4.0 was supposedly 'just a developer preview', and I personally think they dropped the ball on 4.1. Everyone was expecting it to just be 'ready'.
Agreed. Fortunately openSUSE still includes KDE3.5.x and I'll stick with that until KDE4 improves or KDE3 support is dropped entirely.
If Linus is an advanced user, why was he pressured to upgrade from 3.5 to 4.x in the first place? Couldn't he have just kept using 3.5 if that's what he preferred, rather than the GNOME which he hated?
I've read that Linus historically uses quite n00b friendly distros. He's never even run Debian due to its (perceived or otherwise) installation complexity. He's stated that he just wants to work on the kernel and not fiddle with the distro. See this interview.
According to the Computerworld article, Linus upgraded Fedora $version and it bumped him to KDE4 without offering a choice. I think it all boils down to Linus' desire for the distribution to Just Work(tm). I'd imagine he simply doesn't have time to fight the distribution itself to shoehorn it into something resembling a usable environment.
My father has DirecTV HD and an OTA antenna.
HD OTA looks better with a side by side comparison of flipping between DirecTV and his antenna on the same channel.
DirecTV HD is compressed douche, look it up.
My local cable carrier can't spell HDTV (or Internet for that matter). I went with DirecTV for a couple other reasons but I haven't even subscribed to their HDTV offerings yet. One reason is they were having HD DVR shortages for a while last year.
Follow this thread at
Lumenlab and build your own HD antenna! I live ~45 miles as the crow flies from the nearest transmitter. With an antenna I built based on some of the ideas there I can receive 3 HD channels out of 4 possible offerings. I can pick up FOX, NBC and CBS. I built the antenna with stuff I had lying around. I used 2x4s, coat hangers and fencing. Free HD.
And before anyone asks, yes it's ugly. I stuck mine in the attic to hide it. I might be able to put it on a mast and pick up the 4th channel which is ABC but my wife and neighbors would frown.
I live in a fairly mountainous area of the US so I was pleasantly surprised to pick up 3 of 4 channels. Give it a shot this weekend and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Cable and DirecTV's over compressed offerings can't come close to the visual quality of an OTA signal.
Well, according to the Wayback Machine this overall design goes back to at least the second year of Slashdot's existence. According to my whois output Slashdot.org was registered:
Created On:05-Oct-1997 04:00:00 UTC
Slashdot is 8 years old and this design is at least 7 years old.
Regarding a complete redesign, sure some stuff could be changed but this layout is conducive to the type of conversations we have on here. When I don't have mod points I cruise at +3 - Nested - Highest Scores First. I've seen posts on Digg about how Digg is going to be the death of Slashdot and I just don't agree. Sure there are teh lamers on here that post stupid crap. When you get above a certain moderation threshold on Slashdot (for me it seems to fluctuate between +2 and +3) the discussion differences between Digg and Slashdot on highly technical matters are an order of magnitude different. Similar to the difference between a conversation on filesystems in a high school comp-sci class and a Post-Graduate discussion on filesystems.
I didn't mean for this post to turn into a jab at Digg.com but the sheer stupidity of most comments there and the overall juvenile quality of the discussion has turned me off of it completely.
Digg is the exact opposite from Slashdot for me. I go to Digg to look at the links and absolutely ignore the usually useless drivel in the comments. I go to Slashdot and ignore the link and dive into the overall interesting and enlightening comments! Laugh all you want but I've found most comments at Digg.com to consist of "LOL me too, that is teh stupidz who would ever buy that????" No thanks.
There's just a little touch that's missing. How about Slashdot's front page acts more like Google's customizable homepage? I know the AJAX bandwagon isn't something everybody wants to jump on, but this is an excellent application for that technology. I don't mean the front page should become a portal. Anything but. I mean that the front page is a bit more customizable beyond the existing UI like the up down arrows and the kill button for the what I call feed boxes on the right.
