Re:Buy your friend's "dead" laptop!
on
Low-end Laptops?
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· Score: 1
I'm working on a couple laptops for relatives right now. One's 'dead' due to the hard drive and a quick exchange fixed that. Our luck with relatively new Compaq's isn't that great. It seems their DC power connectors don't work very well after a few months. They will have the laptops plugged in and the battery will never charge or the machine will die while they are using it because the plug doesn't make proper contact. My sister's Presario fried a couple chips on the motherboard because of that.
Re:Low end laptops are tough...
on
Low-end Laptops?
·
· Score: 1
If ebay is an indicator of anything, the really cheap laptops will be the ones that don't have a CDROM drive. One can still find a Pentium laptop with a CDROM sometimes in the $200-300 price range though. Unfortunately, they may still have unique RAM cards and the only thing that may be upgradeable would be the hard drive. While it's not the $80 that the original poster would like, it's not bad. It's better than the 386 laptop that I have that has the HD soldered to the motherboard.
Why not do what Moshe Bar did and run Linux S/390 on a
PC using Hercules? Sure the IBM site certainly has more resources, but if it's to just periodically recompile/test a few programs, it may not be too bad to do it on your own hardware. I suppose it could also be a good reason if you are developing a closed source program and are paranoid about having the source on another company's site.
From what I've read, the major flaw with the Kyoto treaty is that it doesn't apply equal standards to the industrialized and developing countries. To me, this seems like a big loophole that will just ecourage industries that generate a lot of pollution to move to the developing countries instead of trying to improve their processes and become more efficient. The industrialized nations have (pretty much) learned their lessons on pollution. Why allow the developing countries to make the same mistakes? Forcing all nations to stick to the same standard seems like it would be best way to go.
Limiting oil imports also reduces the need to be dependant on potentially unstable regions of the world and sticking our noses into their politics. Admit it. If Iraq and Kuwait didn't have any natural resources that were strategic to our economy, would the US and the rest of the West fought a war and kept troops in that region? Probably not.
I do like being effcient as I can since it saves me money. If something pollutes, even if it's cheap, it will cost more money down the road to clean it up. That's money that could be spent for more worthwhile projects. It's odd that most of the drive for clean & efficient power is primarily being hyped from the environmental standpoint. Sure many people care, but probably a lot more don't care or are indifferent -- it doesn't impact them directly, so it's ignored (some probably buy big fat inefficient vehicles just to piss off the tree hugger types). I'd say that a lot more are concerned with the amount of funds in their bank accounts.
deliberately misleading the people to maintain their revenue streams is a very serious, and largely unsupportable, allegation
Maintaining the revenue stream is very important. I worked at a federal lab in the late 80s/early 90s when the global warming/change issue first started to hit big with the public. The primary focus of the installation since the 70s was for archiving, processing and interpreting remotely sensed data, so there always were some people working on enviromental impact studies. However, at one point it seemed that the unwritten rule for the science branch was to try to tie in as much of their research as they could in some way with global change, since that's where the big bucks were. Especially after Clinton/Gore were elected. I respect these people very much and I don't think that any of them would stoop low enough to fudge data in order to get funding. Many projects were trying to improve quality of the data used in some climate models to reduce the wide variations that were observed depending on the land coverage data being used.
However, given how tight some researchers' budgets are, there is certainly the temptation of fudging things to go along with the flow in order to secure funding. It's harder to get funding if the research goes against the status quo, politically and scientifically (more the former than the latter). No one wants to be ostracized from a group of their peers, especially if it means a practical end of your career. If the author has flaws in his publication, they should be calmly and rationally pointed out. IMHO, given the level of vitriol leveled at this guy, it seems to me that he's struck a nerve and may actually be right about a few things. The name calling and pie in the face is something I'd expect from a bunch of immature kids.
The V-Rod looks like one sweet bike. What do you think about the Thunderrod - a motorcycle with a 355HP V8? I saw one once and it was interesting. It's about 2x the price of a V-Rod, though and I'm sure the mileage would suck.
gIDE (which seems to have disappeared) and the like. Buy kylix. That's the root to acceptence. Make things real people can develop with.
