- IBM has lot's of hard-disk related technologies patented - IBM has a relativly flourishing HD business - IBM sells said HD activities (except R&D) - IBM breaks storage records in lab with new technology
=> I'm betting IBM will come out with a new kick-ass storage technologie shitin the next 5 years
We've all had servers crashing on us just before a deadline. We've all had to go to the office in the middle of the night to prevent a disaster. (we've all been hacked by a scipt-kid, once)
Do you have any stories of disasters or difficult moments in the datacenters that kept you all up for a few nights in a row, but went by unnoticed by the public?
While doing some scientific research I discovered that the the Google Seitgeist is a very interesting source of information for research in the area's of social and communication sciences (marketing, lifestyle,...).
However, the available information and the explanation of used methodology is too limitid to make this information usefull scientifically.
This is a shame because the Seitgeist is just the tip of the iceberg. There must be an enormous amount of information available.
I know for sure that a few professors I know would have a field day if they were to be able to analyse all this data.
My question is: would it be possible to open all the available data to scientists for statistical analysis?
It doesn't even have to be free I think. Universities and research organisations pay a lot of money for survey's that result in datasets that are relativly small to the dataset available at Google.
In Europe (as in the USA from what I read in other comments) the railway system has had a lot of problems: not being on time, bad management, bad equipment, bad products,...
But in the last few years Railway operators have discovered the business market and are offering new (high speed) products towards that market.
Thalys and Eurostar are two great examples. They interconnect a few major cities in differnt European countries. Especially THALYS (connecting Brussels (B), Amsterdam (NL) and Colone (D) amongst others) is a big success. It's not much faster or cheaper than flying, but it's much more luxurious and they drive you right to the city centre. Eurostar (connecting Brussels, Paris and London)is not yet very successful, but that's because can't yet benifit from high speeds on the English tracks.
Until now, Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS, or "SiS", as they for some reason want their acronym to be rendered) have not been the chipset provider of choice for the performance PC graphics enthusiast. SIS have produced quite a lot of graphics chipsets, but they've all been cheap chips for entry level systems and boring business boxes. In those tasks, they're generally perfectly fine, for the money; if a video chipset discourages your employees from spending company time shocklancing enemy Havocs, then that's a feature, not a bug. But if you want to run 3D applications, SIS products have always, to four significant digits, sucked.
--------------------
IN BRIEF
What it is: High performance value graphics card Who makes it: Triplex
What it costs: $AUD242 delivered
Best points: Strong performance for the money
Worst points: Drivers a bit quirky. Makes a weird noise.
----------------
This is, however, no longer the case. Because now there's the Xabre.
The Xabre chipset is aimed at the same "high entry level" 3D video adapter market as Nvidia's GeForce4 MX. And it's priced about the same, too. A GeForce4 MX440 card gives you ample 3D power for pretty much any current game on pretty much any current monitor; here in Australia, Aus PC Market will deliver a Leadtek Winfast A170 DDR MX 440 board to you for $AUD242.
But Triplex's new Millennium Silver XabrePRO card costs, as I write this, exactly the same amount. And, if you look down the feature charts, it seems to beat the A170 handily.
For a start, it's faster. Which is something I'll get to in more detail in a moment.
Also, a cheap MX 440 card like the A170 isn't likely to have twin monitor connectors. So Nvidia's drivers may let you access "nView" multi-monitor features, but all you can use them with is the card's TV output, which isn't going to let you do proper dual screen computing.
The Triplex Xabre card has a standard 14 pin D-sub VGA connector, and a Y/C (S-Video) TV output, and a DVI-I connector. It can run two outputs at once, in mirror or true multi-monitor mode. You also get a DVI-to-RGB adapter, so you can easily hook up two regular VGA-connector monitors.
The Xabre also has a full DirectX8.1 feature set, which means it can handle all of the pretty-features used by the newest and shiniest Direct3D games. GeForce4 Titanium cards have full DX8.1, but GeForce4 MX cards don't; they don't even have a full GeForce3 feature set.
In the real world, this isn't a very big deal; everything still runs on a GeForce4 MX, and it generally runs very quickly indeed; you might have noticed that all of those people with GeForce2s haven't suddenly noticed they're unable to play new games. It's going to be some time before DX8.1 compatibility is a must-have feature. But hey, it doesn't hurt to have it, for the same price.
The Xabre is also alleged to embrace compelling relationships and grow ubiquitous synergies between the paradigm frontiers of the blah blah blah, with all sorts of trademarked "technologies", which seem to be broadly similar to those claimed for every other new graphics chip since the invention of dirt.
Frankly, marketing people have so comprehensively poisoned this particular well that I no longer even attempt to figure out which of the new "technologies" mean a darn thing. They're like promises from politicians on the campaign trail; life's too short for it to be worthwhile paying attention.
To be fair, I don't think any graphics chip company has ever described their product as a "mysterious knight" before. But that doesn't mellow me out much.
While we're on the subject of apparently cool stuff that doesn't actually matter very much, the Xabre also supports AGP 8X, the latest doubling of Accelerated Graphics Port speed. AGP 8X brings AGP theoretical bandwidth up to match that of PC2100 DDR memory.
Not that anything's likely to be able to use most of that bandwidth to send data to the graphics card, mind you. Certainly not texture data from main memory, which often has to serve multiple simultaneous requests from various subsystems, and which has large overheads even when it's only got one job to do.
AGP 8X may be the fastest AGP mode yet, but it's still much slower than on-card video memory, so you still need enough memory on the card for all of the textures you want to use.
Besides, practically nobody on the planet has an AGP 8X capable motherboard yet, as I write this.
The "Xabre 400" chipset, also known as the Xabre Pro, is the first to be released; there are two slower models and one faster one in the pipeline. I'm pretty sure that this Triplex card is the only retail Xabre card in existence so far.
It's a good looking thing, with Triplex's distinctive silver finish (also used on their Nvidia-chipset cards, including the GeForce4 Ti4600 one I review here).
The main chip cooler on the Triplex card is quite impressive, but you don't get any heat sinks on the RAM chips. That's OK, though. RAM-sinks on video cards are like spoilers on passenger cars; buy the more expensive, faster model and you get the extra frill thrown in. It doesn't do much of anything, though.
The eight memory chips (there are another four on the back of the card) are all Etron Technology EM658160TS-3.3s. They're slightly faster than any of the EM658160 variants listed on the manufacturers' page here; the -3.3 version is the 3.3 nanosecond incarnation of this 64 megabit chip, and so it ought to have a ceiling specified speed of 300MHz.
So you've got a thoroughly acceptable 64 megabytes of memory (eight times 64 megabits, eight bits to the byte), which should be happy running at an effective 600MHz, after taking DDR doubling into account. Or a bit more, with luck, a following wind, and perhaps also some extra cooling.
This memory isn't running at 300/600MHz on this card, though; the Xabre Pro has 250MHz core and RAM (before DDR doubling) clock speeds, by default.
Hi-ho for some overclocking, then.
You can do that with the standard Triplex drivers, which seem to be the only ones available for the Xabre at the moment. Triplex themselves don't have any Xabre drivers for download; heck, you can't even download drivers from the Xabre site itself yet. The driver pages are "under construction". So don't lose the driver CD that comes with the card.
Drivers for new video chipsets are, typically, crummy. Inadequate development, inadequate testing, personality defects and bugs galore. Nvidia's drivers are a big reason to buy cards that use their chipsets; there's exactly one driver package for each Windows variety, and it covers every Nvidia chipset since the original TNT, and the drivers inside that package have been thoroughly tweaked and tested over the course of years of updates.
Perfect, Nvidia's drivers aren't. About as good as you can get, they are.
SIS seem to have done an OK job with the core functions of the Xabre drivers. But I didn't check a bunch of games on different Windows flavours to be sure; I just ran a few tests on a WinXP Pro machine. For all I know, the card catches fire if you run Quake 2 on WinME, but the drivers smelled all right to me.
The icing that Triplex have put on the SIS code core, though, is... quirky.
As a representative sample of the Triplex visual style, check out this overclocking control panel:
Yee-ow.
If this pub-carpet school of interface design doesn't turn your crank, rest assured that various driver features can also be accessed via what look like cheesy software MP3 player interfaces, instead:
This is a family Web site, so I'll refrain from commenting further on this.
The overclocking controls let you wind up the core and RAM clock speeds quite a bit, but the card, she does not want to know. The results of my overclocking experiments were somewhat inconsistent - a given speed would hang the machine when I tried it one time, but work when I restarted and tried again. But none of the results were particularly impressive.
RAM chips that're rated for a speed well above the speed at which a given card runs them are all very well, but there are limiting factors besides the RAM itself. Those factors are in full effect on the Triplex Xabre board, as far as I can see.
Setting the RAM speed slider to 300MHz instantly, and not very surprisingly, borked the computer.
275MHz mangled the display, but at least I could cancel out of it. 265MHz, the first time I tried it, caused more borkitude, with no escape. Then, after a restart, it worked OK.
Raising the core speed to just 260MHz took me on a trip to the magical land of the BSOD when I tried to do a 3D test, but 250/265 was OK, although it didn't make anything more than 1% faster.
That was the best the Triplex card could do. Perhaps this was something to do with the drivers; they did worrying things like setting the clock sliders all the way to the left, sometimes, when I went to the "DisplaySetting" tab for the first time after a reboot. Clicking Cancel and then going back to DisplaySetting solved that problem every time it happened, putting the sliders back in the right place. But stuff like this didn't inspire confidence.
