So, do they assume that because x% of users say they don't have a licenced copy of one of Word/WordPerfect/etc, then some percent of this percentage MUST have an unlicenced copy of one of the above? What about people who just don't use Word Processors, or Spreadsheets, or whatever?
The statement you quote specifically exludes people who don't use use Word, WordPerfect etc.
To re-iterate, with my added emphasis:
"We ask respondents to choose from a very long list of specific software titles, reporting which ones they regularly use. This means we identify Microsoft Word versus, say, WordPerfect," says Metafacts principal analyst Dan Ness.
How can the router be informed about the address of the computer you want to switch on or is it just broadcast "wake 'em all"?,
Virtual servers. In the router, I map that incoming traffic for port such'n'such should be directed to the equivalant port on a specified LAN machine. That then wakes up the particular LAN machine in question.
>Plus, leaving cars around with running engines >is just asking for them to be stolen.
Now this is a bit lazy thinking of yours here. Of course you lock your car...:)
Cars can be broken into. If you leave the engine running, then it makes it that much easier to steal if you just manage to get the door open.
If you have got an easy and uncumbersome way to save power, energy (which all hurt the environment one or the other way) then why not do so?
Why not indeed? It's not a point we disagree on. My argument is simply that a well power-managed computer does not harm the environment very much. It seems we do disagree on that. That's OK - I still take your points and I hope you agree with some of mine.
I also was launched thirty years ago, and have continued to function more or less as intended since 1972.
I am still giving back data, though whether it is useful or not is definitely a matter of opinion. Sadly, international scientists don't seem to contact me much these days, but I would hope to be able to continue to learn and provide information to others for a few more decades at least...
Ah, now this is better. Point have been made, and they're worth responding to.
Yeah and to use Wake-On-LAN you need just another running computer... Very good energy saving indeed...
Doesn't have to be a 'computer' as such - my router will trigger wake-on-lan. Since I remote access my machines from work, I'm also not always physically present to go around flipping on-switches.
Well, your opinion seems to be, that if cars had power managment and such, just to say, they don't use so much energy (and money) any more, you wouldn't care.
Depending on how well the power management works, no - I wouldn't mind all that much. This should be qualified though.
The trouble is that power management on cars is likely to be abysmally impractical since the engine requires a minimum number of revs to tick over. Plus, leaving cars around with running engines is just asking for them to be stolen. In other words, I don't think a situation such as 'stand-by' will ever arise with a car. Well, not an internal combustion one anyway.
In other words, it's an apple and oranges thing. Comparing leaving a power-managed computer on to leaving aq big hungry fossil-fueled car chugging away is not a sensible comparison.
And believe me, Australia is nothing in comparison to the US.
I work with several Australians who might disagree...:-). I'm not in the US though - I'm in the UK. The Californian hassle, which was caused by ridiculous economic decisions rather than engineering ones, simply does not apply to me.
That is the most arrogant and environment unfriendly behaviour.
Hardly. With the power management set up (including such things as monitor blanking and hard-drive spin down) and wake-on-LAN enabled, it doesn't really take a lot when not in use.
I hope you don't leave your car running in front of the door, so you can save that 3 1/2 second for starting the engine...
Now you're being foolish. Sharpen up the debating skills a bit - 'examples' like that are too easy to knock down.
Steps 1 to 6 could be eliminated if people just got into the habit of leaving their machines on, instead of shutting them down all the time. 1-6 would then become a single stage - log in.
This is how I run my machine. Just leave it on, log in when required and run the apps that I've already left running.
People leave their VCRs on because they know it won't record otherwise - literally their programs won't run. However, people don't seem to have got into the habit of just leaving their machines running and letting it do things in an automated fashion.
are you looking for a specific remote desktop display?
No...I don't care at all how it's done. VNC would be fine - I've experience of using that with both Windows and Solaris (and WinCE in fact).
All it needs to do is exactly replicate my machine's desktop in some remote display. That means it must do Aqua, it must do X...the works. My machine's graphical display must be exported in its entirety to somewhere else.
Can the OSX VNC server do that? I'm a little concerned to here of two versions, one doing Aqua and the other doing X.
Pleased to hear it. Honestly. I was serious in the post that I really want to move to the iMac...it wasn't a knocking post at all.
Given that, do you have experience using VNC with MacOSX? Is it up to scratch then? Work reliably, tunnellable over SSH, work on any client....that kind of thing? Should be - I've found the Windows and Solaris VNC servers to be reliable, but I thought I'd check.
