I'll try to pay more attention when I'm back on my desktop, but i run Linux and haven't seen *any* problems like you describe with memory on my box. The windows machines at work are using a version of FF 7 packaged by Frontmotion (so I can push it out on AD) and haven't had any problems with those boxes either.
Firefox is slower than chrome, but generally uses less memory. There were a couple versions of FF that had a memory leak problm if I recall. See http://www.dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory too
I have sshd set up on all my machines at home (really handy for admin purposes or just to shut down the kids computer when they're not listening;) but have never bothered to set up the port forwarding on the router to get to them from outside. There have been a bunch of times I wish I could access my home machines from outside, but they're all laptops! They're powered off and disconnected from the network - maybe even put away in a case. One day I'll get that Synology NAS device I've been lusting after and maybe I'll set it up then.
Having a picture of your car in an intersection when the light turns red seems to be enough evidence to get the owner of the car to fork up $50 according to the courts. But in that case, its the *car* that is incurring the fine - not the driver - because they can't prove *you* were the driver at the time (thats why there are no points on your license for these red light camera tickets). However, they can prove that you *own* the car through the registration and its certainly pretty strong circumstantial evidence that you were the one driving it if you don't have a solid alibi otherwise. IANAL.
When MS Office 2007 came out everybody started receiving xlsx and docx files and the old versions of MS Office most folks had installed couldn't open them. For the die hards (there were a few) I installed the compatibility pack (buried in the bowels of Microsoft's site since I guess they figure most places are willing to just throw money out the Windows(tm) and will buy a new version but I see no reason to re-buy something as trivial as a word processing program which works perfectly well already), but lots of folks got Oo instead. I even changed the icons for some of them to "ease the transition" and to tell you the truth, a lot of them didn't notice the difference. Some that did liked the presentation program better than Powerpoint and swung the whole sales staff over just on that reason. When users ran into something that worked differently (like how to edit headers/footers or tracking changes) they just chalked it up to the "new version". Since we already use Firefox and Thunderbird some folks have migrated over to Ubuntu from Windows (I always used a LTS version but then found they had decided to upgrade to the bleeding edge on their own later and seemed to have no issues most of the time so I let them play). We're not a big company (maybe 100 PCs), and we do engineering and development work so most people are pretty tech savvy, but of course the big issue was our ERP system which is designed for Windows, but its turned out easier to maintain that through terminal services anyway.
I use DSL on an old Dell 400MHz Celeron L400c and it runs pretty quick. I'd say faster than Windows 98 did on that box. As far as boot up time, I really can't say since its been running for about 2 years now without a reboot;) Its playing a list of mp3s in mp3blaster to provide music on hold for a PBX phone system. Every once in a while I ssh in and change the playlist. Good example of repurposed old hardware.
I've been running Ubuntu 7.10 as my kids machine (blog post), and even use firestarter to block internet sites (blog post) other than those I allow them to visit. Those sites (pbskids.org and the like) all use Flash, and so require the flash plugin. I've had some few reported lockups from the kids, but usually it's because the machine is so slow they ended up clicking several times to launch the same thing and the machine just ran out of memory. Most of the times it just works (tm). Kids are all about games, and there are plenty of wholesome open source games, as well as good educational offerings, all available for free (if you have an internet connection). Sadly, shockwave is still not available for Linux so some little online programs just won't be available.
This just proves what everybody has always known about KiSS - they are all about the money, period. That might be OK if they were talented too, but unfortunately in Gene Simmons case this is not so clearly true. If he can't figure out how to make money in the new reality that is digital content, he should retire and go fishing. Pointing the finger at American kids who share music (just like I did when I was a kid recording albums to tape to share with my friends) and ignoring the fact that the bulk of the rest of world (Asia, etc.) don't give a fig about his intellectual property rights at all is just stupid. I, for one, will not cry when the blood sucking record companies meet their well deserved inglorious end, and I hope it comes soon. I want to buy music directly from the artist, online - and I DONT need to go to a 50,000 seat stadium to watch Gene Simmons dance around in makeup from so far away I need binoculars to tell he's almost 60 years old.
You're completely correct that people want to use what they're used to, and the business world is used to Outlook/Exchange. But I will repeat, if you haven't looked at Google Apps yet, you should - because while it's certainly not there yet, it already does offer share calendars (with scheduled warning abilities via email), integrated IM, cell phone/blackberry support, shared contacts, as well as collaborative documents with killer diff abilities and revision history that folks still stuck emailing Word docs around cannot fathom the coolness of. Microsoft is mightily scared of Google, and I think, for good reason.
I don't think it will be very long before Google Apps makes it very clear that it doesn't matter what OS you run at all. If you haven't tried Google's Docs and Calendar offerings, check them out if only to get educated about the power of hosted web apps. The day is coming, and I for one will be very happy to see the end of Outlook, Exchange, and probably a large part of Office to boot. I'm pretty sure Microsoft understands this very real threat too, and have many a sweaty meeting about it.
