Couldn't agree more. I gave up on the Linux desktop many months ago because I grew tired of the constant battle when it came time to get a new or updated version of a program going.
I bought Quake3 Linux Edition, I had a voodoo3 running, I never managed to get it to work reliably after many many hours of trying different things. I downloaded the windows binaries for it and had it running within 30 minutes including time to find the latest voodoo drivers. I followed ALL the tips I could find to get it working in Linux, but eventually the wish to just play the damn game was more than the wish to play it under Linux.
Mandrake 8.0 finally made me throw in the towel, I wanted to use some of the newer apps in it, installed it, new apps worked... however GIMP would now segfault all the time on me, tried downloading source and rebuilding, same thing.
For a server it's wonderful, as a desktop OS, there's a long way to go. I did use it for 2 full years before throwing in the towel, sorry but I just wanted to get some work done and the endless hours of trying to get little things working here and there was too much.
I'll look at the Linux desktop again at some point, I do see areas where it is useful.
Ok, first thing, if you're running a business and using Paypal to accept credit card payments, you look very unprofessional, cheap and just plain silly.
Why? First a new client would have to register with PayPal, they want a confirmation from the client that it's their credit card by using the special number they attach to your bill, if your client can't access their transactions online then he's waiting until the next bill arrives in the mail before he can even begin to pay you.
I use Intuit's Quickbooks' credit card services, very easy to setup, no monthly fees and a reasonable 3.5% transaction fee, if I did more business via credit card I would look at my own merchant account, but until then the Quickbooks system works just fine. My clients also see MY business name on their bills.
They do keep a 5% rolling reserve for 180 days, but hey, now I have a steady stream of residual income over time and I didn't have to put up several thousand in reserve funds either.
I considered PayPal, but quickly realized that would be foolish and I really didn't want to cheapen my business by slapping that icon on the front page.
A killer app is something everyone wants/needs, I hardly think a game will ever fall under this category, especially since T2 has been out for a while now and I don't even have a copy or the urge to go buy a copy.
No, the only thing that's gonna drive Linux desktop usage to the top is when it can run Windows apps cleanly, quickly and without endless hours of tweaking to get things running in the first place.
Epost is too hard to use for most consumers, I've been using computers forever and a day but I found the signup process very tedious, and now I haven't logged in for a few months, not on my daily visits list.
The "pay your bills online" feature will never take off, they're asking you to pay extra for a feature already free in most web banking services offered by pretty much every bank in the country. This seems to be the area they are trying to make money on directly from the consumer.
I imagine the partnered companies who can deliver invoices electronically are paying per invoice as well, so that's much like regular stamped snail mail. Problem is, I find getting the bill delivered in the mailbox much more convenient, I have a pile I keep my unpaid bills and pay them as their due dates arrive. It doesn't matter much to me if they're on the computer, but I think I'd be more apt to forget a payment unless I'm logging onto the epost.ca site daily.
I also got some spam from them the other day, now they're offering password protected PDF delivery using a 128bit SSL web server, and announcing it as the latest cool-tool they can provide. Guess it's good for those online businesses who don't already have their own SSL cert setup:)
Micropayments won't work, as others have mentioned it would just stop people from searching.
The big problem with online content is the lack of advertising dollars available to support it. I have a few sites, I get not bad traffic on them, in 4 days I managed to display 20,000 ads on 20,000 page views, I made $0.09, umm, there's something wrong with this picture. My local newspaper reaches 17,000 homes, yet I know I can't call them up and offer them 9 cents to run an ad there, no matter how small I make it.
Granted most of the ads were for affiliates via cj.com, it doesn't work, now CJ is trying to get me to run ads for Ebay and other networks, pretty much for free. Not likely, why should I contribute to branding campaigns for companies with no payment? I wouldn't stick a Coca Cola banner on my pages without Coke paying per impression and I'm not about to start with well known sites like Ebay either.
What did I do? I pulled most of the ads from the pages, they weren't worth the bandwidth costs for the banner code.
Something needs to be done that's for sure, but who knows what. For now I'll keep the sites up and if someone wants their ad in front of the visitors to my sites they can pay me directly, in real dollars for each impression, regardless of whether the viewers click their banners. I see lots of ads in magazines, television and elsewhere but I certainly don't run out and buy the products being pitched every time.
Whatever happened to our sense of exploration, our sense of wonder?
Most of the comments for this type of stuff do nothing but proclaim anyone with a little imagination as a nut job.
The fact is, IF we do not get off this planet and expand then we as a race are doomed and eventually there will be no trace we even existed.
So the structures some see on Mars may be natural, but at the same time they may be artificial, until we go there ourselves to find out we won't know for sure. I think an ever so slight chance that there is artificial structures on any planet or moon in our solar system needs to be investigated thoroughly and as soon as technically possible.