For example: a logged in user would be able to drag topics from the "Sections" menu on the left side of the page into the mini feed box area on the right. The feed boxes on the right could be draggable. The topic icons at the top could be dragged into the feed box area. C'mon guys, surely between all the know-how of the users and the site admins this could be accomplished. Embrace and extend!
Good job.
I cancelled my accounts with these scumbags as soon as I read about this ~12:30AM Eastern.
As a previous poster suggested, hopefully Google Wallet will turn out to be more than hype and bury these assholes.
What I'd like to know is whether most of the Asian ISPs are doing like the ones here in the States. Every broadband connection I've had until recently had a dynamic IP. Even so, the shortest time I ever had an IP was 12 months. That's with Charter cable, Sprint DSL, and a regional telecom outfit Ntelos. If the Asian ISPs are setting super high TTLs on the IPs like they do in the States, then just block the individual problem IPs as needed. IMO that would be a much safer route to take than blocking entire countries.
How's wireless support under the Linux installs you have on the Fujitsu? I have a Fujitsu S6210 and Suse 9.3 works like a champ with this notebook and a bog standard Intel 2200BG chipset.
Semi-OT: Suse 9.3 is the only install I've put on this notebook that I haven't had to do *any* configuration to get WPA-PSK working. Fill in your pre-shared key and take off. I've tried just about every distro and although I could get WPA working it wasn't nearly as seamless as it is in Suse 9.3. The kinternet tool in 9.3 is what keeps me on Suse. No mucking with config files and custom scripts to bring the wireless up and down. Very nice.
Trying to keep it on topic here:) How about suspend to RAM or suspend to disk in Suse... any issues with that? I ask because I'll be damned if I can get suspend to anything working on this notebook using any distro.
Looking at the datasheet on Fujitsu's site it is stated that that particular model is fixed at 256MB of RAM. That looks like it will be the only sticking point for me. As far as build quality, the only other notebooks I've used personally that compare to and surpass Fujitsu is the excellent Thinkpad. I still miss my T30 that a Diet Coke destroyed *sniff*.
Anybody have any experience with the ultra-low voltage Pentium-Ms? I'm looking at the entire Fujitsu ultra-portable line due to the pleasant experience I've had with this S6210. Obviously speed isn't my main concern but portability and battery life are.
Dell does kinda/sorta/maybe support other distros.
Check it out: linux.dell.com
Along with Red Hat they list various flavors of SuSE, Debian, and Slack here.
This part of the site has an interesting link site that says Dell is partnering with Novell to offer SuSE.
Old news maybe to slashdot, it's dated October 27, 2004.
I've always heard that you should not use a cdrom and a hard disk on the same channel because it'll kill your hard drive performance.
If you're talking about parallel IDE, you've heard correctly.
What happens is the bus gets knocked down to the lowest common denominator. If your hard drive and CDROM are on the same channel and the hard drive is ATA66 and your CDROM is ATA33 then the best you'll get is ATA33.
I don't know about SATA, I've yet to have a chance to fool with it. No need for home PC upgrades and our servers use SCSI. Can you buy an SATA CDROM|DVD|burner yet?
I doubt any kind of hard science channel will take off. Joe Public doesn't like to think. He just wants to be passively entertained.
Look at how far downhill the programming on TLC has gone. Shows that were mildly entertaining on BBC are highly irritating on that channel. Shows like Trading Spaces and such fill their daily programming now, and not because management there "guesses" people will watch.
Outside of academia and industries that have hard sciences as their backbone, people are pretty damned stupid. Seriously. Joe Public is an idiot and will do whatever it takes to keep from having to think too hard. Joe Public seems to have enough sense to keep himself alive for 70 some odd years and little drive to pick up any more knowledge.
You been thinkin' son?
Yeah, but I don't think I'm thunk.
Good points but the landscape with regards to budgeting is beginning to change. The company I work for does a mix of installations; fileservers, email, web...the usual. When given the choice, most businesses now like the sound of free.
