IF you are just loading one Web site a day, there is no reason to need broadband.
IF you spend any amount of time using the 'net, you need broadband.
Web use: 1 hour of 'net christmas shopping via broadband == 6 hours of 'net christmas shopping over a modem.
Mail use: 200 e-mails a day == 30 seconds to check via broadband, 10 minutes to check via modem.
Research: 100.PDF files from scholarly journals for a research paper == 1 afternoon to find and download via broadband, 3 weeks to find and download via modem.
Software: 1 download of Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Your Favorite Game Demo == 10 minutes to 1 hour via broadband, NEVER (good luck!) via modem.
It's no more correct to say that all consumers don't need broadband than it is to say that all true Americans are christians.
I should have an easy print setup... my printer is a postscript printer with gobs of memory... and yet in KOffice nothing prints as it appears on-screen and printing from things like Konqueror doesn't work, because a single text page in Konqueror creates something like a 2MB job (!) in which all of the fonts come out very tiny, as though they were being printed as bitmaps instead of using the PostScript font facilities.
Printing from WordPerfect Office 2000 and Mozilla, on the other hand, works without a hitch, is very fast, and looks great.
Anyone else have experience with this kind of print problem and KDE? It's my one major complaint about KDE2... in every other way, it's great!
Are you kidding? GNOME is the most controversial project in the history of Linux because it was basically launched, at least at first, to kill KDE (which is the second most controversial project in the history of Linux).
GNOME's GPL-ness and RMS-ness have been the subject of attacks and discussion and "I'm taking my ball and going home" for years now. Only KDE, with its former questionable-GPL-ness and non-RMS-ness comes close in terms of controversy.
I would suggest that there has never been either a GNOME or KDE story on Slashdot or most any other site that did not start a flame war on the related forum. It's the nature of GNOME and KDE... because they are the "desktops of Linux" people have the perception that whichever eventually becomes more popular will essentially be Linux (for the average user) for the rest of time... that kind of perception of finality brings out all the GPL-crazies, anti-GPL-crazies, make-Linux-like-Windows-for-the-user crazies and I-am-anti-Windows-don't-do-it crazies.
(Meanwhile, WindowMaker on the desktop has been silently winning in terms of actual usability almost since its inception.)
Pillow: quiets a shot, prevents power burns, reduces blood+tissue spatter, etc. Place large pillow over head, put gun into pillow, shoot through pillow.
This is to be able to play Nintendo games under emulators on PCs, PDAs, and other machines, right? Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but:
1. Game ROMs for every Nintendo game under the sun are already on the net for download. Anyone who just wants the ROM for a game doesn't need this device.
2. Therefore anyone who would want one of these likely buys (i.e. owns) the cartridges themselves and is trying to "do the right thing" by Nintendo.
3. The game console is usually a loss-leader to sell the games.
So it seems to me that Nintendo's financial situation is actually improved by this device, since console (sold at a loss) sales can be cut back while game sales continue unabated, played on PDAs and PCs?
Where's the harm? It seems like Nintendo should continue to go after all of the ROM pirates already out there, but encourage sale of this device, since it requires that the user buy the cartridges in order to be useful. Am I missing something really obvious, or is this just a company shooting themselves in the foot because they're so orgasmic about intellectual property rights?
No, it wasn't recompiled against Wine-Lib. It used a special Corel wine binary to run specially recompiled.EXE files but they were still.EXE files rather than Linux binaries linked against the Wine library.
When running Corel applications, the 'ps' command listed multiple instances of 'wine' not 'wordperfect' or 'coreldraw' etc.
In 1997, I worked for a very small travel company that decided to try its hand at SPAM. Of course, take this anecdote for what it's worth (it *was* five years ago).
They set up a small server that would just browse around the Web and usenet harvesting e-mail addresses wherever they could be found. The first week they sent out about 80,000 pieces of e-mail per day. They got tons and tons of hate mail in return but also a few hits. The first day, there were about 60 sales of a $69.99 "travel club membership" product (essentially a hotel and airline coupon book), and by that Friday they were up to over 200 sales a day thanks to the SPAM. Totals for the week were something like 350,000 e-mails sent and 900 sales for a total of about $63,000 in revenue that week thanks to SPAM. The coupon book itself wasn't all that expensive -- the deals were promotional and each book only cost the company something like $12.00, so the net was around $52,000 for the week. Not bad for a computer sitting in the corner with a $100 piece of software -- this likely explains why spammers stay at it.
I left shortly thereafter so I don't really know whether they "stuck with it" or not, but it obviously can generate sales.
The following experiences have led me to wonder whether my ISP (AT&T Broadband) or my Web host (Doteasy) are selling e-mail addresses to spammers as they are created:
1. Created a new e-mail account for a friend at my doteasy domain. I am the only owner of the domain ever, and have held it for years. The e-mail address had never existed before. About 12 hours later, while helping my friend to configure outlook express to check the account, I was surprised to discover two pieces of SPAM already in the account. This is a new address that has never been used or given to anyone, ever.