According to a recent GNotices, gIDE and Anjuta are going to be merged for Gnome 2. So if 'real people' can't develop with vi/Emacs, what do you call those that are productive with those tools? Personally, I can't stand GUI IDEs.
I haven't had any problems with it over-winding, but it will wind down and stop if it hasn't been worn for a couple days. That's fine with me as long as it runs and keeps accurate time after I take it off before going to bed. Since I can see the spring, I know if I need to do some extra fidgeting during the course of the day.
I agree. I didn't get a Seiko, but I did get this watch. I like not having to buy batteries or remember to wind it up. I've had a few people comment that it was a cool watch because one can watch the gears and pendulum move.
The company that I worked for considered using GPG for a project. I had pushed for it but it was met with a lot of resistance until it was discovered that another group in the company was using it (typical programmers don't know anything, will listen only to another PHB attitude). Unfortunately, the other organization that we would be sending the data to refused to accept it if it was anything other than the commercial PGP.
So you may win over people inside your company, but if the recipients are stuck in the 'proprietary software only' mindset you may have to keep PGP around for them. There are companies that have explicit IT dept guidelines banning open source, freeware, and shareware -- even if it's bundled with a commercial product. PeopleSoft claimed it had to ship an alternative commercial *nix web server with it's software for those companies where Apache would be against the set in stone policies.
If you choose to run a Debian based Linux distribution, apt-get is not an obscure tool. It's probably the main reason many people choose to run it. It makes upgrading the system extremely simple and is very easy to use. Besides, how did typing in something from a CLI become something that people use to boost their ego? Being able to read simple online help and typing a command in doesn't make someone a person better than another. It's not rocket science.
I like Macs. I just wish I had the money buy a new one, so I'm not an Apple hater, but I do prefer typing to point-and-clicking. Even if Software Update is easy to use, one would still want to read up a little on it to find out what it can and can't do and to know how it can bite you. (Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I like knowing a little about the operation of a program that updates the system software before I start playing around with it.) How is that different than looking at the apt-get man page for a minute or two?..not countless hours. It's not hard to understand and none of this has anything to do with ego, so why even bring it up?
Besides the scientists that would make the best use of clustering are much smarter than I am, so if I can 'get it', they certainly should be able to.
spending quite a lot of time figuring out how to use the incredubly arcane "apt"
IMHO, if it takes you more than 1-2 minutes looking at the apt-get man page to figure out how to use it, you have problems. It wouldn't be difficult to define a menu option that does just that in your favorite window manager either. Just because it's a command line program, it doesn't mean it's difficult to learn or use.
BTW, my gripe is not with the MIME standard or how various mailers may or may not implement it. It is with its use. Sure there are cases where having both is needed and it works great. However, for what most people use html email for, it's over kill. And yes efficiency in terms of message size does matter. Sure it could be smaller if it was compressed at the message level, but portability is more important since compression can be done when it is stored or during transmission. Even with compression, an email with text and html is going to take up more space than one with just text. This is a consideration if you are archiving thousands of messages or have metered internet access where you pay by the minute or by the byte. I hate getting lots email with duplicate content when I'm traveling since it ends up costing me more to download it. My sister didn't understand my 'only plain text email' attitude until she moved to the Caribbean for a few years. She went from a relatively fast flat rate or free service to one that was slow and had very expensive per minute charges. She started telling people to cut out the html, use Bcc if sending to a big group, and to clip address headers of messages that have been forwarded several times.
People have the same sort of gripe about those who include huge signatures or when replying to a 100 line email, cite all of it and include a line or two as the response. It's a waste of a shared resource and is inconsiderate to the recipient of the message.
My mail client can handle it, but it just seems to be a waste when most of the time, the html tagged part doesn't look any different than the text section or if it does, it is quite annoying. It is better than the situation where the email is sent with just html tagging (and lots of it) and no MIME headers so the mail program can treat it properly. Fortunately, most of that is spam, so I don't care if I can't read it. I've never seen mailing list digests handle html email properly either. Maybe the mailing list software could rip out the html and just use the text, but none that I've subscribed to do that.
