When I was shopping for a set of powerful speakers, I had it narrowed down to the Altec 641 or the Logitech 400W system. The Klipsch were not technically out of my price range - I could afford them - but I did not want to spend that much if I could avoid it. I checked out the user reviews; my long personal experience with Altec already had me leaning in that direction, but the Logitech sure looked nice on the spec sheet. I'm glad I checked the reviews first.
The user reviews were a shock. A disturbing number of people reported "exploding amplifiers" in the subwoofers of the Logitech systems. To be fair, they also said that they had turned them up to 90% volume (!), but Altec buyers didn't report any such problems.
Obviously I chose the Altec. I've never even had it up to 40%, but the bass carries throughout the house (so even my remote speakers sound better). I have it tied in to my PC as well as my home theater.
Most people don't need this much power. Most people don't require as many speakers as I have, either - I have two 4.1 systems connected to my TV/VCR setup, plus another 5.1 that kicks in when the DVD player is in use (adding to the 4.1's). All this in one 12' x 14' room, with the subwoofers and satellites strategically located so that everywhere I go in the room, I have stereo sound.
Plus, I have a set of wireless stereo speakers tied in to the front channel - so I don't miss a trick when I have to walk to the front of the house. You know, grab a beer, answer the door when the pizza guy arrives, wash the dishes, etc.
Sound is sensation is life.
They aren't much help for surround sound, but for normal TV, radio or CD audio they work perfectly.
LOL!! Oh yes, those jocks and cheerleaders were just so cool. We were all jealous... yeah, right.
The biggest partiers I knew - also the biggest drug dealers, by the way - were brainiacs, long-haired acid-eating dope-smokers. A few even went on to work on ARPAnet and start up software companies. After they made some money cooking up acid and software in college, of course, with a wimpy academic scholarship (if they got lucky - most had to pay their own way).
The jocks went on to work for daddy, or as salesmen, or as laborers. After playing some ball (and paying some long-haired brainiac doper to write their papers) in college, of course, with a full athletic scholarship.
When I go back to our HS reunions, the jocks look fat and old, the brains still look young.
I don't want anybody accessing my floppy drive except me. You're talking crazy talk. You're crazy!
Of course, I wouldn't buy a Dell anyway. They are badly overpriced. At least once a year at work we get an offer for "a great deal from Dell, at the company rate," that's still way over market value for an equivalent machine, same components, from any other reputable manufacturer.
And I've heard the "but the support!" line, too - that doesn't wash. If you know nothing about computers and need help making it work at all, OK. Pay the money. But if you think you need to pay Dell prices in order to have hardware support, then the hardware had better fail a lot. In which case you should choose a different brand.
Here's a fine example: our (big, major, worldwide) company has a contract with Dell. Lots and lots of money for Dell. A 20 gig drive (where did they even find drives that small in 2002?) went bad within 6 months of installation; Dell didn't want to believe it, and our IT department (or at least Lt. Nimrod, the MSCE dingus) said "it's probably just a software problem." OK; so MSCE school teaches you that "no boot device" is a software problem. In an indirect way, I suppose; the hard disk failed, so the BIOS could not find the boot software; yep, that's sort of a software problem. Can't find the freakin' software! That's why I call him Nimrod. Couldn't even script his way out of a paper bag, and the bugger ain't smart enough to carry a knife either. Prepubescent scum.
So Dell and Nimrod insisted that we run ScanDisk. We did this several times over the span of one and a half weeks; every time it took hours, finding countless lost fragments and bad sectors. We lost over a thousand dollars of one man's work (in man-hours; data corrupted when the disk crashed without warning), we fell behind schedule - on a government contract, mind you - all for a measly 20 gig hard drive that must have been worth less than $50 US. Finally, Dell agreed to replace it, but only AFTER we sent the DEAD DRIVE to them!
At knifepoint, Nimrod agreed to take a new 40 gig drive from one of the dozens that had been sitting unused on pallets this whole time, and put it in my employee's machine so we could get on with supplying our government with the things it needs.