2. After the AT&T @Home to AT&T Broadband fiasco, new e-mail addresses had to be created. One of the accounts I created (and did not use for anything) got spam within hours of its being created. Here again, this e-mail address had never been supplied to anyone but AT&T Broadband, in the process of creating it.
My reluctant conclusion (unless someone can explain some other solution to me) is that both ISPs and Web hosts routinely place e-mail addresses they host on lists which are sold to spammers, I guess as a way to supplement the revenue stream.
That's right, I am so professional about my Slashdot postings that I type them into a word processor first, then give them to my editor, who proofreads them; finally, once they have passed editorial review, I submit them to Slashdot. It's a long and arduous process, but the quality of posting and the importance of Slashdot makes it all worth the effort.
At least I've something meaningful to say. Sheesh.
I have a Beige G3 300 and as I've posted to Slashdot before (every time this discussion comes up) the OS X I paid so dearly for works about like shite. Here's what Apple tech support says:
- Don't use the SCSI on Beige G3's under OS X, it's likely to lock your system up, especially if you are using a SCSI hard drive.
- Many Apple CD-ROM drives won't boot the OS X CDs. If you suffer from this problem, buy a new CD-ROM drive.
- Onboard ATI video on a Beige G3 is not accelerated 2D *or* 3D, that's why window resizing is almost impossible (nearly freezes the display), scrolling is sluggish, and games do not play at all. Accelerated drivers for Beige G3's are not planned.
- If running OS X on a Beige G3, you may want to have 256-384MB of RAM to account for the slowness of video and CPU.
- OS X will be slow on a Beige G3, consider upgrading to a G4.
Thanks, Apple. Wish you'd said all that on the box.
There are a lot of posts about WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and its dependence on Wine, as well as about instability. Gotta add my $0.15 (it's longer than $0.02).
I bought the product right at release, and it's true: it was based on Wine. However, it was a "special" in-house version of Wine with modifications to get WordPerfect Office 2000 to run, and the Corel Wine was much faster than the WineHQ Wine at running Office applications. In addition, because Corel Wine and the WordPerfect Office 2000 binaries for Linux were tweaked for each other, they actually worked (and do work) very well together.
We musn't forget that Corel is a smallish company and WordPerfect Office 2000 is a Windows product. To do an entire native port would have been a herculean effort and probably beyond the company's realistic abilities, certainly it would have been impossible in the time frame in which they were able to release WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
Not to mention that many Linux users are applauding TransGaming for their Wine support and calling Wine the best way to bring Linux to the masses... You can't have it both ways; if it's good enough for TransGaming, there's no point in saying that it shouldn't be good enough for Corel.
That said, there were some problems -- the installer of the original release only properly supported the major distributions (i.e. Debian, Corel, Red Hat) while minor distributions (Caldera & others) had some trouble and required by-hand rpm'ing in some cases, or other tweaks. There were also behavior problems with non-KDE-1.x desktops which led to some crashing and other effects likely to generate a poor first impression of the product. I know of several users who returned their Corel Linux products almost immediately.
Unfortunately, the response from Corel to these problems was mixed. A new installer script was released, but a service pack to fix the crashing and non-KDE problems was never made -- which is a damn shame, because the CVS version of Corel Wine hosted at opensource.corel.com did fix both the crashing and the non-KDE-1.1 behavior bugs, leading to a very functional office suite for Linux. Some in the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux community even packaged the CVS of Corel Wine up as an RPM and released it that way, and I continue to use the "unofficial" Corel Wine RPM to this day, every day, with my copy of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
So, there is no denying that Corel may be partly at fault for releasing an undertested product and then stupidly failing to release fixes which already existed and were downloadable (albeit in difficult to use form) from their Web site.
On the other hand, seen from Corel's point of view -- very poor sales and rampant piracy (which I saw myself in several offices) -- it may have been difficult to justify spending any additional capital on the Linux products once they had been launched. The problems with smaller-name distributions and non-KDE window managers likely generated lots of tech support traffic from a few squeaky wheels and a high number of product returns, while at the same time sales were (apparently) very slow. To this day, it's surprising to me just how many Linux users positively bristle when I tell them that I actually paid for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, rather than use an open-source alternative -- almost as though I were a Benedict Arnold for actually buying software.
All in all, it's just a sad thing altogether, because Corel was one of the few companies that really did take the plunge and release and market Linux products, and (once you got them installed properly) both WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux work very well -- better than most anything available for Linux to this point.
WordPerfect 2000(L) is available for download on Morphious. It has the full suite but since it runs on WINE it can be a bit harder to install. I remember when I had it installed at work.
And this, folks, is why WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux are no longer available. Linux users shooting themselves in the foot by not buying (see my other posts on this story). Shame, too, because WordPerfect Office for Linux is a great product and I wouldn't be without it -- best $150 I ever spent on software, even if it hasn't been supported with service packs (and has therefore become more and more difficult to install with each successive Red Hat release).
Very poor. This is the reason for WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux being effectively pulled after the initial production run.
To make matters worse, tech support needs for Linux products were greater, apparently because the few users they did manage to sell their Linux products to were "newbies" rather than Linux veterans, who don't seem to buy software at all.