Triplex provide a couple of optional extras along with the drivers themselves - a pop-up menu thing that gives quick access to Display Properties and other features and is therefore somewhat useful, and a multi-function bar thing whose best feature is that you don't have to install it. That's it for the software bundle; no cheapo DVD player software, no colour calibration thingummy, no bundled game you don't want to play.
In contrast, the software bundle that comes with the Leadtek A170 includes all of the above.
Big deal.
More significantly, the A170's 64Mb of DDR memory is made up of Samsung K4D263238M-QC40 chips, which are four nanosecond chips, and should be good for 250 un-doubled megahertz, or 500MHz after DDR's worked its magic.
The MX 440 only runs at a core speed of 270MHz and a RAM speed of 200MHz, by default. The general consensus seems to be that no core overclock worth bothering with is likely to be possible, but RAM speeds of 225 to 250 pre-doubling megahertz are routinely attainable. That'll net you a worthwhile speed increase, if you're running a high enough resolution and/or anti-aliasing mode.
Probably not, however, enough of an increase to make up for the Xabre's natural speed advantage over the MX 440. Not unless you've got a pretty big monitor, anyway.
I tried out both the Millennium Silver XabrePRO and the Leadtek A170 on what now, alarmingly enough, qualifies as a medium performance PC. It's a Thunderbird Athlon machine, running at 1477.5MHz (according to WCPUID, anyway) on an Asus A7A266 motherboard, with 512Mb of humble PC133 RAM. Roughly Athlon XP 1600+ CPU performance, let down a bit by the RAM, in other words. Tests were performed under Windows XP Professional.
Mad Onion's 3DMark2001 SE is a thorough and quite realistic DirectX 8 benchmark. The Xabre can't currently handle the Advanced Pixel Shader test, but SIS say that's Mad Onion's fault, not theirs.
With the defective test disabled, the Xabre at stock speed beat the MX 440 at stock speed by about 33% in 1024 by 768, using 32 bit colour and compressed textures. It won by about the same amount when both cards had 2X full screen anti-aliasing turned on.
In the same resolution with 4X FSAA, neither card was performing particularly well, but the Xabre still won by more than 11%. That gap would be pretty much annihilated by a reasonable RAM overclock on the MX 440 card.
In 1600 by 1200 with no FSAA, the Xabre won by less than 10%. Then again, it managed 1600 by 1200 with 2X FSAA at a respectable 66% of its no-FSAA speed. The MX 440 is less memory efficient, and couldn't even attempt that test.
For those who can't comprehend benchmark numbers unless they're presented in a cheesy Excel graph, here one is.
I wanted to do some OpenGL tests next, but was defeated by the fact that the drivers that come with the retail Xabre card don't seem to provide any way to turn off vertical sync (vsync), which tells the video card to wait for a new screen refresh before displaying another frame.
With vsync turned on you won't get "tearing" caused by the screen updating faster than it refreshes, but you also end up with a hard cap on your frame rate that's equal to the refresh rate. Try as I might, I couldn't turn vsync off - turning it off elsewhere (in, for instance, the Quake III Arena config file), didn't work.
So much for that, then.
As quirks go, though, the locked-on vsync paled into insignificance compared with the noise.
The Xabre card makes a noise when it's in 3D mode.
It's usually a vague, high pitched, white-noise-y rasp. Sometimes, as in the 3DMark2001SE Point Sprites test, it's distinctly different - more of a whistling noise. I've never heard anything like it from a video card before. It's bizarre. It's not really annoyingly loud, but you'd be able to hear it without taking the side off your case.
This is not an oddity of the one card I got for review, either. I procured another one. Same noise. A friend tested a third. Same noise.
Perhaps this is just the sound of a Triplex Xabre board; perhaps it's the sound of all Xabres. Usually, solid state devices making a clearly audible noise are in the process of being electronically beaten to death; by misdesigning a power supply, I once managed to make a solid state battery charger tick like a clock until it expired. It did so in such a thorough way that the note later attached to the charger by a thwarted repair technician read "murdered by owner".
But looping demos on the Triplex cards didn't seem to hurt them.
So the source of the noise baffles me.
Overall Frankly, I wouldn't buy a Xabre card right now. The thing seems to be decently fast, but it has sufficient points of weirdness that I think it'd be a good idea to hang about a bit and see whether any of them turn out to be symptomatic of serious problems.
If someone gave me a Triplex Xabre as a present, though, I wouldn't go straight out and try to swap it for a GeForce4 MX. It doesn't seem terribly likely that it'll go up in a puff of smoke, none of its driver quirks are crippling (well, unless disabling OpenGL vsync is essential for your continued happiness), and the little melon-picker is a dual-monitor board with respectable 3D performance.
So wait and see on this one, I say.
If you've got the price of a Xabre board burning a hole in your pocket and you're currently using a thoroughly inadequate graphics card, then play it safe and get a GeForce4 MX instead. If you can stand to wait for about a month, though, do. By then, enough people should have prodded the Xabre around that Usenet and review directories should give you a definite yea or nay on the thing.
Right now, though, it's a Video Card Of Mystery. And I'd rather not pay for one of those, if it's all the same to you.
I agree, it wasn't easy, but we can: - watch DVD's, TV, DivX's, foto's - listen to music - record from TV -...
Our project is far from finished but once it is, it'll make a kick ass HTPC out of any linux-box.
ATM Windows is easier but we went with Linux because in the long run it's easier to set up, maintain, change and distribute. It's also FAR more easy to customize and you're not so dependent on one company (Microsoft for windows and mediaplayer)
It's been a slow month for davedina development because we had to work on some other stuff, but some new volunteers would be a good incentive to get us back going.
(Note that I said Netscape Composer, and not Mozilla... which I personal feel is a piece of bloated slow s**t... open source or not... try running it on a P200 and you'll see what I mean, its unusable)
ANY full-featured modern browser is slow on a P200.
Just don't run software on your P200 that wasn't intended for it. I bet WinXP will run slow on your P200, but that doesn't mean it's bad software. Oh wait, bad example:-)
If you're going windows on a P200 i would recommend win98lite (with all the desktop enhancements turned off) and netscape 4.7x or IE 5.
I'm no expert at this, so i'm going out on a limb here, but i think they only 'stole' the interface.
The underlaying (is that an English word?) multimedia platform (gstreamer) seems to be very original and innovative and something we will probably hear more about in the future.
Sure, it looks like iTunes, but under the hood it's a completely different thing. In my opinion the inteface is just a thin layer on the surface.
It just depends on how you define 'stealing'. It's a blurry discussion. iTunes isn't the first audio player so you could say they stole the idea from earlier audio software. Every spreadsheet and wordprocessor looks alike. But that's far from saying that they stole from each other or that they are the same.
Furthermore rythmbox is not a finished product so who knows. Maybe it will be skinnable in the future.
Of course, it's pretty fun to see the occasional dhcp logs on their screens...
They have DHCP logs? So they must be connected in some kind of wireless network? That's so cool!
The ones used in my supermarket keep the price-database in memory (i think). The database gets uploaded everytime you store it in the terminal (i think)
In my local Delhaize supermarket (part of the Delhaize group like the Food Lion chain) registered users can grab a small barscanner (somewhat bigger than the cueat)at the entrance of the store and scan everything they want to purchase theirselves.
When you're finished you put the scanner in a terminal which prints your receipt. with this receipt you go to a special (selfscanning only) checkout to pay.
No lines, saves time
You can always see how musch you're spending
You can bag while you shop, saves time
Stealing is pretty easy this way but i wouldn't there because there are random checks. And if you get caught there are evere punishments:)
It's a neat and cool system but i haven't seen it anywhere else? Has anybody else seen this system before?
If you are an information-hungry power user, one of your most important tools is e-mail. You use e-mail for research to contact people who really know what they're talking about. You use it to subscribe to mailing lists, where you will often be able to get a regular flow of high-signal information from a certain field. You use it to stay in touch with your friends, who may frequently send you interesting or funny links and forwards. Given this importance of email, it is surprising how poorly most email clients handle the task of organizing large amounts of information, especially when compared to Ximian Evolution, a free, open-source (GPL) email client for Unix. Windows users may wish to continue reading to see what they are missing.
Right now, I have an Evolution window open with about 40,000 mails from the last 5 years. (It's amazing how much traffic some mailing lists generate.) These are all sorted nicely into folders. One of these folders contains 14,000 messages that I received from May 1998 to May 2000 using Netscape Messenger. Searching the full text of all these messages for a string, say, "Finnish", takes about 5 seconds. Doing the same with Netscape Messenger would probably take a minute or longer. This example highlights some of the greatest features of Evolution. By indexing all incoming mail (explained below) it offers amazingly fast searches. These searches can be stored as so-called "virtual folders", which can then be browsed just like real folders. Evolution imports mail from many common clients and uses the Unix standard mailbox format itself, so that Evolution mail can easily be moved to other clients should the need arise. Evolution is multi-threaded, which means that in most cases, it doesn't matter if the client is doing something in the background (like reorganizing your mail to save harddisk space) -- you can keep using it normally.
Now that I've teased you by listing some of the cooler features, let's look at the application's background and purpose -- you can probably skip this part if you're familiar with the Linux/Unix world. In any case, you may have heard of KDE or GNOME. These are projects which aim to make Unix easier to use by providing a pretty, well-integrated and intuitive graphical user interface (and the underlying backend). This goal has not been fully met, especially as competitors like Microsoft and Apple are also constantly improving their desktops. Linux in particular struggles with problems of standardization: The installation procedure for applications and hardware drivers is often difficult, and getting fonts under Linux' X-Window-System to look right is a perpetual nightmare (by now, most Linux distributions offer good, but not quite satisfying defaults).