I heard the iphone doesn't support 3G because of battery life, but that they have to address this to break into the Euro market with the thing - I don't think many Europeans are going to be wowwed by the slow American iphone. Nokia's offerings seem to be a better fit for the European market right now.
Funny - I used GNU Keyring too for years, until my Palm m500 died. I was able to resurrect from a timely backup, but what a pain, and I couldn't every trust it again. I've been putting passwords into an encrypted email (Thunderbird + enigmail) which I update regularly and send to the email I use at home, the one I use at work and to my wife. I have to have enigmail + TB set up at work too, but I do so it's OK;)
Personally I am very concerned about electronic voting, especially in cases where there is no verifiable paper trail produced by the machines. The obvious benefits of having a machine tally the votes has to be weighted against the importance of having fair and open elections where the outcome can be verified.
That said, I very much hope that the sudden appearance of this proprietary code this doesn't have anything to do with a recent theft of Diebold software.
I have been attempting to use Open Office (since Star Office days) for years, and though I would love to grasp every opportunity to bash M$, I have to admit that printing envelopes in OO recently was a massive letdown. We could never get the thing to print on the envelope in a consistent manner (even after figuring out how to print the correct direction which took a while). The text would never print in the same place on the envelope twice in a row! Other than that though, OO has been an exceedingly well written replacement for MS Office. In fact, I recently wrote a presentation in Impress after struggling with Powerpoint for 20 minutes. Impress was easy to use, intuitive and exported to PP without a hitch.
Isn't it more unfortunate that it took Microsoft almost 10 years (Outlook 2007) to fully support that standard, when as you correctly point out a Microsoft employee is listed as one of it's principal creators?
For the company website, my tech writer and I decided we would ensure that as much of the site validated as possible. The site is PHP driven tied to a mySql database and produces about 175 pages of content. Once we understood what validated and what didn't, it was a simple exercise to make them all compliant, since most of the pages are produced programmatically anyways. The only thing that doesn't validate is the darn first page because it has flash on it. The hardest part of the job was cleaning up the messy, non-compliant code of the previous outsourced site, but now that it's done - the standardization it forced on us makes the code easy to read and uniform. It was be very easy to change this site next time because of our choice. Oh, and since we run Firefox as default on all work PCs, we had added incentive.
I'm not alone! I've been doing that for years. The funny thing is most people don't even notice the difference until I've already converted them to tab-using, highlighted find-wielding, RSS-empowered mozilla junkies. Mmwahaahaa! They can grasp all that, but if there isn't a blue 'e' on the desktop to click on to get to the internet, they're on the phone, baby.
Most companies lease the machine and so most of the service is done off that contract. However, I've never had to call Xerox for a '(gl)ass-crack', but I bet it wouldn't be covered.
My small (100+ employee) company does. There's only one of me but I share my office with the tech writer (who works with me on the website and helps coordinate advertising projects). I'm actually surprised that IT seems to be treated so poorly elsewhere, and might consider another position if I had to leave. Why am I surprised? Generally an in-house IT person needs to be trusted - beyond reproach - because he/she has the keys to the whole company. That person can see everyone's salary (if they chose to), change passwords, read email, delete documents, etc. It's really a lot of responsibility - treating a person entrusted with that much *access* poorly (or unfairly) could be dangerous....and besides, cubicles suck, man.
I imagine that although not very many people have your scrupels, there are enough of them that WILL NOT REST until the DRM on some precious content of interest to them (hmmm... Star Trek, Stargate, Bab 5, come to mind) is cracked wide open.
I personally balk at buying anything with any kind of DRM at all. I can usually find a way to get the content onto whatever platform I happen to be using at the time anyway, but it's the principal of the thing, man.
Sounds like you haven't installed Linux in a while, most of the distros I've tried recently auto-detect everything. Even Knoppix (a bootable CD) auto-detects all the hardware in most machines and will get itself to a workable state without you having to do anything more than turn the PC on. The only thing that might seem a bit strange to folks when doing their first Linux install is the disk partitioning questions - which, in my experience have been defaulted to something reasonable (for beginners) anyway.
If you want to see a great silent movie, check out Buster Keaton's 'The General'. Made in 1927, Keaton did most of the stunts himself and they are pretty incredible. Set in the Civil War, Keaton is a locomotive engineer too small to make it into the Confederate army, so he helps out any way he can. Great comedy too! Note: this is not entirely OT, it's a *real* 20's film, so you can use it to set the mood before your next Cthulhu campaign.
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I resemble that remark.