This info comes from my calling Corel's sales and tech support to inquire about the Linux products line in the process of writing an article.
I'm sure this had nothing to do with the $135 million investment from Microsoft Corp, not.....
It doesn't. If you have called Corel to try to order any of ther Linux products, you will find that they are all "out of print" and are not available for purchase. If you ask why, you will be told that there was absolutely no demand -- not enough interest in the products even to justify keeping a few copies around for sale.
Linux users just don't by software (except me, who bought WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux during the brief moment when they were available, and use them every day).
The Model 100 beats laptops, WinCE devices.
on
Tandys Never Die
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I wrote my first book on a Model 100. It's a great machine, much better than a laptop or a WinCE PDA these days.
Instant on, battery life on the order of 20 hours with a few AA cells, no moving parts so no need to be delicate, display with large pixels easily readable in sunlight or lamplight, very light, full-size keyboard... to get your data into your PC, you just connect it to the serial port and "capture" your data using a program like Procomm, Telix or (for those of you who are a little younger) HyperTerminal. On a Unix system, you just redirect it from the right device to a file. Nice and simple and clean.
Why did I stop using mine? It got stolen at a public library when I turned my back for about a second and a half. Seriously, whoever stole it must have been waiting to snatch it and run like the wind. I looked into replacing it (the theft occurred in the early '90s) but they were still quite expensive at that time.
I bought a 386 laptop instead but regretted it afterward because the M100 was a much better machine with much better ergonomics.
As far as I'm concerned, taking notes is useful. I took notes in college under WinCE with natural handwriting recognition. Now I often work as an editor and I take notes on my Newton and mark up RTF documents on same using a pen and natural handwriting recognition.
Why is that not as useful as what an executive needs to do? Actually, maybe I missed the point... Maybe the point is that executives are not all that useful...
...there isn't any decent way to get text into the them. You can tap out characters on a screen, but that isn't the same as typing, and gets frustrating quickly.
There are very nice handwriting recognition systems for other operating systems, just not for Linux. I used Calligrapher for Windows CE (now bought by Microsoft and renamed to Transcriber) and used it to take notes all through college. I was able to scribble fast enough to keep up with professors and accuracy was better than 90-95%, more than enough to make readable notes. When I got my BA, I had >300 printed pages of notes which had been written by hand and recognized in real-time into Pocket Word documents.
My current PDA is a Newton 2100, which I would say gets about 99.5% accuracy for me (it actually "learns" your handwriting as you use it, getting better over time) and I e-mail and post to Usenet with it all the time. I don't even think about it; I never have to bring up the tap-tap keyboard, even for punctuation or unusual symbols like umlauts in German.
For Linux, unfortunately, there isn't anything comparable to either of these handwriting recognizers. I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic and installed Linux+KDE on it on a 12GB drive for a brief moment. I thought I was going to use it as my main computer, only plugging a keyboard into the PS/2 port when I needed to to extensive data entry. Unfortunately, I gave up and sold it because the only Linux-based pen input I could find at all was xscribble, a horrible implementation of Palm's Graffiti, and much less helpful for serious use than Calligrapher/Transcriber under CE or Rosetta/Paragraph under Newton, meaning that with the Stylistic+Linux, I had to have the keyboard plugged in all the time to be useful.
Natural handwriting recognition exists, and it works, quickly and accurately. Just because Palm users or Linux users have never seen it doesn't mean it's not there.
Newton's greatness was more than just NewtonScript, it was the design of the entire Newton OS. I've owned Palms and Windows CE devices and (in a desperate attempt to find a usable pen-based system) a Fujitsu Stylistic running Linux+KDE. I just couldn't satisfy my needs for an "information everything device" with any of these systems. I had owned a Newton long ago (until 1995) when the display got shattered and I remembered it fondly, so in 2001 I bought a Newton 2000 unit to see if it was still as nice as I was remembering it to be.
The level of integration on my Newton is unmatched by Palm or CE. For example, I installed a mail program (SimpleMail) and suddenly, all applications on the system had a new option to send the current document or current page as an e-mail. If in a database, for example, I select the mail option, it will bring up my names and let me select the person to whom I want to send a nicely formatted copy of the database. If I tap the mail option in a sketch program, the image will be exported as a GIF and mailed as an attachment. This ability of a program (like SimpleMail) to add functionality to the system (like e-mailing) means that as you install the applications you need on the Newton to manage the types of information you work with, things get more and more integrated, rather than less integrated with each new application as happens in PalmOS or Windows CE. If at some point I don't need mail any more, I will delete the SimpleMail application (only two taps needed) and the mail option will disappear from all of the programs on the system as if it had never been there.
Furthermore, because I have ethernet (2 PCMCIA slots on this unit) I can send and receive tons of mail, browse the web, read usenet, telnet into my Linux system, etc., all with relative ease. I don't use wireless, but there are many who do. And at the drop of the hat, I can eject the standard 3Com PCMCIA ethernet card and isnert a standard PCMCIA modem if I need to use dial-up PPP.