Serious question. I don't care about sound or what have you, I just care that I'd be able to see and use my desktop remotely, and if you've successfully used VNC to solve that, then I can cross that objection off my list.
Yeah...the trouble with the VPC idea is that it's not exactly switching, is it? I'd still be tied to the PC in some form (virtual, my old box...whatever). And since accounts is are in my top three uses for the machine (email, web, accounts in order), then I'd find myself going back to the PC an awful lot.
Remote Desktop Display is the ability for me to see and use my desktop as if I were sitting at the monitor, but from some remote location across the internet. Like VNC, if you're familiar with that. It's built in to XP (admittedly the first version of Windows to do that), and I use it to do....wait for it...my accounts! In spare time at work, rather than wasting time at home in the evening.
The video conferencing is stupidly irritating. Basically, they just need an H.323-compliant app. They've got all the basics, and the open source OpenH323 works for audio. A bit of work on that project from Apple, and they could turn it into their standard video conferencing app.
I'm an ex-Apple user, from the LC days, and used to earn my living writing code on the Mac. I also wrote a freeware app, quite successful in its day (StartupFrills, if you're interested), so I'm not anti-Apple. I really would like to go over (or back, to be more accurate). It's just that I find the software situation worse today than it was when I last moved in about 1992.
Ummm, at the risk of sounding stupid, what is a 6-to-4 pin cable?
Some firewire interfaces, notably Sony's iLink and most laptops, don't provide power to the ports. These normally take a four-pin cable rather than a six-pin cable. Six-pins carry the full power.
Basically, he's saying that it's easier to plug in your Sony DV gear now.
I'm slightly disappointed not to read about DVD+RW as an option in iMacs. DVD-RW seems to have lost the battle, and I would have thought that now would be a good time to make the switch.
I think I've mentioned before - I'd love to get a new iMac, but lack of software is holding me back. Not the generalised moan you often hear about, but three specific areas:
No UK version of Quicken (absolutely crucial to me)
Remote desktop display is a $200 extra.
No standards-compliant video conferencing under OSX
Sadly, I have to conclude the iMac is still not a viable machine for me. Damned shame - I'd love to get one otherwise.
Believe me, folks, it's point is to make people think twice about driving in.
Yes, I find driving into the centre to be pointless. I work in London, but live about twenty miles west in Marlow and what I do is drive to the outskirts and get the Tube the rest of the way in.
I used to have to go near where you describe - I worked at Chase near Southwark bridge, about a five minute walk away. Now my journey is actually longer, and I have to get out to Canary Wharf. And this is my problem with the idea.
You see, my daily experience shows that the Tube can't cope with the existing numbers of passengers, let alone all the ex-drivers that they're trying to encourage down there. Basically, there's no public infrastructure capable of taking the extra burden caused by people dumping their cars in the centre.
That's the annoyance - because no alternative has been put in place, the whole thing essentially plays out as just being another tax. People who have to drive will still have to drive, because the alternatives are swamped already.
Bring on the crossrail project, that's what I say. Charge after that's in place (a virtually-non-stopping east/west link across the city, for those not familiar with the idea), rather than just punitively before anyone can do anything about it.
No, it isn't. Please bear in mind that the UK has sadly been having to deal with terrorism, and attacks on its soil, for rather longer than the US. Anti-terrorist measure are a well understood thing in London, and the public certainly doesn't get to see all of it.
Why is the parent modded as flamebait? It's a valid point of view, and completely accurate for many uses.
However, I'm not as 100% opposed as the poster above. Specifically, I have a minor SGML background as well as XML and so can see the uses a little better.
Basically, the data is nothing without the associated transform. I'm talking about the literal meaning of the word transform here - whether transformed into into memory structures within a program through parsing, or whether merely transformed into other document types via XSLT.
For example, I use XML as the format in which my servlet-based reports are generated. JAXP then handles transforming into my desired output format. The user wants a web pagea as their result? Fine - here's the XSLT stylesheet to transform into HTML. They wan't Excel? Well...almost but here's the XSLT to transform into.csv.
You get the idea. Automatic, reflex use of XML is over the top and unecessary. Use of XML where portable source data is transformed into one of a variety of options however is quite useful.
It's the wireframe arcade machine, where you blast the Ties, shoot the tops of towers, then hurtle down the trench to release your photon torpedoes and blow up the Death Star.
Kids today. Pah. Why, this 20 year plus classic is still being aped in the first level of Star Wars:Rogue Leader II game for Nintendo GameCube. I know - I have that game, have played it, 'quite' like it but not as much as SuperMonkeyBall. Which itself...err...'apes' Marble Madness. Another ancient arcade machine.