I'll try to pay more attention when I'm back on my desktop, but i run Linux and haven't seen *any* problems like you describe with memory on my box. The windows machines at work are using a version of FF 7 packaged by Frontmotion (so I can push it out on AD) and haven't had any problems with those boxes either.
Firefox is slower than chrome, but generally uses less memory. There were a couple versions of FF that had a memory leak problm if I recall.
See http://www.dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory too
HP has always managed to make pretty decent hardware - its their software thats always sucked. Oh, the irony.
I have sshd set up on all my machines at home (really handy for admin purposes or just to shut down the kids computer when they're not listening ;) but have never bothered to set up the port forwarding on the router to get to them from outside. There have been a bunch of times I wish I could access my home machines from outside, but they're all laptops! They're powered off and disconnected from the network - maybe even put away in a case. One day I'll get that Synology NAS device I've been lusting after and maybe I'll set it up then.
Having a picture of your car in an intersection when the light turns red seems to be enough evidence to get the owner of the car to fork up $50 according to the courts. But in that case, its the *car* that is incurring the fine - not the driver - because they can't prove *you* were the driver at the time (thats why there are no points on your license for these red light camera tickets). However, they can prove that you *own* the car through the registration and its certainly pretty strong circumstantial evidence that you were the one driving it if you don't have a solid alibi otherwise. IANAL.
When MS Office 2007 came out everybody started receiving xlsx and docx files and the old versions of MS Office most folks had installed couldn't open them. For the die hards (there were a few) I installed the compatibility pack (buried in the bowels of Microsoft's site since I guess they figure most places are willing to just throw money out the Windows(tm) and will buy a new version but I see no reason to re-buy something as trivial as a word processing program which works perfectly well already), but lots of folks got Oo instead. I even changed the icons for some of them to "ease the transition" and to tell you the truth, a lot of them didn't notice the difference. Some that did liked the presentation program better than Powerpoint and swung the whole sales staff over just on that reason. When users ran into something that worked differently (like how to edit headers/footers or tracking changes) they just chalked it up to the "new version". Since we already use Firefox and Thunderbird some folks have migrated over to Ubuntu from Windows (I always used a LTS version but then found they had decided to upgrade to the bleeding edge on their own later and seemed to have no issues most of the time so I let them play). We're not a big company (maybe 100 PCs), and we do engineering and development work so most people are pretty tech savvy, but of course the big issue was our ERP system which is designed for Windows, but its turned out easier to maintain that through terminal services anyway.
I use DSL on an old Dell 400MHz Celeron L400c and it runs pretty quick. I'd say faster than Windows 98 did on that box. As far as boot up time, I really can't say since its been running for about 2 years now without a reboot ;) Its playing a list of mp3s in mp3blaster to provide music on hold for a PBX phone system. Every once in a while I ssh in and change the playlist. Good example of repurposed old hardware.
I've been running Ubuntu 7.10 as my kids machine (blog post), and even use firestarter to block internet sites (blog post) other than those I allow them to visit. Those sites (pbskids.org and the like) all use Flash, and so require the flash plugin. I've had some few reported lockups from the kids, but usually it's because the machine is so slow they ended up clicking several times to launch the same thing and the machine just ran out of memory. Most of the times it just works (tm). Kids are all about games, and there are plenty of wholesome open source games, as well as good educational offerings, all available for free (if you have an internet connection). Sadly, shockwave is still not available for Linux so some little online programs just won't be available.
This just proves what everybody has always known about KiSS - they are all about the money, period. That might be OK if they were talented too, but unfortunately in Gene Simmons case this is not so clearly true. If he can't figure out how to make money in the new reality that is digital content, he should retire and go fishing. Pointing the finger at American kids who share music (just like I did when I was a kid recording albums to tape to share with my friends) and ignoring the fact that the bulk of the rest of world (Asia, etc.) don't give a fig about his intellectual property rights at all is just stupid. I, for one, will not cry when the blood sucking record companies meet their well deserved inglorious end, and I hope it comes soon. I want to buy music directly from the artist, online - and I DONT need to go to a 50,000 seat stadium to watch Gene Simmons dance around in makeup from so far away I need binoculars to tell he's almost 60 years old.
You're completely correct that people want to use what they're used to, and the business world is used to Outlook/Exchange. But I will repeat, if you haven't looked at Google Apps yet, you should - because while it's certainly not there yet, it already does offer share calendars (with scheduled warning abilities via email), integrated IM, cell phone/blackberry support, shared contacts, as well as collaborative documents with killer diff abilities and revision history that folks still stuck emailing Word docs around cannot fathom the coolness of. Microsoft is mightily scared of Google, and I think, for good reason.
I don't think it will be very long before Google Apps makes it very clear that it doesn't matter what OS you run at all. If you haven't tried Google's Docs and Calendar offerings, check them out if only to get educated about the power of hosted web apps. The day is coming, and I for one will be very happy to see the end of Outlook, Exchange, and probably a large part of Office to boot. I'm pretty sure Microsoft understands this very real threat too, and have many a sweaty meeting about it.