On my Newton, I never have to remember where any document is "saved" because everything entered into the system anywhere is instantly saved in flash until you remove the information, not in a file, but in the inivisibly-managed "soups" (i.e. a kind of distributed storage database) of the operating system. Applications are stored the same way, so that text and applications are actually managed in a unified manner. It's such a great system...
On Palms, there was always a 1:1 correlation -- your document or information basically "belonged" to the applet you used to enter it; the system wasn't integrated enough to use the same valuable bits of data in many different ways. In Windows CE, I just got tired of using a desktop OS -- too often I found myself navigating my flash card like a hard drive, searching for a filename, doing file -> open, etc.
And in both PalmOS and CE, applications are stored and managed differently from documents (especially in CE, where installing/uninstalling/categorizing applications is a nightmare), while in NewtonOS applications and documents rather unified and are managed and conceptually related to one another using the same taps.
I'll still go to the local CompUSA to try to new Palm devices, but I have recently invested hundreds in two "backup" Newton 2100 units on eBay so that I can continue to use Newton far into the future if nobody else can come up with something as nice. With a 160 MHz StrongARM processor (this from a five-year-old device!) and the ability to use CompactFlash (thanks to the Newton ATA project), a 100dpi 480x320 4-bit depth display and wireless ethernet, I don't feel outdated at all.
Reading this discussion and watching all of free-market maniacs rave and rationalize about how expensive it should be simply to communicate and work in the modern world, I become very, very glad that I use Linux and GPL software.
Yes, Linux, the oft-hated, much-lambasted "socialist software" community in which I can make a living without having to pay someone for permission, I can set the price myself (and then donate that amount the author or project), and I can contribute my own labor (because the source code is free). Not to mention that the quality of software is so much higher in the Linux environment.
Now all we need is to get Linux running on PDAs and I will never have to pay for software again. And the Americans can all faint because their hold on the rest of the world through intellectual property begins to fade.
You all said "you don't like it, write your own damn software and then you won't have to pay" and so the rest of the world did.;)
For example, we have a taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts and it is a treasure. What would be so wrong about a National Endowment for Computer Software, from which qualified/competent developers could receive grants and write software that would benefit the public and which would then be required to be freely available to individuals?
Corporations could still be charged to use the software in a profit-driven environment, citizens not trying to make a buck would get the software at no cost, and the developer would get paid for out-of-pocket development costs and could make enough to make a living (as many artists working with NEA do, just on grants).
I can't comment on whether or not a Mac cluster is easier to create or maintain (since I've never used a Mac cluster), but I'd prefer a Linux cluster running PC hardware, because:
-- Initial build costs are much lower (dual Athlon 2000+ right now without graphics hardware is way cheaper than a dual G4 1GHz).
-- Maintenance costs are much, much lower. Anything goes wrong with a PC node, just swap out that part with another commodity part. Mac repair or parts replacement costs will eat you, especially if you start to have many, many nodes.
Plus you can modify bits of Linux if you need to optimize the behavior of your cluster for the sort of computing you do, which you can't do with Mac OS.
The Linux manual is a Beowulf cluster of Mac manuals.
(Parent quoted since it was modded down to -1 and I thought it was pretty funny.)
Re:WHY SO MUCH EMPHASIS ON M$ OFFICE?
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Wired Talks Wine
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· Score: 5, Insightful
As a journalist and writer, I can tell you.
It's because publishers and everyone else in the publishing chain work in Word. No, import/export filters are not good enough -- because it's not just about the text. For example, Word has "revision marks" -- a system of keeping track of editorial changes to a document, who made them, when they were made, etc. An editor can easily step through each edit in a document, look at both the pre- and post-edit versions of a sentence, and certify the one of two (or of three or of four) versions which works best in context.
This type of data is not preserved across imports/exports because StarOffice, Applix, KWord, etc. have no concept of such a feature, so they have no reason to try to import the revision data; they just discard all of it (including the entire stream of edits and ceritifications from editors, co-authors, etc) and import the document in original form. WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux *did* have such a feature and imported it more or less correctly... but WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux has been pulled from the market.
This is only one specific instance, but it is not an isolated one. There are many other Word features which are closely tied to file format and vice-versa, and if the entire publishing chain of your publication or press has tied its processes and equipment to Word, you're not going to change this by waltzing in one day and saying "I use Linux so we're all switching to OpenOffice, you'll have to find new ways of doing W, X, Y and we'll now have to hire someone to do Z because OpenOffice won't do it!"
The features just aren't there for most Linux applications (even GIMP, when compared to Photoshop or Corel Draw, comes up far short), and at the same time, the inertia of Windows-world applications is there, in spades. The same can easily be said for other MS Apps. MS Office is a great product. The only general-purpose competitor which comes close is from Corel, and has been discontinued for Linux users.
That is not to say that I think Wine is a useful product. I've tried it over and over and over again for half a decade and it has never worked for anything other than Solitaire. I don't see the point in releasing a 1.0 version when it still won't install Internet Explorer (any version), MS Office (any version) or Photoshop (any version). Why bother?
Slashdot Mirror
IF you are just loading one Web site a day, there is no reason to need broadband.
