I like this one because it is so ineffecient that per person/purchase, it turns out to be huge.
Somewhere (I lost track of where) I had found that every year, each person buys on average 2 albums per year. There product was NEVER a volume industry. It was never priced to be a voulume industry.
Compare your monthly Internet bill with your monthly CD purchases. Verison and Comcast may advertise a lot, but on average they are getting a much bigger return on their promotions.
The CD industry needs a shot in the arm to get me back into buying CD's like I now buy DVD's. I seldom buy DVD's over $10 because the selection of under $10 DVD's is huge. At least they have me in looking at the selection every week.
I haven't looked at CD's on a retail shelf in 6 Months. The last CD I looked for was the sound track to Phantom of the Opera. It was over $30. WTF???? Online I see there are copies for under $15 now.
And why do people buy MP3-enabled phones which don't also do this?
Razor/Razor Balde sales model. It's been here for a long time. The cheapskate gets the crippled phone on the cheap phone plan with the high priced low included minutes plans with fees for extra services such as a way to send and recieve text messages, extra talk time, a way to download photos from the phone, and of course a fee to download ringtones.
The DIY users pays more up front for a better phone with features for unlimited texting, data transfer, and a local access port, USB cable and such to avoid the extra fees for ringtones.
I don't understand why retailers would bother carying it.
if it's $6.98, that would give retail a 42.7 percent gross margin, similar to the profit margin cassette and vinyl albums enjoyed back in the day.
the margin is good, but I don't think the volume will be anything to write home about. It will be dead floor space without a ton of promotion. Wal*Mart of all people should know their price sensitive consumers are not going to touch it.
Hmm.. $6.98 for 3 songs or a 2 hour classic movie with change back.. easy choice.
I spent 6 hours trying to printer share from Vista to XP.
How long did it take you to log into a Windows share protected by a simple password on your LAN? It took me 3 hours. It took another 2 hours to connect to an IPP printer hanging directly on the LAN. I hate my wife's new laptop.
The only thing they did right that works out of the box is the Vista laptop can now burn an ISO to CD or DVD instead of requiring an upgrade to add that feature.
Why aren't Microsoft sharing this upgrade with their paying customers?
They are, just not all of them yet. Try using a Genuine copy that has been installed on several machines. This doesn't just kill the copies. It kills the Genuine install also.
Post was trying to point out is that if a Key is *incorrectly* marked as invalid then they have done nothing wrong and nor has the OEM.
Simply put, keys made with a keygen that match your brand new copy will mean that your legal copy has pre-expired keys. In an office, a key borrowed from a CD(DVD) and posted online as an enterprise working key could kill an entire office at once as the key becomes invalid. This could be fun in the next few days. The ways to DOS Vista machines has just grown by leaps and bounds. I just hope Microsoft has had the insight to massively increase the number of people in their support center.
MS Office IS part of/required by my documents") will not change quick enough to allow for any sort of mass migration.
That will change as the.DOC format is rejected by your peers and they demand ODF instead. As more people find they don't have to spend $400 on MS Office, the bigger the demand is for open standards.
I just downloaded the PDF user manual. It isn't clear on one point.
I use Astroplanner for all of my observing and planning. It will draw the stars as they appear in the eyepieces of you telescope, so you can compare and make sure you are looking at what you think you are looking.
It mentions pointing and clicking an item in the manual and then clicking Go to drive your mount to the object. This drive to an object, is it then tracking the object, or is it a one shot to there while waiting the next Go as the star drifts out of view?
Can you answer this? Are you using it with a motorized mount?
6 Put hoops in the way of the shopper. I'm here to look at what you are offering, not fill out a subscription card for your hot lead database.
I won't even link them, but Lower My bills dot com got nailed for that. I went to look up the information for the advertised loan for the 300,000 fixed rate loan for under $1000 a month payments. In a classic bait and switch, I didn't find the information but was hit with a data miner instead. That's a quick trip to the hosts filter.
As far as I understand it, the pay-per-view advertising model has gone the way of the dodo,
It depends on the website and the advertiser. Not all site owners sell all kinds of advertising space. Product placement advertisement is still out there building name recognition.
What is funny is abusive advertisements are what get ad servers and the companies domain added to my hosts file. Then if they do show up in a Google search for something I am looking for (example, lost a fuser in my old laser printer and needed a replacement asap) when they do show up in the Google results, the link to their site is now dead. Abuse of advertising puts black marbles in the box.
Did you know X-10 is in my hosts file simply due to the wireless cam advertisements that covered content?
On the other hand, ThinkGeek is whitelisted in support of Slashdot.
Website owners need to know what the impact is when they sell advertising space. Some things are an abuse of the visitor. They may pay well only while you still have remaining visitors.
When you site warns me that it's going to resize my browser, install software and watch everything I do I'll stop blocking it.
Actually that is when I block the entire site, not just the advertisements.
It is when the advertisements covered up the site so you could not access the content (X-10 cams?) is when I got serious about blocking advertisements. Yahoo news was almost unreadable due to all the junk floating over the page. It was as welcome as reading a used newspaper after someone used it to mop up a spilled bottle of catchup. The flash floaties were so bad, I went to the extreme to fully remove flash from my machine so I could read the articles. Later other tools came out to deal with the problem, the best being flashblock. That gave me the best of both worlds. I could view flash content and control the ugly spills on the articles.
It was obtrusive advertising that started this mess.
Once flashblock was working it was a small step to find discussions regarding the problem and solutions. The solutions would not have had a market if there were not a serious problem to deal with. The advertising hasn't improved, except Google came along and showed the world that a page full of banner advertisements isn't required to have effective advertising. Search engines have for the most part have cleaned up their act, but most news sites haven't caught on and are playing games with flash advertising for those who haven't blocked it yet, article keyword advertisements, and the old standby banner advertisements.
A hint for advertisers is to be there in the search results. Provide lots of great sponsored content. When I need soething, I'll come looking for you. That is the best kind of consumer, ones that want your product. As an example I was looking for information on a failing lamp in my laptop. Do I replace the laptop? Can I replace the lamp? Is it expensive? Is it hard to replace?
A Google search gave me the answers and a vendor with reasonable prices. The vendor didn't need to buy a bunch of banner or flash advertisements to get my business. They just needed to provide the info I needed and a good catalog of the proper parts.
I found my bulk inkjet supplier and fuser supplier for my old laserjet the same way. I looked into how to refill cartridges, how to reset the ink level indicator, and such. The supplier with the info got my order. I found them from a Google search. I did not respond to a flash or banner advertisement. Those advertisements simply don't contain the info needed. Most click-through advertisements simply put you into a data mine site. They gather information on the hot new lead instead of providing the information you seek. Bad move. I'm not signing up to everyone's email list just to get questions answered. Visit the above example for the laptop lamps. Notice the total lack of data mining. They don't ask your age, income, e-mail, profession, etc. They simply provide an open door. From there I placed my order and supplied the information needed for the order. Notice who got the sale and who didn't.
Ad blocking isn't evil. It's just an efficient way to toss the electronic 3rd class mail in bulk that you never open or respond to anyway. The free samples of catchup not spilled on your web page is a bonus. You shouldn't let advertisers spill gooey messy stuff all over your pretty web page.
I like Stellarium but it is not a very useful tool of astronomy.
One feature that you need for photography is the ability to find your star and drive the scope to it, then track it real time for the photo. In the list of features, it mentions telescope control just like Kstars. With a larger library of stars and objects, it may be worthwhile as a repository of data for your telescope drive. I have not used it, so I don't know how hard it is to use. The Kstars interface is not difficult to learn and has all the naked eye viable objects without a large confusing library making it very useful to a beginning astronomer. Picking a popular target such as Mars is a simple point and click interface to locate the object and drive your scope to it.
I don't know if Stellarium with it's added bells and whistles has ease of use buried in a maze of menus. I also don't know if it just drives to a star or does tracking.
Kstars has the advantage of Open Source, Runs on Linux, and communicates with a large variety of motorized telescope mounts. This allows picking a feature on screen, driving your scope to it, and tracking it for a long exposure for those dim objects requiring long exposure times.
What is the single best product I can buy and configure at my home office to hold a "safety copy" of my data? Should I simply RAID a few drives in an old *NIX box? Is there a pre-configured-in-a-shiny-box product worth the price? Educate me, please educate me. I still hear the clicking of a crashed MacBook HD, even as I type this.
Disclaimer, I have a couple on my shelf, but no other affilliation. The box does nice raid with a couple external USB drives. Simple and works well. Uses much less power than a typical PC fileserver.
There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers.
Could it be a simple case that one of the sites they hosted on their 2 IP address was an anti-419 scammer page that got attacked. This could be a case where a target of a DOS attack took the host down. This outage is in the time frame that the anti-scam sites got nailed by a massive DOS attack. Does anybody know of any anti-scam stites on this host?
For those laptops that do not have integrated wireless, you might do some shopping around and discover which vendors support linux the best.
Personally, I got a 3-Com xjack card for that very reason. I plugged it in, my linux distro found it, and I'm on the internet. All of this was accomplished without the NDIS Wrapper.
Getting WPA to work has been a problem. The solution which I have found 100% compatible is to use an AP in Client Mode. It's a little bulky and requires a power outlet, but it provides WPA in all modes, is compatible with all flavors of Nix that can find a NIC in the machine, and has better range than most PCI or USB cards.
Even an old Linksys WRT54G router running DD_WRT firmware makes an outstanding client with the bonus of adjustable power and high gain antennas. It is compatible with every version on Linux that can find the NIC in the PC.
It always works (I use Windows XP), so I can get away with buying $50 PC's from the thrift shop. I know the reasons are complicated, but the fact is that buying special name-brand hardware takes both time and money. --
My friend, you just hit the main reason I have an Ubuntu laptop. I had an older IBM Thinkpad. It was running Windows 2000. It got to the point when I would go to a meeting and someone wanted to give me a copy of their report or presentation, I could not read their thumbdrive. It was most often the case of Windows is serching for drivers for the new hardware. To make matters worse, there was rarely wireless internet on location. That got old fast.
Here is the situation. A hundred bucks for XP and a few hundred more for newer versions of Office so I can open the new documents and Power Point slides, and a subscription to another year of a major AV company, or load Ubuntu and just spend $30 for a compatible wireless NIC. It was a simple decision. I've never looked back. For use in meetings and such, I'm now an avid advocate for the Open Document Format. I haven't found a thumb drive needing a driver in forever. With the money saved, I bought an LCD monitor.
And any time someone new the *nix asks me about wireless, and why it isn't working, I always insist they spend the $20 on the Atheros chipset, as, again, it is damn near flawless.
I use a D-Link AirPlus G model DWL-G630 on my laptop running Dapper Drake. It has the Atheros chipset, but it doesn't support WPA, just WEP in Ubuntu. Other than that, it works fine.
Since i have a Medion Mim with some proprietry medion chipset, i'm stuck with no wireless for ubuntu..:( the driver doesnt work with NDIS wrapper either... of course... that doesn't stop me using debian stable on my desktop!
It's not pretty, but I found a solution which even works with old Windows 95 (for testing) and enables full WBA encryption. It works on any OS that can use the wired NIC in a machine. Are you ready...
Use an access point which is capable of Client Mode operation. I use a D-Link AP in client mode. I configure it with my browser. It requires no software install of any kind. Testing was done on the D-link AP and now a Linksys 54G router has been added to my travel pack because it cost less (lucky find, a version 4 for $12 at Goodwill).
I have been running wireless with an AP in client mode since Breezy Badger. Upgrading the firmware to DD-WRT has added the client mode. As a bonus, you get to use high gain antennas with much better range than a stock laptop provides, and the power is adjustable for use in poor signal locations. The router does the site survey for you internally, so you don't even need to know the SSID ahead of time. It is as simple as switching to either client or client bridge mode, scanning, choosing an AP, and picking the encryption and entering the key. After that it's net, nothing but net.
There are hardware solutions out there. The package may be a little big and bulky and not run on self contained batteries, but it provides excellent connections in hotels in marginal reception areas. With the external box, it can be positioned in a window where the neighbors open AP may provide better bandwidth than the hotel provides. I went to a Starbucks once not knowing the wireless wasn't free (T-mobile). I was able to find 2 unsecured APs from inside Starbucks to use instead. Nobody at Starbucks was the wiser. It beats getting busted for sitting in a car leaching on some residential street.
Slashdot Mirror
marketing programs (a big piece of the pie)
I like this one because it is so ineffecient that per person/purchase, it turns out to be huge.
Somewhere (I lost track of where) I had found that every year, each person buys on average 2 albums per year. There product was NEVER a volume industry. It was never priced to be a voulume industry.
Compare your monthly Internet bill with your monthly CD purchases. Verison and Comcast may advertise a lot, but on average they are getting a much bigger return on their promotions.
The CD industry needs a shot in the arm to get me back into buying CD's like I now buy DVD's. I seldom buy DVD's over $10 because the selection of under $10 DVD's is huge. At least they have me in looking at the selection every week.
I haven't looked at CD's on a retail shelf in 6 Months. The last CD I looked for was the sound track to Phantom of the Opera. It was over $30. WTF???? Online I see there are copies for under $15 now.
And why do people buy MP3-enabled phones which don't also do this?
Razor/Razor Balde sales model. It's been here for a long time. The cheapskate gets the crippled phone on the cheap phone plan with the high priced low included minutes plans with fees for extra services such as a way to send and recieve text messages, extra talk time, a way to download photos from the phone, and of course a fee to download ringtones.
The DIY users pays more up front for a better phone with features for unlimited texting, data transfer, and a local access port, USB cable and such to avoid the extra fees for ringtones.
I don't understand why retailers would bother carying it.
if it's $6.98, that would give retail a 42.7 percent gross margin, similar to the profit margin cassette and vinyl albums enjoyed back in the day.
the margin is good, but I don't think the volume will be anything to write home about. It will be dead floor space without a ton of promotion. Wal*Mart of all people should know their price sensitive consumers are not going to touch it.
Hmm.. $6.98 for 3 songs or a 2 hour classic movie with change back.. easy choice.
re-install windows and go back to them (or another outlet). It's as easy as this.
In my case it is re-install the original small hard drive and keep the Linux drive for when the laptop is returned.
Linux Genuine Advantage has been cracked.
http://www.alienos.com/articles/2007/02/02/linux-genuine-advantage-cracked
Better stay from here to keep the lawsuits away for using this illegal code.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3610011/Linux_Genuine_Advantage_Crack
And what if the WGA server is down again?
I get vastly better download speeds on my cable connection, web pages load faster, and my SPAM problem is quickly reduced overnight.
I spent 6 hours trying to printer share from Vista to XP.
How long did it take you to log into a Windows share protected by a simple password on your LAN? It took me 3 hours. It took another 2 hours to connect to an IPP printer hanging directly on the LAN. I hate my wife's new laptop.
The only thing they did right that works out of the box is the Vista laptop can now burn an ISO to CD or DVD instead of requiring an upgrade to add that feature.
Why aren't Microsoft sharing this upgrade with their paying customers?
They are, just not all of them yet. Try using a Genuine copy that has been installed on several machines. This doesn't just kill the copies. It kills the Genuine install also.
Post was trying to point out is that if a Key is *incorrectly* marked as invalid then they have done nothing wrong and nor has the OEM.
Simply put, keys made with a keygen that match your brand new copy will mean that your legal copy has pre-expired keys. In an office, a key borrowed from a CD(DVD) and posted online as an enterprise working key could kill an entire office at once as the key becomes invalid. This could be fun in the next few days. The ways to DOS Vista machines has just grown by leaps and bounds. I just hope Microsoft has had the insight to massively increase the number of people in their support center.
MS Office IS part of/required by my documents") will not change quick enough to allow for any sort of mass migration.
.DOC format is rejected by your peers and they demand ODF instead.
That will change as the
As more people find they don't have to spend $400 on MS Office, the bigger the demand is for open standards.
So when your legit copy of Vista dumps you to a blue screen of death, you can rest assured that you are experiencing the Genuine Advantage.
Linux users don't have to be left out. Enjoy.
http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/
I just downloaded the PDF user manual. It isn't clear on one point.
I use Astroplanner for all of my observing and planning. It will draw the stars as they appear in the eyepieces of you telescope, so you can compare and make sure you are looking at what you think you are looking.
It mentions pointing and clicking an item in the manual and then clicking Go to drive your mount to the object. This drive to an object, is it then tracking the object, or is it a one shot to there while waiting the next Go as the star drifts out of view?
Can you answer this? Are you using it with a motorized mount?
The year of linux is every year since 1992, just for different people.
What a perfect time to go legal. Ditch that copy of Vists. It's broken by design. It's a feature, not a flaw.
On the other hand going legal works. Start here.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
6 Put hoops in the way of the shopper. I'm here to look at what you are offering, not fill out a subscription card for your hot lead database.
I won't even link them, but Lower My bills dot com got nailed for that. I went to look up the information for the advertised loan for the 300,000 fixed rate loan for under $1000 a month payments. In a classic bait and switch, I didn't find the information but was hit with a data miner instead. That's a quick trip to the hosts filter.
As far as I understand it, the pay-per-view advertising model has gone the way of the dodo,
It depends on the website and the advertiser. Not all site owners sell all kinds of advertising space. Product placement advertisement is still out there building name recognition.
Im pretty certain the advertisers on these pages paid for the banner space and not just clickthroughs.
http://www.autotrader.com/
and sponsor results here
http://dir.yahoo.com/Health/Pharmacy/
What is funny is abusive advertisements are what get ad servers and the companies domain added to my hosts file. Then if they do show up in a Google search for something I am looking for (example, lost a fuser in my old laser printer and needed a replacement asap) when they do show up in the Google results, the link to their site is now dead. Abuse of advertising puts black marbles in the box.
Did you know X-10 is in my hosts file simply due to the wireless cam advertisements that covered content?
On the other hand, ThinkGeek is whitelisted in support of Slashdot.
Website owners need to know what the impact is when they sell advertising space. Some things are an abuse of the visitor. They may pay well only while you still have remaining visitors.
When you site warns me that it's going to resize my browser, install software and watch everything I do I'll stop blocking it.
Actually that is when I block the entire site, not just the advertisements.
It is when the advertisements covered up the site so you could not access the content (X-10 cams?) is when I got serious about blocking advertisements. Yahoo news was almost unreadable due to all the junk floating over the page. It was as welcome as reading a used newspaper after someone used it to mop up a spilled bottle of catchup. The flash floaties were so bad, I went to the extreme to fully remove flash from my machine so I could read the articles. Later other tools came out to deal with the problem, the best being flashblock. That gave me the best of both worlds. I could view flash content and control the ugly spills on the articles.
It was obtrusive advertising that started this mess.
Once flashblock was working it was a small step to find discussions regarding the problem and solutions. The solutions would not have had a market if there were not a serious problem to deal with. The advertising hasn't improved, except Google came along and showed the world that a page full of banner advertisements isn't required to have effective advertising. Search engines have for the most part have cleaned up their act, but most news sites haven't caught on and are playing games with flash advertising for those who haven't blocked it yet, article keyword advertisements, and the old standby banner advertisements.
A hint for advertisers is to be there in the search results. Provide lots of great sponsored content. When I need soething, I'll come looking for you. That is the best kind of consumer, ones that want your product. As an example I was looking for information on a failing lamp in my laptop. Do I replace the laptop? Can I replace the lamp? Is it expensive? Is it hard to replace?
A Google search gave me the answers and a vendor with reasonable prices. The vendor didn't need to buy a bunch of banner or flash advertisements to get my business. They just needed to provide the info I needed and a good catalog of the proper parts.
Here is the tutorial that got me to the vendor's site;
http://www.ccfldirect.com/lcdtutorial.html
Here is the table that told me what lamp I needed;
http://www.ccfldirect.com/lcdrepair.html
And from the table, here is the lamp I need and the price;
http://www.ccfldirect.com/2x29fuspccla.html
I found my bulk inkjet supplier and fuser supplier for my old laserjet the same way. I looked into how to refill cartridges, how to reset the ink level indicator, and such. The supplier with the info got my order. I found them from a Google search. I did not respond to a flash or banner advertisement. Those advertisements simply don't contain the info needed. Most click-through advertisements simply put you into a data mine site. They gather information on the hot new lead instead of providing the information you seek. Bad move. I'm not signing up to everyone's email list just to get questions answered. Visit the above example for the laptop lamps. Notice the total lack of data mining. They don't ask your age, income, e-mail, profession, etc. They simply provide an open door. From there I placed my order and supplied the information needed for the order. Notice who got the sale and who didn't.
Ad blocking isn't evil. It's just an efficient way to toss the electronic 3rd class mail in bulk that you never open or respond to anyway. The free samples of catchup not spilled on your web page is a bonus. You shouldn't let advertisers spill gooey messy stuff all over your pretty web page.
I like Stellarium but it is not a very useful tool of astronomy.
One feature that you need for photography is the ability to find your star and drive the scope to it, then track it real time for the photo. In the list of features, it mentions telescope control just like Kstars. With a larger library of stars and objects, it may be worthwhile as a repository of data for your telescope drive. I have not used it, so I don't know how hard it is to use. The Kstars interface is not difficult to learn and has all the naked eye viable objects without a large confusing library making it very useful to a beginning astronomer. Picking a popular target such as Mars is a simple point and click interface to locate the object and drive your scope to it.
I don't know if Stellarium with it's added bells and whistles has ease of use buried in a maze of menus. I also don't know if it just drives to a star or does tracking.
Kstars has the advantage of Open Source, Runs on Linux, and communicates with a large variety of motorized telescope mounts. This allows picking a feature on screen, driving your scope to it, and tracking it for a long exposure for those dim objects requiring long exposure times.
Did I mention it was Free..
Here is the info.
http://www.simpletech.com/support/guides/user-guides/61600-00072-001.pdf
It's under disk pool management. Support for mirrored and striped is listed.
It is low power, inexpensive, takes little shelf space and works well for me.
Use whatever size external drives you like.
What is the single best product I can buy and configure at my home office to hold a "safety copy" of my data? Should I simply RAID a few drives in an old *NIX box? Is there a pre-configured-in-a-shiny-box product worth the price? Educate me, please educate me. I still hear the clicking of a crashed MacBook HD, even as I type this.
Disclaimer, I have a couple on my shelf, but no other affilliation. The box does nice raid with a couple external USB drives. Simple and works well. Uses much less power than a typical PC fileserver.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/
Load an older version of the firmware to Raid the external drives. Raid and encryption has been removed in the new versions of firmware.
There is speculation that Jatol may have stopped paying their host, Fastservers.