The GNOME project was initiated in 1997 by Mexico-born hacker Miguel de Icaza. It is somewhat competitive to the KDE project, for reasons that are now obsolete -- but this is a case where most people agree that the competition has its benefits, and interoperability between KDE and GNOME is usually not much of an issue. Together with a fellow GNOME hacker, de Icaza was able to convince some venture capitalists (AKA "suckers") that a potentially huge amount of money could be made by giving away powerful software for free. Sometimes you just got to love capitalism!
This is, of course, a slight exaggeration -- in the past years Ximian developed several credible business models that are at least far better than most of the cat litter ecommerce projects that were fed with billions of dollars. After all, de Icaza's company, Ximian, is still around and the cat litter sellers are not.
Ximian employs lots of highly skilled hackers and artists. They sell (and offer for free download) a variant of the GNOME desktop that is more streamlined and more beautiful (I haven't tested it, but I prefer KDE anyway). They also offer Red Carpet, a small and useful application that makes it easier to install software under Linux -- with Red Carpet, you just select the package and wait a few second until the installation finishes. Any dependencies on other software or libraries are resolved automatically and the respective missing pieces are fetched as well. The whole thing is free, but you get faster access to their servers as a subscriber.
Red Carpet offers Linux users a convenience that most Linux distributions do not have. Only Gentoo and Debian (and those based on either of them) make the installation of applications equally simple. Since I use Debian, Red Carpet is of no interest to me: Debian comes with its own software installation system called "apt" which does pretty much the same thing as Red Carpet, without any fees and with very high speed, although it's a bit harder to get working.
As a company that aims for Linux on the desktop (and the corporate desktop in particular, as that's where the money is), Ximian quickly realized that one of the main reasons corporations are so slow to adopt Linux are missing equivalents to their productivity apps. This includes Office, but with the Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org suite, a replacement is well on its way. However, one of the most important apps in corporations is Outlook.
The Magic-8-Ball says: Outlook not so good
Hardly any company with more than 10 employees can exist without some kind of internal messaging system, usually in the form of an Intranet. Such Intranets often run with a combination of Microsoft Exchange as a messaging server and Microsoft Outlook as the client. But Outlook can do more than just mail, in combination with Exchange, users can schedule meetings or share calendars, and read their messages directly on the server so that they can easily access it from all workstations. While not all companies use these features, it's obvious that they are valuable in many contexts.
Outlook has the speed and usability one would expect from a Microsoft product. It has become the subject of international media reports for another reason, though: Frequent security holes in combination with weaknesses in the underlying operating system have made Outlook the cause of the most annoying email worms in history.
One problem with Windows is that versions of the OS still based on the ancient DOS had no real access control model. Concepts like file ownership and processes running as different users were not to be found in the "little brother" of the more professional Windows NT/2K operating systems. Fortunately, with Windows XP, the product lines have been united. Still, for various reasons, most home users will continue to run their sytems as superusers. That means that any virus or worm has read and write access to all the user's files.
Let me contrast that with my current setup. I am right now logged in as user "moeller". I have write access only to my personal desktop and application configuration as well as the projects I'm currently working on. I can start most applications, but I cannot delete any of them. Once I have finished working on a project I move it away to another directory where I only have read access as a normal user. As a result, a Windows-style virus or worm could do little harm on my system. It would also have a hard time installing itself without getting noticed by me.
Aside from that, Linux offers another protection against viruses and worms: diversity. While I may run an Debian/KDE/evolution combination on a patched 2.4.18 kernel, someone else might run SuSE/GNOME/mutt with a SuSE-specific 2.4.10 kernel. On Windows, you have millions of users with a system that is essentially still DOS and Outlook Express as an email client.
And then there's active content. Microsoft's strategy to kill browser rival Netscape involved the use of technology that would only run on Microsoft systems, such as "ActiveX controls" which are basically just Windows executables embedded in a webpage. There's also the powerful but dangerous VB Scripting language. In addition to that, they have embedded their web browser, Internet Explorer, into nearly all of their applications (to display help files, mail etc.). This was necessary to make their case that IE cannot be removed from Windows without causing irreparable damage. Outlook therefore uses IE to display HTML mail. That means that whenever there's a problem with Internet Explorer, the same problem can be exploited to develop email worms. Since users only rarely update or patch their systems, bugs can often be exploited for months.
This combination of Microsoft monoculture with active content and an insufficient underlying security system has proven to be nothing less than disastrous. Some worms have spread because users have executed attachments (another Windows-specific problem: executables are often not recognizable as such -- on Unix, they all have the "executable" flag). Others are automatically run by Outlook because of flaws in Internet Explorer or the active content interpreters. Some worms are happy to just replicate, others mail around users' files (not without infecting them first, of course) or send messages in other people's name (cf. this Wired article).
Even in a corporate environment, systems are frequently unpatched and users have too many rights on their systems or the network. But the nastiest part is that, since email is a very open system, these worms get sent everywhere, even to Unix users. If you have your email address on a few well-indexed webpages, you can hardly protect yourself from an influx of messages caused by the latest worm. Of course, Unix users have the best tools for email filtering available, but it's still a pest. Now you know why many Linux users are proselytizing zealots -- they are acting in their own best interest!
Unix mail has many advantages to Windows mail -- after all, email was invented on Unix systems and is part of the system architecture. Any Unix system has a mail spool that can be used to queue messages for local delivery. That means that the system itself can send messages to you. For example, you might get an email that the installation of some program has failed for certain reasons. Unix comes with sendmail or equivalents, which means that you can easily setup your own mail server. If you have a static IP address, you can then get your mail delivered directly to you without any delays. Unix has a standardized mailbox format which is understood by most Unix mail clients -- fetching mail with one client and reading it with another is completely viable. And so on, and so forth.
The Messaging Mystery
Given all this, why do corporations not switch to Unix-based messaging solutions? One valid reason in the past has been that traditional Unix mail clients do not care much about usability. Most of them are console-based, all with their own keyboard syntax and menu layout. Also, few if any of the old clients have collaboration features like Outlook -- they are email clients and nothing else. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that such business decisions are purely rational. Managers make these decisions based on buzzwords and screenshots, even if none of the nifty features is ever used. And then there's the simple platform dominance of Windows: It is required for too many applications to just switch.
With more and more productivity apps coming to Linux, this is about to change. And Evolution should give pointy-haired bosses more buzzwords than they can shake an MS-Word attachment at. Ximian spent years working on Evolution to fill this application void in the Unix world. Licensed under the GPL, its source code is freely available for anyone to modify. Besides being a graphical email client, it is also a calendar, contact manager, task-planner and news tracker. And if you're willing to pay, you can use Exchange's collaboration features.
I cannot comment on the installation procedure on some *cough* inferior *cough* Linux distributions, since all I had to do to install evolution was typing "apt-get install evolution" in a console window. It can be installed through Red Carpet, though. I am not aware of a Windows port of Evolution, but this is certainly not impossible -- many other complex Unix applications have been ported to Windows; there's even a project to port the whole KDE desktop.
When you start Evolution, you are presented with an Outlook style multi-panel window, with a big button bar on the left side. Let's look at the features in detail.
The Summary
The first page you see is the "Summary" page, shown in the screenshot below. This page contains weather information for locations you can specify, the latest headlines from news sites you can select (anything that supports the RDF Site Summary format, i.e. almost every major site), information about your folders, tasks and schedule. This is a pretty neat idea. To render the page (and other HTML pages), the GtkHTML control is used. I mention this only to clarify that it is not Mozilla's Gecko engine -- so if a security flaw in Mozilla is found, you don't have to worry about your Evolution security (as opposed to the IE/Outlook connection).
Evolution summary view. This view shows headlines from a few sites, including infoAnarchy, and my current To-Do-List (can you figure out what I'm working on?).
The summary comes in very handy, especially since it's so customizable. I'm a bit surprised that they don't put a little donation box for Evolution development there, with feedback on the amount of donations they have received that month. In any case, when you hear Microsoft talking about "Web Services", don't forget that a lot of it is hype: What you see in the Evolution summary is nothing less than "customizable web service delivery", or something.
Messaging
Evolution lets you fetch mail from a POP3 server, but you can also use a traditional Unix tool like fetchmail to get it, or access it on an IMAP server. Sending mail is similarly easy, you can use an SMTP host or your local sendmail server. You can import mail in a few formats, including Outlook and Unix' mbox-format. I previously used Pegasus Mail for Windows, which is a bit exotic so it's not supported, but with a little tweaking I got it to work (see my HOWTO) and, as mentioned above, have managed to import my entire remaining email backlog (a feat I have not accomplished with any email client for Windows).
Once you have your mail set up, you will want to organize your folders. The interface for doing so is a bit cumbersome, but since you will not use it too often, this doesn't matter much. At this point, we need to take a look at the difference between vFolders and real folders. Real folders are files on your local harddisk that store messages. vFolders are small files that store searches, but in the program, they act just like folders. When creating a vFolder, you specify certain search criteria and the folder(s) to which they are to be applied (these can also be vFolders). That's it: When you click the vFolder, the actions are performed and the messages viewed.
When should you use vFolders and when folders? That is a matter of taste. In my opinion, vFolders should be used only for searching, and folders for organizing. If you want to read certain mail exclusively in a certain folder, use a normal folder. If you just want to temporarily switch your view, use a vFolder. For automatically copying or moving mail to folders, filters are used. These are applied to all incoming mail matching the set criteria. Besides copying and moving stuff around, you can also delete the mail, change its color, status, or score. (The score is used for ranking the mail in the list.)
Nicely enough, Evolution offers some presets for quickly generating filters from the subject, sender or recipient field or from a mailing list. This makes organizing your mailing list filters quick and easy as it should be. The same presets are available for vFolders.