.PDF files from scholarly journals for a research paper == 1 afternoon to find and download via broadband, 3 weeks to find and download via modem.
IF you spend any amount of time using the 'net, you need broadband.
Web use: 1 hour of 'net christmas shopping via broadband == 6 hours of 'net christmas shopping over a modem.
Mail use: 200 e-mails a day == 30 seconds to check via broadband, 10 minutes to check via modem.
Research: 100
Software: 1 download of Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenOffice, Your Favorite Game Demo == 10 minutes to 1 hour via broadband, NEVER (good luck!) via modem.
It's no more correct to say that all consumers don't need broadband than it is to say that all true Americans are christians.
I should have an easy print setup... my printer is a postscript printer with gobs of memory... and yet in KOffice nothing prints as it appears on-screen and printing from things like Konqueror doesn't work, because a single text page in Konqueror creates something like a 2MB job (!) in which all of the fonts come out very tiny, as though they were being printed as bitmaps instead of using the PostScript font facilities.
Printing from WordPerfect Office 2000 and Mozilla, on the other hand, works without a hitch, is very fast, and looks great.
Anyone else have experience with this kind of print problem and KDE? It's my one major complaint about KDE2... in every other way, it's great!
Are you kidding? GNOME is the most controversial project in the history of Linux because it was basically launched, at least at first, to kill KDE (which is the second most controversial project in the history of Linux).
GNOME's GPL-ness and RMS-ness have been the subject of attacks and discussion and "I'm taking my ball and going home" for years now. Only KDE, with its former questionable-GPL-ness and non-RMS-ness comes close in terms of controversy.
I would suggest that there has never been either a GNOME or KDE story on Slashdot or most any other site that did not start a flame war on the related forum. It's the nature of GNOME and KDE... because they are the "desktops of Linux" people have the perception that whichever eventually becomes more popular will essentially be Linux (for the average user) for the rest of time... that kind of perception of finality brings out all the GPL-crazies, anti-GPL-crazies, make-Linux-like-Windows-for-the-user crazies and I-am-anti-Windows-don't-do-it crazies.
(Meanwhile, WindowMaker on the desktop has been silently winning in terms of actual usability almost since its inception.)
How do you shoot somebody with a pillow?
Pillow: quiets a shot, prevents power burns, reduces blood+tissue spatter, etc. Place large pillow over head, put gun into pillow, shoot through pillow.
This is to be able to play Nintendo games under emulators on PCs, PDAs, and other machines, right? Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but:
1. Game ROMs for every Nintendo game under the sun are already on the net for download. Anyone who just wants the ROM for a game doesn't need this device.
2. Therefore anyone who would want one of these likely buys (i.e. owns) the cartridges themselves and is trying to "do the right thing" by Nintendo.
3. The game console is usually a loss-leader to sell the games.
So it seems to me that Nintendo's financial situation is actually improved by this device, since console (sold at a loss) sales can be cut back while game sales continue unabated, played on PDAs and PCs?
Where's the harm? It seems like Nintendo should continue to go after all of the ROM pirates already out there, but encourage sale of this device, since it requires that the user buy the cartridges in order to be useful. Am I missing something really obvious, or is this just a company shooting themselves in the foot because they're so orgasmic about intellectual property rights?
No, it wasn't recompiled against Wine-Lib. It used a special Corel wine binary to run specially recompiled .EXE files but they were still .EXE files rather than Linux binaries linked against the Wine library.
When running Corel applications, the 'ps' command listed multiple instances of 'wine' not 'wordperfect' or 'coreldraw' etc.
In 1997, I worked for a very small travel company that decided to try its hand at SPAM. Of course, take this anecdote for what it's worth (it *was* five years ago).
They set up a small server that would just browse around the Web and usenet harvesting e-mail addresses wherever they could be found. The first week they sent out about 80,000 pieces of e-mail per day. They got tons and tons of hate mail in return but also a few hits. The first day, there were about 60 sales of a $69.99 "travel club membership" product (essentially a hotel and airline coupon book), and by that Friday they were up to over 200 sales a day thanks to the SPAM. Totals for the week were something like 350,000 e-mails sent and 900 sales for a total of about $63,000 in revenue that week thanks to SPAM. The coupon book itself wasn't all that expensive -- the deals were promotional and each book only cost the company something like $12.00, so the net was around $52,000 for the week. Not bad for a computer sitting in the corner with a $100 piece of software -- this likely explains why spammers stay at it.
I left shortly thereafter so I don't really know whether they "stuck with it" or not, but it obviously can generate sales.
The following experiences have led me to wonder whether my ISP (AT&T Broadband) or my Web host (Doteasy) are selling e-mail addresses to spammers as they are created:
1. Created a new e-mail account for a friend at my doteasy domain. I am the only owner of the domain ever, and have held it for years. The e-mail address had never existed before. About 12 hours later, while helping my friend to configure outlook express to check the account, I was surprised to discover two pieces of SPAM already in the account. This is a new address that has never been used or given to anyone, ever.
2. After the AT&T @Home to AT&T Broadband fiasco, new e-mail addresses had to be created. One of the accounts I created (and did not use for anything) got spam within hours of its being created. Here again, this e-mail address had never been supplied to anyone but AT&T Broadband, in the process of creating it.
My reluctant conclusion (unless someone can explain some other solution to me) is that both ISPs and Web hosts routinely place e-mail addresses they host on lists which are sold to spammers, I guess as a way to supplement the revenue stream.
That's right, I am so professional about my Slashdot postings that I type them into a word processor first, then give them to my editor, who proofreads them; finally, once they have passed editorial review, I submit them to Slashdot. It's a long and arduous process, but the quality of posting and the importance of Slashdot makes it all worth the effort.
At least I've something meaningful to say. Sheesh.
Did you try your local retailer? I bought both products by walking into CompUSA and grabbing them off the shelf.
I have a Beige G3 300 and as I've posted to Slashdot before (every time this discussion comes up) the OS X I paid so dearly for works about like shite. Here's what Apple tech support says:
- Don't use the SCSI on Beige G3's under OS X, it's likely to lock your system up, especially if you are using a SCSI hard drive.
- Many Apple CD-ROM drives won't boot the OS X CDs. If you suffer from this problem, buy a new CD-ROM drive.
- Onboard ATI video on a Beige G3 is not accelerated 2D *or* 3D, that's why window resizing is almost impossible (nearly freezes the display), scrolling is sluggish, and games do not play at all. Accelerated drivers for Beige G3's are not planned.
- If running OS X on a Beige G3, you may want to have 256-384MB of RAM to account for the slowness of video and CPU.
- OS X will be slow on a Beige G3, consider upgrading to a G4.
Thanks, Apple. Wish you'd said all that on the box.
NOT FUD
There are a lot of posts about WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and its dependence on Wine, as well as about instability. Gotta add my $0.15 (it's longer than $0.02).
I bought the product right at release, and it's true: it was based on Wine. However, it was a "special" in-house version of Wine with modifications to get WordPerfect Office 2000 to run, and the Corel Wine was much faster than the WineHQ Wine at running Office applications. In addition, because Corel Wine and the WordPerfect Office 2000 binaries for Linux were tweaked for each other, they actually worked (and do work) very well together.
We musn't forget that Corel is a smallish company and WordPerfect Office 2000 is a Windows product. To do an entire native port would have been a herculean effort and probably beyond the company's realistic abilities, certainly it would have been impossible in the time frame in which they were able to release WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
Not to mention that many Linux users are applauding TransGaming for their Wine support and calling Wine the best way to bring Linux to the masses... You can't have it both ways; if it's good enough for TransGaming, there's no point in saying that it shouldn't be good enough for Corel.
That said, there were some problems -- the installer of the original release only properly supported the major distributions (i.e. Debian, Corel, Red Hat) while minor distributions (Caldera & others) had some trouble and required by-hand rpm'ing in some cases, or other tweaks. There were also behavior problems with non-KDE-1.x desktops which led to some crashing and other effects likely to generate a poor first impression of the product. I know of several users who returned their Corel Linux products almost immediately.
Unfortunately, the response from Corel to these problems was mixed. A new installer script was released, but a service pack to fix the crashing and non-KDE problems was never made -- which is a damn shame, because the CVS version of Corel Wine hosted at opensource.corel.com did fix both the crashing and the non-KDE-1.1 behavior bugs, leading to a very functional office suite for Linux. Some in the WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux community even packaged the CVS of Corel Wine up as an RPM and released it that way, and I continue to use the "unofficial" Corel Wine RPM to this day, every day, with my copy of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
So, there is no denying that Corel may be partly at fault for releasing an undertested product and then stupidly failing to release fixes which already existed and were downloadable (albeit in difficult to use form) from their Web site.
On the other hand, seen from Corel's point of view -- very poor sales and rampant piracy (which I saw myself in several offices) -- it may have been difficult to justify spending any additional capital on the Linux products once they had been launched. The problems with smaller-name distributions and non-KDE window managers likely generated lots of tech support traffic from a few squeaky wheels and a high number of product returns, while at the same time sales were (apparently) very slow. To this day, it's surprising to me just how many Linux users positively bristle when I tell them that I actually paid for WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, rather than use an open-source alternative -- almost as though I were a Benedict Arnold for actually buying software.
All in all, it's just a sad thing altogether, because Corel was one of the few companies that really did take the plunge and release and market Linux products, and (once you got them installed properly) both WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux work very well -- better than most anything available for Linux to this point.
WordPerfect 2000(L) is available for download on Morphious. It has the full suite but since it runs on WINE it can be a bit harder to install. I remember when I had it installed at work.
And this, folks, is why WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux are no longer available. Linux users shooting themselves in the foot by not buying (see my other posts on this story). Shame, too, because WordPerfect Office for Linux is a great product and I wouldn't be without it -- best $150 I ever spent on software, even if it hasn't been supported with service packs (and has therefore become more and more difficult to install with each successive Red Hat release).
Very poor. This is the reason for WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux being effectively pulled after the initial production run.