It's basic economics...here's how we sell our open source services:
Companies are used to paying for a software license and support. It makes more sense to their bottom line to just pay for the support. Why pay more than you have to if somebody (in this case my company) will stand behind the product and support it?
Don't underestimate the power of free. We are beginning to deal with a lot of governmental type organizations (counties, city govts, etc) and they hate paying for a server license for Exchange, a CAL for the workstation and someone to support it. They simply do not have the funds for this kind of frivolous spending. If they aren't using the neat stuff of Exchange like shared calendars why not drop in a qmail|postfix|exim server and just pay for the support? Our backlog of contracts says that people will do that.
It comes down to this: the software is free for the taking...the support can either be absorbed in-house or outsourced, just like it always has.
Isn't it interesting how throughout the last several years we've been researching and coding like hell to take cartoon(ish) characters and make them look as realistic as possible? Look at the work that went into transforming an artist's sketches of Dr. Aki Ross et al into the very real looking characters of Final Fantasy.
Now we're researching and coding like hell to go back the other way.
I'm sure there's a Microsoft joke in there somewhere:)
Both companies offer similar programming, it basically boils down to the guide service. I dropped the local digital cable service(Charter blech) because the online guide sucked so bad and the pixellation due to compression. Dish and Direct both have PiP while you're surfing the guide and offer RF remotes which are really nice to have.
I have DirectTV and have friends with DirectTV and friends with Dish. I personally like DirecTV's guide much more than the spartan guide offered by Dish Networks. I have never experienced pixelation due to compression whereas I've seen it several times on my friends' Dish Network systems. I'm moving at the end of this week so we'll see how DirecTV's "pack up your receiver and go" works. I don't suffer fools when it comes to money out of my pocket:)
Almost forgot that the PVRs for each differ and that in itself may sway your choice one way or another. I don't have any experience with either one but a friend has the Dish PVR and he's a fan of it. DirecTV offers(offered?) DirecTivo. Go to a local retailer with both and try them out and go with the one with the guide that strikes your fancy. Good luck, I love my 5.1 DTV setup especially compared to the craptacular digital cable offered by Charter.
I don't know if you have tried using say, Mapquest's. If you have, you might have been in the mood to say "Mapquest is on crack". The directions are a good attempt, but aren't anywhere near effective.
The online direction and mapping tools are indeed lacking but the standalone packages are quite impressive. Garmin's Metroguide is really nice and coupled with a GPS makes travelling in an unfamiliar city much less stressful in my experience. But, I'm the nerdball you see driving down the road with GPS on the dash, a wi-fi antenna stuck to the top all hooked to my laptop honking and whistling in the backseat or in the lap of a passenger.
I have to admit though that the best route planning and mapping software I've used is Microsoft's Streets and Trips. You can update your route with the latest construction areas and request a certain type of road. My sister is going to the beach and I requested all freeways and limited-access highways to cut down on the number of turns and exits she would have to navigate. Streets and Trips gave me a route with one exit not counting the final destination. Not bad for a ~400 mile trip. I personally took a similar trip two weeks ago and opted for the shortest route instead of the simplest and it worked like a champ.
The net effect is that if you follow automated directions the trip time will mostly be far longer than if a person familiar with local conditions selects the route.
No argument there but unfortunately that's not always feasible.
Beside which, topography is modeled but the ground cover isn't.
For this reason you can't solely rely on topo maps. The TerraServer has aerial photos down to 1 meter resolution. That's not going to cut it for the military but for you and me that's plenty. Besides, the military uses aerial and satellite imagery that is much higher resolution than anything available to civilians. For better or worse that's the way it is.