Don't you see the problem? Look at all the overhead that's tacked on because some marketing bozo wants his email to look 'pretty'. IMHO, MIME is ok for adding attachments for images, data files, sounds, etc. Sending two copies of the same message, one in plain text and the other with tons of markup seems a bit ridiculous to me. Do you send all the other recipients of an email that's been forwarded a dozen times when you forward the letter on to someone else?
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
Wow, have you been misled. Outlook has it's own crappy database format. It puts all of your mail into one huge binary file.
And just think, MS has plans to replace the file system with a SQL server database. The Register has an article about it with a link to a paper by Hans Reiser concerning similar work.
My wife had AOL, and yes, their email and web clients sucked. However, there wasn't anything stopping a person from downloading a new version of netscape/explorer/fetch/micq/etc. and using it like a normal ISP providing TCP/IP access. The web based interface to their email system wasn't too bad. It helped keep people from trying to install AOL on their work machines just so they could read email during lunch. Sure they have lots of aol-only content that had to be accessed via their program, but one could still ignore all of that and use standard tools to access the Net (an ISP with a really bloated dialer). Whether their users do that or stick with what AOL provides is another story.
Add another one: will run w/o electrical system. I was on a date and on the drive home, the alternator in the car went out. However, since it was a diesel, I could still drive it. It was about a 30 mile trip, but luckily there was a full moon out that night and no one else was on the road.
That we stop referring to these vehicles as SUVs. Only a small minority of the owners actually use then for off road sporting type functions or use them to haul lots of equipment that would classify them as being a utility vehicle. Face it, 80-90% of them are used for commuting, running down to the store to pick up a bag of groceries and the ever popular picking up kids at school. How about these choices:
MSW - Macho Station Wagon. It's or the guys that wouldn't be caught dead in a station wagon or minivan, but would drive an MSW to do the same functions.
SSV - Status Symbol Vehicle. Face it. No one is going to take their Caddilac, Mercedes, or Lincoln off road. They cost too much. It's to show the neighbors that you have lots of money. Which leads to...
MMTBV - More Money Than Brains Vehicle. Given that they cost $250/month more than an equivilant luxury car in operating costs, the smart rich dude, while still wanting to show off, knows better than to burn money on such expenses.
If anyone can think of any more, I'd like to hear them....Looks like I need to change my sig again. Damn
Of course if his company is the type where things have to be bought or needs 24 bit color, sound, and local printing for the apps, he can always get WinConnect.
(hopefully rdesktop supports that too, but I couldn't determine that from the website).
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I'm working on a couple laptops for relatives right now. One's 'dead' due to the hard drive and a quick exchange fixed that. Our luck with relatively new Compaq's isn't that great. It seems their DC power connectors don't work very well after a few months. They will have the laptops plugged in and the battery will never charge or the machine will die while they are using it because the plug doesn't make proper contact. My sister's Presario fried a couple chips on the motherboard because of that.
If ebay is an indicator of anything, the really cheap laptops will be the ones that don't have a CDROM drive. One can still find a Pentium laptop with a CDROM sometimes in the $200-300 price range though. Unfortunately, they may still have unique RAM cards and the only thing that may be upgradeable would be the hard drive. While it's not the $80 that the original poster would like, it's not bad. It's better than the 386 laptop that I have that has the HD soldered to the motherboard.
They don't look that great either. What's that a picture of? A 486 model that Compaq stopped making at least 7 years ago.
Indeed, Kentucky citizens are permitted to kill fleeing felons while making a citizen's arrest (Kentucky Criminal Code 37; S 43, 44.)
I wonder how many times that excuse has been used?
Why not do what Moshe Bar did and run Linux S/390 on a PC using Hercules? Sure the IBM site certainly has more resources, but if it's to just periodically recompile/test a few programs, it may not be too bad to do it on your own hardware. I suppose it could also be a good reason if you are developing a closed source program and are paranoid about having the source on another company's site.
From what I've read, the major flaw with the Kyoto treaty is that it doesn't apply equal standards to the industrialized and developing countries. To me, this seems like a big loophole that will just ecourage industries that generate a lot of pollution to move to the developing countries instead of trying to improve their processes and become more efficient. The industrialized nations have (pretty much) learned their lessons on pollution. Why allow the developing countries to make the same mistakes? Forcing all nations to stick to the same standard seems like it would be best way to go.