To make matters worse, tech support needs for Linux products were greater, apparently because the few users they did manage to sell their Linux products to were "newbies" rather than Linux veterans, who don't seem to buy software at all.
This info comes from my calling Corel's sales and tech support to inquire about the Linux products line in the process of writing an article.
I'm sure this had nothing to do with the $135 million investment from Microsoft Corp, not.....
It doesn't. If you have called Corel to try to order any of ther Linux products, you will find that they are all "out of print" and are not available for purchase. If you ask why, you will be told that there was absolutely no demand -- not enough interest in the products even to justify keeping a few copies around for sale.
Linux users just don't by software (except me, who bought WordPerfect Office for Linux and Corel Draw for Linux during the brief moment when they were available, and use them every day).
I wrote my first book on a Model 100. It's a great machine, much better than a laptop or a WinCE PDA these days.
Instant on, battery life on the order of 20 hours with a few AA cells, no moving parts so no need to be delicate, display with large pixels easily readable in sunlight or lamplight, very light, full-size keyboard... to get your data into your PC, you just connect it to the serial port and "capture" your data using a program like Procomm, Telix or (for those of you who are a little younger) HyperTerminal. On a Unix system, you just redirect it from the right device to a file. Nice and simple and clean.
Why did I stop using mine? It got stolen at a public library when I turned my back for about a second and a half. Seriously, whoever stole it must have been waiting to snatch it and run like the wind. I looked into replacing it (the theft occurred in the early '90s) but they were still quite expensive at that time.
I bought a 386 laptop instead but regretted it afterward because the M100 was a much better machine with much better ergonomics.
As far as I'm concerned, taking notes is useful. I took notes in college under WinCE with natural handwriting recognition. Now I often work as an editor and I take notes on my Newton and mark up RTF documents on same using a pen and natural handwriting recognition.
Why is that not as useful as what an executive needs to do? Actually, maybe I missed the point... Maybe the point is that executives are not all that useful...
...there isn't any decent way to get text into the them. You can tap out characters on a screen, but that isn't the same as typing, and gets frustrating quickly.
There are very nice handwriting recognition systems for other operating systems, just not for Linux. I used Calligrapher for Windows CE (now bought by Microsoft and renamed to Transcriber) and used it to take notes all through college. I was able to scribble fast enough to keep up with professors and accuracy was better than 90-95%, more than enough to make readable notes. When I got my BA, I had >300 printed pages of notes which had been written by hand and recognized in real-time into Pocket Word documents.
My current PDA is a Newton 2100, which I would say gets about 99.5% accuracy for me (it actually "learns" your handwriting as you use it, getting better over time) and I e-mail and post to Usenet with it all the time. I don't even think about it; I never have to bring up the tap-tap keyboard, even for punctuation or unusual symbols like umlauts in German.
For Linux, unfortunately, there isn't anything comparable to either of these handwriting recognizers. I owned a Fujitsu Stylistic and installed Linux+KDE on it on a 12GB drive for a brief moment. I thought I was going to use it as my main computer, only plugging a keyboard into the PS/2 port when I needed to to extensive data entry. Unfortunately, I gave up and sold it because the only Linux-based pen input I could find at all was xscribble, a horrible implementation of Palm's Graffiti, and much less helpful for serious use than Calligrapher/Transcriber under CE or Rosetta/Paragraph under Newton, meaning that with the Stylistic+Linux, I had to have the keyboard plugged in all the time to be useful.
Natural handwriting recognition exists, and it works, quickly and accurately. Just because Palm users or Linux users have never seen it doesn't mean it's not there.
Newton's greatness was more than just NewtonScript, it was the design of the entire Newton OS. I've owned Palms and Windows CE devices and (in a desperate attempt to find a usable pen-based system) a Fujitsu Stylistic running Linux+KDE. I just couldn't satisfy my needs for an "information everything device" with any of these systems. I had owned a Newton long ago (until 1995) when the display got shattered and I remembered it fondly, so in 2001 I bought a Newton 2000 unit to see if it was still as nice as I was remembering it to be.
The level of integration on my Newton is unmatched by Palm or CE. For example, I installed a mail program (SimpleMail) and suddenly, all applications on the system had a new option to send the current document or current page as an e-mail. If in a database, for example, I select the mail option, it will bring up my names and let me select the person to whom I want to send a nicely formatted copy of the database. If I tap the mail option in a sketch program, the image will be exported as a GIF and mailed as an attachment. This ability of a program (like SimpleMail) to add functionality to the system (like e-mailing) means that as you install the applications you need on the Newton to manage the types of information you work with, things get more and more integrated, rather than less integrated with each new application as happens in PalmOS or Windows CE. If at some point I don't need mail any more, I will delete the SimpleMail application (only two taps needed) and the mail option will disappear from all of the programs on the system as if it had never been there.
Furthermore, because I have ethernet (2 PCMCIA slots on this unit) I can send and receive tons of mail, browse the web, read usenet, telnet into my Linux system, etc., all with relative ease. I don't use wireless, but there are many who do. And at the drop of the hat, I can eject the standard 3Com PCMCIA ethernet card and isnert a standard PCMCIA modem if I need to use dial-up PPP.