Semi ontopic: for some cool Win32 software to let you play around with aerial photos and eat up some of Microsoft's bandwidth at the same time:) check out USAPhotoMaps, it's free as in beer. I picked up TopoFusion not too long ago and love it. It's not free but it's worth the $40 I put into it. It lets me pull down imagery from the TerraServer site and overlay it with topo maps. It also has a neat feature that syncs digital photos with waypoints you've set in your GPS and will spit out a web page with clickable icons at each waypoint that is quite nice. Oh, and it lets you download elevation information and generate 3D maps of an area. Neato! I haven't played with much GPS software outside the Win32 domain but I'll be researching that as soon as i re-partion my Thinkpad for a dual-boot.
Well, I can say with some surety that this system would never be permitted for use in the US military for these reasons, as well as a few others. Nothing will obviate good reconnaissance.
True, but good reconnaissance sometimes includes nothing more than a satellite image of an area. This info could be (maybe it is?) updated realtime on a notebook in the field via uplink. Admittedly I know very little about how our military operates outside of the world of Tom Clancy novels:) But this looks neat as hell for civilians at least.
Now, if only we had something affordable that could do that on the Linux server side, with clients on Linux, Windows and Mac platforms...and no, webmail doesn't cut it...
I'm not so sure webmail doesn't cut it. I recently rolled out a web based groupware server based on qmail/vpopmail/phpgroupware and the users couldn't be happier. They do everything they used to do on Exchange and I freed up a sizable chunk of IT's budget by no longer needing Win2k/2k3 Server license, Exchange license, and CALs. That adds up.
I installed Mozilla Firebird on the Ghost build host and have the browser start with all the pages they need in tabs. Aside from some Oracle and AS/400 users, most never have to leave the browser to do their work.
Web applications are great in an enterprise environment, they free up a bunch of my time so I can do useful things like post on slashdot;)
Re:The Philosopher's Google Box
on
Google's Next Steps
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Easy...take a breath.
I am quickly losing the esteem I have always had for Google with this out of control shitfest of sappy, foaming-at-the-mouth hype.
If you didn't notice, nobody from Google wrote any of these articles. They aren't hosted by Google.
I'll recap for you:
An article at SearchEngineWatch states...
Another article at Kottke.org says...
Some people predicts(sic) that...
I'm no apologist for any company, but your post blasts Google for no good reason. You now dislike Google because of a few articles not written by Google??? Google is one of the few usable search engines available and I'll not jump the gun on hating a company with such a good track record.
Frankly, I would feel uncomfortable giving my data to any company, especially if they are not obligated to destroy it after I terminate my account.
You've never bought a car? A house? Used a credit card? A debit card? You posted that comment through an anonymous proxy that you connected to using someone else's computer or a wireless account you sniffed? Google is right now one of the few companies I would feel comfortable with my information. Again, they have done nothing to make me feel differently.
Linux is just as capable of becoming corpulent and lazy as the dominant OS provider.
Ahh yes, that would be true if there was a Linux. There is no one distributor of Linux, which at the risk of sounding like Stallman is just the kernel. It's not the kernel that makes a Linux distribution, sure it's important, but it's all the bits and bobs added in by the distro packager and the kindly souls at sourceforge. It might be easy for a single Linux distribution to become corpulent and lazy, those distributions die. However, I think you'd be hard pressed to find all the developers of all the little parts that make a Linux distribution into a working, cohesive operating system getting lazy and sitting on their collective asses.
Lazily maintained useless code dies. Lazily maintained useful code forks or is picked up by another maintainer.
An intriguing distribution to say the least!
My only question is this: is this Windows distribution updated via conventional methods such as yum or apt? Or does one build new versions of this program outlook, from ports? Or does one simply emerge outlook?
I'm not too keen on gui or even curses-based update utilities and would like to hear about your distribution's command-line update utilities. I don't mind installing packages from source but if you offer the equivalent of apt-get update && apt-get install outlook then I'm all ears!
I've looked for your project on sourceforge and on distrowatch.com, but it must be too new for those.
Thanks for any more information you can give.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this "big rock star" would have the same attitude if his kids (does he even have kids?) were doing it
Actually he does have at least one child. He's a jack-wagon like his pops.