We trace our own history back almost 4 million years, yet many fail to realize that 4 million years is a drop in the bucket of time compared to the age of just our solar system, a LOT could have happened on the planets circling our sun in that time.
Certainly if at some point a civilization existed on Mars way back when there may be a chance some structures were built that we may be viewing the remains of now. Consider that on Earth, if we were wiped out today evidence of our own existence would persist on the surface for around 1 billion years, after which time it would become more and more difficult to find such evidence at surface level.
There are lots of questions about our own history, questions about just what level of technology ancient civilizations may have had.
Open your minds a little folks, encourage our leaders to spend more on exploring our own solar system than they currently spend on silly shit like weapons of war which ultimately aren't going to do us much good in the long term.
Then again, maybe NASA does know more than they let on (after all, just why aren't we going to the moon anymore?). Personally I think any knowledge that would disprove or bring into question religious beliefs would be suppressed in the US because a majority of the people are believers in such rubbish.
It's just your bad luck I'd say, or you stuffed the machine full of low cost, crap hardware from manufacturers whose name may begin with Z and end in x.
What do you think IBM and Dell throw in their machines? Stuff they invent themselves?
Do some research before you build, learn what "quality" hardware is.
I put a dual celeron system together, I've had no trouble with it. Before that I had a P200 I threw together myself, again no troubles at all. I've worked for a company that built their own computers, very little if any hardware problems.
There's a difference between throwing a system together to build it the cheapest or throwing one together cheaply with quality parts inside.
Not so, BC Hydro shut off the taps just before the rolling blackouts started, at which point they owed BC $300million or so. BC sells to them at market rates, it's not set by NAFTA but my the free market.
We've given them power since then but mostly just to give them some surplus supplies, from what I've heard they still haven't paid their bill either, which sucks because if they pay we're supposed to get a rebate on ours up here! Well gas bill rebates anyways, our power bill hasn't risen much over last year.
Pays to have dams in house I think:)
Sorry California, if you don't want them big stinky power plants in your State then you're just gonna have to pay the going rate for electricity aren't ya? It's just too bad for you that you aren't the ones setting that rate:)
I think we'll join in with Oregon and Washington State in saying we don't plan on being an energy farm for California either.
While I agree that sites "should" be written for multiple browsers this is becoming harder and harder to do. Sites either have to code very simple websites that do not take advantage of almost any new web standards or techniques, or the sites have to maintain multiple code bases.
Why is it harder to do? Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) seems to be forgotten nowadays by the crazies who think a website is nothing unless it has some worthless Flash animation on it.
This story reminds me of a problem with my old bank, note I said old, they changed their web banking site for some reason that made it unusable in Linux Netscape, I bugged them for over 3 months to fix it and finally gave up and changed banks.
A couple months later I hear that the reason it wouldn't work in Netscape was because of bad Javascript and Style Sheet code mixed, if you turned off StyleSheet support in Netscape it would work.
I have to ask, was such useless code necessary? No, I was unable to access web banking because someone figured he needed some fancy style sheet code that wasn't 100% cross-browser compatible.
Was it worth losing customers over? I doubt it.
As I told that bank at the time, get rid of the idiot who's using javascript for such tasks as footer layout on the pages, hadn't this joker heard of server side includes or something that wouldn't cause any browser trouble?
Frankly too many website designers try using useless and uneeded code on the client side, if they can't guarantee it will work on all browsers it shouldn't be needed, unless the application in question is aimed at one specific platform to begin with.
Client side code should be kept to an absolute minimum at all times for best results, very few websites need it anyway.
You must not derive your living from the computer industry. If you did, you'd be very interested that the average Joe consumer, upon whose purchases your welfare depends, have a positive experience with computer salespeople. Unless 'techies' want to acquire the positive public image of used-car-shysters, competent salefolk are a essential. Thank god I didn't have to build my car from parts recommended by the guy next door
No I don't work in selling people computers, but, I was at one time working in a store that just happened to sell computers, we built our own from the quality parts I spoke off, our customer satisfaction rate was excellent.
Too many times we had people bring in the brand name stuff wishing to upgrade, only to be told there's not much we can do to it. They're built so that when they become outdated (2 years tops) you have to go and buy an entire new system. Our stuff you could easily upgrade and save a lot doing so.
I don't recommend any prepackaged units to friends and family, and they've all been happy with the units they've purchased and when they want they can watch or help put it together.
I've seen many lemmons from Future Shop and the likes, including one abonamation from Costco, a 486 motherboard with some weird addon board upon which a Pentium CPU was running.. they sold it as a Pentium machine cheap, within 4 months the customer had asked us to fix it any way we could, it meant a new motherboard, etc. His lesson, no more buying prefabs from warehouse outfits.
