My mom lives in Singapore, and complains a lot about Internet Explorer and Windows in general. I've tried to get her to buy a Mac or at the very least, switch to one of the Mozilla browsers.
She is resistant because she says there are a lot of web sites that are IE-specific, and don't work properly with other browsers. Singapore has moved to some kind of Internet-based tax filing system, and one of her Mac-using friends apparently had quite an exhausting experience trying to file her taxes through the web site. She (my mom's friend) eventually gave up and used one of the Wintel boxes at work to do her taxes.
Can someone more tech-savvy than my mom report on their experience with IE-specific web sites that Singapore citizens are required to use? I'd love to be able to get my mom using some other browser. There are some pop-ups you just don't want your parents seeing...
I'm a T68i owner in Maryland who has been subjected to this "upgrade". A customer service rep called me on Friday to see if I had received my replacement phone, and whether I had sent my T68i back to them.
I politely informed her that I use the Bluetooth feature of the T68, and without similar functionality on the replacement, it would be useless to me for day-to-day use. She responded that the T226 was a gift with no strings attached, and I was free to keep using the T68i and keep the T226 as a spare. So, at least in my case, this upgrade seems like an offer I can refuse.
Doesn't really matter. Thanks to AT&T's crappy customer service, and inability to provide global roaming on my recent trip to Southeast Asia, I'm planning on switching to a different provider in the next month or two. I was thinking of waiting until the T630 becomes available before making the switch...
there's an AGP 4x slot open with plenty of room for a decent video card (air circulation might be a problem though.)
Well, I went nuts and got a Radeon 9800 Pro for the 8x AGP slot. Seems to work fine, no heat-related issues so far, and I've been giving the UT2004 demo a few workouts.
Do all of the features of the SB65G2 work with a 2.4 kernel?
On-board 10/100 ethernet works great. I use a USB keyboard with an optical mouse chained to it, both work fine. (You do need a PS2 keyboard to mess with the BIOS, but that's not unusual.) To take advantage of the onboard audio you need to download the driver from Realtek and build it for your kernel, but that's not especially difficult, and the sound quality is good.
I read a few posts that suggest Linux support for S-ATA is not quite ready for primetime, so I chickened out and went with ATA-100. Turns out that's damn fast as it is, and well supported.
UT2003 is not as fast under Linux as it is under XP, which is disappointing. I'm not sure why that is -- might be because ATI's Linux drivers are lagging behind their Win32 drivers, might be problems with AGP 8x support. Also, I couldn't get UT2003 to work with ALSA, though I confess I didn't spend a lot of time troubleshooting it, since the framerate and rendering features (reflective water and other icing) is just better under XP.
Anyhow, it's a sweet setup for gaming under XP, and excellent for getting real work done under Linux.
I just built out my own Shuttle system a couple of weeks ago, based around the SB65G2 and a P4 3Ghz. Unless you've seen one in person, the "cube" format is smaller than you expect from pictures.
The quality of the case and motherboard are very impressive, the cooling solution for such a small system is very clever. In addition, the instructions that came with the system are very clear, with photographs that detail each step of the build.
I'm dual booting it between XP and Redhat 9, and both are running great on the system.
Myth is more of a real time tactical game. Strategy technically includes resource management and so forth. On the other hand, game makers lump tactics into the "strategy" label, so I think we can do the same.
Myth is clearly the best real-time strategy game ever. Personally, I believe it's one of the best games ever, in any genre.
King of the Hill in Myth had some intense multiplayer action... Rushing the defenders with 10 seconds left on the clock, holding the flag in neutral until your wight gets there, huge poisonous explosion, and your last surviving thrall is still close enough to the flag to clinch the win!
I have a static IP, which is connected to an 802.11 router, which I've left open (I think it still believes its name is "Linksys"). If someone gets lost and stops by my house, I feel they should have access to mapquest.com.
The point is more about forcing the employees to be responcible and accountable.
How do you force someone to be responsible? That's absurd -- a sense of responsibility can be inspired, but that requires that an employer treat the employees with respect, not force. Draconian measures like this only make the worker feel like a slave. The end result is an unmotivated and disgruntled workforce.
In the case of commercial software, has anyone ever done the "sue and recover" thing successfully?
And in the article, "forced to use Microsoft"? Who is that? Any individual or company can select a different browser. Nobody is "forced" to use Internet Explorer. Sure, an employee of a company might have to use a company-mandated browser, but if it's IE, that's the company's idiocy.
Funny, I have a laundry list of software I have to install on a WinXP box before it's usable for me. (Firebird, PuTTY, XEmacs, Cygwin, TweakUI, Python, etc) The default Windows environment is hardly usable out of the box, at least for me.
I think the whole "sync up files and apps" is a wash. It's work you have to do on either system when you move to a different computer.