You should read this thread
It might help a non-Android developer understand a bit more about the perceived fragmentation situation.
cheers!
Agreed. Fortunately openSUSE still includes KDE3.5.x and I'll stick with that until KDE4 improves or KDE3 support is dropped entirely.
I've read that Linus historically uses quite n00b friendly distros. He's never even run Debian due to its (perceived or otherwise) installation complexity. He's stated that he just wants to work on the kernel and not fiddle with the distro. See this interview.
According to the Computerworld article, Linus upgraded Fedora $version and it bumped him to KDE4 without offering a choice. I think it all boils down to Linus' desire for the distribution to Just Work(tm). I'd imagine he simply doesn't have time to fight the distribution itself to shoehorn it into something resembling a usable environment.
Cheers
there fixed that for you.
Sorry, I didn't elaborate.
My father has DirecTV HD and an OTA antenna.
HD OTA looks better with a side by side comparison of flipping between DirecTV and his antenna on the same channel.
DirecTV HD is compressed douche, look it up.
My local cable carrier can't spell HDTV (or Internet for that matter). I went with DirecTV for a couple other reasons but I haven't even subscribed to their HDTV offerings yet. One reason is they were having HD DVR shortages for a while last year.
Follow this thread at Lumenlab and build your own HD antenna! I live ~45 miles as the crow flies from the nearest transmitter. With an antenna I built based on some of the ideas there I can receive 3 HD channels out of 4 possible offerings. I can pick up FOX, NBC and CBS. I built the antenna with stuff I had lying around. I used 2x4s, coat hangers and fencing. Free HD.
And before anyone asks, yes it's ugly. I stuck mine in the attic to hide it. I might be able to put it on a mast and pick up the 4th channel which is ABC but my wife and neighbors would frown.
I live in a fairly mountainous area of the US so I was pleasantly surprised to pick up 3 of 4 channels. Give it a shot this weekend and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Cable and DirecTV's over compressed offerings can't come close to the visual quality of an OTA signal.
Well, according to the Wayback Machine this overall design goes back to at least the second year of Slashdot's existence. According to my whois output Slashdot.org was registered:
Slashdot is 8 years old and this design is at least 7 years old.Regarding a complete redesign, sure some stuff could be changed but this layout is conducive to the type of conversations we have on here. When I don't have mod points I cruise at +3 - Nested - Highest Scores First. I've seen posts on Digg about how Digg is going to be the death of Slashdot and I just don't agree. Sure there are teh lamers on here that post stupid crap. When you get above a certain moderation threshold on Slashdot (for me it seems to fluctuate between +2 and +3) the discussion differences between Digg and Slashdot on highly technical matters are an order of magnitude different. Similar to the difference between a conversation on filesystems in a high school comp-sci class and a Post-Graduate discussion on filesystems.
I didn't mean for this post to turn into a jab at Digg.com but the sheer stupidity of most comments there and the overall juvenile quality of the discussion has turned me off of it completely.
Digg is the exact opposite from Slashdot for me. I go to Digg to look at the links and absolutely ignore the usually useless drivel in the comments. I go to Slashdot and ignore the link and dive into the overall interesting and enlightening comments! Laugh all you want but I've found most comments at Digg.com to consist of "LOL me too, that is teh stupidz who would ever buy that????" No thanks.
First off, nice job guys. It's about time. :)
There's just a little touch that's missing. How about Slashdot's front page acts more like Google's customizable homepage? I know the AJAX bandwagon isn't something everybody wants to jump on, but this is an excellent application for that technology. I don't mean the front page should become a portal. Anything but. I mean that the front page is a bit more customizable beyond the existing UI like the up down arrows and the kill button for the what I call feed boxes on the right.
For example: a logged in user would be able to drag topics from the "Sections" menu on the left side of the page into the mini feed box area on the right. The feed boxes on the right could be draggable. The topic icons at the top could be dragged into the feed box area. C'mon guys, surely between all the know-how of the users and the site admins this could be accomplished. Embrace and extend!