I would love to get an iMac, but a few things were holding me back. One was the small monitor - that seems to be being fixed.
The other, somewhat more major one is that as far as I can tell there's no accounts package that adheres to UK rules. No UK version of Quicken. Nothing.
I have seven years' worth of accounts data in Quicken. I also do my small business accounts in it, which means that I can't just buy the US version as the tax rules differ.
Does anyone know of an accounts package, both for home and business, that works according to UK tax rules?
There is considerably more to the computing world than PCs. High-end 3D graphics don't get done on PCs, just the low-end stuff that makes it into games. Even here there's no monopoly - Sony has its take on gaming, as does Nintendo.
If you're suggesting that Microsoft offers the dominant 3D API for Microsoft platforms, well then yes - it does. But then where's the surprise in that? Sony offer the dominant API for Sony platforms, and Nintendo offer the dominant API for Nintendo platforms.
Don't be too quick to cry 'monopoly'. It devalues the term, and makes it lose impact for when it's really needed.
Bah. We should have stayed on those green-screen thingies with nice reliable mainframes behind them
Well now, funnily enough most of what I do for this organsation is done on an XTerm set as either amber-screen (dev) or green-screen (prod), and involves linking backend Unisys databases to Sybase databases with Perl scripts.
Low tech. enough?:-)
All I really need is for someone to emulate ghosting from non-responsive screens, and I can properly recreate that 1970s look. If it doesn't whirr, scroll the screen with thousands of pointless log lines or simply go beep for no real reason, it just isn't worth programming for.
Migrating off Windows 2000 workstation should be something you're already doing
Why?
The company I'm contracting for at the moment is a large multinational financial organisation. It uses NT4, with a smattering of W2K.
Why should they dump NT4? It does everything their typical users need. W2K is being used on some desktops and servers due to the deployment of.Net apps, and eventually a full firmwide W2K rollout will take place. But W2K. Not the untried, untested XP.
I use XP Pro my machines at home. It has features that I want - faster boot times (useful on the laptop), user switching and remote desktop built in. So for me it's useful. None of those features are required on a corporate desktop. NT4 will run Excel, Powerpoint and Word (in that order of priority for most people) quite well enough. The rest of the apps are usually either custom or web-based anyway.
Why upgrade? Why force users to learn a new desktop for no extra benefit? Why junk perfectly good hardware to get more powerful stuff just to run XP? What, in short, is the point?
All the above is practical of course. I know the actual point, that MS doesn't want you to do it and so won't support or license it. However, this 'do as I say or else' attitude is just ludicrous. There's a huge installed base of NT4 in the corporate world, a tiny installed base of W2K and absolutely zero base of XP. MS should support its paying customers.
Slashdot Mirror
The statement you quote specifically exludes people who don't use use Word, WordPerfect etc.
To re-iterate, with my added emphasis:
"We ask respondents to choose from a very long list of specific software titles, reporting which ones they regularly use. This means we identify Microsoft Word versus, say, WordPerfect," says Metafacts principal analyst Dan Ness.
Cheers,
Ian
Virtual servers. In the router, I map that incoming traffic for port such'n'such should be directed to the equivalant port on a specified LAN machine. That then wakes up the particular LAN machine in question.
>Plus, leaving cars around with running engines
>is just asking for them to be stolen.
Now this is a bit lazy thinking of yours here. Of course you lock your car... :)
Cars can be broken into. If you leave the engine running, then it makes it that much easier to steal if you just manage to get the door open.
If you have got an easy and uncumbersome way to save power, energy (which all hurt the environment one or the other way) then why not do so?
Why not indeed? It's not a point we disagree on. My argument is simply that a well power-managed computer does not harm the environment very much. It seems we do disagree on that. That's OK - I still take your points and I hope you agree with some of mine.
Cheers,
Ian
I am still giving back data, though whether it is useful or not is definitely a matter of opinion. Sadly, international scientists don't seem to contact me much these days, but I would hope to be able to continue to learn and provide information to others for a few more decades at least...
Cheers,
Ian
Yeah and to use Wake-On-LAN you need just another running computer... Very good energy saving indeed...
Doesn't have to be a 'computer' as such - my router will trigger wake-on-lan. Since I remote access my machines from work, I'm also not always physically present to go around flipping on-switches.
Well, your opinion seems to be, that if cars had power managment and such, just to say, they don't use so much energy (and money) any more, you wouldn't care.
Depending on how well the power management works, no - I wouldn't mind all that much. This should be qualified though.