Limiting oil imports also reduces the need to be dependant on potentially unstable regions of the world and sticking our noses into their politics. Admit it. If Iraq and Kuwait didn't have any natural resources that were strategic to our economy, would the US and the rest of the West fought a war and kept troops in that region? Probably not.
I do like being effcient as I can since it saves me money. If something pollutes, even if it's cheap, it will cost more money down the road to clean it up. That's money that could be spent for more worthwhile projects. It's odd that most of the drive for clean & efficient power is primarily being hyped from the environmental standpoint. Sure many people care, but probably a lot more don't care or are indifferent -- it doesn't impact them directly, so it's ignored (some probably buy big fat inefficient vehicles just to piss off the tree hugger types). I'd say that a lot more are concerned with the amount of funds in their bank accounts.
deliberately misleading the people to maintain their revenue streams is a very serious, and largely unsupportable, allegation
Maintaining the revenue stream is very important. I worked at a federal lab in the late 80s/early 90s when the global warming/change issue first started to hit big with the public. The primary focus of the installation since the 70s was for archiving, processing and interpreting remotely sensed data, so there always were some people working on enviromental impact studies. However, at one point it seemed that the unwritten rule for the science branch was to try to tie in as much of their research as they could in some way with global change, since that's where the big bucks were. Especially after Clinton/Gore were elected. I respect these people very much and I don't think that any of them would stoop low enough to fudge data in order to get funding. Many projects were trying to improve quality of the data used in some climate models to reduce the wide variations that were observed depending on the land coverage data being used.
However, given how tight some researchers' budgets are, there is certainly the temptation of fudging things to go along with the flow in order to secure funding. It's harder to get funding if the research goes against the status quo, politically and scientifically (more the former than the latter). No one wants to be ostracized from a group of their peers, especially if it means a practical end of your career. If the author has flaws in his publication, they should be calmly and rationally pointed out. IMHO, given the level of vitriol leveled at this guy, it seems to me that he's struck a nerve and may actually be right about a few things. The name calling and pie in the face is something I'd expect from a bunch of immature kids.
The V-Rod looks like one sweet bike. What do you think about the Thunderrod - a motorcycle with a 355HP V8? I saw one once and it was interesting. It's about 2x the price of a V-Rod, though and I'm sure the mileage would suck.
gIDE (which seems to have disappeared) and the like. Buy kylix. That's the root to acceptence. Make things real people can develop with.
According to a recent GNotices, gIDE and Anjuta are going to be merged for Gnome 2. So if 'real people' can't develop with vi/Emacs, what do you call those that are productive with those tools? Personally, I can't stand GUI IDEs.
I haven't had any problems with it over-winding, but it will wind down and stop if it hasn't been worn for a couple days. That's fine with me as long as it runs and keeps accurate time after I take it off before going to bed. Since I can see the spring, I know if I need to do some extra fidgeting during the course of the day.
I agree. I didn't get a Seiko, but I did get this watch. I like not having to buy batteries or remember to wind it up. I've had a few people comment that it was a cool watch because one can watch the gears and pendulum move.
The company that I worked for considered using GPG for a project. I had pushed for it but it was met with a lot of resistance until it was discovered that another group in the company was using it (typical programmers don't know anything, will listen only to another PHB attitude). Unfortunately, the other organization that we would be sending the data to refused to accept it if it was anything other than the commercial PGP.
So you may win over people inside your company, but if the recipients are stuck in the 'proprietary software only' mindset you may have to keep PGP around for them. There are companies that have explicit IT dept guidelines banning open source, freeware, and shareware -- even if it's bundled with a commercial product. PeopleSoft claimed it had to ship an alternative commercial *nix web server with it's software for those companies where Apache would be against the set in stone policies.
If you choose to run a Debian based Linux distribution, apt-get is not an obscure tool. It's probably the main reason many people choose to run it. It makes upgrading the system extremely simple and is very easy to use. Besides, how did typing in something from a CLI become something that people use to boost their ego? Being able to read simple online help and typing a command in doesn't make someone a person better than another. It's not rocket science.