Much like the car industry there's good and bad cars, sure you can run out and buy a Pinto, but in the end you'd have been better off buying the Mercedes for a little more.
I agree, I use RBL on all my mail servers, one server I also throw in the DUL and RSS, that one is mostly for my own domain names.
It is effective, when I started getting over a dozen spams a day in each mailbox on my domain I figured enough was enough.
Sorry, but I don't really care if the odd person has trouble emailing my domain, mostly they're trying from crappo free email providers anyways and I tell them to find another one, their most compelling argument is "oh, but this domain name is cooler than those other ones", franky I don't give a damn how cool your email domain name is, if they've been branded as spam sources I don't want mail from them.
I work with a hosting company, during the 2 years I've been here we've had 2 spammers sign up, in the first case we shut them down within 6 hours, zero tolerance, we didn't even receive a complaint but one look at their log file showed they were hiding IP's and it was obvious coming from a spammed email.
In the second case it was a newbie spammer who got right upset when we cut them off, what we've learned so far is that most spammer types seem to hang out in Florida, they're mostly dumb as rocks and are usually the type of morons who fall for the "get rich doing nothing" schemes you see around.
Media3 are obviously spam friendly, hell we wouldn't even accept a client who had "bulk" in their url and seemed to indicate that was bulk email, not worth the hassle of getting blacklisted and that should be enough to police the rest of the ISPs out there.
Chances are Media3 are owned and operated by spammer types to begin with, these marketing geniuses always seem to group themselves together so they can pray on the weak and stupid side of society, which is really their only clientelle.
The computer salespeople at Future Shop shouldn't be your one stop center for advice on how good a computer is.
A friend of mine applied for a job there, they turned him down because he knew too much about computers, basically he knew the crap systems they sell are just that, crap.
You want a good and reliable machine, build one, find an OEM shop close to you or order online, use reliable and brand name parts (ie, NO ZOLTRIX!), research on usenet before buying, see what trouble others may have. It takes a little longer but you pay less and have something you can be proud of as well, not some cloned clunker.
These days building an ATX is easy, our office manager is looking at getting a new computer, I gave her a list of parts, she plans on buying those and then putting it together herself. Of course I will lend a hand where needed but I really think she'll be able to pull it off on her own.
Anyone who simply drops by the local Future Shop, listens to a salesman for advice and gets stuck with a lemmon deserves it, those stores pray on average Joe consumer who'll believe anything the salesman tells them, most of his recommendations are made to up his commissions.
Take it from someone who walks into Future Shop and is purposely ignored by the sales people until I ask for something, after a while they figure out you know more than them and leave you alone to browse. I buy the odd part from them but I'd never grab an entire computer off the shelf.
There's a bunch more sites that discuss it, the final image taken by Phobos2 was never released by the Soviets for some reason.
Again, it is rather weird that we have such a high failure rate for probes sent that way, maybe it's nothing but equipment failures but I know that if the Shuttle missions had a 75% failure rate we wouldn't still be doing those:)
There's good evidence for this according to Richard Hoagland... Enterprise Mission.
Let's see, for some reason we've lost more than 75% of missions to that planet, rather high failure rate when we've got other hardware functioning beyond pluto already. Two USSR probes lost in one mission with some weird images being sent in the final minutes of the second probes loss as well.
Hoagland thinks the excuses are rather thin at best, also look for his take on Hubble's first 3 years of "blindness":)
This of course assumes that we've hit the peak of propulsion technology and that no new science or possible loopholes in the universe exist that may indeed make interstellar travel much more feasible within a carbon-based lifeforms lifetime.
We're not exactly all that bright a race yet remember, we still enjoy killing and maiming each other, we've only had high-tech such as electricity (on a wide scale basis) for a couple hundred years at best. We have so much more to learn I'd think.
I do agree though that the possibility off ancient civilizations being much more advanced than we currently think they were is probably part of the answer.
However these ancients are much harder to find than traces of current civilization would be, there are many things around today that would survive nicely in the proper packaging and I'm sure some folks have buried such things already.
And don't forget about the space junk we've sent up, much of it will be in orbit for a long time before coming back to earth, I think the Keo(?) satellite is supposed to spend 50,000 years in orbit before plummeting back to the ground, and it's unpowered and in a lower orbit than our communications satellites parked in geo-stationary orbit 27,000 miles away.
There definitely is a bunch of stuff just in our solar system that seems out of the ordinary, a lot of the stuff seems to be some sort of message or riddle left for future civilizations to discover and interpret.
Of course there are many skeptics who just can't believe any of these anomalous objects throughout our system are real, attempts to get the powers at NASA to release untampered with pictures and other info is sometimes met with resistance or they play dumb and say a malfunction occurred with equipment. Funny how that equipment malfunctions at some weird times too.