On my Newton, I never have to remember where any document is "saved" because everything entered into the system anywhere is instantly saved in flash until you remove the information, not in a file, but in the inivisibly-managed "soups" (i.e. a kind of distributed storage database) of the operating system. Applications are stored the same way, so that text and applications are actually managed in a unified manner. It's such a great system...
On Palms, there was always a 1:1 correlation -- your document or information basically "belonged" to the applet you used to enter it; the system wasn't integrated enough to use the same valuable bits of data in many different ways. In Windows CE, I just got tired of using a desktop OS -- too often I found myself navigating my flash card like a hard drive, searching for a filename, doing file -> open, etc.
And in both PalmOS and CE, applications are stored and managed differently from documents (especially in CE, where installing/uninstalling/categorizing applications is a nightmare), while in NewtonOS applications and documents rather unified and are managed and conceptually related to one another using the same taps.
I'll still go to the local CompUSA to try to new Palm devices, but I have recently invested hundreds in two "backup" Newton 2100 units on eBay so that I can continue to use Newton far into the future if nobody else can come up with something as nice. With a 160 MHz StrongARM processor (this from a five-year-old device!) and the ability to use CompactFlash (thanks to the Newton ATA project), a 100dpi 480x320 4-bit depth display and wireless ethernet, I don't feel outdated at all.
Reading this discussion and watching all of free-market maniacs rave and rationalize about how expensive it should be simply to communicate and work in the modern world, I become very, very glad that I use Linux and GPL software.
;)
Yes, Linux, the oft-hated, much-lambasted "socialist software" community in which I can make a living without having to pay someone for permission, I can set the price myself (and then donate that amount the author or project), and I can contribute my own labor (because the source code is free). Not to mention that the quality of software is so much higher in the Linux environment.
Now all we need is to get Linux running on PDAs and I will never have to pay for software again. And the Americans can all faint because their hold on the rest of the world through intellectual property begins to fade.
You all said "you don't like it, write your own damn software and then you won't have to pay" and so the rest of the world did.
For example, we have a taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts and it is a treasure. What would be so wrong about a National Endowment for Computer Software, from which qualified/competent developers could receive grants and write software that would benefit the public and which would then be required to be freely available to individuals?
Corporations could still be charged to use the software in a profit-driven environment, citizens not trying to make a buck would get the software at no cost, and the developer would get paid for out-of-pocket development costs and could make enough to make a living (as many artists working with NEA do, just on grants).
The best Web site on the net is just such a cookbook, and it can be found here.
I can't comment on whether or not a Mac cluster is easier to create or maintain (since I've never used a Mac cluster), but I'd prefer a Linux cluster running PC hardware, because:
-- Initial build costs are much lower (dual Athlon 2000+ right now without graphics hardware is way cheaper than a dual G4 1GHz).
-- Maintenance costs are much, much lower. Anything goes wrong with a PC node, just swap out that part with another commodity part. Mac repair or parts replacement costs will eat you, especially if you start to have many, many nodes.
Plus you can modify bits of Linux if you need to optimize the behavior of your cluster for the sort of computing you do, which you can't do with Mac OS.
My $0.02.
The Linux manual is a Beowulf cluster of Mac manuals.
(Parent quoted since it was modded down to -1 and I thought it was pretty funny.)
As a journalist and writer, I can tell you.
It's because publishers and everyone else in the publishing chain work in Word. No, import/export filters are not good enough -- because it's not just about the text. For example, Word has "revision marks" -- a system of keeping track of editorial changes to a document, who made them, when they were made, etc. An editor can easily step through each edit in a document, look at both the pre- and post-edit versions of a sentence, and certify the one of two (or of three or of four) versions which works best in context.
This type of data is not preserved across imports/exports because StarOffice, Applix, KWord, etc. have no concept of such a feature, so they have no reason to try to import the revision data; they just discard all of it (including the entire stream of edits and ceritifications from editors, co-authors, etc) and import the document in original form. WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux *did* have such a feature and imported it more or less correctly... but WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux has been pulled from the market.
This is only one specific instance, but it is not an isolated one. There are many other Word features which are closely tied to file format and vice-versa, and if the entire publishing chain of your publication or press has tied its processes and equipment to Word, you're not going to change this by waltzing in one day and saying "I use Linux so we're all switching to OpenOffice, you'll have to find new ways of doing W, X, Y and we'll now have to hire someone to do Z because OpenOffice won't do it!"
The features just aren't there for most Linux applications (even GIMP, when compared to Photoshop or Corel Draw, comes up far short), and at the same time, the inertia of Windows-world applications is there, in spades. The same can easily be said for other MS Apps. MS Office is a great product. The only general-purpose competitor which comes close is from Corel, and has been discontinued for Linux users.
That is not to say that I think Wine is a useful product. I've tried it over and over and over again for half a decade and it has never worked for anything other than Solitaire. I don't see the point in releasing a 1.0 version when it still won't install Internet Explorer (any version), MS Office (any version) or Photoshop (any version). Why bother?