The trouble is that power management on cars is likely to be abysmally impractical since the engine requires a minimum number of revs to tick over. Plus, leaving cars around with running engines is just asking for them to be stolen. In other words, I don't think a situation such as 'stand-by' will ever arise with a car. Well, not an internal combustion one anyway.
In other words, it's an apple and oranges thing. Comparing leaving a power-managed computer on to leaving aq big hungry fossil-fueled car chugging away is not a sensible comparison.
And believe me, Australia is nothing in comparison to the US.
I work with several Australians who might disagree... :-). I'm not in the US though - I'm in the UK. The Californian hassle, which was caused by ridiculous economic decisions rather than engineering ones, simply does not apply to me.
Cheers,
Ian
Hardly. With the power management set up (including such things as monitor blanking and hard-drive spin down) and wake-on-LAN enabled, it doesn't really take a lot when not in use.
I hope you don't leave your car running in front of the door, so you can save that 3 1/2 second for starting the engine...
Now you're being foolish. Sharpen up the debating skills a bit - 'examples' like that are too easy to knock down.
Cheers,
Ian
This is how I run my machine. Just leave it on, log in when required and run the apps that I've already left running.
People leave their VCRs on because they know it won't record otherwise - literally their programs won't run. However, people don't seem to have got into the habit of just leaving their machines running and letting it do things in an automated fashion.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
No...I don't care at all how it's done. VNC would be fine - I've experience of using that with both Windows and Solaris (and WinCE in fact).
All it needs to do is exactly replicate my machine's desktop in some remote display. That means it must do Aqua, it must do X...the works. My machine's graphical display must be exported in its entirety to somewhere else.
Can the OSX VNC server do that? I'm a little concerned to here of two versions, one doing Aqua and the other doing X.
Cheers,
Ian
But it's a DVD-RW drive, whereas the standard in computing at least seems to be edging towards DVD+RW.
Basically, I'd buy the one without the rewriter and then add an external DVD+RW unit.
Cheers,
Ian
Pleased to hear it. Honestly. I was serious in the post that I really want to move to the iMac...it wasn't a knocking post at all.
Given that, do you have experience using VNC with MacOSX? Is it up to scratch then? Work reliably, tunnellable over SSH, work on any client....that kind of thing? Should be - I've found the Windows and Solaris VNC servers to be reliable, but I thought I'd check.
Serious question. I don't care about sound or what have you, I just care that I'd be able to see and use my desktop remotely, and if you've successfully used VNC to solve that, then I can cross that objection off my list.
Cheers,
Ian
Remote Desktop Display is the ability for me to see and use my desktop as if I were sitting at the monitor, but from some remote location across the internet. Like VNC, if you're familiar with that. It's built in to XP (admittedly the first version of Windows to do that), and I use it to do....wait for it...my accounts! In spare time at work, rather than wasting time at home in the evening.
The video conferencing is stupidly irritating. Basically, they just need an H.323-compliant app. They've got all the basics, and the open source OpenH323 works for audio. A bit of work on that project from Apple, and they could turn it into their standard video conferencing app.
I'm an ex-Apple user, from the LC days, and used to earn my living writing code on the Mac. I also wrote a freeware app, quite successful in its day (StartupFrills, if you're interested), so I'm not anti-Apple. I really would like to go over (or back, to be more accurate). It's just that I find the software situation worse today than it was when I last moved in about 1992.
Cheers,
Ian
Some firewire interfaces, notably Sony's iLink and most laptops, don't provide power to the ports. These normally take a four-pin cable rather than a six-pin cable. Six-pins carry the full power.
Basically, he's saying that it's easier to plug in your Sony DV gear now.
Cheers,
Ian
I think I've mentioned before - I'd love to get a new iMac, but lack of software is holding me back. Not the generalised moan you often hear about, but three specific areas:
Sadly, I have to conclude the iMac is still not a viable machine for me. Damned shame - I'd love to get one otherwise.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It's a poetry book, and dull as dishwater.
Cheers,
Ian
Yes, I find driving into the centre to be pointless. I work in London, but live about twenty miles west in Marlow and what I do is drive to the outskirts and get the Tube the rest of the way in.
I used to have to go near where you describe - I worked at Chase near Southwark bridge, about a five minute walk away. Now my journey is actually longer, and I have to get out to Canary Wharf. And this is my problem with the idea.
You see, my daily experience shows that the Tube can't cope with the existing numbers of passengers, let alone all the ex-drivers that they're trying to encourage down there. Basically, there's no public infrastructure capable of taking the extra burden caused by people dumping their cars in the centre.