Do some research into this stuff, look at it from all sides. A good starting point is Enterprise Mission which is the main site for Hoagland's research.
Hoagland has been right about many things in the past and he approaches the subject scientifically and is only asking the questions that need definitive answers, maybe there's nothing to the face on Mars, but the new info from NASA didn't prove it one way or the other since the new pics from MGS were put through filters before being released, why?
Personally I am somewhere in the middle, I think it is very possible that either another advanced civilization existed in our solar system at some point or an alien race or two have been able to travel through the great expanse of space. Or the anomolies may indeed be natural formations with no secrets laying beneath. I don't try and supply answers, I just know there are questions that need answered.
We're talking about a solar system that's 5 BILLION years old here, the possiblities of life on not only this planet but other bodies in the system during that time are pretty good if as current theories are starting to prove life is the norm rather than the exception where conditions exist to support it.
One more thing, over 75% of our missions to Mars have ended in failure, anyone else find this rather high? Considering that we've sent probes well outside our solar system now that have continued to operate well beyond their expected lifetimes, and we have such a dismal failure rate reaching Mars for some reason. Many of the failures have peculiar circumstances surrounding them as well.
Man I hear ya there, I've got one branded with 3dfx all over it still wrapped in the shrink wrap after I realized they don't work worth a damn under Linux and there's no damn Win2k drivers for them either. What a waste! At least I ended up getting 2 for the price of 1 due to some outfits pathetic shipping department, and $50 off to boot!:)
I ended up buying a Hauppauge WinTV and it works just dandy in most OSes, even BeOS picked that up first crack.
Damn, finally a fix and it's too late cause I switched banks over the whole thing... I figured that any coder who saw fit to use a javascript function to add a footer to a page was slightly screwy anyways:)
It's like nobody has shown them server side includes or something.. course that NT stuff might have trouble with that...
I too encountered the problems he had, numerous emails to TD did nothing, I was polite and offered assistance to their MSCE grads doing the website on how to write cross platform code, they just kept telling me it should/might work soon.
Well since they took months with no changes, turned me down for my mortgage anyways and were generally charging too much for too little I moved on!
HSBC has good web banking, although they just started with it a while back and it's still maturing. A month after I signed up their site suddenly suffered from MSCE javascript code too, this time i couldn't even log in at all. So I email them letting them know this and that I'm rather pissed because this is why I left TD Bank, I even had to ask if it was maybe the same guy doing the pages and he'd been hired at HSBC to spite us:)
HSBC were much more responsive to the errors however, they did fix them and I imagine they forced their coders to check the site out using Linux to make sure it worked, the offending javascript was still in the code but obviously fixed to work on all browsers.
Ahh well, ya try and explain to these kids nowadays that client side code should be used sparingly but they've been brainwashed it seems.
I do all my bill payments using my online banking interface that my branch offers. This is mega convenient, I've never been so up to date with my bills until now, usually as soon as I get the bill in the mail I'll go online and pay it.
When I had to go and mail the money more often than not I'd end up with the money spent before I mailed off the check, so my credit rating still suffers to this day because of that.
I don't think I'd use an outside service to do this though, you should be able to do it all via your bank, mine doesn't charge me extra to do so and in fact encourages its customers to use this method rather than bothering a teller.
As for problems, never seen one yet, soon as I hit the payment button I get a confirmation number that I can use later on if the payment doesn't make it to the company in question.
Originally my bank was using some proprietary software package, but quickly switched to web based banking once enough people bitched about their broken software and the fact that it required Windows didn't help them any.
Might just be me, but I thought that Loki only distributed the game in this case since the Linux development was done my id themselves to get all 3 platforms out at the same time.
$11.50 a month??? Where are you getting programming dude, I'm paying quite a bit more for that with some alacarte channels, HBO and Disney being the most expensive:)
But yes I do recommend C-Band over small dish technology, the feeds are great and you get some channels that don't make it to the small dish. PPV is available to you as well and with the digital receiver you far surpass the pizza dishes for channel selection.
The driver coming from Creative themselves will not be shareware, the OSS driver on the other hand is shareware.
I'm just happy now cause I can finally listen to my CD's again in Linux with my Live! with OSS' alpha driver.. listening to Van Halen right now using it.. wahoo!!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Quickly before it ends, man, you will never forget the anniversary AND you save on gifts!!
:)
I did it, today is my 4th anniversary, bought the wife a digital camera too, don't ask how I got away with that one
Couldn't agree more. I gave up on the Linux desktop many months ago because I grew tired of the constant battle when it came time to get a new or updated version of a program going.
... however GIMP would now segfault all the time on me, tried downloading source and rebuilding, same thing.