Good job.
I cancelled my accounts with these scumbags as soon as I read about this ~12:30AM Eastern.
As a previous poster suggested, hopefully Google Wallet will turn out to be more than hype and bury these assholes.
What I'd like to know is whether most of the Asian ISPs are doing like the ones here in the States. Every broadband connection I've had until recently had a dynamic IP. Even so, the shortest time I ever had an IP was 12 months. That's with Charter cable, Sprint DSL, and a regional telecom outfit Ntelos. If the Asian ISPs are setting super high TTLs on the IPs like they do in the States, then just block the individual problem IPs as needed. IMO that would be a much safer route to take than blocking entire countries.
Neat ultra-portable there.
How's wireless support under the Linux installs you have on the Fujitsu? I have a Fujitsu S6210 and Suse 9.3 works like a champ with this notebook and a bog standard Intel 2200BG chipset.
Semi-OT: Suse 9.3 is the only install I've put on this notebook that I haven't had to do *any* configuration to get WPA-PSK working. Fill in your pre-shared key and take off. I've tried just about every distro and although I could get WPA working it wasn't nearly as seamless as it is in Suse 9.3. The kinternet tool in 9.3 is what keeps me on Suse. No mucking with config files and custom scripts to bring the wireless up and down. Very nice.
Trying to keep it on topic here :) How about suspend to RAM or suspend to disk in Suse ... any issues with that? I ask because I'll be damned if I can get suspend to anything working on this notebook using any distro.
Looking at the datasheet on Fujitsu's site it is stated that that particular model is fixed at 256MB of RAM. That looks like it will be the only sticking point for me. As far as build quality, the only other notebooks I've used personally that compare to and surpass Fujitsu is the excellent Thinkpad. I still miss my T30 that a Diet Coke destroyed *sniff*.
Anybody have any experience with the ultra-low voltage Pentium-Ms? I'm looking at the entire Fujitsu ultra-portable line due to the pleasant experience I've had with this S6210. Obviously speed isn't my main concern but portability and battery life are.
Good idea.
Also remember to leave some pretty stout fishing line in with the runs of cable in case you need to make future runs.
Dell does kinda/sorta/maybe support other distros.
Check it out: linux.dell.com
Along with Red Hat they list various flavors of SuSE, Debian, and Slack here.
This part of the site has an interesting link site that says Dell is partnering with Novell to offer SuSE.
Old news maybe to slashdot, it's dated October 27, 2004.
I've always heard that you should not use a cdrom and a hard disk on the same channel because it'll kill your hard drive performance.
If you're talking about parallel IDE, you've heard correctly.
What happens is the bus gets knocked down to the lowest common denominator. If your hard drive and CDROM are on the same channel and the hard drive is ATA66 and your CDROM is ATA33 then the best you'll get is ATA33.
I don't know about SATA, I've yet to have a chance to fool with it. No need for home PC upgrades and our servers use SCSI. Can you buy an SATA CDROM|DVD|burner yet?
I doubt any kind of hard science channel will take off. Joe Public doesn't like to think. He just wants to be passively entertained.
Look at how far downhill the programming on TLC has gone. Shows that were mildly entertaining on BBC are highly irritating on that channel. Shows like Trading Spaces and such fill their daily programming now, and not because management there "guesses" people will watch.
Outside of academia and industries that have hard sciences as their backbone, people are pretty damned stupid. Seriously. Joe Public is an idiot and will do whatever it takes to keep from having to think too hard. Joe Public seems to have enough sense to keep himself alive for 70 some odd years and little drive to pick up any more knowledge.
You been thinkin' son?
Yeah, but I don't think I'm thunk.
Perhaps we should identify it with (im)famous person(s)...
imfamous...that means more than famous right?
Good points but the landscape with regards to budgeting is beginning to change. The company I work for does a mix of installations; fileservers, email, web...the usual. When given the choice, most businesses now like the sound of free.
It's basic economics...here's how we sell our open source services:
Companies are used to paying for a software license and support. It makes more sense to their bottom line to just pay for the support. Why pay more than you have to if somebody (in this case my company) will stand behind the product and support it?
Don't underestimate the power of free. We are beginning to deal with a lot of governmental type organizations (counties, city govts, etc) and they hate paying for a server license for Exchange, a CAL for the workstation and someone to support it. They simply do not have the funds for this kind of frivolous spending. If they aren't using the neat stuff of Exchange like shared calendars why not drop in a qmail|postfix|exim server and just pay for the support? Our backlog of contracts says that people will do that.
It comes down to this: the software is free for the taking...the support can either be absorbed in-house or outsourced, just like it always has.
Isn't it interesting how throughout the last several years we've been researching and coding like hell to take cartoon(ish) characters and make them look as realistic as possible? Look at the work that went into transforming an artist's sketches of Dr. Aki Ross et al into the very real looking characters of Final Fantasy.
Now we're researching and coding like hell to go back the other way.
I'm sure there's a Microsoft joke in there somewhere :)
Both companies offer similar programming, it basically boils down to the guide service. I dropped the local digital cable service(Charter blech) because the online guide sucked so bad and the pixellation due to compression. Dish and Direct both have PiP while you're surfing the guide and offer RF remotes which are really nice to have.
I have DirectTV and have friends with DirectTV and friends with Dish. I personally like DirecTV's guide much more than the spartan guide offered by Dish Networks. I have never experienced pixelation due to compression whereas I've seen it several times on my friends' Dish Network systems. I'm moving at the end of this week so we'll see how DirecTV's "pack up your receiver and go" works. I don't suffer fools when it comes to money out of my pocket :)
Almost forgot that the PVRs for each differ and that in itself may sway your choice one way or another. I don't have any experience with either one but a friend has the Dish PVR and he's a fan of it. DirecTV offers(offered?) DirecTivo. Go to a local retailer with both and try them out and go with the one with the guide that strikes your fancy. Good luck, I love my 5.1 DTV setup especially compared to the craptacular digital cable offered by Charter.
I don't know if you have tried using say, Mapquest's. If you have, you might have been in the mood to say "Mapquest is on crack". The directions are a good attempt, but aren't anywhere near effective.
The online direction and mapping tools are indeed lacking but the standalone packages are quite impressive. Garmin's Metroguide is really nice and coupled with a GPS makes travelling in an unfamiliar city much less stressful in my experience. But, I'm the nerdball you see driving down the road with GPS on the dash, a wi-fi antenna stuck to the top all hooked to my laptop honking and whistling in the backseat or in the lap of a passenger.
I have to admit though that the best route planning and mapping software I've used is Microsoft's Streets and Trips. You can update your route with the latest construction areas and request a certain type of road. My sister is going to the beach and I requested all freeways and limited-access highways to cut down on the number of turns and exits she would have to navigate. Streets and Trips gave me a route with one exit not counting the final destination. Not bad for a ~400 mile trip. I personally took a similar trip two weeks ago and opted for the shortest route instead of the simplest and it worked like a champ.
The net effect is that if you follow automated directions the trip time will mostly be far longer than if a person familiar with local conditions selects the route.
No argument there but unfortunately that's not always feasible.
Beside which, topography is modeled but the ground cover isn't.
For this reason you can't solely rely on topo maps. The TerraServer has aerial photos down to 1 meter resolution. That's not going to cut it for the military but for you and me that's plenty. Besides, the military uses aerial and satellite imagery that is much higher resolution than anything available to civilians. For better or worse that's the way it is.