That's the annoyance - because no alternative has been put in place, the whole thing essentially plays out as just being another tax. People who have to drive will still have to drive, because the alternatives are swamped already.
Bring on the crossrail project, that's what I say. Charge after that's in place (a virtually-non-stopping east/west link across the city, for those not familiar with the idea), rather than just punitively before anyone can do anything about it.
Cheers,
Ian
No, it isn't. Please bear in mind that the UK has sadly been having to deal with terrorism, and attacks on its soil, for rather longer than the US. Anti-terrorist measure are a well understood thing in London, and the public certainly doesn't get to see all of it.
Cheers,
Ian
However, I'm not as 100% opposed as the poster above. Specifically, I have a minor SGML background as well as XML and so can see the uses a little better.
Basically, the data is nothing without the associated transform. I'm talking about the literal meaning of the word transform here - whether transformed into into memory structures within a program through parsing, or whether merely transformed into other document types via XSLT.
For example, I use XML as the format in which my servlet-based reports are generated. JAXP then handles transforming into my desired output format. The user wants a web pagea as their result? Fine - here's the XSLT stylesheet to transform into HTML. They wan't Excel? Well...almost but here's the XSLT to transform into .csv.
You get the idea. Automatic, reflex use of XML is over the top and unecessary. Use of XML where portable source data is transformed into one of a variety of options however is quite useful.
Cheers,
Ian
It's the wireframe arcade machine, where you blast the Ties, shoot the tops of towers, then hurtle down the trench to release your photon torpedoes and blow up the Death Star.
Kids today. Pah. Why, this 20 year plus classic is still being aped in the first level of Star Wars:Rogue Leader II game for Nintendo GameCube. I know - I have that game, have played it, 'quite' like it but not as much as SuperMonkeyBall. Which itself...err...'apes' Marble Madness. Another ancient arcade machine.
Kids. Pah. And again I say...Pah!
Cheers,
'Grumpy Old Uncle' Ian
The other, somewhat more major one is that as far as I can tell there's no accounts package that adheres to UK rules. No UK version of Quicken. Nothing.
I have seven years' worth of accounts data in Quicken. I also do my small business accounts in it, which means that I can't just buy the US version as the tax rules differ.
Does anyone know of an accounts package, both for home and business, that works according to UK tax rules?
Cheers,
Ian
Some people would disagree.
There is considerably more to the computing world than PCs. High-end 3D graphics don't get done on PCs, just the low-end stuff that makes it into games. Even here there's no monopoly - Sony has its take on gaming, as does Nintendo.
If you're suggesting that Microsoft offers the dominant 3D API for Microsoft platforms, well then yes - it does. But then where's the surprise in that? Sony offer the dominant API for Sony platforms, and Nintendo offer the dominant API for Nintendo platforms.
Don't be too quick to cry 'monopoly'. It devalues the term, and makes it lose impact for when it's really needed.
Cheers,
Ian
Well now, funnily enough most of what I do for this organsation is done on an XTerm set as either amber-screen (dev) or green-screen (prod), and involves linking backend Unisys databases to Sybase databases with Perl scripts.
Low tech. enough? :-)
All I really need is for someone to emulate ghosting from non-responsive screens, and I can properly recreate that 1970s look. If it doesn't whirr, scroll the screen with thousands of pointless log lines or simply go beep for no real reason, it just isn't worth programming for.
Cheers,
Ian
Why?
The company I'm contracting for at the moment is a large multinational financial organisation. It uses NT4, with a smattering of W2K.
Why should they dump NT4? It does everything their typical users need. W2K is being used on some desktops and servers due to the deployment of .Net apps, and eventually a full firmwide W2K rollout will take place. But W2K. Not the untried, untested XP.
I use XP Pro my machines at home. It has features that I want - faster boot times (useful on the laptop), user switching and remote desktop built in. So for me it's useful. None of those features are required on a corporate desktop. NT4 will run Excel, Powerpoint and Word (in that order of priority for most people) quite well enough. The rest of the apps are usually either custom or web-based anyway.
Why upgrade? Why force users to learn a new desktop for no extra benefit? Why junk perfectly good hardware to get more powerful stuff just to run XP? What, in short, is the point?
All the above is practical of course. I know the actual point, that MS doesn't want you to do it and so won't support or license it. However, this 'do as I say or else' attitude is just ludicrous. There's a huge installed base of NT4 in the corporate world, a tiny installed base of W2K and absolutely zero base of XP. MS should support its paying customers.
Cheers,
Ian
Has anyone got wireless networking going with a Linux-based Playstation 2? A USB adaptor perhaps?
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian