Yeah right, I just started an advanced Java programming class in school. OO experience required and all of that stuff.. But anyway the first day they told us that we would be programming on win2k machines using the standard Sun CLI tools + notepad.exe! Yikes, I can still use that, but using a real text editor will increase productivity tremendously. I'll probably just use gvim.exe whether they like it or not. What kind of 'advanced programming' class would advocate the use of notepad?? You can't do any real work with that POS..
There is a huge difference between the size of the napster setup file and the OpenOffice setup file. Not a big deal if you have bandwidth, but a huge obstacle if you are on =56k.
I'm not sure about their computer support, but I think that their printer support is very good. We use nothing but Laserjet printers at work, and I have had to call HP a few times on some minor issues. Their techs seem to be trained on a very small number of printers, so they know a lot about one particualar model and not a little about a lot of models.
I have never seen one of their computers, but I have heard that they are crap. I really like their laser printers though!
Or how about buying two computers, two NICs, and a crossover cable and just telnet to the other one? I'll let you guess which OS you'll be telneting to:) This way you don't have to leave your primary OS to access the other one.
If it was only that easy.. You're forgetting about the support costs. You're going to have to hire more techs to answer phone calls and more people to test various hardware configurations. OEMs already offer a lot of flexibility as far as hardware goes. All of that stuff is tested under windows, if you use another OS you're going to have to duplicate testing effort. The downside to this is that supports costs rise. If you throw in another OS, you might not _double_ support costs, but you'll come pretty close.
What the hell are you talking about, HP makes great products. Their laserjet line is excellent, we have about eight 4000s/4050s/5000s at work and I rarely have problems with them. One of the few devices that I can just buy, put in place, and then forget about.
huh? you have to setup HW twice when you use two separate boxes -and- you have twice as much hardware. But when you have one box, you still have to setup the hardware twice (once per OS), but you only have 1 video card, 1 soundcard, 1 scsi adapter, 1 monitor, etc.
I personally like to have a dedicated hard disc for linux and a dedicated drive for windows. Then a common area for data (usually a partition, formatted as FAT32 so windows can read it).
Lets face it, the idea of dual-booting a system for Joe Blow is a really dumb idea for an OEM. Dell tried to offer linux as an option and they lost money and had to dump the support. I have a difficult time synching between three operating systems myself.
However, I think that if they released it completely unsupported, that would be a good start. And even better, allow systems to be sold _without_ the windows tax, even if the software and OS is completely unsupported.
Well, I think that the way thin clients work is that the terminal actually does very little processing. Keystrokes and mouse clicks/movements are the only things sent over the wire. The X server then sends the state of the screen(?). So a P75 with 24MB of RAM should do just fine.
I wonder if they are using hard discs in these machines or not? I might actually try this at work if I didn't have to use a hard disc. I have an office filled with P166 machines with 32MB of RAM that I can't use.
You can download it, but you have to either have Adobe Acrobat installed (not the reader) or have to prove ownership of Acrobat somehow. I can't really remember. As other people have pointed out, just printing to a ps file in windows and then running it through ps2pdf works very well for creating pdf files.
heh, I just tried this on my win98se system with 256MB of RAM and 5.6GB (a little over 1,000 files) of mp3s. One process seemed to work OK, except that winamp hung for about 30 seconds. Then I enabled multiple instances and saved all of my work:) It probably won't surprise anybody that win98 died shortly after I tried this. The weird thing was that the system was still trying to play several mp3s, but the entire system had locked up.. I waited about 5 minutes, and then punched the reset button.
but will XP play my games? That will be the big selling point for me, not only does it have to work with my games, but the performance in these games would have to be as good as 9x as well. I tried windows 2000 at home and even though it is still installed on my machine, I never use it anymore because the performance in some of my favorite games sucks so badly. Example, my framerate in Windows 2000 running winquake.exe is _less than half_ of what it is in win98se. I don't see how XP is going to be compatible with old 9x games so from a gamer's POV, I'll stick with 9x. Even if they do manage to get these games working, I'm sure it will still have the horrible performance that windows 2000 has.
Has anyone been able to figure out the difference between the Insprion 8000 and the Latitude C800? We buy nothing but Dell laptops and work and both types have crossed my desk. The funny thing is that they seem almost identical, same chassis and everything... I think both are great though, if you need a powerful laptop and don't care that much about weight and battery life, this is worth looking into. And for a laptop, it's relatively cheap at around $2,000 base.
I think that if somebody wrote something similar to this for apache, we would get similar results. It wouldn't be _this_ bad, but still.. look at attrition and you can tell that there are a lot of people that don't secure their webservers (both apache and IIS). However, the graph showing the spike in NT defacements is pretty funny. They really should teach people in those classes that there is more to setting up a server than popping in the CD and clicking next a couple of times.