Could it be a simple case that one of the sites they hosted on their 2 IP address was an anti-419 scammer page that got attacked. This could be a case where a target of a DOS attack took the host down. This outage is in the time frame that the anti-scam sites got nailed by a massive DOS attack. Does anybody know of any anti-scam stites on this host?
For those laptops that do not have integrated wireless, you might do some shopping around and discover which vendors support linux the best.
Personally, I got a 3-Com xjack card for that very reason. I plugged it in, my linux distro found it, and I'm on the internet. All of this was accomplished without the NDIS Wrapper.
Getting WPA to work has been a problem. The solution which I have found 100% compatible is to use an AP in Client Mode. It's a little bulky and requires a power outlet, but it provides WPA in all modes, is compatible with all flavors of Nix that can find a NIC in the machine, and has better range than most PCI or USB cards.
Even an old Linksys WRT54G router running DD_WRT firmware makes an outstanding client with the bonus of adjustable power and high gain antennas.
It is compatible with every version on Linux that can find the NIC in the PC.
It always works (I use Windows XP), so I can get away with buying $50 PC's from the thrift shop. I know the reasons are complicated, but the fact is that buying special name-brand hardware takes both time and money.
--
My friend, you just hit the main reason I have an Ubuntu laptop. I had an older IBM Thinkpad. It was running Windows 2000. It got to the point when I would go to a meeting and someone wanted to give me a copy of their report or presentation, I could not read their thumbdrive. It was most often the case of Windows is serching for drivers for the new hardware. To make matters worse, there was rarely wireless internet on location. That got old fast.
Here is the situation. A hundred bucks for XP and a few hundred more for newer versions of Office so I can open the new documents and Power Point slides, and a subscription to another year of a major AV company, or load Ubuntu and just spend $30 for a compatible wireless NIC. It was a simple decision. I've never looked back. For use in meetings and such, I'm now an avid advocate for the Open Document Format. I haven't found a thumb drive needing a driver in forever. With the money saved, I bought an LCD monitor.
And any time someone new the *nix asks me about wireless, and why it isn't working, I always insist they spend the $20 on the Atheros chipset, as, again, it is damn near flawless.
I use a D-Link AirPlus G model DWL-G630 on my laptop running Dapper Drake. It has the Atheros chipset, but it doesn't support WPA, just WEP in Ubuntu. Other than that, it works fine.
Since i have a Medion Mim with some proprietry medion chipset, i'm stuck with no wireless for ubuntu.. :(
the driver doesnt work with NDIS wrapper either...
of course...
that doesn't stop me using debian stable on my desktop!
It's not pretty, but I found a solution which even works with old Windows 95 (for testing) and enables full WBA encryption. It works on any OS that can use the wired NIC in a machine. Are you ready...
Use an access point which is capable of Client Mode operation. I use a D-Link AP in client mode. I configure it with my browser. It requires no software install of any kind. Testing was done on the D-link AP and now a Linksys 54G router has been added to my travel pack because it cost less (lucky find, a version 4 for $12 at Goodwill).
I have been running wireless with an AP in client mode since Breezy Badger. Upgrading the firmware to DD-WRT has added the client mode. As a bonus, you get to use high gain antennas with much better range than a stock laptop provides, and the power is adjustable for use in poor signal locations. The router does the site survey for you internally, so you don't even need to know the SSID ahead of time. It is as simple as switching to either client or client bridge mode, scanning, choosing an AP, and picking the encryption and entering the key. After that it's net, nothing but net.
There are hardware solutions out there. The package may be a little big and bulky and not run on self contained batteries, but it provides excellent connections in hotels in marginal reception areas. With the external box, it can be positioned in a window where the neighbors open AP may provide better bandwidth than the hotel provides. I went to a Starbucks once not knowing the wireless wasn't free (T-mobile). I was able to find 2 unsecured APs from inside Starbucks to use instead. Nobody at Starbucks was the wiser. It beats getting busted for sitting in a car leaching on some residential street.