I heard the iphone doesn't support 3G because of battery life, but that they have to address this to break into the Euro market with the thing - I don't think many Europeans are going to be wowwed by the slow American iphone. Nokia's offerings seem to be a better fit for the European market right now.
Funny - I used GNU Keyring too for years, until my Palm m500 died. I was able to resurrect from a timely backup, but what a pain, and I couldn't every trust it again. I've been putting passwords into an encrypted email (Thunderbird + enigmail) which I update regularly and send to the email I use at home, the one I use at work and to my wife. I have to have enigmail + TB set up at work too, but I do so it's OK ;)
Personally I am very concerned about electronic voting, especially in cases where there is no verifiable paper trail produced by the machines. The obvious benefits of having a machine tally the votes has to be weighted against the importance of having fair and open elections where the outcome can be verified.
That said, I very much hope that the sudden appearance of this proprietary code this doesn't have anything to do with a recent theft of Diebold software.
I have been attempting to use Open Office (since Star Office days) for years, and though I would love to grasp every opportunity to bash M$, I have to admit that printing envelopes in OO recently was a massive letdown. We could never get the thing to print on the envelope in a consistent manner (even after figuring out how to print the correct direction which took a while). The text would never print in the same place on the envelope twice in a row! Other than that though, OO has been an exceedingly well written replacement for MS Office. In fact, I recently wrote a presentation in Impress after struggling with Powerpoint for 20 minutes. Impress was easy to use, intuitive and exported to PP without a hitch.
Isn't it more unfortunate that it took Microsoft almost 10 years (Outlook 2007) to fully support that standard, when as you correctly point out a Microsoft employee is listed as one of it's principal creators?
For the company website, my tech writer and I decided we would ensure that as much of the site validated as possible. The site is PHP driven tied to a mySql database and produces about 175 pages of content. Once we understood what validated and what didn't, it was a simple exercise to make them all compliant, since most of the pages are produced programmatically anyways. The only thing that doesn't validate is the darn first page because it has flash on it. The hardest part of the job was cleaning up the messy, non-compliant code of the previous outsourced site, but now that it's done - the standardization it forced on us makes the code easy to read and uniform. It was be very easy to change this site next time because of our choice. Oh, and since we run Firefox as default on all work PCs, we had added incentive.
I'm not alone! I've been doing that for years. The funny thing is most people don't even notice the difference until I've already converted them to tab-using, highlighted find-wielding, RSS-empowered mozilla junkies. Mmwahaahaa! They can grasp all that, but if there isn't a blue 'e' on the desktop to click on to get to the internet, they're on the phone, baby.
...get it? ...wouldn't be covered? har har.
Most companies lease the machine and so most of the service is done off that contract. However, I've never had to call Xerox for a '(gl)ass-crack', but I bet it wouldn't be covered.
My small (100+ employee) company does. There's only one of me but I share my office with the tech writer (who works with me on the website and helps coordinate advertising projects). I'm actually surprised that IT seems to be treated so poorly elsewhere, and might consider another position if I had to leave. Why am I surprised? Generally an in-house IT person needs to be trusted - beyond reproach - because he/she has the keys to the whole company. That person can see everyone's salary (if they chose to), change passwords, read email, delete documents, etc. It's really a lot of responsibility - treating a person entrusted with that much *access* poorly (or unfairly) could be dangerous. ...and besides, cubicles suck, man.
I imagine that although not very many people have your scrupels, there are enough of them that WILL NOT REST until the DRM on some precious content of interest to them (hmmm... Star Trek, Stargate, Bab 5, come to mind) is cracked wide open.
I personally balk at buying anything with any kind of DRM at all. I can usually find a way to get the content onto whatever platform I happen to be using at the time anyway, but it's the principal of the thing, man.
http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html
Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture OSCON 2002 (flash presentation)
Sounds like you haven't installed Linux in a while, most of the distros I've tried recently auto-detect everything. Even Knoppix (a bootable CD) auto-detects all the hardware in most machines and will get itself to a workable state without you having to do anything more than turn the PC on. The only thing that might seem a bit strange to folks when doing their first Linux install is the disk partitioning questions - which, in my experience have been defaulted to something reasonable (for beginners) anyway.
If you want to see a great silent movie, check out Buster Keaton's 'The General'. Made in 1927, Keaton did most of the stunts himself and they are pretty incredible. Set in the Civil War, Keaton is a locomotive engineer too small to make it into the Confederate army, so he helps out any way he can. Great comedy too! Note: this is not entirely OT, it's a *real* 20's film, so you can use it to set the mood before your next Cthulhu campaign.