Oh, how I hate self-important Nimrods and the companies they let badger them. Obviously, I feel somewhat differently about being the badger. Rrrrr.
The nice thing about the Nimrods is, if you see them in person, there is the potential for intimidation. You can forget that with Dell Hell. This is not Nice Mike Dell in his dorm room anymore.
Yes, we know without even reading it what a Potato Gun is.
It shoots solid potatoes. Ideally, the end of the tube is externally chamfered so that it will trim the potato to fit perfectly within the barrel. The natural moisture contained in the potato provides the lubricant.
Click! Foom! Flyin' potato! (Don't point it at anything you do not intend to hit - hard)
Mind you, I don't honestly know if I would buy one of these or not. I don't drive, by choice; I used to, but now I ride a bike or take public transport. I'd have to give it a test drive to decide whether it was worth my while first. The fact that a lot of people would think I looked like a doofus riding this beast is not that much of a factor, quite honestly. That they would is a given; if that was all I was concerned about, I wouldn't even give this machine a second thought.
I can see banning them from sidewalks. Many localities bar bicycles from the sidewalks in downtown areas, for safety reasons. I've had my share of close calls. However, since the places where I've lived (Florida, western NY) tend to have either bike lanes (Florida) or paved shoulders (NY) wide enough to accomodate the Segway, I don't see the point in banning them from the street.
Here's an interesting tidbit. I work with a fellow contractor who was a mechanical designer for Kamen's company when the Segway was under development, and he was able to test-drive early models. They originally had the wheels front-and-back, rather than side-to-side. I imagine that the width of the production models might have something to do with concerns about letting them on the streets where no bike lanes exist. They do appear to be rather wide for safe travel on shoulderless roads.
It would not be a tragedy for me, simply a minor inconvenience; it didn't take very long for me to pick up Graffiti. (except that pesky "V".) A new scripting style couldn't be all that bad.
I've seen friends buy Palms and quickly drop them, though, because they had absolutely no patience - they expected a PC in their breast pocket and when it proved that they would actually have to spend a few hours to become proficient, they gave up, because "that onscreen keyboard is so small, and it doesn't understand my writing."
Your post inspired an interesting thought - although I'm sure somebody thought of it before - porting a Graffiti-type language to a CAD environment. I don't know how many people actually still use a tablet (I always found them clumsy), but Graffiti would seem like a logical addition to the CAD tablet environment.
I keep my hard copies, so I keep the software that I used to prepare the hard copies installed. TurboTax is a relatively small program (if you don't let it install Quicken).
The plus side to leaving it installed is, you can drag in the previous year's tax return info. Security risk? Maybe, if you consider leaving that kind of thing on your machine a risk. I have the luxury of a third PC that I don't normally boot up or have tied into my network.
OK. Now that I've explained that, let's get to the "one PC vs. many" issue. At first, when I read this year's license agreement, I kind of liked it; silly me. My first impression was this: I can install it on the machine where I'm going to do the "real job" first, then I can put it on another so I can jerk around with it without mucking up my actual tax return. Just to get an idea of how I want to approach this year's return, you know? Not a bad idea, actually. It wasn't until I read this Slashdot article that I realized that a crash on my "real job" machine might cause a problem. Now, we're only talking about $39.95, against a couple thou I'm getting back (well, the ex is getting it; I won't see it, that's another story) but it does seem like I might have some recourse through Customer Service at Intuit. Forty bucks is not a big deal to me, fortunately, but I'd rather not pay it if I don't have to. The point is that I would not just run down to CompUSA or Best Buy for a second copy (or a different program entirely) on the authority of a license agreement without first going up the chain of command at Intuit.
By the way, the impression I'm getting from some of the earlier posts is that people think you can't run TurboTax after the year it's designed for. I haven't had that problem, but I can only speak for myself.