I bought Quake3 Linux Edition, I had a voodoo3 running, I never managed to get it to work reliably after many many hours of trying different things. I downloaded the windows binaries for it and had it running within 30 minutes including time to find the latest voodoo drivers. I followed ALL the tips I could find to get it working in Linux, but eventually the wish to just play the damn game was more than the wish to play it under Linux.
Mandrake 8.0 finally made me throw in the towel, I wanted to use some of the newer apps in it, installed it, new apps worked
For a server it's wonderful, as a desktop OS, there's a long way to go. I did use it for 2 full years before throwing in the towel, sorry but I just wanted to get some work done and the endless hours of trying to get little things working here and there was too much.
I'll look at the Linux desktop again at some point, I do see areas where it is useful.
Ok, first thing, if you're running a business and using Paypal to accept credit card payments, you look very unprofessional, cheap and just plain silly.
Why? First a new client would have to register with PayPal, they want a confirmation from the client that it's their credit card by using the special number they attach to your bill, if your client can't access their transactions online then he's waiting until the next bill arrives in the mail before he can even begin to pay you.
I use Intuit's Quickbooks' credit card services, very easy to setup, no monthly fees and a reasonable 3.5% transaction fee, if I did more business via credit card I would look at my own merchant account, but until then the Quickbooks system works just fine. My clients also see MY business name on their bills.
They do keep a 5% rolling reserve for 180 days, but hey, now I have a steady stream of residual income over time and I didn't have to put up several thousand in reserve funds either.
I considered PayPal, but quickly realized that would be foolish and I really didn't want to cheapen my business by slapping that icon on the front page.
LOL .. are you delusional? T2 a "killer app"?
A killer app is something everyone wants/needs, I hardly think a game will ever fall under this category, especially since T2 has been out for a while now and I don't even have a copy or the urge to go buy a copy.
No, the only thing that's gonna drive Linux desktop usage to the top is when it can run Windows apps cleanly, quickly and without endless hours of tweaking to get things running in the first place.
A game just doesn't cut it.
Trips
Epost is too hard to use for most consumers, I've been using computers forever and a day but I found the signup process very tedious, and now I haven't logged in for a few months, not on my daily visits list.
:)
The "pay your bills online" feature will never take off, they're asking you to pay extra for a feature already free in most web banking services offered by pretty much every bank in the country. This seems to be the area they are trying to make money on directly from the consumer.
I imagine the partnered companies who can deliver invoices electronically are paying per invoice as well, so that's much like regular stamped snail mail. Problem is, I find getting the bill delivered in the mailbox much more convenient, I have a pile I keep my unpaid bills and pay them as their due dates arrive. It doesn't matter much to me if they're on the computer, but I think I'd be more apt to forget a payment unless I'm logging onto the epost.ca site daily.
I also got some spam from them the other day, now they're offering password protected PDF delivery using a 128bit SSL web server, and announcing it as the latest cool-tool they can provide. Guess it's good for those online businesses who don't already have their own SSL cert setup
Trips
Micropayments won't work, as others have mentioned it would just stop people from searching.
The big problem with online content is the lack of advertising dollars available to support it. I have a few sites, I get not bad traffic on them, in 4 days I managed to display 20,000 ads on 20,000 page views, I made $0.09, umm, there's something wrong with this picture. My local newspaper reaches 17,000 homes, yet I know I can't call them up and offer them 9 cents to run an ad there, no matter how small I make it.
Granted most of the ads were for affiliates via cj.com, it doesn't work, now CJ is trying to get me to run ads for Ebay and other networks, pretty much for free. Not likely, why should I contribute to branding campaigns for companies with no payment? I wouldn't stick a Coca Cola banner on my pages without Coke paying per impression and I'm not about to start with well known sites like Ebay either.
What did I do? I pulled most of the ads from the pages, they weren't worth the bandwidth costs for the banner code.
Something needs to be done that's for sure, but who knows what. For now I'll keep the sites up and if someone wants their ad in front of the visitors to my sites they can pay me directly, in real dollars for each impression, regardless of whether the viewers click their banners. I see lots of ads in magazines, television and elsewhere but I certainly don't run out and buy the products being pitched every time.
Trips
Whatever happened to our sense of exploration, our sense of wonder?
Most of the comments for this type of stuff do nothing but proclaim anyone with a little imagination as a nut job.
The fact is, IF we do not get off this planet and expand then we as a race are doomed and eventually there will be no trace we even existed.
So the structures some see on Mars may be natural, but at the same time they may be artificial, until we go there ourselves to find out we won't know for sure. I think an ever so slight chance that there is artificial structures on any planet or moon in our solar system needs to be investigated thoroughly and as soon as technically possible.
We trace our own history back almost 4 million years, yet many fail to realize that 4 million years is a drop in the bucket of time compared to the age of just our solar system, a LOT could have happened on the planets circling our sun in that time.