I don't think that the HOWTO pages are a good way to learn linux. I would recommend a 'learning' book from oreilly and/or web resources like rute. Both have been a big help to me.
Well, it sucks because I can't remember 15 different passwords. I started keeping a hint list in a safe place a few months ago, but balancing all of my usernames / passwords for various online apps, work, school, and home has become difficult.
At school, for example, valid passwords can not contain any symbols and passwords must be sent over telnet (no ssh). Therefore, I can't use my primary password since I have to keep that secure for online banking, work and such. So I am forced to come up with some new, throwaway password that won't compromise the rest of my stuff if it gets out. And to make matters worse, school also uses some kind of Microsoft authentication system that, much like the previous comment, keeps a list of all passwords that you have used in the last X number of months and then adds those to the invalid password list. Bleh, so I just came up with an increment that I add to my throwaway password.
I think that the biggest problem is a lack of standards when it comes to password restrictions. For example, at work we use "three out of the five classes of characters" must be in your password, and then that password must be at least five characters long.. Then when I looked into online banking the other day, it requires a password five characters or less. NECXdirect won't accept symbols. Some systems only accept numbers. Of course, usernames are a completely different problem. they are almost like a secondary password now...
Hey, you'll just ruin it for everyone else! When the MPAA learns of this, they will send their own shuttle to the moon to destroy the compact disk. About two million people are going to be pissed that their name is no longer on the moon.
You can navigate most of Windows without double-clicking the mouse button. Some versions of windows has a single-click feature that you can enable so that double-clicking on files and shortcuts is not necessary. It almost makes the entire computer look and feel like a web browser. I don't personally think this feature is any good, but if somebody has problems double-clicking it is worth trying.
distributed systems like gnutella and its clones don't scale and are too slow to be of any use on the Internet. FTP has gone down the tubes in the last few years. Even though such sites as oth still exist, getting music is still very difficult on FTP. I don't see how newsgroups / IRC will help much, since they are not automated.
I think most people that have used napster and FTP and gnuetlla can tell you that napster really was the best method of obtaining mp3s at one point in time. I am hoping that Napigator / opennap takes off though.
I have the same card, I probably should have mentioned that I am running windows 2000. I have seen some reports on the Internet that the nvidia implementation of direct3d on win2k is pretty bad. Under win9x, the performace will probably be fine, but I don't want to install win98, just for this game...
that sounds something like the direct 3d problem in Diablo II. The game ran great under my voodoo3 2000 in glide mode. Then when I upgraded to a geforce2mx card and had to run under direct3d, performance was horrible. The game is actually playable under 2d directdraw.
Other games run great under the new card in direct3d mode, I just wish that game companies would work closer with video card manufacturers to ensure compatibility and decent performance.
Well, you can't really complain about being duped because it is clearly mentioned on their website on a FAQ. If you are even interested in rewriting the ROM that the OS sits on, you in the minority. Most users of the handspring visor don't even know what flash memory or an OS is... So basically, I think that as a consumer, you have to read the technical specs on these things if you want to do things like upgrade the OS that lives on ROM. This is one of those things you can not learn from most reviews of the product by various companies such as CNET or ZDNET. Also, you probably won't find this type of technical information on the box as well, so your only option is to check out the specifications on the website, before you even consider buying one.
someone else mentioned this as well, but most CD-writers support CD-RW discs. This will allow you to format a CD-RW to act exactly like a floppy (or zip) disc. There are appropriate redirectors available in every major OS (not enabled by default, usually) to make this very transparent. No employee retraining is necessary either because it acts just like a big 570MB floppy disc.
However, the issue with compatibility is a big one. CD-RW discs can not be read in most CD-ROM drives. But then, zip discs can not be read in most computers, so you can not really say that one is any more compatible with another. If you really need compatibility, CD-writers have the ability to write to CD-R media. This gives them a big advantage over other types of removable media imho.
Well, the reason why people run as administrator so often on a windows NT/2000 machine is that Windows lacks an easy way of starting a new graphical shell on top of the existing one as an administrator. Actually, I am not even sure if this is possible...
If I am logged into an NT machine (with a default setup) as an unprivledged user and I need to do something as an administrator, I am forced to close all of the programs I am currently in and log off/log back on as an administrator. Under Windows 2000, you can use the 'run as...' feature, but it still does not allow the user to do enough to make it a replacement for su like behavior. Since I hate logging off/logging back on just to do one little task as an administrator, I just run as an administrator all of the time on my NT/2000 machines. Maybe if Microsoft develops a GUI version of su I will switch. The command line version of su that I have tried is difficult to use as well since it is not very intuitive on how to control NT/2000 from the command line. It is so much easier in linux...