You bet your neighbors might be cool. Get this - my uncle (not Tungsten) worked for Kodak from the 60's through the 80's. He "couldn't tell us what he did." Sure, there is secrecy; industrial secrets have to be protected. But he wouldn't even talk about what field he was in - computers, chemistry, what? BS. He had a degree, he was an engineer. We knew that much, but he would not let us know any more. And we were family!
Now, on to neighbors. When I moved out and bought a house, I had a VERY cool neighbor - I lived in the middle of cow country, but this one guy owned an antique clock shop. His specialty was antique watches and cuckoo clocks. I met him and his wife by chance, in a bar 12 miles away; he lived a half mile from my house. His home was filled with cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, railroad clocks; all antiques. He drove antique cars exclusively. His glasses frames were antiques! They heated their home with an antique coal stove. These people were *seriously* cool.
Not to be too off-topic, I bought "Uncle Tungsten" shortly after I heard the author interviewed on NPR. I still haven't read it - it's in my stack of 24 (yes, 24) unread books. I truly enjoyed all of the sciences in school; I planned on a Chemistry major at college, but decided not to go at the last minute. Just as well, my fate lay in electronic design, which I just fell into years later - but I had a great talent for it; it has been extraordinarily fulfilling, and we all know how neat electronics can be. To be a part of the creation process is wonderful, and seeing the released products in action is spectactular.
I moved to Linux because I was tired of constantly "fiddling" with Windows through the barriers that M$ puts up to "protect" the user from himself.
In general, I know what I am doing, or can find out what I need to know - if that info can be found. Windows makes that awfully difficult. Macs supposedly work perfectly all the time, but when something does go wrong nobody can fix them. Linux is just sitting there, wide open like a car hood with its carburetor ready for the tweaking.
And, when Microsoft told me that I had "called too many times" for re-install codes for Office 2000 (added a hard drive to one machine, that needed an extra call; moved it to a different machine, another call; added 256MB RAM, another call), I moved to OpenOffice. I still have XP on two machines, because it came preinstalled and it's better for games, but when I build a machine I put Linux on it.
More importantly, if you buy the Student version when you are not a student, you should read the fine print: it cannot be upgraded. When a new version comes out, you have to pay for it.
When the Comcast guy came to my house, I rebooted into Windows (dual-boot machine) and this red screen came up because Win98 always used to complain about my second hard drive (100% Linux ext2). So, Goober backed away from the computer and said he wouldn't touch it, I'd have to do my own install. Happy day! That's what I wanted anyway. His buddy verified that the cable was getting a good signal, they gave me a NIC and a line splitter (free of charge, I will grant them that) and hit the road.
Unfortunately, 1) he didn't leave me all of the information I needed to connect properly, even with the crappy Excite@home software they had at the time - I had to call Tech Sub-port and have more paperwork and another CD mailed to me, and 2) the software he did give me hosed up Win98 so bad that even I couldn't fix it. And that's saying something.
Their software hijacked Internet Explorer (but left Netscape alone, thank goodness), didn't get along with McAfee firewall (crash, crash, crash); every time I talked to Tech Sub-port they told me "we don't support Linux" - I always had to explain, "you don't need to. I do my own support. You just have to get the signal into and out of my house, and give me the IP address, DNS, etc. so I can connect." Like they expect us to call them for basic Windows and hardware support unrelated to their service?
Now Win98 is completely gone from that box, and I have two other boxen on my home network (boxen and network are new since Comcast arrived in my life). Both the new boxen have WinXP and neither have even been in the same room as Comcast's install CD, nor have I used their "Member Support" option on their website - it will install all that crap too! Why? So they can remotely monitor your "problem" to give you a better crappy answer (and new, improved spam?).
You don't need their software for anything at all, unless you have too much stability in your life and need excitement. Best bet: go to Radio Shack or CompUSA and buy the install kit. Install it yourself. Don't let Goober Pyle touch your computer. Ever.