Certainly if at some point a civilization existed on Mars way back when there may be a chance some structures were built that we may be viewing the remains of now. Consider that on Earth, if we were wiped out today evidence of our own existence would persist on the surface for around 1 billion years, after which time it would become more and more difficult to find such evidence at surface level.
There are lots of questions about our own history, questions about just what level of technology ancient civilizations may have had.
Open your minds a little folks, encourage our leaders to spend more on exploring our own solar system than they currently spend on silly shit like weapons of war which ultimately aren't going to do us much good in the long term.
Then again, maybe NASA does know more than they let on (after all, just why aren't we going to the moon anymore?). Personally I think any knowledge that would disprove or bring into question religious beliefs would be suppressed in the US because a majority of the people are believers in such rubbish.
Trips
It's just your bad luck I'd say, or you stuffed the machine full of low cost, crap hardware from manufacturers whose name may begin with Z and end in x.
What do you think IBM and Dell throw in their machines? Stuff they invent themselves?
Do some research before you build, learn what "quality" hardware is.
I put a dual celeron system together, I've had no trouble with it. Before that I had a P200 I threw together myself, again no troubles at all. I've worked for a company that built their own computers, very little if any hardware problems.
There's a difference between throwing a system together to build it the cheapest or throwing one together cheaply with quality parts inside.
BC's biggest cash crop == Weed
:)
Our silly government might legalize it and make money off that too since they see huge tax possiblities here
Not so, BC Hydro shut off the taps just before the rolling blackouts started, at which point they owed BC $300million or so. BC sells to them at market rates, it's not set by NAFTA but my the free market.
:)
:)
We've given them power since then but mostly just to give them some surplus supplies, from what I've heard they still haven't paid their bill either, which sucks because if they pay we're supposed to get a rebate on ours up here! Well gas bill rebates anyways, our power bill hasn't risen much over last year.
Pays to have dams in house I think
Sorry California, if you don't want them big stinky power plants in your State then you're just gonna have to pay the going rate for electricity aren't ya? It's just too bad for you that you aren't the ones setting that rate
I think we'll join in with Oregon and Washington State in saying we don't plan on being an energy farm for California either.
I'm running mine with drives on the ATA33 and ATA66 side, not a problem, run Linux, W2k, BeOS, QNX without a hitch.
You may have had one of the bad ones as others have pointed out to you.
Overall I'm very satisfied with the board, but as the manual says, the board is a beta product anyways and not meant for regular users to be using.
While I agree that sites "should" be written for multiple browsers this is becoming harder and harder to do. Sites either have to code very simple websites that do not take advantage of almost any new web standards or techniques, or the sites have to maintain multiple code bases.
Why is it harder to do? Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) seems to be forgotten nowadays by the crazies who think a website is nothing unless it has some worthless Flash animation on it.
This story reminds me of a problem with my old bank, note I said old, they changed their web banking site for some reason that made it unusable in Linux Netscape, I bugged them for over 3 months to fix it and finally gave up and changed banks.
A couple months later I hear that the reason it wouldn't work in Netscape was because of bad Javascript and Style Sheet code mixed, if you turned off StyleSheet support in Netscape it would work.
I have to ask, was such useless code necessary? No, I was unable to access web banking because someone figured he needed some fancy style sheet code that wasn't 100% cross-browser compatible.
Was it worth losing customers over? I doubt it.
As I told that bank at the time, get rid of the idiot who's using javascript for such tasks as footer layout on the pages, hadn't this joker heard of server side includes or something that wouldn't cause any browser trouble?
Frankly too many website designers try using useless and uneeded code on the client side, if they can't guarantee it will work on all browsers it shouldn't be needed, unless the application in question is aimed at one specific platform to begin with.
Client side code should be kept to an absolute minimum at all times for best results, very few websites need it anyway.
You must not derive your living from the computer industry. If you did, you'd be very interested that the average Joe consumer, upon whose purchases your welfare depends, have a positive experience with computer salespeople. Unless 'techies' want to acquire the positive public image of used-car-shysters, competent salefolk are a essential. Thank god I didn't have to build my car from parts recommended by the guy next door
.. they sold it as a Pentium machine cheap, within 4 months the customer had asked us to fix it any way we could, it meant a new motherboard, etc. His lesson, no more buying prefabs from warehouse outfits.
No I don't work in selling people computers, but, I was at one time working in a store that just happened to sell computers, we built our own from the quality parts I spoke off, our customer satisfaction rate was excellent.
Too many times we had people bring in the brand name stuff wishing to upgrade, only to be told there's not much we can do to it. They're built so that when they become outdated (2 years tops) you have to go and buy an entire new system. Our stuff you could easily upgrade and save a lot doing so.
I don't recommend any prepackaged units to friends and family, and they've all been happy with the units they've purchased and when they want they can watch or help put it together.
I've seen many lemmons from Future Shop and the likes, including one abonamation from Costco, a 486 motherboard with some weird addon board upon which a Pentium CPU was running
Much like the car industry there's good and bad cars, sure you can run out and buy a Pinto, but in the end you'd have been better off buying the Mercedes for a little more.
I agree, I use RBL on all my mail servers, one server I also throw in the DUL and RSS, that one is mostly for my own domain names.
It is effective, when I started getting over a dozen spams a day in each mailbox on my domain I figured enough was enough.
Sorry, but I don't really care if the odd person has trouble emailing my domain, mostly they're trying from crappo free email providers anyways and I tell them to find another one, their most compelling argument is "oh, but this domain name is cooler than those other ones", franky I don't give a damn how cool your email domain name is, if they've been branded as spam sources I don't want mail from them.
I work with a hosting company, during the 2 years I've been here we've had 2 spammers sign up, in the first case we shut them down within 6 hours, zero tolerance, we didn't even receive a complaint but one look at their log file showed they were hiding IP's and it was obvious coming from a spammed email.
In the second case it was a newbie spammer who got right upset when we cut them off, what we've learned so far is that most spammer types seem to hang out in Florida, they're mostly dumb as rocks and are usually the type of morons who fall for the "get rich doing nothing" schemes you see around.
Media3 are obviously spam friendly, hell we wouldn't even accept a client who had "bulk" in their url and seemed to indicate that was bulk email, not worth the hassle of getting blacklisted and that should be enough to police the rest of the ISPs out there.
Chances are Media3 are owned and operated by spammer types to begin with, these marketing geniuses always seem to group themselves together so they can pray on the weak and stupid side of society, which is really their only clientelle.
The computer salespeople at Future Shop shouldn't be your one stop center for advice on how good a computer is.
A friend of mine applied for a job there, they turned him down because he knew too much about computers, basically he knew the crap systems they sell are just that, crap.
You want a good and reliable machine, build one, find an OEM shop close to you or order online, use reliable and brand name parts (ie, NO ZOLTRIX!), research on usenet before buying, see what trouble others may have. It takes a little longer but you pay less and have something you can be proud of as well, not some cloned clunker.
These days building an ATX is easy, our office manager is looking at getting a new computer, I gave her a list of parts, she plans on buying those and then putting it together herself. Of course I will lend a hand where needed but I really think she'll be able to pull it off on her own.
Anyone who simply drops by the local Future Shop, listens to a salesman for advice and gets stuck with a lemmon deserves it, those stores pray on average Joe consumer who'll believe anything the salesman tells them, most of his recommendations are made to up his commissions.
Take it from someone who walks into Future Shop and is purposely ignored by the sales people until I ask for something, after a while they figure out you know more than them and leave you alone to browse. I buy the odd part from them but I'd never grab an entire computer off the shelf.
Here's some pages from Google on the subject ...
:)
http://members.aol.com/pgrsel2/phobos12.htm
http://www.skiesare.demon.co.uk/phob.htm
There's a bunch more sites that discuss it, the final image taken by Phobos2 was never released by the Soviets for some reason.
Again, it is rather weird that we have such a high failure rate for probes sent that way, maybe it's nothing but equipment failures but I know that if the Shuttle missions had a 75% failure rate we wouldn't still be doing those
There's good evidence for this according to Richard Hoagland ... Enterprise Mission.
:)
Let's see, for some reason we've lost more than 75% of missions to that planet, rather high failure rate when we've got other hardware functioning beyond pluto already. Two USSR probes lost in one mission with some weird images being sent in the final minutes of the second probes loss as well.
Hoagland thinks the excuses are rather thin at best, also look for his take on Hubble's first 3 years of "blindness"
This of course assumes that we've hit the peak of propulsion technology and that no new science or possible loopholes in the universe exist that may indeed make interstellar travel much more feasible within a carbon-based lifeforms lifetime.
We're not exactly all that bright a race yet remember, we still enjoy killing and maiming each other, we've only had high-tech such as electricity (on a wide scale basis) for a couple hundred years at best. We have so much more to learn I'd think.
I do agree though that the possibility off ancient civilizations being much more advanced than we currently think they were is probably part of the answer.
However these ancients are much harder to find than traces of current civilization would be, there are many things around today that would survive nicely in the proper packaging and I'm sure some folks have buried such things already.
And don't forget about the space junk we've sent up, much of it will be in orbit for a long time before coming back to earth, I think the Keo(?) satellite is supposed to spend 50,000 years in orbit before plummeting back to the ground, and it's unpowered and in a lower orbit than our communications satellites parked in geo-stationary orbit 27,000 miles away.
There definitely is a bunch of stuff just in our solar system that seems out of the ordinary, a lot of the stuff seems to be some sort of message or riddle left for future civilizations to discover and interpret.
Of course there are many skeptics who just can't believe any of these anomalous objects throughout our system are real, attempts to get the powers at NASA to release untampered with pictures and other info is sometimes met with resistance or they play dumb and say a malfunction occurred with equipment. Funny how that equipment malfunctions at some weird times too.
Do some research into this stuff, look at it from all sides. A good starting point is Enterprise Mission which is the main site for Hoagland's research.
Hoagland has been right about many things in the past and he approaches the subject scientifically and is only asking the questions that need definitive answers, maybe there's nothing to the face on Mars, but the new info from NASA didn't prove it one way or the other since the new pics from MGS were put through filters before being released, why?
Personally I am somewhere in the middle, I think it is very possible that either another advanced civilization existed in our solar system at some point or an alien race or two have been able to travel through the great expanse of space. Or the anomolies may indeed be natural formations with no secrets laying beneath. I don't try and supply answers, I just know there are questions that need answered.
We're talking about a solar system that's 5 BILLION years old here, the possiblities of life on not only this planet but other bodies in the system during that time are pretty good if as current theories are starting to prove life is the norm rather than the exception where conditions exist to support it.
One more thing, over 75% of our missions to Mars have ended in failure, anyone else find this rather high? Considering that we've sent probes well outside our solar system now that have continued to operate well beyond their expected lifetimes, and we have such a dismal failure rate reaching Mars for some reason. Many of the failures have peculiar circumstances surrounding them as well.
Man I hear ya there, I've got one branded with 3dfx all over it still wrapped in the shrink wrap after I realized they don't work worth a damn under Linux and there's no damn Win2k drivers for them either. What a waste! At least I ended up getting 2 for the price of 1 due to some outfits pathetic shipping department, and $50 off to boot! :)
I ended up buying a Hauppauge WinTV and it works just dandy in most OSes, even BeOS picked that up first crack.
Damn, finally a fix and it's too late cause I switched banks over the whole thing ... I figured that any coder who saw fit to use a javascript function to add a footer to a page was slightly screwy anyways :)
.. course that NT stuff might have trouble with that ...
It's like nobody has shown them server side includes or something
I too encountered the problems he had, numerous emails to TD did nothing, I was polite and offered assistance to their MSCE grads doing the website on how to write cross platform code, they just kept telling me it should/might work soon.
:)
Well since they took months with no changes, turned me down for my mortgage anyways and were generally charging too much for too little I moved on!
HSBC has good web banking, although they just started with it a while back and it's still maturing. A month after I signed up their site suddenly suffered from MSCE javascript code too, this time i couldn't even log in at all. So I email them letting them know this and that I'm rather pissed because this is why I left TD Bank, I even had to ask if it was maybe the same guy doing the pages and he'd been hired at HSBC to spite us
HSBC were much more responsive to the errors however, they did fix them and I imagine they forced their coders to check the site out using Linux to make sure it worked, the offending javascript was still in the code but obviously fixed to work on all browsers.
Ahh well, ya try and explain to these kids nowadays that client side code should be used sparingly but they've been brainwashed it seems.
I do all my bill payments using my online banking interface that my branch offers. This is mega convenient, I've never been so up to date with my bills until now, usually as soon as I get the bill in the mail I'll go online and pay it.
When I had to go and mail the money more often than not I'd end up with the money spent before I mailed off the check, so my credit rating still suffers to this day because of that.
I don't think I'd use an outside service to do this though, you should be able to do it all via your bank, mine doesn't charge me extra to do so and in fact encourages its customers to use this method rather than bothering a teller.
As for problems, never seen one yet, soon as I hit the payment button I get a confirmation number that I can use later on if the payment doesn't make it to the company in question.
Originally my bank was using some proprietary software package, but quickly switched to web based banking once enough people bitched about their broken software and the fact that it required Windows didn't help them any.
Umm,
:-)
Might just be me, but I thought that Loki only distributed the game in this case since the Linux development was done my id themselves to get all 3 platforms out at the same time.
I could be wrong
$11.50 a month??? Where are you getting programming dude, I'm paying quite a bit more for that with some alacarte channels, HBO and Disney being the most expensive :)
But yes I do recommend C-Band over small dish technology, the feeds are great and you get some channels that don't make it to the small dish. PPV is available to you as well and with the digital receiver you far surpass the pizza dishes for channel selection.
The driver coming from Creative themselves will not be shareware, the OSS driver on the other hand is shareware.
.. listening to Van Halen right now using it .. wahoo!! :)
I'm just happy now cause I can finally listen to my CD's again in Linux with my Live! with OSS' alpha driver