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Yeah right, I just started an advanced Java programming class in school. OO experience required and all of that stuff.. But anyway the first day they told us that we would be programming on win2k machines using the standard Sun CLI tools + notepad.exe! Yikes, I can still use that, but using a real text editor will increase productivity tremendously. I'll probably just use gvim.exe whether they like it or not. What kind of 'advanced programming' class would advocate the use of notepad?? You can't do any real work with that POS..
example:
c:\> javac MyClass.java
error line 503
How am I supposed to find line 503 with notepad?
There is a huge difference between the size of the napster setup file and the OpenOffice setup file. Not a big deal if you have bandwidth, but a huge obstacle if you are on =56k.
I'm not sure about their computer support, but I think that their printer support is very good. We use nothing but Laserjet printers at work, and I have had to call HP a few times on some minor issues. Their techs seem to be trained on a very small number of printers, so they know a lot about one particualar model and not a little about a lot of models.
I have never seen one of their computers, but I have heard that they are crap. I really like their laser printers though!
Very sad news.. the goatse man died today.
Or how about buying two computers, two NICs, and a crossover cable and just telnet to the other one? I'll let you guess which OS you'll be telneting to :) This way you don't have to leave your primary OS to access the other one.
If it was only that easy.. You're forgetting about the support costs. You're going to have to hire more techs to answer phone calls and more people to test various hardware configurations. OEMs already offer a lot of flexibility as far as hardware goes. All of that stuff is tested under windows, if you use another OS you're going to have to duplicate testing effort. The downside to this is that supports costs rise. If you throw in another OS, you might not _double_ support costs, but you'll come pretty close.
What the hell are you talking about, HP makes great products. Their laserjet line is excellent, we have about eight 4000s/4050s/5000s at work and I rarely have problems with them. One of the few devices that I can just buy, put in place, and then forget about.
huh? you have to setup HW twice when you use two separate boxes -and- you have twice as much hardware. But when you have one box, you still have to setup the hardware twice (once per OS), but you only have 1 video card, 1 soundcard, 1 scsi adapter, 1 monitor, etc.
I personally like to have a dedicated hard disc for linux and a dedicated drive for windows. Then a common area for data (usually a partition, formatted as FAT32 so windows can read it).
Lets face it, the idea of dual-booting a system for Joe Blow is a really dumb idea for an OEM. Dell tried to offer linux as an option and they lost money and had to dump the support. I have a difficult time synching between three operating systems myself.
However, I think that if they released it completely unsupported, that would be a good start. And even better, allow systems to be sold _without_ the windows tax, even if the software and OS is completely unsupported.
Well, I think that the way thin clients work is that the terminal actually does very little processing. Keystrokes and mouse clicks/movements are the only things sent over the wire. The X server then sends the state of the screen(?). So a P75 with 24MB of RAM should do just fine.
I wonder if they are using hard discs in these machines or not? I might actually try this at work if I didn't have to use a hard disc. I have an office filled with P166 machines with 32MB of RAM that I can't use.
You can download it, but you have to either have Adobe Acrobat installed (not the reader) or have to prove ownership of Acrobat somehow. I can't really remember. As other people have pointed out, just printing to a ps file in windows and then running it through ps2pdf works very well for creating pdf files.
heh, I just tried this on my win98se system with 256MB of RAM and 5.6GB (a little over 1,000 files) of mp3s. One process seemed to work OK, except that winamp hung for about 30 seconds. Then I enabled multiple instances and saved all of my work :) It probably won't surprise anybody that win98 died shortly after I tried this. The weird thing was that the system was still trying to play several mp3s, but the entire system had locked up.. I waited about 5 minutes, and then punched the reset button.
but will XP play my games? That will be the big selling point for me, not only does it have to work with my games, but the performance in these games would have to be as good as 9x as well. I tried windows 2000 at home and even though it is still installed on my machine, I never use it anymore because the performance in some of my favorite games sucks so badly. Example, my framerate in Windows 2000 running winquake.exe is _less than half_ of what it is in win98se. I don't see how XP is going to be compatible with old 9x games so from a gamer's POV, I'll stick with 9x. Even if they do manage to get these games working, I'm sure it will still have the horrible performance that windows 2000 has.
Has anyone been able to figure out the difference between the Insprion 8000 and the Latitude C800? We buy nothing but Dell laptops and work and both types have crossed my desk. The funny thing is that they seem almost identical, same chassis and everything... I think both are great though, if you need a powerful laptop and don't care that much about weight and battery life, this is worth looking into. And for a laptop, it's relatively cheap at around $2,000 base.