Let this inspire your confidence in the cable guy: one of them said to my buddy, as he had his hands inside his machine, "can you believe that two weeks ago I had never touched a computer?"
... that lets somebody hack your web interface without you even noticing. Good for you. Glad you like it. I'll keep my Linux, thanks. It's not perfect, but it is better - and I don't have to pay an arm and two legs for false security either. Even BillG says that the security is lacking. Of course his front man, Dancing Monkey Boy, probably wouldn't admit it.
In 12 years of using Unix and Wintel machines and keyboards manufactured by Apollo, CompuAdd, Gateway, Dell, Micron, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and Sun, I have always had keyboards (on my machines, that is) with the control key in the lower-left corner, shift above that, and caps lock above that. With the exception of the Sun and Apollo workstations, all of the others also had complementary control keys in the lower right corner.
I've seen keyboards with the caps lock and control keys swapped (I hate that!) but they've been rare. The new SunBlade machines at work have that layout, and I told the sysadmin that I didn't want that. I use the caps lock a lot - we use caps exclusively in our drawings (drafting, that is) per company rules.
Not only that, but on a Wintel machine, it is only logical to have the two control keys in complementary positions; if you are going to swap caps lock and control, you should swap the other control key with the enter key, eh?
On my computers, I prefer *nix systems - not because they are "harder to use," but because I find them easier to use. To me, they are less limiting. They let me do what I want to do, the way I want to do it. I just bought a new box with Windows XP preloaded, and it stubbornly tries to prevent users (and administrators!) from stepping beyond its carefully-delineated pathways. If others prefer that regime, fine; I can't work that way.
I apply a similar philosophy to standard transmission vehicles; when I have to drive in the snow, I want as much control over the vehicle as possible. Automatic transmissions don't give me what I want, standard transmissions do. However, each has its particular niche and the end user must decide which he/she needs.
When you dumb down any complex system beyond a certain point, you risk losing practical value in the name of so-called usability.
In general, user-friendly is good, but bottle-feeding the user constantly is bad.
If they have so much cash on hand, why are they suddenly so concerned in the past few years about copyright fraud? Why do we, as users, have to make a phone call to M$ to re-register our software after we upgrade the hardware in our PC? I added 256MB of memory, made no other changes, and had to call for a code in order to use the Excel software that I paid for.
When I write stuff at work, a lot of the time most of the code is application-specific; Mentor Graphics AMPLE script, for example. That is augmented with shell scripts so I can awk and grep the text output to give my engineers some readable reports. When things go beyond what these tools can accomplish, I fire up gcc.
Another PC board design tool I support runs on Windows and uses VB as its scripting language (eww!); for that, I have DOS ports of gawk, sed and grep, and of course gcc. They have added VB extensions for interacting with the internals of the design tool but BASIC just doesn't cut it when you need to parse text for handling funky reports.
I suppose I'm not your usual developer, but it breaks up the day.
- the Insane Multitasker
Re:Mandrake update does not
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
Mandrake update still cannot be trusted to upgrade anything reliably, and it does not give you any kind of informative messages when it fails. I only use it to tell me what needs to be upgraded, then fetch the files using Mozilla, and I use plain vanilla rpm to do the real installation/upgrade. Good ol' command line! Nothing better for real feedback on your work. GUI's are all well and good, but the command line is far from dead.
I finally got KDE 2.2.1 installed without forcing it - but it was NOT easy. I could write a book.
Of course, now rpm hangs; it was part of the required upgrade... hmmm, what to do, what to do...
Slashdot Mirror
... and I just received my Slashdot digest moments ago ...
What's a poor geek to do?
The 400W models used to ... rather spectacularly, as I recall ...
When I was shopping for a set of powerful speakers, I had it narrowed down to the Altec 641 or the Logitech 400W system. The Klipsch were not technically out of my price range - I could afford them - but I did not want to spend that much if I could avoid it. I checked out the user reviews; my long personal experience with Altec already had me leaning in that direction, but the Logitech sure looked nice on the spec sheet. I'm glad I checked the reviews first.