My five year old knows that death is forever, and bullets kill people. Of course, my five year old also understands that if he hits someone because he was playing a real-life game of Jak and Daxter, he's going to be in deep trouble.
Prosecute the kids, not the parents, but I hope the parents have years of sleepless nights because (1) their little darlings are in prison and are routinely rented out for a pack of cigarettes, and (2) they raised a couple of morons that murdered someone, and had no better excuse than they saw it in a videogame.
After all my X-Box bashing in alt.games.video.sony-playstation2, I'm betting that "the system" will determine I am "without value". When Microsoft controls everything, I suspect I will be free()'ed at the first opportunity.
I have also had very good response from proprietary companies, especially those working in niche markets.
I certainly agree with you as regards nice market companies. I'm thinking more along the lines of operating systems, office applications, and programming languages. IMO, if you graph market size against support responsiveness, the line for open source diverges from the line for proprietary software. (No, I'm not going to do an ASCII graph.:^)
But purchasing managers don't have techs telling them to buy Seagate drives, because they make the best-tasting platters. Whereas, one of the selling points of open source software is that "No user servicible parts beyond this seal" labels are non-existent.
Personally, I think paying for support is a waste of money. I can google a mailing list much faster than I can sit on hold to tech support, or worse, have my hand held through a dialogue-tree of settings and restarts that I've already done myself, twice.
The mailing list usually has the answer. Sometimes a post to Usenet will get a response from the developers working on open source applications. Does that ever happen with proprietary software? With paid tech support, I've been told "we're aware of that and our programmers are looking into it, but we can't tell you when to expect a fix."
But don't let me get off on a rant... I still think your response kinda missed the point, cute though it was.
Slashdot Mirror
I think DELL pays about 5% of the total computer price for Windows.
That is quite a bit, considering their margins are wafer thin...
-- Bander
My mom lives in Singapore, and complains a lot about Internet Explorer and Windows in general. I've tried to get her to buy a Mac or at the very least, switch to one of the Mozilla browsers.
She is resistant because she says there are a lot of web sites that are IE-specific, and don't work properly with other browsers. Singapore has moved to some kind of Internet-based tax filing system, and one of her Mac-using friends apparently had quite an exhausting experience trying to file her taxes through the web site. She (my mom's friend) eventually gave up and used one of the Wintel boxes at work to do her taxes.
Can someone more tech-savvy than my mom report on their experience with IE-specific web sites that Singapore citizens are required to use? I'd love to be able to get my mom using some other browser. There are some pop-ups you just don't want your parents seeing...
-- Bander
I'm a T68i owner in Maryland who has been subjected to this "upgrade". A customer service rep called me on Friday to see if I had received my replacement phone, and whether I had sent my T68i back to them.
I politely informed her that I use the Bluetooth feature of the T68, and without similar functionality on the replacement, it would be useless to me for day-to-day use. She responded that the T226 was a gift with no strings attached, and I was free to keep using the T68i and keep the T226 as a spare. So, at least in my case, this upgrade seems like an offer I can refuse.
Doesn't really matter. Thanks to AT&T's crappy customer service, and inability to provide global roaming on my recent trip to Southeast Asia, I'm planning on switching to a different provider in the next month or two. I was thinking of waiting until the T630 becomes available before making the switch...
-- Bander
Forget all those lame ping jokes, I want to see the traceroute.
-- Bander
there's an AGP 4x slot open with plenty of room for a decent video card (air circulation might be a problem though.)
Well, I went nuts and got a Radeon 9800 Pro for the 8x AGP slot. Seems to work fine, no heat-related issues so far, and I've been giving the UT2004 demo a few workouts.
Do all of the features of the SB65G2 work with a 2.4 kernel?
On-board 10/100 ethernet works great. I use a USB keyboard with an optical mouse chained to it, both work fine. (You do need a PS2 keyboard to mess with the BIOS, but that's not unusual.) To take advantage of the onboard audio you need to download the driver from Realtek and build it for your kernel, but that's not especially difficult, and the sound quality is good.
I read a few posts that suggest Linux support for S-ATA is not quite ready for primetime, so I chickened out and went with ATA-100. Turns out that's damn fast as it is, and well supported.
UT2003 is not as fast under Linux as it is under XP, which is disappointing. I'm not sure why that is -- might be because ATI's Linux drivers are lagging behind their Win32 drivers, might be problems with AGP 8x support. Also, I couldn't get UT2003 to work with ALSA, though I confess I didn't spend a lot of time troubleshooting it, since the framerate and rendering features (reflective water and other icing) is just better under XP.
Anyhow, it's a sweet setup for gaming under XP, and excellent for getting real work done under Linux.
-- Bander
I just built out my own Shuttle system a couple of weeks ago, based around the SB65G2 and a P4 3Ghz. Unless you've seen one in person, the "cube" format is smaller than you expect from pictures.