I think that if somebody wrote something similar to this for apache, we would get similar results. It wouldn't be _this_ bad, but still.. look at attrition and you can tell that there are a lot of people that don't secure their webservers (both apache and IIS). However, the graph showing the spike in NT defacements is pretty funny. They really should teach people in those classes that there is more to setting up a server than popping in the CD and clicking next a couple of times.
I don't think that the HOWTO pages are a good way to learn linux. I would recommend a 'learning' book from oreilly and/or web resources like rute. Both have been a big help to me.
Well, it sucks because I can't remember 15 different passwords. I started keeping a hint list in a safe place a few months ago, but balancing all of my usernames / passwords for various online apps, work, school, and home has become difficult.
At school, for example, valid passwords can not contain any symbols and passwords must be sent over telnet (no ssh). Therefore, I can't use my primary password since I have to keep that secure for online banking, work and such. So I am forced to come up with some new, throwaway password that won't compromise the rest of my stuff if it gets out. And to make matters worse, school also uses some kind of Microsoft authentication system that, much like the previous comment, keeps a list of all passwords that you have used in the last X number of months and then adds those to the invalid password list. Bleh, so I just came up with an increment that I add to my throwaway password.
I think that the biggest problem is a lack of standards when it comes to password restrictions. For example, at work we use "three out of the five classes of characters" must be in your password, and then that password must be at least five characters long.. Then when I looked into online banking the other day, it requires a password five characters or less. NECXdirect won't accept symbols. Some systems only accept numbers. Of course, usernames are a completely different problem. they are almost like a secondary password now...
Hey, you'll just ruin it for everyone else! When the MPAA learns of this, they will send their own shuttle to the moon to destroy the compact disk. About two million people are going to be pissed that their name is no longer on the moon.
You can navigate most of Windows without double-clicking the mouse button. Some versions of windows has a single-click feature that you can enable so that double-clicking on files and shortcuts is not necessary. It almost makes the entire computer look and feel like a web browser. I don't personally think this feature is any good, but if somebody has problems double-clicking it is worth trying.
> ... Napster is now only of historical interest
distributed systems like gnutella and its clones don't scale and are too slow to be of any use on the Internet. FTP has gone down the tubes in the last few years. Even though such sites as oth still exist, getting music is still very difficult on FTP. I don't see how newsgroups / IRC will help much, since they are not automated.
I think most people that have used napster and FTP and gnuetlla can tell you that napster really was the best method of obtaining mp3s at one point in time. I am hoping that Napigator / opennap takes off though.
I have the same card, I probably should have mentioned that I am running windows 2000. I have seen some reports on the Internet that the nvidia implementation of direct3d on win2k is pretty bad. Under win9x, the performace will probably be fine, but I don't want to install win98, just for this game...
that sounds something like the direct 3d problem in Diablo II. The game ran great under my voodoo3 2000 in glide mode. Then when I upgraded to a geforce2mx card and had to run under direct3d, performance was horrible. The game is actually playable under 2d directdraw.
Other games run great under the new card in direct3d mode, I just wish that game companies would work closer with video card manufacturers to ensure compatibility and decent performance.
Well, you can't really complain about being duped because it is clearly mentioned on their website on a FAQ. If you are even interested in rewriting the ROM that the OS sits on, you in the minority. Most users of the handspring visor don't even know what flash memory or an OS is... So basically, I think that as a consumer, you have to read the technical specs on these things if you want to do things like upgrade the OS that lives on ROM. This is one of those things you can not learn from most reviews of the product by various companies such as CNET or ZDNET. Also, you probably won't find this type of technical information on the box as well, so your only option is to check out the specifications on the website, before you even consider buying one.
someone else mentioned this as well, but most CD-writers support CD-RW discs. This will allow you to format a CD-RW to act exactly like a floppy (or zip) disc. There are appropriate redirectors available in every major OS (not enabled by default, usually) to make this very transparent. No employee retraining is necessary either because it acts just like a big 570MB floppy disc.
However, the issue with compatibility is a big one. CD-RW discs can not be read in most CD-ROM drives. But then, zip discs can not be read in most computers, so you can not really say that one is any more compatible with another. If you really need compatibility, CD-writers have the ability to write to CD-R media. This gives them a big advantage over other types of removable media imho.
If I am logged into an NT machine (with a default setup) as an unprivledged user and I need to do something as an administrator, I am forced to close all of the programs I am currently in and log off/log back on as an administrator. Under Windows 2000, you can use the 'run as...' feature, but it still does not allow the user to do enough to make it a replacement for su like behavior. Since I hate logging off/logging back on just to do one little task as an administrator, I just run as an administrator all of the time on my NT/2000 machines. Maybe if Microsoft develops a GUI version of su I will switch. The command line version of su that I have tried is difficult to use as well since it is not very intuitive on how to control NT/2000 from the command line. It is so much easier in linux...