... is very important to me ..."
The user reviews were a shock. A disturbing number of people reported "exploding amplifiers" in the subwoofers of the Logitech systems. To be fair, they also said that they had turned them up to 90% volume (!), but Altec buyers didn't report any such problems.
Obviously I chose the Altec. I've never even had it up to 40%, but the bass carries throughout the house (so even my remote speakers sound better). I have it tied in to my PC as well as my home theater.
Most people don't need this much power. Most people don't require as many speakers as I have, either - I have two 4.1 systems connected to my TV/VCR setup, plus another 5.1 that kicks in when the DVD player is in use (adding to the 4.1's). All this in one 12' x 14' room, with the subwoofers and satellites strategically located so that everywhere I go in the room, I have stereo sound.
Plus, I have a set of wireless stereo speakers tied in to the front channel - so I don't miss a trick when I have to walk to the front of the house. You know, grab a beer, answer the door when the pizza guy arrives, wash the dishes, etc.
Sound is sensation is life.
They aren't much help for surround sound, but for normal TV, radio or CD audio they work perfectly.
"Sound
LOL!! ... yeah, right.
Oh yes, those jocks and cheerleaders were just so cool. We were all jealous
The biggest partiers I knew - also the biggest drug dealers, by the way - were brainiacs, long-haired acid-eating dope-smokers. A few even went on to work on ARPAnet and start up software companies. After they made some money cooking up acid and software in college, of course, with a wimpy academic scholarship (if they got lucky - most had to pay their own way).
The jocks went on to work for daddy, or as salesmen, or as laborers. After playing some ball (and paying some long-haired brainiac doper to write their papers) in college, of course, with a full athletic scholarship.
When I go back to our HS reunions, the jocks look fat and old, the brains still look young.
I don't want anybody accessing my floppy drive except me. You're talking crazy talk. You're crazy!
Of course, I wouldn't buy a Dell anyway. They are badly overpriced. At least once a year at work we get an offer for "a great deal from Dell, at the company rate," that's still way over market value for an equivalent machine, same components, from any other reputable manufacturer.
And I've heard the "but the support!" line, too - that doesn't wash. If you know nothing about computers and need help making it work at all, OK. Pay the money. But if you think you need to pay Dell prices in order to have hardware support, then the hardware had better fail a lot. In which case you should choose a different brand.
Here's a fine example: our (big, major, worldwide) company has a contract with Dell. Lots and lots of money for Dell. A 20 gig drive (where did they even find drives that small in 2002?) went bad within 6 months of installation; Dell didn't want to believe it, and our IT department (or at least Lt. Nimrod, the MSCE dingus) said "it's probably just a software problem." OK; so MSCE school teaches you that "no boot device" is a software problem. In an indirect way, I suppose; the hard disk failed, so the BIOS could not find the boot software; yep, that's sort of a software problem. Can't find the freakin' software! That's why I call him Nimrod. Couldn't even script his way out of a paper bag, and the bugger ain't smart enough to carry a knife either. Prepubescent scum.
So Dell and Nimrod insisted that we run ScanDisk. We did this several times over the span of one and a half weeks; every time it took hours, finding countless lost fragments and bad sectors. We lost over a thousand dollars of one man's work (in man-hours; data corrupted when the disk crashed without warning), we fell behind schedule - on a government contract, mind you - all for a measly 20 gig hard drive that must have been worth less than $50 US. Finally, Dell agreed to replace it, but only AFTER we sent the DEAD DRIVE to them!
At knifepoint, Nimrod agreed to take a new 40 gig drive from one of the dozens that had been sitting unused on pallets this whole time, and put it in my employee's machine so we could get on with supplying our government with the things it needs.
Oh, how I hate self-important Nimrods and the companies they let badger them. Obviously, I feel somewhat differently about being the badger. Rrrrr.