Theory of Evolution
How is the ultra-fast searching and filtering that is necessary for features like vFolders to work accomplished? Quite simply, Evolution uses the same method any database (for example, Google's) uses to make searching stuff faster. Instead of wading through the file by brute force, the positions of words within the mailbox files are indexed: a separate file contains pointers into the mailbox file, so that when you search a specific phrase, the search is sped up by orders of magnitude. The index is automatically kept up-to-date as new mail comes in. This sounds simple, but the underlying mathematics can get tricky, so Ximian's hackers have done a great job.
It is unfortunate that this kind of indexing is not more wide-spread. It would be nice to have it implemented on the filesystem-level, with specific support for certain filetypes (like XML). This would mean that whenever you create a file, the appropriate index would be updated. As a consequence, you could search all the files on your harddisk for a certain string within a few seconds. Sadly, while a few commercial solutions that produce similar results exist (DTSearch, Altavista Personal Search etc.), these are not very popular (and not free). On Unix, the locate-database at least contains an index of all filenames, so that you can search for filenames matching certain criteria quickly, and there are a few open source search engines like htdig. It is rumored that the next Windows version will contain advanced indexed search functionality.
The implementation in Evolution is stable and fast and shows the benefits of indexing clearly, without many disadvantages (the indexes themselves use a few megabytes of space, but not much to worry about). Take care, though: If you want to access your email with another client, your index will get messed up if the client changes the file -- the index will then point to the wrong positions in the file and therefore be no longer valid. Make sure to parse the file as read-only, or import a copy. If something goes wrong, you can delete the index files, and they will be regenerated.
As you delete mail in your folders, it is crossed out and needs to be cleaned before it is really removed. This has the advantage that mail can still be undeleted for some time.
Reading and writing mail
With alternating background colors, the message list is well-readable. It has the expected columns, but in the default view doesn't show the message size. Hint: Right-click the column titles to add or remove a column. Thanks to the index, you can very quickly sort the list by all criteria. A semi-complex search mask can be found directly above the message list, making quick filtering amazingly simple. All status indicators are obvious and well designed. Mails can be temporarily marked as "important" with a single click and sorted so that these come first, then newest. This is my preferred message view. It's a really good way to remember replying to certain mail and, in my opinion, beats complex filtering rules for color highlighting or scoring.
A typical folder view with a search filter applied. Even with thousands of mails, these filters can be applied within a few seconds.
Evolution uses a mail preview panel similar to Outlook. While I never got used to mail preview elsewhere, Evolution's implementation is acceptable. After a definable period of viewing a mail, its status is changed to "read". But you can also view the mail in a separate window instead. Mails can be moved around with drag and drop. GtkHTML renders most spam (HTML) mails you will receive correctly. Attachments are handled nicely, although the user interface looks a bit strange. Images are displayed inline. The reader is still feature-poor; for example, in V1.03, it has no "Select All" function. These features and menus are being added for V1.2, though, or already in CVS.
The composer has everything you would expect, including HTML (which should not be used in mail to preserve interoperability) and spellchecking support for various languages (needs to be enabled). However, for large mails, you will want to use a powerful text editor instead.
Encryption
Email worms faking senders have made it obvious that encryption and digital signatures are essential to email safety. Any modern email client should make encryption available with a few keypresses. Fortunately, Evolution has the necessary functionality. There is a free PGP-compatible encryption tool called gpg, and while you might expect such a thing to be difficult to use, it's a lot easier than the good old PGP command-line client, and several graphical front-ends exist. What is more, you don't need to do much with the command-line client anyway -- you just create a keypair, tell Evolution the ID of your key and it does the rest: signing, encryption, key import, signature verification etc. - it's all there just waiting to be used. Encrypting and decrypting is very fast and works almost transparently. Except for neat features like key lookup and gpg's initial configuration, gpg integration into Evolution is perfect.
IMAP and Exchange
Evolution natively supports reading mail on an IMAP server by subscribing to specific folders. Since I do not have an IMAP server, I cannot tell you if or how well that works and how it affects the local indexing. On March 25 Ximian released a product with which Evolution can read mail directly on a Microsoft Exchange server as well. That product is called Ximian Connector and is traditional closed-source software; it costs $69 for a single-seat license. Besides mail, it also supports Exchange's collaboration features, more on those below.
Summary of mail component
Nomen est omen: Email with Evolution is definitely a step forward. The user interface offers the comfort of the best clients from the Windows world, while the indexing and virtual folders are Unix-typical high-productivity ideas. What tabbed browsing is to Mozilla, the indexing is to Evolution -- once you have discovered its value, you will never want to live without it. Searching that lost password, digging out the years-old recipe from grandma or just quickly changing the sorting order are all so fast that you don't have to think about whether you want to go to the effort of doing it or not -- you just do it.
Task Planner
The task list is a simple table where you can very quickly add and remove tasks as you complete them, but also add advanced information (completion data, priority, amount of work already complete etc.) if necessary. If you define a completion date, the color of the task will change as the date comes nearer. As you check a task to be complete, it is crossed out -- you can configure the planner to automatically hide these tasks after a certain period of time.
This is all nice and pretty much what you expect from a task planner, although it does not include any collaborative features. Personally, I'd like to be able to give scores to tasks and gain points (and possibly RPG-like levels) by completing them, as a motivation trainer, but this is probably a too wild idea to be tested here first. Collaborative task completion would be interesting, though: Putting tasks on a server and letting users decide which ones they want to finish.
Calendar
The calendar is far more complex than the task list. Like most organizers, it allows you to display different time scales and to add a new appointment by double-clicking a calendar cell. Appointments have a daytime property or can be all day long, they can be public or private and assigned to one or several categories. Of course Evolution also has a built-in reminder, which is nicely implemented since it can do several things at different times: Show a message 30 minutes before the event, play a sound 10 minutes before it and give the user an electric shock if he's still there when it happens.
But Evolution not only allows you to plan your personal appointments but to also schedule appointments together with others. The so-called iCalendar standard makes it possible to schedule appointments without a need for a central server -- you just need someone who organizes the event. iCalendar files are simple email attachments that are sent to all people involved in the event. You can configure the event so that the attendance of some people is required and the attendance of others is optional. Once your selection is complete, the invitation is sent to the selected people, and they just have to say whether they want to accept the meeting or not -- this reply is then sent to the event organizer.
You can schedule an appointment with other users by sending them a suggestion in the form of iCalendar files.
In order to effectively find the right date and time, participants can mark some timeblocks in their calendar as "free time" and then exchange their calendar files before scheduling. This is a bit tedious, and that's where the proprietary Ximian Connector comes in again -- it uses the central Exchange server for the entire scheduling process.
The scheduling interface could be a bit more streamlined, but it is only valuable where the people you are dealing with have the software capability to handle the iCalendar attachments. In a corporate environment, the clients can be standardized -- outside it's a bit harder.
Contacts
The contact manager is quite sophisticated feature-wise, but I found it a bit buggy -- I had big problems with the search functionality. Other than that, it worked fine. It allows you to create cards with many information fields and even lets you link a contact to other contacts, but it also makes it easy to just manage email addresses. Cards can be forwarded as vCard-files, which is another of those helpful business standards. As you would expect, you can also create contact lists which you can use to quickly distribute mail to several recipients. The drag & drop interface used to add contacts to a list is not optimal, though, as it requires the window to be always-on-top.
Conclusion
Using Evolution is a pleasant experience. Almost everything works as it should and most functionality is quite intuitive. Where it isn't, the helpfile is usually quite informative (unlike, unfortunately, the helpfiles of most open source applications). For a recent version 1.0, Evolution is remarkably stable. The general performance (aside from searches) is not what Unix users get from console clients, but is better than all Windows clients I know. The localization and internationalization are a bit shaky at times: Some translations are incorrect, and some foreign character encodings in the subject line are not properly interpreted.
The very best part is that Evolution is completely free to use and will never die, even if Ximian should go down the tubes. That's the best argument a startup can have against a large corporation like Microsoft, proving Ximian's open source decision right. At the same time, a proprietary connector application to Exchange seems like a good business model, since it harms neither consumers nor corporations -- even for small companies, the price is a bargain, whereas private users don't care about Exchange access. It would be nice to see an open source equivalent of Exchange, so that companies can switch entirely to free software. But no plans for such a server seem to be in the works.
I'm surprised that Ximian doesn't try to get normal users to support development -- given the quality of the product, I believe the willingness to pay for specific feature additions would be definitely there, and the donation interface could be easily integrated.
Evolution is clearly a product to keep an eye on, and for those who are still stuck on Windows, it's an excellent reason to switch. In fact, I would go so far to say that Ximian has done such a good job that they could even make Evolution-using monkeys out of creationists.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Google seems to have all the keys to success. So that would be like looking for a needle in a
why do you think i keep replying?
The longer this thread becomes, the more people will see it!
how about that!
I was going to write:
"that could be cool if there would actually be some new content on that site"
But then I saw you just (finally?
yey! askadick rules.
As far as I know every major hard disk manufacturer has had a bad model somewhere along the line.
yeah, and I could use a kick-ass spell checker
(In my defense, it's late and English is not my mother tongue)
interresting timeline
- IBM has lot's of hard-disk related technologies patented
- IBM has a relativly flourishing HD business
- IBM sells said HD activities (except R&D)
- IBM breaks storage records in lab with new technology
=> I'm betting IBM will come out with a new kick-ass storage technologie shitin the next 5 years
We've all had servers crashing on us just before a deadline. We've all had to go to the office in the middle of the night to prevent a disaster. (we've all been hacked by a scipt-kid, once)
Do you have any stories of disasters or difficult moments in the datacenters that kept you all up for a few nights in a row, but went by unnoticed by the public?
While doing some scientific research I discovered that the the Google Seitgeist is a very interesting source of information for research in the area's of social and communication sciences (marketing, lifestyle, ...).
However, the available information and the explanation of used methodology is too limitid to make this information usefull scientifically.
This is a shame because the Seitgeist is just the tip of the iceberg. There must be an enormous amount of information available.
I know for sure that a few professors I know would have a field day if they were to be able to analyse all this data.
My question is: would it be possible to open all the available data to scientists for statistical analysis?
It doesn't even have to be free I think. Universities and research organisations pay a lot of money for survey's that result in datasets that are relativly small to the dataset available at Google.
I love old computers and over the years i've visited more than a few of these museum-site's.
These are my two favorites:
- old-computers.com : a fairly new, well maintained site. They already have a big database and it's growing day by day.
- obsolete computer museum: One of the first really good site's.
P.
In Europe (as in the USA from what I read in other comments) the railway system has had a lot of problems: not being on time, bad management, bad equipment, bad products, ...
But in the last few years Railway operators have discovered the business market and are offering new (high speed) products towards that market.
Thalys and Eurostar are two great examples. They interconnect a few major cities in differnt European countries. Especially THALYS (connecting Brussels (B), Amsterdam (NL) and Colone (D) amongst others) is a big success. It's not much faster or cheaper than flying, but it's much more luxurious and they drive you right to the city centre.
Eurostar (connecting Brussels, Paris and London)is not yet very successful, but that's because can't yet benifit from high speeds on the English tracks.
Any on-line links to that mini-book? I would really like to read it!)
(Corel Photo paint is actually quite good these days. I use it everyday.)
Triplex Millennium Silver XabrePRO graphics card Review date: 28 May 2002.
Until now, Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS, or "SiS", as they for some reason want their acronym to be rendered) have not been the chipset provider of choice for the performance PC graphics enthusiast.
SIS have produced quite a lot of graphics chipsets, but they've all been cheap chips for entry level systems and boring business boxes. In those tasks, they're generally perfectly fine, for the money; if a video chipset discourages your employees from spending company time shocklancing enemy Havocs, then that's a feature, not a bug. But if you want to run 3D applications, SIS products have always, to four significant digits, sucked.
--------------------
IN BRIEF
What it is: High performance value graphics card
Who makes it: Triplex
What it costs: $AUD242 delivered
Best points: Strong performance for the money
Worst points: Drivers a bit quirky. Makes a weird noise.
----------------
This is, however, no longer the case. Because now there's the Xabre.
The Xabre chipset is aimed at the same "high entry level" 3D video adapter market as Nvidia's GeForce4 MX. And it's priced about the same, too. A GeForce4 MX440 card gives you ample 3D power for pretty much any current game on pretty much any current monitor; here in Australia, Aus PC Market will deliver a Leadtek Winfast A170 DDR MX 440 board to you for $AUD242.
But Triplex's new Millennium Silver XabrePRO card costs, as I write this, exactly the same amount. And, if you look down the feature charts, it seems to beat the A170 handily.
For a start, it's faster. Which is something I'll get to in more detail in a moment.
Also, a cheap MX 440 card like the A170 isn't likely to have twin monitor connectors. So Nvidia's drivers may let you access "nView" multi-monitor features, but all you can use them with is the card's TV output, which isn't going to let you do proper dual screen computing.
The Triplex Xabre card has a standard 14 pin D-sub VGA connector, and a Y/C (S-Video) TV output, and a DVI-I connector. It can run two outputs at once, in mirror or true multi-monitor mode. You also get a DVI-to-RGB adapter, so you can easily hook up two regular VGA-connector monitors.
The Xabre also has a full DirectX8.1 feature set, which means it can handle all of the pretty-features used by the newest and shiniest Direct3D games. GeForce4 Titanium cards have full DX8.1, but GeForce4 MX cards don't; they don't even have a full GeForce3 feature set.
In the real world, this isn't a very big deal; everything still runs on a GeForce4 MX, and it generally runs very quickly indeed; you might have noticed that all of those people with GeForce2s haven't suddenly noticed they're unable to play new games. It's going to be some time before DX8.1 compatibility is a must-have feature. But hey, it doesn't hurt to have it, for the same price.
The Xabre is also alleged to embrace compelling relationships and grow ubiquitous synergies between the paradigm frontiers of the blah blah blah, with all sorts of trademarked "technologies", which seem to be broadly similar to those claimed for every other new graphics chip since the invention of dirt.
Frankly, marketing people have so comprehensively poisoned this particular well that I no longer even attempt to figure out which of the new "technologies" mean a darn thing. They're like promises from politicians on the campaign trail; life's too short for it to be worthwhile paying attention.
To be fair, I don't think any graphics chip company has ever described their product as a "mysterious knight" before. But that doesn't mellow me out much.
While we're on the subject of apparently cool stuff that doesn't actually matter very much, the Xabre also supports AGP 8X, the latest doubling of Accelerated Graphics Port speed. AGP 8X brings AGP theoretical bandwidth up to match that of PC2100 DDR memory.
Not that anything's likely to be able to use most of that bandwidth to send data to the graphics card, mind you. Certainly not texture data from main memory, which often has to serve multiple simultaneous requests from various subsystems, and which has large overheads even when it's only got one job to do.
AGP 8X may be the fastest AGP mode yet, but it's still much slower than on-card video memory, so you still need enough memory on the card for all of the textures you want to use.
Besides, practically nobody on the planet has an AGP 8X capable motherboard yet, as I write this.
The "Xabre 400" chipset, also known as the Xabre Pro, is the first to be released; there are two slower models and one faster one in the pipeline. I'm pretty sure that this Triplex card is the only retail Xabre card in existence so far.
It's a good looking thing, with Triplex's distinctive silver finish (also used on their Nvidia-chipset cards, including the GeForce4 Ti4600 one I review here).
The main chip cooler on the Triplex card is quite impressive, but you don't get any heat sinks on the RAM chips. That's OK, though. RAM-sinks on video cards are like spoilers on passenger cars; buy the more expensive, faster model and you get the extra frill thrown in. It doesn't do much of anything, though.
The eight memory chips (there are another four on the back of the card) are all Etron Technology EM658160TS-3.3s. They're slightly faster than any of the EM658160 variants listed on the manufacturers' page here; the -3.3 version is the 3.3 nanosecond incarnation of this 64 megabit chip, and so it ought to have a ceiling specified speed of 300MHz.
So you've got a thoroughly acceptable 64 megabytes of memory (eight times 64 megabits, eight bits to the byte), which should be happy running at an effective 600MHz, after taking DDR doubling into account. Or a bit more, with luck, a following wind, and perhaps also some extra cooling.
This memory isn't running at 300/600MHz on this card, though; the Xabre Pro has 250MHz core and RAM (before DDR doubling) clock speeds, by default.
Hi-ho for some overclocking, then.
You can do that with the standard Triplex drivers, which seem to be the only ones available for the Xabre at the moment. Triplex themselves don't have any Xabre drivers for download; heck, you can't even download drivers from the Xabre site itself yet. The driver pages are "under construction". So don't lose the driver CD that comes with the card.
Drivers for new video chipsets are, typically, crummy. Inadequate development, inadequate testing, personality defects and bugs galore. Nvidia's drivers are a big reason to buy cards that use their chipsets; there's exactly one driver package for each Windows variety, and it covers every Nvidia chipset since the original TNT, and the drivers inside that package have been thoroughly tweaked and tested over the course of years of updates.
Perfect, Nvidia's drivers aren't. About as good as you can get, they are.
SIS seem to have done an OK job with the core functions of the Xabre drivers. But I didn't check a bunch of games on different Windows flavours to be sure; I just ran a few tests on a WinXP Pro machine. For all I know, the card catches fire if you run Quake 2 on WinME, but the drivers smelled all right to me.
The icing that Triplex have put on the SIS code core, though, is... quirky.
As a representative sample of the Triplex visual style, check out this overclocking control panel:
Yee-ow.
If this pub-carpet school of interface design doesn't turn your crank, rest assured that various driver features can also be accessed via what look like cheesy software MP3 player interfaces, instead:
This is a family Web site, so I'll refrain from commenting further on this.
The overclocking controls let you wind up the core and RAM clock speeds quite a bit, but the card, she does not want to know. The results of my overclocking experiments were somewhat inconsistent - a given speed would hang the machine when I tried it one time, but work when I restarted and tried again. But none of the results were particularly impressive.
RAM chips that're rated for a speed well above the speed at which a given card runs them are all very well, but there are limiting factors besides the RAM itself. Those factors are in full effect on the Triplex Xabre board, as far as I can see.
Setting the RAM speed slider to 300MHz instantly, and not very surprisingly, borked the computer.
275MHz mangled the display, but at least I could cancel out of it. 265MHz, the first time I tried it, caused more borkitude, with no escape. Then, after a restart, it worked OK.
Raising the core speed to just 260MHz took me on a trip to the magical land of the BSOD when I tried to do a 3D test, but 250/265 was OK, although it didn't make anything more than 1% faster.
That was the best the Triplex card could do. Perhaps this was something to do with the drivers; they did worrying things like setting the clock sliders all the way to the left, sometimes, when I went to the "DisplaySetting" tab for the first time after a reboot. Clicking Cancel and then going back to DisplaySetting solved that problem every time it happened, putting the sliders back in the right place. But stuff like this didn't inspire confidence.
Triplex provide a couple of optional extras along with the drivers themselves - a pop-up menu thing that gives quick access to Display Properties and other features and is therefore somewhat useful, and a multi-function bar thing whose best feature is that you don't have to install it. That's it for the software bundle; no cheapo DVD player software, no colour calibration thingummy, no bundled game you don't want to play.
In contrast, the software bundle that comes with the Leadtek A170 includes all of the above.
Big deal.
More significantly, the A170's 64Mb of DDR memory is made up of Samsung K4D263238M-QC40 chips, which are four nanosecond chips, and should be good for 250 un-doubled megahertz, or 500MHz after DDR's worked its magic.
The MX 440 only runs at a core speed of 270MHz and a RAM speed of 200MHz, by default. The general consensus seems to be that no core overclock worth bothering with is likely to be possible, but RAM speeds of 225 to 250 pre-doubling megahertz are routinely attainable. That'll net you a worthwhile speed increase, if you're running a high enough resolution and/or anti-aliasing mode.
Probably not, however, enough of an increase to make up for the Xabre's natural speed advantage over the MX 440. Not unless you've got a pretty big monitor, anyway.
I tried out both the Millennium Silver XabrePRO and the Leadtek A170 on what now, alarmingly enough, qualifies as a medium performance PC. It's a Thunderbird Athlon machine, running at 1477.5MHz (according to WCPUID, anyway) on an Asus A7A266 motherboard, with 512Mb of humble PC133 RAM. Roughly Athlon XP 1600+ CPU performance, let down a bit by the RAM, in other words. Tests were performed under Windows XP Professional.
Mad Onion's 3DMark2001 SE is a thorough and quite realistic DirectX 8 benchmark. The Xabre can't currently handle the Advanced Pixel Shader test, but SIS say that's Mad Onion's fault, not theirs.
With the defective test disabled, the Xabre at stock speed beat the MX 440 at stock speed by about 33% in 1024 by 768, using 32 bit colour and compressed textures. It won by about the same amount when both cards had 2X full screen anti-aliasing turned on.
In the same resolution with 4X FSAA, neither card was performing particularly well, but the Xabre still won by more than 11%. That gap would be pretty much annihilated by a reasonable RAM overclock on the MX 440 card.
In 1600 by 1200 with no FSAA, the Xabre won by less than 10%. Then again, it managed 1600 by 1200 with 2X FSAA at a respectable 66% of its no-FSAA speed. The MX 440 is less memory efficient, and couldn't even attempt that test.
For those who can't comprehend benchmark numbers unless they're presented in a cheesy Excel graph, here one is.
I wanted to do some OpenGL tests next, but was defeated by the fact that the drivers that come with the retail Xabre card don't seem to provide any way to turn off vertical sync (vsync), which tells the video card to wait for a new screen refresh before displaying another frame.
With vsync turned on you won't get "tearing" caused by the screen updating faster than it refreshes, but you also end up with a hard cap on your frame rate that's equal to the refresh rate. Try as I might, I couldn't turn vsync off - turning it off elsewhere (in, for instance, the Quake III Arena config file), didn't work.
So much for that, then.
As quirks go, though, the locked-on vsync paled into insignificance compared with the noise.
The Xabre card makes a noise when it's in 3D mode.
It's usually a vague, high pitched, white-noise-y rasp. Sometimes, as in the 3DMark2001SE Point Sprites test, it's distinctly different - more of a whistling noise. I've never heard anything like it from a video card before. It's bizarre. It's not really annoyingly loud, but you'd be able to hear it without taking the side off your case.
This is not an oddity of the one card I got for review, either. I procured another one. Same noise. A friend tested a third. Same noise.
Perhaps this is just the sound of a Triplex Xabre board; perhaps it's the sound of all Xabres. Usually, solid state devices making a clearly audible noise are in the process of being electronically beaten to death; by misdesigning a power supply, I once managed to make a solid state battery charger tick like a clock until it expired. It did so in such a thorough way that the note later attached to the charger by a thwarted repair technician read "murdered by owner".
But looping demos on the Triplex cards didn't seem to hurt them.
So the source of the noise baffles me.
Overall
Frankly, I wouldn't buy a Xabre card right now. The thing seems to be decently fast, but it has sufficient points of weirdness that I think it'd be a good idea to hang about a bit and see whether any of them turn out to be symptomatic of serious problems.
If someone gave me a Triplex Xabre as a present, though, I wouldn't go straight out and try to swap it for a GeForce4 MX. It doesn't seem terribly likely that it'll go up in a puff of smoke, none of its driver quirks are crippling (well, unless disabling OpenGL vsync is essential for your continued happiness), and the little melon-picker is a dual-monitor board with respectable 3D performance.
So wait and see on this one, I say.
If you've got the price of a Xabre board burning a hole in your pocket and you're currently using a thoroughly inadequate graphics card, then play it safe and get a GeForce4 MX instead. If you can stand to wait for about a month, though, do. By then, enough people should have prodded the Xabre around that Usenet and review directories should give you a definite yea or nay on the thing.
Right now, though, it's a Video Card Of Mystery. And I'd rather not pay for one of those, if it's all the same to you.
I think he means the extremly ugly visual style of the (windows) control panel.
eviltypeguy makes a good point here.
As I already pointed out in another post in this thread, we are trying to make a HTPC and we chose Linux as our platform because of the flexibility.
Linux gives you flexibility because you can change a lot. Because of this you can custumise existing applications to your HTPC needs.
We have a linux box next to our Tv that does the job quite effectively.
I agree, it wasn't easy, but we can:
- watch DVD's, TV, DivX's, foto's
- listen to music
- record from TV
-
Our project is far from finished but once it is, it'll make a kick ass HTPC out of any linux-box.
ATM Windows is easier but we went with Linux because in the long run it's easier to set up, maintain, change and distribute. It's also FAR more easy to customize and you're not so dependent on one company (Microsoft for windows and mediaplayer)
Over at http://davedina.apestaart.org we're trying to make a linux based HTPC.
It's been a slow month for davedina development because we had to work on some other stuff, but some new volunteers would be a good incentive to get us back going.
(Note that I said Netscape Composer, and not Mozilla... which I personal feel is a piece of bloated slow s**t... open source or not... try running it on a P200 and you'll see what I mean, its unusable)
:-)
ANY full-featured modern browser is slow on a P200.
Just don't run software on your P200 that wasn't intended for it. I bet WinXP will run slow on your P200, but that doesn't mean it's bad software. Oh wait, bad example
If you're going windows on a P200 i would recommend win98lite (with all the desktop enhancements turned off) and netscape 4.7x or IE 5.
I'm no expert at this, so i'm going out on a limb here, but i think they only 'stole' the interface.
The underlaying (is that an English word?) multimedia platform (gstreamer) seems to be very original and innovative and something we will probably hear more about in the future.
Sure, it looks like iTunes, but under the hood it's a completely different thing. In my opinion the inteface is just a thin layer on the surface.
It just depends on how you define 'stealing'. It's a blurry discussion. iTunes isn't the first audio player so you could say they stole the idea from earlier audio software.
Every spreadsheet and wordprocessor looks alike. But that's far from saying that they stole from each other or that they are the same.
Furthermore rythmbox is not a finished product so who knows. Maybe it will be skinnable in the future.
just my two cents.
Of course, it's pretty fun to see the occasional dhcp logs on their screens...
They have DHCP logs? So they must be connected in some kind of wireless network? That's so cool!
The ones used in my supermarket keep the price-database in memory (i think). The database gets uploaded everytime you store it in the terminal (i think)
When you're finished you put the scanner in a terminal which prints your receipt. with this receipt you go to a special (selfscanning only) checkout to pay.
No lines, saves time
You can always see how musch you're spending
You can bag while you shop, saves time
:)
Stealing is pretty easy this way but i wouldn't there because there are random checks. And if you get caught there are evere punishments
It's a neat and cool system but i haven't seen it anywhere else? Has anybody else seen this system before?
:-)
Point taken.
If you are an information-hungry power user, one of your most important tools is e-mail. You use e-mail for research to contact people who really know what they're talking about. You use it to subscribe to mailing lists, where you will often be able to get a regular flow of high-signal information from a certain field. You use it to stay in touch with your friends, who may frequently send you interesting or funny links and forwards. Given this importance of email, it is surprising how poorly most email clients handle the task of organizing large amounts of information, especially when compared to Ximian Evolution, a free, open-source (GPL) email client for Unix. Windows users may wish to continue reading to see what they are missing.
Right now, I have an Evolution window open with about 40,000 mails from the last 5 years. (It's amazing how much traffic some mailing lists generate.) These are all sorted nicely into folders. One of these folders contains 14,000 messages that I received from May 1998 to May 2000 using Netscape Messenger. Searching the full text of all these messages for a string, say, "Finnish", takes about 5 seconds. Doing the same with Netscape Messenger would probably take a minute or longer.
This example highlights some of the greatest features of Evolution. By indexing all incoming mail (explained below) it offers amazingly fast searches. These searches can be stored as so-called "virtual folders", which can then be browsed just like real folders. Evolution imports mail from many common clients and uses the Unix standard mailbox format itself, so that Evolution mail can easily be moved to other clients should the need arise. Evolution is multi-threaded, which means that in most cases, it doesn't matter if the client is doing something in the background (like reorganizing your mail to save harddisk space) -- you can keep using it normally.
Now that I've teased you by listing some of the cooler features, let's look at the application's background and purpose -- you can probably skip this part if you're familiar with the Linux/Unix world. In any case, you may have heard of KDE or GNOME. These are projects which aim to make Unix easier to use by providing a pretty, well-integrated and intuitive graphical user interface (and the underlying backend). This goal has not been fully met, especially as competitors like Microsoft and Apple are also constantly improving their desktops. Linux in particular struggles with problems of standardization: The installation procedure for applications and hardware drivers is often difficult, and getting fonts under Linux' X-Window-System to look right is a perpetual nightmare (by now, most Linux distributions offer good, but not quite satisfying defaults).
The GNOME project was initiated in 1997 by Mexico-born hacker Miguel de Icaza. It is somewhat competitive to the KDE project, for reasons that are now obsolete -- but this is a case where most people agree that the competition has its benefits, and interoperability between KDE and GNOME is usually not much of an issue. Together with a fellow GNOME hacker, de Icaza was able to convince some venture capitalists (AKA "suckers") that a potentially huge amount of money could be made by giving away powerful software for free. Sometimes you just got to love capitalism!
This is, of course, a slight exaggeration -- in the past years Ximian developed several credible business models that are at least far better than most of the cat litter ecommerce projects that were fed with billions of dollars. After all, de Icaza's company, Ximian, is still around and the cat litter sellers are not.
Ximian employs lots of highly skilled hackers and artists. They sell (and offer for free download) a variant of the GNOME desktop that is more streamlined and more beautiful (I haven't tested it, but I prefer KDE anyway). They also offer Red Carpet, a small and useful application that makes it easier to install software under Linux -- with Red Carpet, you just select the package and wait a few second until the installation finishes. Any dependencies on other software or libraries are resolved automatically and the respective missing pieces are fetched as well. The whole thing is free, but you get faster access to their servers as a subscriber.
Red Carpet offers Linux users a convenience that most Linux distributions do not have. Only Gentoo and Debian (and those based on either of them) make the installation of applications equally simple. Since I use Debian, Red Carpet is of no interest to me: Debian comes with its own software installation system called "apt" which does pretty much the same thing as Red Carpet, without any fees and with very high speed, although it's a bit harder to get working.
As a company that aims for Linux on the desktop (and the corporate desktop in particular, as that's where the money is), Ximian quickly realized that one of the main reasons corporations are so slow to adopt Linux are missing equivalents to their productivity apps. This includes Office, but with the Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org suite, a replacement is well on its way. However, one of the most important apps in corporations is Outlook.
The Magic-8-Ball says: Outlook not so good
Hardly any company with more than 10 employees can exist without some kind of internal messaging system, usually in the form of an Intranet. Such Intranets often run with a combination of Microsoft Exchange as a messaging server and Microsoft Outlook as the client. But Outlook can do more than just mail, in combination with Exchange, users can schedule meetings or share calendars, and read their messages directly on the server so that they can easily access it from all workstations. While not all companies use these features, it's obvious that they are valuable in many contexts.
Outlook has the speed and usability one would expect from a Microsoft product. It has become the subject of international media reports for another reason, though: Frequent security holes in combination with weaknesses in the underlying operating system have made Outlook the cause of the most annoying email worms in history.
One problem with Windows is that versions of the OS still based on the ancient DOS had no real access control model. Concepts like file ownership and processes running as different users were not to be found in the "little brother" of the more professional Windows NT/2K operating systems. Fortunately, with Windows XP, the product lines have been united. Still, for various reasons, most home users will continue to run their sytems as superusers. That means that any virus or worm has read and write access to all the user's files.
Let me contrast that with my current setup. I am right now logged in as user "moeller". I have write access only to my personal desktop and application configuration as well as the projects I'm currently working on. I can start most applications, but I cannot delete any of them. Once I have finished working on a project I move it away to another directory where I only have read access as a normal user. As a result, a Windows-style virus or worm could do little harm on my system. It would also have a hard time installing itself without getting noticed by me.
Aside from that, Linux offers another protection against viruses and worms: diversity. While I may run an Debian/KDE/evolution combination on a patched 2.4.18 kernel, someone else might run SuSE/GNOME/mutt with a SuSE-specific 2.4.10 kernel. On Windows, you have millions of users with a system that is essentially still DOS and Outlook Express as an email client.
And then there's active content. Microsoft's strategy to kill browser rival Netscape involved the use of technology that would only run on Microsoft systems, such as "ActiveX controls" which are basically just Windows executables embedded in a webpage. There's also the powerful but dangerous VB Scripting language. In addition to that, they have embedded their web browser, Internet Explorer, into nearly all of their applications (to display help files, mail etc.). This was necessary to make their case that IE cannot be removed from Windows without causing irreparable damage. Outlook therefore uses IE to display HTML mail. That means that whenever there's a problem with Internet Explorer, the same problem can be exploited to develop email worms. Since users only rarely update or patch their systems, bugs can often be exploited for months.
This combination of Microsoft monoculture with active content and an insufficient underlying security system has proven to be nothing less than disastrous. Some worms have spread because users have executed attachments (another Windows-specific problem: executables are often not recognizable as such -- on Unix, they all have the "executable" flag). Others are automatically run by Outlook because of flaws in Internet Explorer or the active content interpreters. Some worms are happy to just replicate, others mail around users' files (not without infecting them first, of course) or send messages in other people's name (cf. this Wired article).
Even in a corporate environment, systems are frequently unpatched and users have too many rights on their systems or the network. But the nastiest part is that, since email is a very open system, these worms get sent everywhere, even to Unix users. If you have your email address on a few well-indexed webpages, you can hardly protect yourself from an influx of messages caused by the latest worm. Of course, Unix users have the best tools for email filtering available, but it's still a pest. Now you know why many Linux users are proselytizing zealots -- they are acting in their own best interest!
Unix mail has many advantages to Windows mail -- after all, email was invented on Unix systems and is part of the system architecture. Any Unix system has a mail spool that can be used to queue messages for local delivery. That means that the system itself can send messages to you. For example, you might get an email that the installation of some program has failed for certain reasons. Unix comes with sendmail or equivalents, which means that you can easily setup your own mail server. If you have a static IP address, you can then get your mail delivered directly to you without any delays. Unix has a standardized mailbox format which is understood by most Unix mail clients -- fetching mail with one client and reading it with another is completely viable. And so on, and so forth.
The Messaging Mystery
Given all this, why do corporations not switch to Unix-based messaging solutions? One valid reason in the past has been that traditional Unix mail clients do not care much about usability. Most of them are console-based, all with their own keyboard syntax and menu layout. Also, few if any of the old clients have collaboration features like Outlook -- they are email clients and nothing else. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that such business decisions are purely rational. Managers make these decisions based on buzzwords and screenshots, even if none of the nifty features is ever used. And then there's the simple platform dominance of Windows: It is required for too many applications to just switch.
With more and more productivity apps coming to Linux, this is about to change. And Evolution should give pointy-haired bosses more buzzwords than they can shake an MS-Word attachment at. Ximian spent years working on Evolution to fill this application void in the Unix world. Licensed under the GPL, its source code is freely available for anyone to modify. Besides being a graphical email client, it is also a calendar, contact manager, task-planner and news tracker. And if you're willing to pay, you can use Exchange's collaboration features.
I cannot comment on the installation procedure on some *cough* inferior *cough* Linux distributions, since all I had to do to install evolution was typing "apt-get install evolution" in a console window. It can be installed through Red Carpet, though. I am not aware of a Windows port of Evolution, but this is certainly not impossible -- many other complex Unix applications have been ported to Windows; there's even a project to port the whole KDE desktop.
When you start Evolution, you are presented with an Outlook style multi-panel window, with a big button bar on the left side. Let's look at the features in detail.
The Summary
The first page you see is the "Summary" page, shown in the screenshot below. This page contains weather information for locations you can specify, the latest headlines from news sites you can select (anything that supports the RDF Site Summary format, i.e. almost every major site), information about your folders, tasks and schedule. This is a pretty neat idea. To render the page (and other HTML pages), the GtkHTML control is used. I mention this only to clarify that it is not Mozilla's Gecko engine -- so if a security flaw in Mozilla is found, you don't have to worry about your Evolution security (as opposed to the IE/Outlook connection).
Evolution summary view. This view shows headlines from a few sites, including infoAnarchy, and my current To-Do-List (can you figure out what I'm working on?).
The summary comes in very handy, especially since it's so customizable. I'm a bit surprised that they don't put a little donation box for Evolution development there, with feedback on the amount of donations they have received that month. In any case, when you hear Microsoft talking about "Web Services", don't forget that a lot of it is hype: What you see in the Evolution summary is nothing less than "customizable web service delivery", or something.
Messaging
Evolution lets you fetch mail from a POP3 server, but you can also use a traditional Unix tool like fetchmail to get it, or access it on an IMAP server. Sending mail is similarly easy, you can use an SMTP host or your local sendmail server. You can import mail in a few formats, including Outlook and Unix' mbox-format. I previously used Pegasus Mail for Windows, which is a bit exotic so it's not supported, but with a little tweaking I got it to work (see my HOWTO) and, as mentioned above, have managed to import my entire remaining email backlog (a feat I have not accomplished with any email client for Windows).
Once you have your mail set up, you will want to organize your folders. The interface for doing so is a bit cumbersome, but since you will not use it too often, this doesn't matter much. At this point, we need to take a look at the difference between vFolders and real folders. Real folders are files on your local harddisk that store messages. vFolders are small files that store searches, but in the program, they act just like folders. When creating a vFolder, you specify certain search criteria and the folder(s) to which they are to be applied (these can also be vFolders). That's it: When you click the vFolder, the actions are performed and the messages viewed.
When should you use vFolders and when folders? That is a matter of taste. In my opinion, vFolders should be used only for searching, and folders for organizing. If you want to read certain mail exclusively in a certain folder, use a normal folder. If you just want to temporarily switch your view, use a vFolder. For automatically copying or moving mail to folders, filters are used. These are applied to all incoming mail matching the set criteria. Besides copying and moving stuff around, you can also delete the mail, change its color, status, or score. (The score is used for ranking the mail in the list.)
