Meh, occasionally companies could use some shoving to get them to move their lethargic ass. As an example, our workstations migrated from HPUX to RHEL only when our main app vendor EOL'd their support on HPUX. On the face of it that doesn't sound too bad, but it was actually many years after pretty much everyone else had dropped support (at one point we were sourcing workstations off eBay, essentially everyone else's old useless computers). Had that vendor not dropped support I would probably still be using a C3700 to this day. Of course now we are perpetually stuck on RHEL4 presumably until the app vendor EOL's that (but at least the hardware is better).
Similarly one of our corporate websites just recently started rendering properly in Firefox. Why, because it was designed for some ancient version of IE which I'm guessing just recently became unavailable on whatever Windows version they provide to management's desktops, thereby necessitating a more standards compliant upgrade to the site (it was quite a surprise after 10 years of incorrect rendering to actually see it working).
Yeah, I have no sympathy for IT or their severely myopic BS testing cycles. I don't think FF5 vs FF4 even shows up on their radar.
I've got a feeling that 2011 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Yes, on Oct 21st the worthy Mac and Windows users will be raptured to a place where their old machines will be discarded and instead they will use Eee Books running Ubuntu. This will be a time of Unity.
The unworthy will be stuck using their Mac and Windows machines, or for the truly unworthy BSD.
Oh indeed, I was quite an Ubuntu fan at one time also, but now I can say I never would have discovered Arch's rolling-release model if it weren't for Ubuntu. I bailed on the KDE4 disaster. IMO the problem with Ubuntu is compound - they force a 6month cycle, they rake in experimental development projects as their release base, they use point releases instead of rolling, and they encourage everyone to upgrade as soon as possible. Intelligent people should jump only on the LTS releases, but in practice that's not what happens.
I've heard this story so often it should just be called Ubuntu Story #1 - Install Ubuntu for the first time, everything is great, very point-and-click install. Setup your account, get running and customized, everything is cake for 6 months. On the next release, a couple things are off here and there, nothing major, a week or two and you get it tweaked back into working order. Next point release, something major changed - maybe the audio, the video, some GUI element, who knows. Cursing ensues, but a month later you get things patched in a way, maybe it involves a reinstall, maybe not. Then comes the next release, 1.5 - 2 years post your first Ubuntu moment, and WTF, all your custom compiled stuff is broken, audio is stuttering, X thinks your suddenly on a VGA monitor, and it looks like someone took everything you knew about the GUI and tossed it. Another ex-Ubuntu user is born.
I'm really not sure what user experience they are going after with this cycle they go through. They seem to vastly under estimate the importance of stability and consistent experience in order to roll in these new features. LTS doesn't really help either, they will roll in last minute broken crap just the same as on a non-LTS, it just gives more tweaking time between major breakage.
Well, with Ubuntu becoming more and more mainstream, I wonder how this will affect other Linux distributions.
The other distros will probably be happy to get all those new users. By the time Ubuntu 14.x rolls out they should have alienated almost all of their userbase. Their half baked releases combined with the 6 month release cycle give everyone just enough time to get things stable right before they break it all again. From swapping audio subsystems to experimental unconfigurable GUIs, they make sure to cover all their bases.
Maximize and minimize functions are available still, in a non-intuitive way. This is one of the most irksome changes which has rubbed many people the wrong way.
Seriously, when I read this in the heading:
'With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.'
I almost laughed. I don't think I've ever used a massively changed GUI and ever felt "delighted, and at ease". I expect if I tried using GNOME 3 I would be frustrated, irritated, and cursing out loud. Just looking at the screenshots on the GNOME site gets me irritated, much less actually using the thing. And I like at the bottom of the page they include this:
Our system settings have been completely redesigned for GNOME 3.
Oh fun, the hide-the-system-settings-game, everyone enjoys playing that. I still haven't found the setting that controls the right-click menu in GNOME 2...
Why exactly wouldn't it be a good idea to remove it? It was an almost-always-nearly-blank toolbar that mostly just took up space
Said the person who uses no addons. My status bar has Noscript, Auto-pager, proxy settings, a Dilbert button, and of course conveniently displays load progress and most importantly link locations (this is not including the whole set of addons disabled by FF4). I don't know why FF devs think they need to copy Chrome, there are reasons some of us don't use Chrome and lack of things like status bar is one of them. And as of this moment, about 97k other people agree with me.
I used to use Ubuntu, and I loved it at first because it was my first Linux distro, but it kept breaking when I did auto-upgrades to new versions and some of the decisions they made really make little sense.... I switched over to Arch Linux, which, while not being nearly as simple to set up if you're a "n00b", only patches applications when absolutely necessary and lets you build your desktop how you want it from near-scratch.... Ubuntu, however, is an absolutely bloated mess with stupid design decisions that I wouldn't recommend to anybody any longer.
I second all these points. Same exact experience, been through all the "main" distros and they all have the same breakage problems. With RH, Fedora, or Ubuntu it seemed the system took forever to get tweaked, and by the time it got settled it was outdated and EOL'd. Rebuild and repeat. On the other hand there is Centos or RHEL which are such long releases that it feels you are forever anchored in time (we have work machines stuck on RHEL4, which was released what 6-7 years ago - long enough that when the time comes those machines don't get updated they get replaced).
For the last couple years I've been using Arch, and the rolling release model is much nicer experience than the others. The only rebuild I've done is to move a physical machine into a virtual machine. Updating a machine a year out of date isn't any more difficult than one that is a week out of date.
More bonuses for Arch is that it is not Gnome-centric (Metacity should be shot multiple times and buried somewhere), doesn't pre-install a crapload of unneeded services (sendmail running by default?!? only on every RH version ever), and by the time install is done you know exactly what is running (/etc/rc.conf FTW, not a bunch of config hidden in a directory somewhere and buried under a GUI).
But, it says it happened 5.6 miles from the transmitter, it almost certainly means the article is completely confused. Which if true, means GPS IS NOT BEING JAMMED. PERIOD. For them to be that close to a transmitter means they are in space, which simply isn't likely. Likely, they are talking about WAAS [wikipedia.org], which is not GPS in of itself. Rather, WAAS is ground based signal correction/enhancement which is used to increase GPS accuracy; but GPS still works without it.
No they are talking about distance to the terrestrial 4G transmit tower. As a vehicle (car or plane) approaches the tower the GPS device loses signal. This effect is real - essentially a powerful enough off-channel signal can saturate the front-end LNA in the GPS receiver and block the on-channel signal. I've had to deal with this before on GSM front-end designs (it's been a while but IIRC blocker specs may be in the GSM spec, I forget). Essentially the front-end SAW filters only provide so much off-channel attenuation, and the LNA is always more wideband than the narrow desired receive channel, so if you have a strong enough signal (say a giant tower transmitting a high level signal) on a close off-channel band you can easily saturate the LNA and kill the on-channel signal.
I have an encrypted drive on my laptop which has the same basic problem you describe. For this situation there is an easy workaround, just pop a live CD (I use a Puppy Linux live CD) into the drive and set the bios to boot from CD. It boots a little slower, but there is no login issue.
Another option is to put a live CD image on a USB stick and bury the stick somewhere in the laptop innards, then have it boot from that (essentially a small second HD hack, since most laptops don't have extra HD bays).
This is the same problem I've had with Linux also. For some reason the devs find it impossible to create a standard subsystem and then stick with it. There is this incessant drive to refactor the APIs, thereby breaking large numbers of what would otherwise be working apps. Ubuntu is notorious for shoehorning in some half-baked bleeding-edge code as part of their standard release (PulseAudio being a recent example).
Personally I got tired of "upgrading" an Ubuntu release only to have it left in a half-broken state. A couple years ago I switched to Arch linux using their rolling-release model, and that seems to have helped quite a bit. Another possible workaround I've used in the past is to build up a set of apps I need by static compiling them and dumping them in a/usr/local tree (that prevents a certain degree of "upgrade" breakage), but it's a hassle to maintain.
I do agree with other commenters that games represent a large part of the justification of keeping a Windows box, and I can't wait for the day Steam finally makes it to Linux.