I like Macs. I just wish I had the money buy a new one, so I'm not an Apple hater, but I do prefer typing to point-and-clicking. Even if Software Update is easy to use, one would still want to read up a little on it to find out what it can and can't do and to know how it can bite you. (Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I like knowing a little about the operation of a program that updates the system software before I start playing around with it.) How is that different than looking at the apt-get man page for a minute or two?..not countless hours. It's not hard to understand and none of this has anything to do with ego, so why even bring it up?
Besides the scientists that would make the best use of clustering are much smarter than I am, so if I can 'get it', they certainly should be able to.
spending quite a lot of time figuring out how to use the incredubly arcane "apt"
IMHO, if it takes you more than 1-2 minutes looking at the apt-get man page to figure out how to use it, you have problems. It wouldn't be difficult to define a menu option that does just that in your favorite window manager either. Just because it's a command line program, it doesn't mean it's difficult to learn or use.
BTW, my gripe is not with the MIME standard or how various mailers may or may not implement it. It is with its use. Sure there are cases where having both is needed and it works great. However, for what most people use html email for, it's over kill. And yes efficiency in terms of message size does matter. Sure it could be smaller if it was compressed at the message level, but portability is more important since compression can be done when it is stored or during transmission. Even with compression, an email with text and html is going to take up more space than one with just text. This is a consideration if you are archiving thousands of messages or have metered internet access where you pay by the minute or by the byte. I hate getting lots email with duplicate content when I'm traveling since it ends up costing me more to download it. My sister didn't understand my 'only plain text email' attitude until she moved to the Caribbean for a few years. She went from a relatively fast flat rate or free service to one that was slow and had very expensive per minute charges. She started telling people to cut out the html, use Bcc if sending to a big group, and to clip address headers of messages that have been forwarded several times.
People have the same sort of gripe about those who include huge signatures or when replying to a 100 line email, cite all of it and include a line or two as the response. It's a waste of a shared resource and is inconsiderate to the recipient of the message.
My mail client can handle it, but it just seems to be a waste when most of the time, the html tagged part doesn't look any different than the text section or if it does, it is quite annoying. It is better than the situation where the email is sent with just html tagging (and lots of it) and no MIME headers so the mail program can treat it properly. Fortunately, most of that is spam, so I don't care if I can't read it. I've never seen mailing list digests handle html email properly either. Maybe the mailing list software could rip out the html and just use the text, but none that I've subscribed to do that.
Maybe there should be a required netiquette section for any class on how to use a computer.
Wow, have you been misled. Outlook has it's own crappy database format. It puts all of your mail into one huge binary file.
And just think, MS has plans to replace the file system with a SQL server database. The Register has an article about it with a link to a paper by Hans Reiser concerning similar work.
My wife had AOL, and yes, their email and web clients sucked. However, there wasn't anything stopping a person from downloading a new version of netscape/explorer/fetch/micq/etc. and using it like a normal ISP providing TCP/IP access. The web based interface to their email system wasn't too bad. It helped keep people from trying to install AOL on their work machines just so they could read email during lunch. Sure they have lots of aol-only content that had to be accessed via their program, but one could still ignore all of that and use standard tools to access the Net (an ISP with a really bloated dialer). Whether their users do that or stick with what AOL provides is another story.
Add another one: will run w/o electrical system. I was on a date and on the drive home, the alternator in the car went out. However, since it was a diesel, I could still drive it. It was about a 30 mile trip, but luckily there was a full moon out that night and no one else was on the road.
That we stop referring to these vehicles as SUVs. Only a small minority of the owners actually use then for off road sporting type functions or use them to haul lots of equipment that would classify them as being a utility vehicle. Face it, 80-90% of them are used for commuting, running down to the store to pick up a bag of groceries and the ever popular picking up kids at school. How about these choices:
If anyone can think of any more, I'd like to hear them....Looks like I need to change my sig again. Damn
You can buy them directly from the SONICblue Online Store for $499. Here is the catalog page
Of course if his company is the type where things have to be bought or needs 24 bit color, sound, and local printing for the apps, he can always get WinConnect. (hopefully rdesktop supports that too, but I couldn't determine that from the website).