In my experience, you've got a point. A female friend of mine is a very good sysadmin, but she has very little interest in playing with the new stuff. She's excellent at managing routers etc, and any company would be lucky to have her, but she's not likely to be the one to come up with an entirely new solution. Her main strengths are organization and planning. Of course, you can't generalize about 50% of the population from one case, but still...
I have a "server" connected to my DSL line; this 486/66 is WAY less powerful than even the bottom end PCs available today. What gives it the chance to be useful is the connection. (And Linux + Apache of course;o)
I'm currently taking one of their courses, and I'm pretty happy. I think the main advantage of distance learning is the ability to participate at the times which best fit your schedule, which the WebTycho format allows. For the Comp Sci classes I'm taking, I don't think seeing a live feed of a lecturer would add too much. You get your assignments, you have a forum to ask & answer questions, and you do your reading. It's kind of basic, but it works. For other subjects it might not be as good, but I'm happy.
I know a number of people running copied versions of Windows and Office on home machines who are also dual booting to Linux. If these people were faced with even a $300 software bill for OS & office apps, their next machine would be missing that Windows partition. The more people (myself included) get used to using Linux as a day to day desktop, learning the idiosyncracies, the better off we'll all be.
It makes sense to have clear standards like this to work towards. Once these get incorporated into burning software it should be straightforward to make discs you are confident will be reasonably easy to access across a range of players. Right now you're not sure if a player will read 8.3 format or what.
Is it just me, or does anyone else see the demise of MP3s in about 5 years? At that point, I would hope that cheap mass storage would allow for the storage of music in lossless formats or even just plain wav files. I mean, when I can buy a 250Gb drive & burn 17Gb DVDs to send to friends, why put up with any loss in quality. Alrady on my low end DSL line at home downloading isos isn't too bad, and it's only going to get better. When I can replace my 400 disk changer with a little device holding exact images I won't be messing around with MP3z.
Sure, a second cheap hard drive is a great thing - get a $50 IDE RAID card and mirror your drive in case of failure. Mirroring does not allow you to do a number of things which tapes do, however. You can't have a daily/weekly/monthly backup cycle, which allows you to restore from a particular point in time. You can't easily store backups offsite (well, you can remove your drive easily with a tray, but it's not as convenient). For home use, ok, you're not backing up too often. For business settings you really want drive redundancy PLUS a good tape solution. I find that most tape restores aren't due to drive failures (I have redundant drives) but to "oops, I really need that file I deleted last week"; that's when you need your tapes.
There's a reason that DDS DAT cartridges are a lot more expensive than DAT audio tapes. They use a much finer grain of magnetic particle to lessen the chance of losing a stray bit of data. I'd imagine that the DV tapes have the same limits. It would be interesting to play with this though; perhaps some serious error checking could overcome the inherent weakness of the media. I know I have a DV camera & firewire and for some basic home archiving it might be fun. I'd still want to have a copy on CDR or something too, but that's just me.
I can think of a lot of things the average user could do with that sort of power. Rendering compressed digital video, for instance. Once Joe Moron has a HDTV video camera, and wants to email little Johnny's first birthday video to his buddy list, he's not going to want to wait too long for the thing to compress.
IIRC, his company is looking to provide the infrastructure to allow just this sort of device to easily transfer pictures etc. Wasn't there some sort of new compression involved to make it feasible over slow links?
Unless you're currently living in Manhattan, I think you'll find the cost of living in the UK at least will be _higher_ than the US. Rent is expensive (esp. in London), utilities are expensive, petrol (as everybody knows) is expensive. I lived in the UK for 9 years (dual citizen) and, while there are a number of good points about life there, cost of living is not one of them. Italy may be cheaper (I've only visited) but I doubt it's much cheaper. Rural housing in France is cheap, but that's not where you're going to find a job... Your purchasing power will certainly decline substantially with a move to Europe, but so what? You may be happier and you'll earn enough to get home if you want;o)
Last year I used Netzero under Windows for a while, but there was no Linux client. I just went to their site & there's still no Linux client avalable for download (there is a link asking if you want a Mac version). It would be cool to take the client from this box & try it on a regular distro... AFAIK there are no free dial up services which support Linux.
I'm running Mandrake 7.1 & I'm very happy - it installed perfectly from a downloaded ISO on my trusty P233. I found Grub to work great too, and the reason I went with it was it allows me to have a 15Gb Windows partition before my Linux partitions; Lilo chokes if Linux is on a partition beyond 8Gb IIRC. I've been a Mandrake fan for home use for some time now, I've never had any problems. I'm looking forward to downloading the ISO in the next few weeks & checking out KDE 2 & Koffice, hopefully it'll go as well as my previous installs.