Nicely enough, Evolution offers some presets for quickly generating filters from the subject, sender or recipient field or from a mailing list. This makes organizing your mailing list filters quick and easy as it should be. The same presets are available for vFolders.
Theory of Evolution
How is the ultra-fast searching and filtering that is necessary for features like vFolders to work accomplished? Quite simply, Evolution uses the same method any database (for example, Google's) uses to make searching stuff faster. Instead of wading through the file by brute force, the positions of words within the mailbox files are indexed: a separate file contains pointers into the mailbox file, so that when you search a specific phrase, the search is sped up by orders of magnitude. The index is automatically kept up-to-date as new mail comes in. This sounds simple, but the underlying mathematics can get tricky, so Ximian's hackers have done a great job.
It is unfortunate that this kind of indexing is not more wide-spread. It would be nice to have it implemented on the filesystem-level, with specific support for certain filetypes (like XML). This would mean that whenever you create a file, the appropriate index would be updated. As a consequence, you could search all the files on your harddisk for a certain string within a few seconds. Sadly, while a few commercial solutions that produce similar results exist (DTSearch, Altavista Personal Search etc.), these are not very popular (and not free). On Unix, the locate-database at least contains an index of all filenames, so that you can search for filenames matching certain criteria quickly, and there are a few open source search engines like htdig. It is rumored that the next Windows version will contain advanced indexed search functionality.
The implementation in Evolution is stable and fast and shows the benefits of indexing clearly, without many disadvantages (the indexes themselves use a few megabytes of space, but not much to worry about). Take care, though: If you want to access your email with another client, your index will get messed up if the client changes the file -- the index will then point to the wrong positions in the file and therefore be no longer valid. Make sure to parse the file as read-only, or import a copy. If something goes wrong, you can delete the index files, and they will be regenerated.
As you delete mail in your folders, it is crossed out and needs to be cleaned before it is really removed. This has the advantage that mail can still be undeleted for some time.
Reading and writing mail
With alternating background colors, the message list is well-readable. It has the expected columns, but in the default view doesn't show the message size. Hint: Right-click the column titles to add or remove a column. Thanks to the index, you can very quickly sort the list by all criteria. A semi-complex search mask can be found directly above the message list, making quick filtering amazingly simple. All status indicators are obvious and well designed. Mails can be temporarily marked as "important" with a single click and sorted so that these come first, then newest. This is my preferred message view. It's a really good way to remember replying to certain mail and, in my opinion, beats complex filtering rules for color highlighting or scoring.
A typical folder view with a search filter applied. Even with thousands of mails, these filters can be applied within a few seconds.
Evolution uses a mail preview panel similar to Outlook. While I never got used to mail preview elsewhere, Evolution's implementation is acceptable. After a definable period of viewing a mail, its status is changed to "read". But you can also view the mail in a separate window instead. Mails can be moved around with drag and drop. GtkHTML renders most spam (HTML) mails you will receive correctly. Attachments are handled nicely, although the user interface looks a bit strange. Images are displayed inline. The reader is still feature-poor; for example, in V1.03, it has no "Select All" function. These features and menus are being added for V1.2, though, or already in CVS.
The composer has everything you would expect, including HTML (which should not be used in mail to preserve interoperability) and spellchecking support for various languages (needs to be enabled). However, for large mails, you will want to use a powerful text editor instead.
Encryption
Email worms faking senders have made it obvious that encryption and digital signatures are essential to email safety. Any modern email client should make encryption available with a few keypresses. Fortunately, Evolution has the necessary functionality. There is a free PGP-compatible encryption tool called gpg, and while you might expect such a thing to be difficult to use, it's a lot easier than the good old PGP command-line client, and several graphical front-ends exist. What is more, you don't need to do much with the command-line client anyway -- you just create a keypair, tell Evolution the ID of your key and it does the rest: signing, encryption, key import, signature verification etc. - it's all there just waiting to be used. Encrypting and decrypting is very fast and works almost transparently. Except for neat features like key lookup and gpg's initial configuration, gpg integration into Evolution is perfect.
IMAP and Exchange
Evolution natively supports reading mail on an IMAP server by subscribing to specific folders. Since I do not have an IMAP server, I cannot tell you if or how well that works and how it affects the local indexing. On March 25 Ximian released a product with which Evolution can read mail directly on a Microsoft Exchange server as well. That product is called Ximian Connector and is traditional closed-source software; it costs $69 for a single-seat license. Besides mail, it also supports Exchange's collaboration features, more on those below.
Summary of mail component
Nomen est omen: Email with Evolution is definitely a step forward. The user interface offers the comfort of the best clients from the Windows world, while the indexing and virtual folders are Unix-typical high-productivity ideas. What tabbed browsing is to Mozilla, the indexing is to Evolution -- once you have discovered its value, you will never want to live without it. Searching that lost password, digging out the years-old recipe from grandma or just quickly changing the sorting order are all so fast that you don't have to think about whether you want to go to the effort of doing it or not -- you just do it.
Task Planner
The task list is a simple table where you can very quickly add and remove tasks as you complete them, but also add advanced information (completion data, priority, amount of work already complete etc.) if necessary. If you define a completion date, the color of the task will change as the date comes nearer. As you check a task to be complete, it is crossed out -- you can configure the planner to automatically hide these tasks after a certain period of time.
This is all nice and pretty much what you expect from a task planner, although it does not include any collaborative features. Personally, I'd like to be able to give scores to tasks and gain points (and possibly RPG-like levels) by completing them, as a motivation trainer, but this is probably a too wild idea to be tested here first. Collaborative task completion would be interesting, though: Putting tasks on a server and letting users decide which ones they want to finish.
Calendar
The calendar is far more complex than the task list. Like most organizers, it allows you to display different time scales and to add a new appointment by double-clicking a calendar cell. Appointments have a daytime property or can be all day long, they can be public or private and assigned to one or several categories. Of course Evolution also has a built-in reminder, which is nicely implemented since it can do several things at different times: Show a message 30 minutes before the event, play a sound 10 minutes before it and give the user an electric shock if he's still there when it happens.
But Evolution not only allows you to plan your personal appointments but to also schedule appointments together with others. The so-called iCalendar standard makes it possible to schedule appointments without a need for a central server -- you just need someone who organizes the event. iCalendar files are simple email attachments that are sent to all people involved in the event. You can configure the event so that the attendance of some people is required and the attendance of others is optional. Once your selection is complete, the invitation is sent to the selected people, and they just have to say whether they want to accept the meeting or not -- this reply is then sent to the event organizer.
You can schedule an appointment with other users by sending them a suggestion in the form of iCalendar files.
In order to effectively find the right date and time, participants can mark some timeblocks in their calendar as "free time" and then exchange their calendar files before scheduling. This is a bit tedious, and that's where the proprietary Ximian Connector comes in again -- it uses the central Exchange server for the entire scheduling process.
The scheduling interface could be a bit more streamlined, but it is only valuable where the people you are dealing with have the software capability to handle the iCalendar attachments. In a corporate environment, the clients can be standardized -- outside it's a bit harder.
Contacts
The contact manager is quite sophisticated feature-wise, but I found it a bit buggy -- I had big problems with the search functionality. Other than that, it worked fine. It allows you to create cards with many information fields and even lets you link a contact to other contacts, but it also makes it easy to just manage email addresses. Cards can be forwarded as vCard-files, which is another of those helpful business standards. As you would expect, you can also create contact lists which you can use to quickly distribute mail to several recipients. The drag & drop interface used to add contacts to a list is not optimal, though, as it requires the window to be always-on-top.
Conclusion
Using Evolution is a pleasant experience. Almost everything works as it should and most functionality is quite intuitive. Where it isn't, the helpfile is usually quite informative (unlike, unfortunately, the helpfiles of most open source applications). For a recent version 1.0, Evolution is remarkably stable. The general performance (aside from searches) is not what Unix users get from console clients, but is better than all Windows clients I know. The localization and internationalization are a bit shaky at times: Some translations are incorrect, and some foreign character encodings in the subject line are not properly interpreted.
The very best part is that Evolution is completely free to use and will never die, even if Ximian should go down the tubes. That's the best argument a startup can have against a large corporation like Microsoft, proving Ximian's open source decision right. At the same time, a proprietary connector application to Exchange seems like a good business model, since it harms neither consumers nor corporations -- even for small companies, the price is a bargain, whereas private users don't care about Exchange access. It would be nice to see an open source equivalent of Exchange, so that companies can switch entirely to free software. But no plans for such a server seem to be in the works.
I'm surprised that Ximian doesn't try to get normal users to support development -- given the quality of the product, I believe the willingness to pay for specific feature additions would be definitely there, and the donation interface could be easily integrated.
Evolution is clearly a product to keep an eye on, and for those who are still stuck on Windows, it's an excellent reason to switch. In fact, I would go so far to say that Ximian has done such a good job that they could even make Evolution-using monkeys out of creationists.
If I was Microsoft, I would make Xbox2 run PC games directly. No porting needed whatsoever.
I've always wondered why there's a relativly big HD in the Xbox. Not for the stupid music options, surely. And it's way too big to save games.
The HD would make sens if a future OS upgrade would make playing PC-games possible. Cause you need a HD to install those games on.
Everybody who thinks that people who THROW AWAY UNIX BOXEN should be banned from posting on slashdot, raise their hands.
Yes but can stuff 100+ books in your jacket, suitcase (for going on holiday)?
You only have to carry one of these and it can (or should be able to) hold a lot of books.
And it isn't that much bigger than a paperback.