The nice thing about the Nimrods is, if you see them in person, there is the potential for intimidation. You can forget that with Dell Hell. This is not Nice Mike Dell in his dorm room anymore.
Oh yes, that service. Well worth the extra $$$$$.
Yes, we know without even reading it what a Potato Gun is.
It shoots solid potatoes. Ideally, the end of the tube is externally chamfered so that it will trim the potato to fit perfectly within the barrel. The natural moisture contained in the potato provides the lubricant.
Click! Foom! Flyin' potato! (Don't point it at anything you do not intend to hit - hard)
If potatoes were banned, only criminals would have potatoes.
Yeah, well, you saw South Park's explanation, right? I don't think I want to give that version a test drive ...
Mind you, I don't honestly know if I would buy one of these or not. I don't drive, by choice; I used to, but now I ride a bike or take public transport. I'd have to give it a test drive to decide whether it was worth my while first. The fact that a lot of people would think I looked like a doofus riding this beast is not that much of a factor, quite honestly. That they would is a given; if that was all I was concerned about, I wouldn't even give this machine a second thought.
I can see banning them from sidewalks. Many localities bar bicycles from the sidewalks in downtown areas, for safety reasons. I've had my share of close calls. However, since the places where I've lived (Florida, western NY) tend to have either bike lanes (Florida) or paved shoulders (NY) wide enough to accomodate the Segway, I don't see the point in banning them from the street.
Here's an interesting tidbit. I work with a fellow contractor who was a mechanical designer for Kamen's company when the Segway was under development, and he was able to test-drive early models. They originally had the wheels front-and-back, rather than side-to-side. I imagine that the width of the production models might have something to do with concerns about letting them on the streets where no bike lanes exist. They do appear to be rather wide for safe travel on shoulderless roads.
It would not be a tragedy for me, simply a minor inconvenience; it didn't take very long for me to pick up Graffiti. (except that pesky "V".) A new scripting style couldn't be all that bad.
I've seen friends buy Palms and quickly drop them, though, because they had absolutely no patience - they expected a PC in their breast pocket and when it proved that they would actually have to spend a few hours to become proficient, they gave up, because "that onscreen keyboard is so small, and it doesn't understand my writing."
The only reason Windows and Palm have any real connection for me is TinySheet. If it had support for OpenOffice, bye-bye BillG ...
Your post inspired an interesting thought - although I'm sure somebody thought of it before - porting a Graffiti-type language to a CAD environment. I don't know how many people actually still use a tablet (I always found them clumsy), but Graffiti would seem like a logical addition to the CAD tablet environment.
What?!? 'Mumps' didn't make the top 12?
...
The high occurrence of VB is clearly another sign that the End Times are upon us
I keep my hard copies, so I keep the software that I used to prepare the hard copies installed. TurboTax is a relatively small program (if you don't let it install Quicken).
The plus side to leaving it installed is, you can drag in the previous year's tax return info. Security risk? Maybe, if you consider leaving that kind of thing on your machine a risk. I have the luxury of a third PC that I don't normally boot up or have tied into my network.
OK. Now that I've explained that, let's get to the "one PC vs. many" issue. At first, when I read this year's license agreement, I kind of liked it; silly me. My first impression was this: I can install it on the machine where I'm going to do the "real job" first, then I can put it on another so I can jerk around with it without mucking up my actual tax return. Just to get an idea of how I want to approach this year's return, you know? Not a bad idea, actually. It wasn't until I read this Slashdot article that I realized that a crash on my "real job" machine might cause a problem. Now, we're only talking about $39.95, against a couple thou I'm getting back (well, the ex is getting it; I won't see it, that's another story) but it does seem like I might have some recourse through Customer Service at Intuit. Forty bucks is not a big deal to me, fortunately, but I'd rather not pay it if I don't have to. The point is that I would not just run down to CompUSA or Best Buy for a second copy (or a different program entirely) on the authority of a license agreement without first going up the chain of command at Intuit.
By the way, the impression I'm getting from some of the earlier posts is that people think you can't run TurboTax after the year it's designed for. I haven't had that problem, but I can only speak for myself.
Jay
You bet your neighbors might be cool. Get this - my uncle (not Tungsten) worked for Kodak from the 60's through the 80's. He "couldn't tell us what he did." Sure, there is secrecy; industrial secrets have to be protected. But he wouldn't even talk about what field he was in - computers, chemistry, what? BS. He had a degree, he was an engineer. We knew that much, but he would not let us know any more. And we were family!
Now, on to neighbors. When I moved out and bought a house, I had a VERY cool neighbor - I lived in the middle of cow country, but this one guy owned an antique clock shop. His specialty was antique watches and cuckoo clocks. I met him and his wife by chance, in a bar 12 miles away; he lived a half mile from my house. His home was filled with cuckoo clocks, grandfather clocks, railroad clocks; all antiques. He drove antique cars exclusively. His glasses frames were antiques! They heated their home with an antique coal stove. These people were *seriously* cool.
Not to be too off-topic, I bought "Uncle Tungsten" shortly after I heard the author interviewed on NPR. I still haven't read it - it's in my stack of 24 (yes, 24) unread books. I truly enjoyed all of the sciences in school; I planned on a Chemistry major at college, but decided not to go at the last minute. Just as well, my fate lay in electronic design, which I just fell into years later - but I had a great talent for it; it has been extraordinarily fulfilling, and we all know how neat electronics can be. To be a part of the creation process is wonderful, and seeing the released products in action is spectactular.
I moved to Linux because I was tired of constantly "fiddling" with Windows through the barriers that M$ puts up to "protect" the user from himself.
In general, I know what I am doing, or can find out what I need to know - if that info can be found. Windows makes that awfully difficult. Macs supposedly work perfectly all the time, but when something does go wrong nobody can fix them. Linux is just sitting there, wide open like a car hood with its carburetor ready for the tweaking.
And, when Microsoft told me that I had "called too many times" for re-install codes for Office 2000 (added a hard drive to one machine, that needed an extra call; moved it to a different machine, another call; added 256MB RAM, another call), I moved to OpenOffice. I still have XP on two machines, because it came preinstalled and it's better for games, but when I build a machine I put Linux on it.
More importantly, if you buy the Student version when you are not a student, you should read the fine print: it cannot be upgraded. When a new version comes out, you have to pay for it.
When the Comcast guy came to my house, I rebooted into Windows (dual-boot machine) and this red screen came up because Win98 always used to complain about my second hard drive (100% Linux ext2). So, Goober backed away from the computer and said he wouldn't touch it, I'd have to do my own install. Happy day! That's what I wanted anyway. His buddy verified that the cable was getting a good signal, they gave me a NIC and a line splitter (free of charge, I will grant them that) and hit the road.
Unfortunately, 1) he didn't leave me all of the information I needed to connect properly, even with the crappy Excite@home software they had at the time - I had to call Tech Sub-port and have more paperwork and another CD mailed to me, and 2) the software he did give me hosed up Win98 so bad that even I couldn't fix it. And that's saying something.
Their software hijacked Internet Explorer (but left Netscape alone, thank goodness), didn't get along with McAfee firewall (crash, crash, crash); every time I talked to Tech Sub-port they told me "we don't support Linux" - I always had to explain, "you don't need to. I do my own support. You just have to get the signal into and out of my house, and give me the IP address, DNS, etc. so I can connect." Like they expect us to call them for basic Windows and hardware support unrelated to their service?
Now Win98 is completely gone from that box, and I have two other boxen on my home network (boxen and network are new since Comcast arrived in my life). Both the new boxen have WinXP and neither have even been in the same room as Comcast's install CD, nor have I used their "Member Support" option on their website - it will install all that crap too! Why? So they can remotely monitor your "problem" to give you a better crappy answer (and new, improved spam?).
You don't need their software for anything at all, unless you have too much stability in your life and need excitement. Best bet: go to Radio Shack or CompUSA and buy the install kit. Install it yourself. Don't let Goober Pyle touch your computer. Ever.
Let this inspire your confidence in the cable guy: one of them said to my buddy, as he had his hands inside his machine, "can you believe that two weeks ago I had never touched a computer?"
... that lets somebody hack your web interface without you even noticing. Good for you. Glad you like it. I'll keep my Linux, thanks. It's not perfect, but it is better - and I don't have to pay an arm and two legs for false security either. Even BillG says that the security is lacking. Of course his front man, Dancing Monkey Boy, probably wouldn't admit it.
...
And don't get me started on Dell Hell
The name just kills me. Kills me!
It reminds me of an electronic design package from Innoveda - the software is named BetaSoft. BetaSoft! Hah! It's a released product! I'm dying here!
Limbo! Ho-hooo! "How's the project going?" "It's in Limbo."
In 12 years of using Unix and Wintel machines and keyboards manufactured by Apollo, CompuAdd, Gateway, Dell, Micron, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and Sun, I have always had keyboards (on my machines, that is) with the control key in the lower-left corner, shift above that, and caps lock above that. With the exception of the Sun and Apollo workstations, all of the others also had complementary control keys in the lower right corner.
I've seen keyboards with the caps lock and control keys swapped (I hate that!) but they've been rare. The new SunBlade machines at work have that layout, and I told the sysadmin that I didn't want that. I use the caps lock a lot - we use caps exclusively in our drawings (drafting, that is) per company rules.
Not only that, but on a Wintel machine, it is only logical to have the two control keys in complementary positions; if you are going to swap caps lock and control, you should swap the other control key with the enter key, eh?
On my computers, I prefer *nix systems - not because they are "harder to use," but because I find them easier to use. To me, they are less limiting. They let me do what I want to do, the way I want to do it. I just bought a new box with Windows XP preloaded, and it stubbornly tries to prevent users (and administrators!) from stepping beyond its carefully-delineated pathways. If others prefer that regime, fine; I can't work that way.
I apply a similar philosophy to standard transmission vehicles; when I have to drive in the snow, I want as much control over the vehicle as possible. Automatic transmissions don't give me what I want, standard transmissions do. However, each has its particular niche and the end user must decide which he/she needs.
When you dumb down any complex system beyond a certain point, you risk losing practical value in the name of so-called usability.
In general, user-friendly is good, but bottle-feeding the user constantly is bad.
If they have so much cash on hand, why are they suddenly so concerned in the past few years about copyright fraud? Why do we, as users, have to make a phone call to M$ to re-register our software after we upgrade the hardware in our PC? I added 256MB of memory, made no other changes, and had to call for a code in order to use the Excel software that I paid for.
When I write stuff at work, a lot of the time most of the code is application-specific; Mentor Graphics AMPLE script, for example. That is augmented with shell scripts so I can awk and grep the text output to give my engineers some readable reports. When things go beyond what these tools can accomplish, I fire up gcc.
Another PC board design tool I support runs on Windows and uses VB as its scripting language (eww!); for that, I have DOS ports of gawk, sed and grep, and of course gcc. They have added VB extensions for interacting with the internals of the design tool but BASIC just doesn't cut it when you need to parse text for handling funky reports.
I suppose I'm not your usual developer, but it breaks up the day.
- the Insane Multitasker
Mandrake update still cannot be trusted to upgrade anything reliably, and it does not give you any kind of informative messages when it fails. I only use it to tell me what needs to be upgraded, then fetch the files using Mozilla, and I use plain vanilla rpm to do the real installation/upgrade. Good ol' command line! Nothing better for real feedback on your work. GUI's are all well and good, but the command line is far from dead.
... hmmm, what to do, what to do ...
I finally got KDE 2.2.1 installed without forcing it - but it was NOT easy. I could write a book.
Of course, now rpm hangs; it was part of the required upgrade