You should try GnuCash - you can import & export.qif files, which means that you can later hand off everything in an easily imported format. I guess the only problem is that you have to do a.qif for each acount - I could be wrong on this since I've only played around with it a bit. Since Quicken just hosed my loans accounts I'll maybe look at it a bit closer... Good thing I've got backups. Have to say though that this is the first time in 4+ years that I've lost anything, which is pretty good.
We'd looked at SSH but there are latency issues. We've been running a VPN between 2 linux Masq'ing gateways for a few months now using CIPE & DSL(http://sites.inka.de/sites/bigred/devel/cipe.h tml) and it's worked well. It's basic; you just set the endpoints & get the routes straight (the hardest part), but if you have static ips on each end it's great. Windows clients can browse Net Hood no sweat.
I've thought about this, and I think that the main reason would be a clean UI - a nice looking component with a remote & an easy to use display would be way more attractive in the entertainment center than an old laptop... $200 doesn't sound all that bad really. I just hope it takes CAT5 rather than some wierd home networking standard....
Depending on what you're trying to do with the PDFs you might look into PaperMaster (Windoze only, sorry). It's a document manager; you scan in your paper docs to "file cabinets" & can run a batch OCR to enable you to search all files for text. I've found it works pretty well. Seems like the images are just stored as TIFFs. If you just were looking to scan a book & be able to find key words I think it'd do the job; for my limited uses I've been very happy with it. Of course, if you want to distribute PDFs then this will be of no help at all...
I've always thought that computer simulations would be an effective alternative to the wasteful practice of dissection in high school and intro college classes. While there are certainly new areas to be discovered in biology, they are not going to be discovered in these classes. While you would not be eliminating animal testing, you would be substantially reducing it. Similarly, for most purposes (ie cosmetic testing) a computer model doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to give a rough idea of the effects of a particular compound. I think that we have a moral obligation to reduce the amount of suffering we cause to creatures capable of feeling pain, which I take to be those creatures with a central nervous system. This is why I don't eat meat - since I don't need to in order to survive why should I cause uneccessary suffering?
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In my experience, you've got a point. A female friend of mine is a very good sysadmin, but she has very little interest in playing with the new stuff. She's excellent at managing routers etc, and any company would be lucky to have her, but she's not likely to be the one to come up with an entirely new solution. Her main strengths are organization and planning. Of course, you can't generalize about 50% of the population from one case, but still...
...for $499 (15"). That's what I paid for my 17" CRT 4 years ago. This may be the summer for flatscreens.
I have a "server" connected to my DSL line; this 486/66 is WAY less powerful than even the bottom end PCs available today. What gives it the chance to be useful is the connection. (And Linux + Apache of course ;o)
If you don't mind me asking, what program are you running? I'd be interested in a fast secure remote control program.
I'm currently taking one of their courses, and I'm pretty happy. I think the main advantage of distance learning is the ability to participate at the times which best fit your schedule, which the WebTycho format allows. For the Comp Sci classes I'm taking, I don't think seeing a live feed of a lecturer would add too much. You get your assignments, you have a forum to ask & answer questions, and you do your reading. It's kind of basic, but it works. For other subjects it might not be as good, but I'm happy.
I know a number of people running copied versions of Windows and Office on home machines who are also dual booting to Linux. If these people were faced with even a $300 software bill for OS & office apps, their next machine would be missing that Windows partition. The more people (myself included) get used to using Linux as a day to day desktop, learning the idiosyncracies, the better off we'll all be.
My understanding was that this glitch caused problems at the processor when it was getting video data over the PCI bus; I could be wrong of course.
The edit user script kept putting that space in there. Should be ok now.
Thanks for pointing that out. I've just fixed it.
It makes sense to have clear standards like this to work towards. Once these get incorporated into burning software it should be straightforward to make discs you are confident will be reasonably easy to access across a range of players. Right now you're not sure if a player will read 8.3 format or what.
Is it just me, or does anyone else see the demise of MP3s in about 5 years? At that point, I would hope that cheap mass storage would allow for the storage of music in lossless formats or even just plain wav files. I mean, when I can buy a 250Gb drive & burn 17Gb DVDs to send to friends, why put up with any loss in quality. Alrady on my low end DSL line at home downloading isos isn't too bad, and it's only going to get better. When I can replace my 400 disk changer with a little device holding exact images I won't be messing around with MP3z.
I've always been too lazy to find sites like this myself, good links.