Semi ontopic: for some cool Win32 software to let you play around with aerial photos and eat up some of Microsoft's bandwidth at the same time :) check out USAPhotoMaps, it's free as in beer. I picked up TopoFusion not too long ago and love it. It's not free but it's worth the $40 I put into it. It lets me pull down imagery from the TerraServer site and overlay it with topo maps. It also has a neat feature that syncs digital photos with waypoints you've set in your GPS and will spit out a web page with clickable icons at each waypoint that is quite nice. Oh, and it lets you download elevation information and generate 3D maps of an area. Neato! I haven't played with much GPS software outside the Win32 domain but I'll be researching that as soon as i re-partion my Thinkpad for a dual-boot.
Well, I can say with some surety that this system would never be permitted for use in the US military for these reasons, as well as a few others. Nothing will obviate good reconnaissance.
True, but good reconnaissance sometimes includes nothing more than a satellite image of an area. This info could be (maybe it is?) updated realtime on a notebook in the field via uplink. Admittedly I know very little about how our military operates outside of the world of Tom Clancy novels :) But this looks neat as hell for civilians at least.
I'll contribute a George Carlinism (which are becoming quite common here)
Kiss her where it smells...take her to New Jersey!
Now, if only we had something affordable that could do that on the Linux server side, with clients on Linux, Windows and Mac platforms...and no, webmail doesn't cut it...
I'm not so sure webmail doesn't cut it. I recently rolled out a web based groupware server based on qmail/vpopmail/phpgroupware and the users couldn't be happier. They do everything they used to do on Exchange and I freed up a sizable chunk of IT's budget by no longer needing Win2k/2k3 Server license, Exchange license, and CALs. That adds up.
I installed Mozilla Firebird on the Ghost build host and have the browser start with all the pages they need in tabs. Aside from some Oracle and AS/400 users, most never have to leave the browser to do their work.
Web applications are great in an enterprise environment, they free up a bunch of my time so I can do useful things like post on slashdot ;)
Easy...take a breath.
I am quickly losing the esteem I have always had for Google with this out of control shitfest of sappy, foaming-at-the-mouth hype.
If you didn't notice, nobody from Google wrote any of these articles. They aren't hosted by Google. I'll recap for you:
Another article at Kottke.org says...
Some people predicts(sic) that...
I'm no apologist for any company, but your post blasts Google for no good reason. You now dislike Google because of a few articles not written by Google??? Google is one of the few usable search engines available and I'll not jump the gun on hating a company with such a good track record.
Frankly, I would feel uncomfortable giving my data to any company, especially if they are not obligated to destroy it after I terminate my account.
You've never bought a car? A house? Used a credit card? A debit card? You posted that comment through an anonymous proxy that you connected to using someone else's computer or a wireless account you sniffed? Google is right now one of the few companies I would feel comfortable with my information. Again, they have done nothing to make me feel differently.
Linux is just as capable of becoming corpulent and lazy as the dominant OS provider.
Ahh yes, that would be true if there was a Linux. There is no one distributor of Linux, which at the risk of sounding like Stallman is just the kernel. It's not the kernel that makes a Linux distribution, sure it's important, but it's all the bits and bobs added in by the distro packager and the kindly souls at sourceforge. It might be easy for a single Linux distribution to become corpulent and lazy, those distributions die. However, I think you'd be hard pressed to find all the developers of all the little parts that make a Linux distribution into a working, cohesive operating system getting lazy and sitting on their collective asses.
Lazily maintained useless code dies. Lazily maintained useful code forks or is picked up by another maintainer.
An intriguing distribution to say the least!
My only question is this: is this Windows distribution updated via conventional methods such as yum or apt?
Or does one build new versions of this program outlook, from ports? Or does one simply emerge outlook?
I'm not too keen on gui or even curses-based update utilities and would like to hear about your distribution's command-line update utilities. I don't mind installing packages from source but if you offer the equivalent of apt-get update && apt-get install outlook then I'm all ears!
I've looked for your project on sourceforge and on distrowatch.com, but it must be too new for those.
Thanks for any more information you can give.