This is good advice. Demonstrating competence in embedded designs is an easy way for an EE to get into CS. Microcontroller kits are abundant and cheap and can be made into demo projects for interviews. All kinds of areas too - RTOS, robotics, web-connected stand alone devices (can do things like connecting it to a cellphone app to make things even more impressive).
People get passed over for jobs they are qualified for just because hr departments throw out all the applicants who don't have a degree, even in an unrelated field. It makes it so that these people do essentially 'have to' go to college to get jobs, even though they'll get all the training they need on the job.
Aside from a manufacturing or manual labor type of job I don't know what job you are thinking of that you would get "all the training they need on the job". I can think of a lot of fields that I wouldn't want a DIY or on-the-job trained person to be working in - structural engineer, dentist, surgeon, even lawyer.
In our field (EE chip design) we don't hire people that need on-the-job training - the people we hire will eventually end up as our coworkers, not our trainees. When we interview people we always look for degrees (generally MS or better, but occasionally BS). If someone doesn't know the field (coming from an unrelated background), and can't even show a BS degree, then they aren't going to cut it as a coworker because they won't know what the hell they are doing.
A degree is more than a rubber stamped piece of paper, it shows an ability to apply yourself to a given task for a length of time and actually accomplish that task. It's a pretty low bar really, especially for a BS degree, since the whole education is guided and taught to you by someone else (advanced degrees generally involve a thesis, which shows some ability to guide oneself and accomplish a project).
Personally (as a person working on a PhD in science) I don't think a lot of people need to be going to college. I grew up in a car town, and a lot of my friends knew they were going to be doing manufacturing, but they went to college anyway.
This I don't get, unless they got useless degrees, or are simply incapable of moving to a place with better job opportunities. The town I grew up in didn't even have a college, and I was always dismayed at the absolute apathy and disinterest in the people there to improve their lives. Finally getting to a university I found to be a refreshing experience, as most people there are motivated to do something better with their lives (as contrasted with say the aforementioned town's high school where most people couldn't wait to leave and get back to their minimum wage jobs, apparently oblivious to the fact that their career path would go absolutely nowhere).
It also occurs to me the people who wrote TFA need to hook up with business leaders who claim that they need more H1Bs because there are not enough qualified applicants from here in the US.
The Activision I remember is the one that released MW2:Mercs in an unplayable bug-ridden state in order to meet the holiday release. Indeed, the game was so bad at initial release you could not complete the single-player storyline. It only took them a year to finally finish patching the game.
I was so annoyed by that experience I did not purchase another Activision game for many years afterward (I do have games that fall under their purview now simply because of their corporate acquisitions - but seeing their name stamped on a box makes me think twice on game purchases even today).
I don't know why they didn't label the arrow keys on the 50G. I went through college on a 48SX, so I knew about some of the arrow key functionality, but I think only veterans of the 48 know such things. Likewise they failed to ship a full manual with the thing - I didn't even know until a couple years ago that there existed an advanced user guide on the 50G (normal guide, advanced guide - also CAS documentation). There is a ridiculous amount of hidden capability in the 50G, but they don't ship manuals for it, so nobody knows about it. And for anyone who has the 50G dropping keys on them, set the KEYTIME, another great documentation failure by HP.
As far as the swap, I'm not certain if what you call true x-y swap exists on the 50G, but if it does exist in the catalog you can probably map a soft or hard key to it. I would have to check the manual on how to do that, but I have done it before. I had to map a soft key to get back the '->Q' function that was a hard key on my 48SX (left-shift EVAL - converts a fractional number to a ratio of two integers, ex..9225 ->Q gives 369/400).
I've used x48 on Solaris and HPUX on many occasions, however I've found it to be somewhat unstable on recent linux releases (I suspect it's the GUI code, not the emulator itself). In any event I've found a more portable solution (aside from my actual HP50G). Emu48 skinned and running the roms for a HP50G makes for a very nice Win32 desktop calc (all the necessary bits are here, here, here, and refer to this first).