Sure, a second cheap hard drive is a great thing - get a $50 IDE RAID card and mirror your drive in case of failure. Mirroring does not allow you to do a number of things which tapes do, however. You can't have a daily/weekly/monthly backup cycle, which allows you to restore from a particular point in time. You can't easily store backups offsite (well, you can remove your drive easily with a tray, but it's not as convenient). For home use, ok, you're not backing up too often. For business settings you really want drive redundancy PLUS a good tape solution. I find that most tape restores aren't due to drive failures (I have redundant drives) but to "oops, I really need that file I deleted last week"; that's when you need your tapes.
There's a reason that DDS DAT cartridges are a lot more expensive than DAT audio tapes. They use a much finer grain of magnetic particle to lessen the chance of losing a stray bit of data. I'd imagine that the DV tapes have the same limits. It would be interesting to play with this though; perhaps some serious error checking could overcome the inherent weakness of the media. I know I have a DV camera & firewire and for some basic home archiving it might be fun. I'd still want to have a copy on CDR or something too, but that's just me.
I can think of a lot of things the average user could do with that sort of power. Rendering compressed digital video, for instance. Once Joe Moron has a HDTV video camera, and wants to email little Johnny's first birthday video to his buddy list, he's not going to want to wait too long for the thing to compress.
IIRC, his company is looking to provide the infrastructure to allow just this sort of device to easily transfer pictures etc. Wasn't there some sort of new compression involved to make it feasible over slow links?
Unless you're currently living in Manhattan, I think you'll find the cost of living in the UK at least will be _higher_ than the US. Rent is expensive (esp. in London), utilities are expensive, petrol (as everybody knows) is expensive. I lived in the UK for 9 years (dual citizen) and, while there are a number of good points about life there, cost of living is not one of them. Italy may be cheaper (I've only visited) but I doubt it's much cheaper. Rural housing in France is cheap, but that's not where you're going to find a job... Your purchasing power will certainly decline substantially with a move to Europe, but so what? You may be happier and you'll earn enough to get home if you want ;o)
Last year I used Netzero under Windows for a while, but there was no Linux client. I just went to their site & there's still no Linux client avalable for download (there is a link asking if you want a Mac version). It would be cool to take the client from this box & try it on a regular distro... AFAIK there are no free dial up services which support Linux.
I'm running Mandrake 7.1 & I'm very happy - it installed perfectly from a downloaded ISO on my trusty P233. I found Grub to work great too, and the reason I went with it was it allows me to have a 15Gb Windows partition before my Linux partitions; Lilo chokes if Linux is on a partition beyond 8Gb IIRC. I've been a Mandrake fan for home use for some time now, I've never had any problems. I'm looking forward to downloading the ISO in the next few weeks & checking out KDE 2 & Koffice, hopefully it'll go as well as my previous installs.
You should try GnuCash - you can import & export .qif files, which means that you can later hand off everything in an easily imported format. I guess the only problem is that you have to do a .qif for each acount - I could be wrong on this since I've only played around with it a bit. Since Quicken just hosed my loans accounts I'll maybe look at it a bit closer... Good thing I've got backups. Have to say though that this is the first time in 4+ years that I've lost anything, which is pretty good.
I just went there with 5.5 - no errors.
We'd looked at SSH but there are latency issues. We've been running a VPN between 2 linux Masq'ing gateways for a few months now using CIPE & DSL(http://sites.inka.de/sites/bigred/devel/cipe.h tml) and it's worked well. It's basic; you just set the endpoints & get the routes straight (the hardest part), but if you have static ips on each end it's great. Windows clients can browse Net Hood no sweat.
I've thought about this, and I think that the main reason would be a clean UI - a nice looking component with a remote & an easy to use display would be way more attractive in the entertainment center than an old laptop... $200 doesn't sound all that bad really. I just hope it takes CAT5 rather than some wierd home networking standard....
Depending on what you're trying to do with the PDFs you might look into PaperMaster (Windoze only, sorry). It's a document manager; you scan in your paper docs to "file cabinets" & can run a batch OCR to enable you to search all files for text. I've found it works pretty well. Seems like the images are just stored as TIFFs. If you just were looking to scan a book & be able to find key words I think it'd do the job; for my limited uses I've been very happy with it. Of course, if you want to distribute PDFs then this will be of no help at all...
I've always thought that computer simulations would be an effective alternative to the wasteful practice of dissection in high school and intro college classes. While there are certainly new areas to be discovered in biology, they are not going to be discovered in these classes. While you would not be eliminating animal testing, you would be substantially reducing it. Similarly, for most purposes (ie cosmetic testing) a computer model doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to give a rough idea of the effects of a particular compound. I think that we have a moral obligation to reduce the amount of suffering we cause to creatures capable of feeling pain, which I take to be those creatures with a central nervous system. This is why I don't eat meat - since I don't need to in order to survive why should I cause uneccessary suffering?