they want to use their old stuff for something else.
This started back in July. Essentally what prompted the whole thing was a story that ran in the Vancouver Sun about the outrage of a parent who bought Resident Evil for their young child. Never mind the fact that the parent is an idiot, not even reading the box. So said parent screams at his MLA, not much happens, then parent tells the newspaper, and the next thing you know, the Attorney General, Andrew Petter (who in a previous cabinet position in government brought the BC populace what he claimed was a "surplus" budget that turned out to be almost a billion in the hole) is yelling from the rooftops. Letters are then published in the papers from similar clueless parents about how they didn't realize the games they bought their children were violent (guess the SNIPER RIFLE on the box wasn't enough of a clue), and there ought to be a law to protect the children. And since the NDP (ruling party in BC... for now...) currently has the lowest party approval rating in provincial history after fucking up almost everything they touch (horrible overspending, the former premier stepped down after the police raided his house over crooked licensing, stealing money from charities, the Carrier Lumber fiasco, bad land deals, etc.), they see this in light of the Columbine thing and others as having "great optics". They're now a party that's going to Protect Your Children. Becuase the only people who will suffer under this are the video game retailers. And there can't be more than a handful of votes there anyway...
Was that tongue in cheek? You say that like that doesn't happen now. Anyone remember Stac Electronics? Makers of the only hard drive doubling software that *DIDN'T* corrupt your hard drive? What happened to them? M$ stole their source (didn't even bother reverse-engineering it), modified (broke) it, and gave the world DoubleSpace, early versions of which were prone to wreck hard drives. Anyway, Stac was pissed, they went to court, and M$ dragged it out for over a year and a half, eventually lost and had to cough up several million to them. However, that didn't matter to M$ since that was only a puny percentage of their profits, but to Stac, their market share was decimated since DoubleSpace was included in every MSDOS from 6 on up. The award ran the company for about a year, but they were a "bunch of Talented People (tm)" that were a one trick pony, and since nobody wanted to buy their trick anymore, they dried up and blew away. So don't tell me that copyright protection in its current form stops the Big Companies from taking things they really want. All it does is give them a little bee sting as they do it.
However, just like DOS and all of the other spawns of evil from Redmond, where's the lion's share of the software? Right. That's why I have a Visor Deluxe. And that's why I also have a Windows box as well. I don't LIKE Windows, but I can't yet play Tribes and BGII on Linux...