Simply placed on a USB drive the Emu48 install becomes portable. With a PortableApps install, and with a small bit of config editing on the PA side, the Emu48 directory can be dropped into the PortableApps directory and will integrate into the PA menu. Configured like that, you get portable, nice startup/shutdown, and it retains its memory between machines.
What is the benefit of "using the same phone at home"?
Well for starters your average cell these days is many times better than your average cordless. It has your current contact list built in, you only need to charge and maintain one device, and your home/cell number is the same.
I have a coworker who does almost exactly what I described when he is at home (he also picked up on the magicjack news and was thinking of getting it when it becomes available). He has a prepaid cell which he uses as normal away from home. At home he uses skype for outgoing calls with the caller-ID set to his cell number (so return calls will go to the cell). The skype setup he has is a computer + USB handset, so the magicjack would eliminate the need for that.
If you have a cell phone, then you typically have a contract. If you have the resources for a broadband connection, then you have the resources for a mobile phone contract.
This is where the error is. It USED to be the case that everyone with a cell was under contract, but since the introduction of pay-as-you-go (prepaid) cell phones, you can buy minutes and hold them forever. This device allows you to save those minutes for when you are away from the home, while otherwise using the same phone at home for little cost.
Actually I take this in a completely different context. For Congress and the White House to talk about the ails of piracy is a situation so loaded with irony it's almost painful. It's like Congress holding a summit on the ails of substance abuse and extramarital affairs.
If anything, Congress and the White House would school the MPAA and RIAA on how to best extract money from future generations (of course unfounded taxation to support a huge freaking bureaucracy isn't piracy - why that's just your gov't at work).
I'm a fan of O'Reilly books. Interestingly enough this doesn't mean that I'll gloss over issues with what they produce. The result is actually the inverse, in that I go into all their titles with a high level of expectation with regards to quality on every level. This may mean that though I strive to be neutral when I look at a book, I'm probably a little tougher on O'Reilly titles. This made my rough start with Android Application Development a bit jarring. The repetition and what felt like sloppy editing are not what I expect. I was quickly given a sense that this book may have been rushed to publication a little sooner than it should have been.
IMO, O'Reilly's once stellar reputation has gone downhill since the days when they only had a handfull of titles. I think these days in the rush to churn out a Learning/Mastering/Pocket Reference/Nutshell book for every language and variant thereof their editors miss quite a bit. Now you have to scrutinize their books just as much as the other publishers (although they haven't quite hit the abomination level that the Whatever-Language "Bible" books are that Wiley publishes).
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, occasionally companies could use some shoving to get them to move their lethargic ass. As an example, our workstations migrated from HPUX to RHEL only when our main app vendor EOL'd their support on HPUX. On the face of it that doesn't sound too bad, but it was actually many years after pretty much everyone else had dropped support (at one point we were sourcing workstations off eBay, essentially everyone else's old useless computers). Had that vendor not dropped support I would probably still be using a C3700 to this day. Of course now we are perpetually stuck on RHEL4 presumably until the app vendor EOL's that (but at least the hardware is better).
Similarly one of our corporate websites just recently started rendering properly in Firefox. Why, because it was designed for some ancient version of IE which I'm guessing just recently became unavailable on whatever Windows version they provide to management's desktops, thereby necessitating a more standards compliant upgrade to the site (it was quite a surprise after 10 years of incorrect rendering to actually see it working).
Yeah, I have no sympathy for IT or their severely myopic BS testing cycles. I don't think FF5 vs FF4 even shows up on their radar.
Actually when I read the title my first thought was that they were building a simcity-esque Launch Arco, but unfortunately it's nothing like that.
Yes, on Oct 21st the worthy Mac and Windows users will be raptured to a place where their old machines will be discarded and instead they will use Eee Books running Ubuntu. This will be a time of Unity.
The unworthy will be stuck using their Mac and Windows machines, or for the truly unworthy BSD.
Also, perhaps Sony's "R&D" costs wouldn't be so high, if they weren't in the habit of paying off an entire industry in order to get their format accepted instead of their competitors. Maybe they should try not doing that as a cost cutting measure.
Oh indeed, I was quite an Ubuntu fan at one time also, but now I can say I never would have discovered Arch's rolling-release model if it weren't for Ubuntu. I bailed on the KDE4 disaster. IMO the problem with Ubuntu is compound - they force a 6month cycle, they rake in experimental development projects as their release base, they use point releases instead of rolling, and they encourage everyone to upgrade as soon as possible. Intelligent people should jump only on the LTS releases, but in practice that's not what happens.
I've heard this story so often it should just be called Ubuntu Story #1 - Install Ubuntu for the first time, everything is great, very point-and-click install. Setup your account, get running and customized, everything is cake for 6 months. On the next release, a couple things are off here and there, nothing major, a week or two and you get it tweaked back into working order. Next point release, something major changed - maybe the audio, the video, some GUI element, who knows. Cursing ensues, but a month later you get things patched in a way, maybe it involves a reinstall, maybe not. Then comes the next release, 1.5 - 2 years post your first Ubuntu moment, and WTF, all your custom compiled stuff is broken, audio is stuttering, X thinks your suddenly on a VGA monitor, and it looks like someone took everything you knew about the GUI and tossed it. Another ex-Ubuntu user is born.
I'm really not sure what user experience they are going after with this cycle they go through. They seem to vastly under estimate the importance of stability and consistent experience in order to roll in these new features. LTS doesn't really help either, they will roll in last minute broken crap just the same as on a non-LTS, it just gives more tweaking time between major breakage.
The other distros will probably be happy to get all those new users. By the time Ubuntu 14.x rolls out they should have alienated almost all of their userbase. Their half baked releases combined with the 6 month release cycle give everyone just enough time to get things stable right before they break it all again. From swapping audio subsystems to experimental unconfigurable GUIs, they make sure to cover all their bases.
I can't understand how Wizardry didn't even make it anywhere on the page. It was the progenitor of all such games that followed.
Seriously, when I read this in the heading:
I almost laughed. I don't think I've ever used a massively changed GUI and ever felt "delighted, and at ease". I expect if I tried using GNOME 3 I would be frustrated, irritated, and cursing out loud. Just looking at the screenshots on the GNOME site gets me irritated, much less actually using the thing. And I like at the bottom of the page they include this:
Oh fun, the hide-the-system-settings-game, everyone enjoys playing that. I still haven't found the setting that controls the right-click menu in GNOME 2...
Why exactly wouldn't it be a good idea to remove it? It was an almost-always-nearly-blank toolbar that mostly just took up space
Said the person who uses no addons. My status bar has Noscript, Auto-pager, proxy settings, a Dilbert button, and of course conveniently displays load progress and most importantly link locations (this is not including the whole set of addons disabled by FF4). I don't know why FF devs think they need to copy Chrome, there are reasons some of us don't use Chrome and lack of things like status bar is one of them. And as of this moment, about 97k other people agree with me.
I second all these points. Same exact experience, been through all the "main" distros and they all have the same breakage problems. With RH, Fedora, or Ubuntu it seemed the system took forever to get tweaked, and by the time it got settled it was outdated and EOL'd. Rebuild and repeat. On the other hand there is Centos or RHEL which are such long releases that it feels you are forever anchored in time (we have work machines stuck on RHEL4, which was released what 6-7 years ago - long enough that when the time comes those machines don't get updated they get replaced).
For the last couple years I've been using Arch, and the rolling release model is much nicer experience than the others. The only rebuild I've done is to move a physical machine into a virtual machine. Updating a machine a year out of date isn't any more difficult than one that is a week out of date.
More bonuses for Arch is that it is not Gnome-centric (Metacity should be shot multiple times and buried somewhere), doesn't pre-install a crapload of unneeded services (sendmail running by default?!? only on every RH version ever), and by the time install is done you know exactly what is running (/etc/rc.conf FTW, not a bunch of config hidden in a directory somewhere and buried under a GUI).
But, it says it happened 5.6 miles from the transmitter, it almost certainly means the article is completely confused. Which if true, means GPS IS NOT BEING JAMMED. PERIOD. For them to be that close to a transmitter means they are in space, which simply isn't likely. Likely, they are talking about WAAS [wikipedia.org], which is not GPS in of itself. Rather, WAAS is ground based signal correction/enhancement which is used to increase GPS accuracy; but GPS still works without it.
No they are talking about distance to the terrestrial 4G transmit tower. As a vehicle (car or plane) approaches the tower the GPS device loses signal. This effect is real - essentially a powerful enough off-channel signal can saturate the front-end LNA in the GPS receiver and block the on-channel signal. I've had to deal with this before on GSM front-end designs (it's been a while but IIRC blocker specs may be in the GSM spec, I forget). Essentially the front-end SAW filters only provide so much off-channel attenuation, and the LNA is always more wideband than the narrow desired receive channel, so if you have a strong enough signal (say a giant tower transmitting a high level signal) on a close off-channel band you can easily saturate the LNA and kill the on-channel signal.
I have an encrypted drive on my laptop which has the same basic problem you describe. For this situation there is an easy workaround, just pop a live CD (I use a Puppy Linux live CD) into the drive and set the bios to boot from CD. It boots a little slower, but there is no login issue.
Another option is to put a live CD image on a USB stick and bury the stick somewhere in the laptop innards, then have it boot from that (essentially a small second HD hack, since most laptops don't have extra HD bays).
Mercurial's SVN re-education page does a good job of describing the advantages.
This is the same problem I've had with Linux also. For some reason the devs find it impossible to create a standard subsystem and then stick with it. There is this incessant drive to refactor the APIs, thereby breaking large numbers of what would otherwise be working apps. Ubuntu is notorious for shoehorning in some half-baked bleeding-edge code as part of their standard release (PulseAudio being a recent example).
Personally I got tired of "upgrading" an Ubuntu release only to have it left in a half-broken state. A couple years ago I switched to Arch linux using their rolling-release model, and that seems to have helped quite a bit. Another possible workaround I've used in the past is to build up a set of apps I need by static compiling them and dumping them in a /usr/local tree (that prevents a certain degree of "upgrade" breakage), but it's a hassle to maintain.
I do agree with other commenters that games represent a large part of the justification of keeping a Windows box, and I can't wait for the day Steam finally makes it to Linux.
Embedded systems places mainly.
This is good advice. Demonstrating competence in embedded designs is an easy way for an EE to get into CS. Microcontroller kits are abundant and cheap and can be made into demo projects for interviews. All kinds of areas too - RTOS, robotics, web-connected stand alone devices (can do things like connecting it to a cellphone app to make things even more impressive).
Aside from a manufacturing or manual labor type of job I don't know what job you are thinking of that you would get "all the training they need on the job". I can think of a lot of fields that I wouldn't want a DIY or on-the-job trained person to be working in - structural engineer, dentist, surgeon, even lawyer.
In our field (EE chip design) we don't hire people that need on-the-job training - the people we hire will eventually end up as our coworkers, not our trainees. When we interview people we always look for degrees (generally MS or better, but occasionally BS). If someone doesn't know the field (coming from an unrelated background), and can't even show a BS degree, then they aren't going to cut it as a coworker because they won't know what the hell they are doing.
A degree is more than a rubber stamped piece of paper, it shows an ability to apply yourself to a given task for a length of time and actually accomplish that task. It's a pretty low bar really, especially for a BS degree, since the whole education is guided and taught to you by someone else (advanced degrees generally involve a thesis, which shows some ability to guide oneself and accomplish a project).
This I don't get, unless they got useless degrees, or are simply incapable of moving to a place with better job opportunities. The town I grew up in didn't even have a college, and I was always dismayed at the absolute apathy and disinterest in the people there to improve their lives. Finally getting to a university I found to be a refreshing experience, as most people there are motivated to do something better with their lives (as contrasted with say the aforementioned town's high school where most people couldn't wait to leave and get back to their minimum wage jobs, apparently oblivious to the fact that their career path would go absolutely nowhere).
It also occurs to me the people who wrote TFA need to hook up with business leaders who claim that they need more H1Bs because there are not enough qualified applicants from here in the US.
The Activision I remember is the one that released MW2:Mercs in an unplayable bug-ridden state in order to meet the holiday release. Indeed, the game was so bad at initial release you could not complete the single-player storyline. It only took them a year to finally finish patching the game.
I was so annoyed by that experience I did not purchase another Activision game for many years afterward (I do have games that fall under their purview now simply because of their corporate acquisitions - but seeing their name stamped on a box makes me think twice on game purchases even today).
I don't know why they didn't label the arrow keys on the 50G. I went through college on a 48SX, so I knew about some of the arrow key functionality, but I think only veterans of the 48 know such things. Likewise they failed to ship a full manual with the thing - I didn't even know until a couple years ago that there existed an advanced user guide on the 50G (normal guide, advanced guide - also CAS documentation). There is a ridiculous amount of hidden capability in the 50G, but they don't ship manuals for it, so nobody knows about it. And for anyone who has the 50G dropping keys on them, set the KEYTIME, another great documentation failure by HP.
As far as the swap, I'm not certain if what you call true x-y swap exists on the 50G, but if it does exist in the catalog you can probably map a soft or hard key to it. I would have to check the manual on how to do that, but I have done it before. I had to map a soft key to get back the '->Q' function that was a hard key on my 48SX (left-shift EVAL - converts a fractional number to a ratio of two integers, ex. .9225 ->Q gives 369/400).
I've used x48 on Solaris and HPUX on many occasions, however I've found it to be somewhat unstable on recent linux releases (I suspect it's the GUI code, not the emulator itself). In any event I've found a more portable solution (aside from my actual HP50G). Emu48 skinned and running the roms for a HP50G makes for a very nice Win32 desktop calc (all the necessary bits are here, here, here, and refer to this first).
Simply placed on a USB drive the Emu48 install becomes portable. With a PortableApps install, and with a small bit of config editing on the PA side, the Emu48 directory can be dropped into the PortableApps directory and will integrate into the PA menu. Configured like that, you get portable, nice startup/shutdown, and it retains its memory between machines.
What is the benefit of "using the same phone at home"?
Well for starters your average cell these days is many times better than your average cordless. It has your current contact list built in, you only need to charge and maintain one device, and your home/cell number is the same.
I have a coworker who does almost exactly what I described when he is at home (he also picked up on the magicjack news and was thinking of getting it when it becomes available). He has a prepaid cell which he uses as normal away from home. At home he uses skype for outgoing calls with the caller-ID set to his cell number (so return calls will go to the cell). The skype setup he has is a computer + USB handset, so the magicjack would eliminate the need for that.
If you have a cell phone, then you typically have a contract. If you have the resources for a broadband connection, then you have the resources for a mobile phone contract.
This is where the error is. It USED to be the case that everyone with a cell was under contract, but since the introduction of pay-as-you-go (prepaid) cell phones, you can buy minutes and hold them forever. This device allows you to save those minutes for when you are away from the home, while otherwise using the same phone at home for little cost.
Yeah the unions made lives so much better that now the residents of Detroit get to live in post-apocalyptic heaven. The UAW is like a freaking cancerous leech on society.
Actually I take this in a completely different context. For Congress and the White House to talk about the ails of piracy is a situation so loaded with irony it's almost painful. It's like Congress holding a summit on the ails of substance abuse and extramarital affairs.
If anything, Congress and the White House would school the MPAA and RIAA on how to best extract money from future generations (of course unfounded taxation to support a huge freaking bureaucracy isn't piracy - why that's just your gov't at work).
I would love a good alternative personally. All my users do is read the PDFs and we use PDFCreator for merging documents.
Free and you don't even need to install them. Just unpack in a directory:
Foxit Reader Portable
Sumatra PDF Portable
For merge/split: PDFTK Builder Portable
IMO, O'Reilly's once stellar reputation has gone downhill since the days when they only had a handfull of titles. I think these days in the rush to churn out a Learning/Mastering/Pocket Reference/Nutshell book for every language and variant thereof their editors miss quite a bit. Now you have to scrutinize their books just as much as the other publishers (although they haven't quite hit the abomination level that the Whatever-Language "Bible" books are that Wiley publishes).