The quality of the case and motherboard are very impressive, the cooling solution for such a small system is very clever. In addition, the instructions that came with the system are very clear, with photographs that detail each step of the build.
I'm dual booting it between XP and Redhat 9, and both are running great on the system.
-- Bander
Myth is more of a real time tactical game. Strategy technically includes resource management and so forth. On the other hand, game makers lump tactics into the "strategy" label, so I think we can do the same.
Myth is clearly the best real-time strategy game ever. Personally, I believe it's one of the best games ever, in any genre.
King of the Hill in Myth had some intense multiplayer action... Rushing the defenders with 10 seconds left on the clock, holding the flag in neutral until your wight gets there, huge poisonous explosion, and your last surviving thrall is still close enough to the flag to clinch the win!
Good times... good times.
-- Bander
Judging from this, the main criteria is the accumulation of huge tracts of land, and experience in oppressing the peasants.
-- Bander
Yeah, I guess I could have done:
lynx -dump http://whateverthedamnurlis | grep my.static.ip.addy
I still would have liked the OP to have sorted the list before posting.
-- Bander
I'd like to know about this too.
I have a static IP, which is connected to an 802.11 router, which I've left open (I think it still believes its name is "Linksys"). If someone gets lost and stops by my house, I feel they should have access to mapquest.com.
-- Bander
man sort
-- Bander
Damn touchy pagans. sigh
Bander
Mars is the god of war, does it get any more manly than that?
Whereas Saturn... pfft. Saturnalia -> dancing around naked in the woods. Gay, QED.
Bander
How do you force someone to be responsible? That's absurd -- a sense of responsibility can be inspired, but that requires that an employer treat the employees with respect, not force. Draconian measures like this only make the worker feel like a slave. The end result is an unmotivated and disgruntled workforce.
Bander
How is this not +1 funny?
Dammit, do I have to metamoderate to get any moderator points around here?
Bander
In the case of commercial software, has anyone ever done the "sue and recover" thing successfully?
And in the article, "forced to use Microsoft"? Who is that? Any individual or company can select a different browser. Nobody is "forced" to use Internet Explorer. Sure, an employee of a company might have to use a company-mandated browser, but if it's IE, that's the company's idiocy.
-- Bander
Funny, I have a laundry list of software I have to install on a WinXP box before it's usable for me. (Firebird, PuTTY, XEmacs, Cygwin, TweakUI, Python, etc) The default Windows environment is hardly usable out of the box, at least for me.
I think the whole "sync up files and apps" is a wash. It's work you have to do on either system when you move to a different computer.
--Bander
My five year old knows that death is forever, and bullets kill people. Of course, my five year old also understands that if he hits someone because he was playing a real-life game of Jak and Daxter, he's going to be in deep trouble.
Prosecute the kids, not the parents, but I hope the parents have years of sleepless nights because (1) their little darlings are in prison and are routinely rented out for a pack of cigarettes, and (2) they raised a couple of morons that murdered someone, and had no better excuse than they saw it in a videogame.
Bander
After all my X-Box bashing in alt.games.video.sony-playstation2, I'm betting that "the system" will determine I am "without value". When Microsoft controls everything, I suspect I will be free()'ed at the first opportunity.
It was nice knowing you all...
-- Bander
I have also had very good response from proprietary companies, especially those working in niche markets.
I certainly agree with you as regards nice market companies. I'm thinking more along the lines of operating systems, office applications, and programming languages. IMO, if you graph market size against support responsiveness, the line for open source diverges from the line for proprietary software. (No, I'm not going to do an ASCII graph.
Bander
But purchasing managers don't have techs telling them to buy Seagate drives, because they make the best-tasting platters. Whereas, one of the selling points of open source software is that "No user servicible parts beyond this seal" labels are non-existent.
Personally, I think paying for support is a waste of money. I can google a mailing list much faster than I can sit on hold to tech support, or worse, have my hand held through a dialogue-tree of settings and restarts that I've already done myself, twice.
The mailing list usually has the answer. Sometimes a post to Usenet will get a response from the developers working on open source applications. Does that ever happen with proprietary software? With paid tech support, I've been told "we're aware of that and our programmers are looking into it, but we can't tell you when to expect a fix."
But don't let me get off on a rant... I still think your response kinda missed the point, cute though it was.
Bander
Pot has a lot fewer calories than beer.
A friend of mine switched from beer to dope, and she went from zaftig to slender in just a few months, with no other lifestyle changes.
Just saying...
Bander
Wasn't Chip's Challenge originally an Atari game for the old Lynx handheld? We played that game like junkies back when the Lynx was "cool".
-- Bander
You could just unscrew the battery door and open it. No prying required. Damn hackers, making everything more complicated than it needs to be...
-- Bander
Mod parent up. Any Machiavelli quote should get an automatic +1.
No mod points this week...
-- Bander