Actually, links like the ones included with your review aren't the real problem. In a very slightly different universe, they'd have been completely fine. Yes, bn.com affliliate links are good for us (Slashdot), both for consistency (good to always have a link at the bottom to the reviewed book so people can find it, and confusing to have more than one) and because they make the site some small amount of money, but the bigger reason to me for not allowing affiliate links is to prevent abuse.
Allowing affiliate links ups the odds of link-stuffing. I don't want to run reviews that are built like Star Wars Episodes 1-3, thinly veiled links to products. You might be amazed by how many affiliate links some people try to jam into a single review;)
It's a free world though, and when a book is available elsewhere for a lower price, or to folks in e.g. the UK, it usually shows up quickly in the comments. Probably not to bn.com's taste, but Hey, them's the breaks:)
I've used several distributions (distribution families, really) over the past few years, and the biggest hassle in switching from one to another is not the data (CD-Rs worked for a while, and now external hard drives), not the baseline apps (most non-specialist distributions, including RH, come with a boatload of included apps), but rather package management.
Since apt4rpm works very well, once installed, have you considered a greater use for apt vs. RPMs in Fedora / future versions of whatever products end up with the Red Hat label? Mandrake's URPMI does a great, similar job, too. I like the automatic dependency checking that this type of package manager brings, and Synaptic is one of the nicest package management front ends I've seen.
The AI-driven battle simulation software used to create the fighting scenes in the LotR movies now has a greater purpose than merely retelling the saga of how Sauron was defeated, survival of Middle Earth, and all that.
Now, the Orcs can have (3D rendered) faces more in keeping with the times. I'm thinking the new enemy could be called the Makbrydes, or perhaps the S'nntogks.
Click this button to begin the Linux-powered renderfarm...
Saw "Revolutions" on Wednesday night with some friends, on the basis that at the very least it would be *fun* to see, in the same way that, say, "The Mummy" would be fun to see. Special effects and campy dialog would be enough, along with the excitement of seeing a move on release day, etc. In other words, the movie did not have a high threshold to meet;
Context: I saw the first one, in a dollar theater, and was not disappointed enough to bother fighting for the change I felt I was owed. For a dollar, in fact, it was nearly a fair deal. Trite story hinging on many plot holes, bad actor in the alleged lead role, but Hey, cool special effects! The slumber-party bull-session philosophy was eh, so-so. Overwrought and not exactly profound, even though it touches on profound subjects like consciousness, free will, etc. Did not see the second one, so cannot comment fairly on it.
The most exciting thing about the new one, to me and I think everyone in the same theater, was the very exciting fight scene near the beginning. Unless you were at the Theater 5, 10 o'clock showing at some theater ("E-Walk"?) on Times Square, you missed this one, though. It involved some guy (or perhaps a couple of guys, but one main participant) in the back row of the theater. The main participant (we smelled marrijawanna in the air; perhaps he was the source of that?) was engaged in a confrontation with a theater employee and -- I think -- at least one from theater security; then came a bigwig (portly, in a suit) from theater management, then came a few cops, then came more and more cops... If if sounds like a lot of people to restrain one guy, it is. As the reinforcements streamed in, many people stood up to get a better view, and nearly everyone turned around (including us). It never was clear what they guy was in trouble for, but he was certainly not going without a fight; after he was restrained (handcuffs? plastic ziptie?) it appeared to us that he tried to squirm under the seats in an effort to evade the cops / theater security. The whole thing seemed to happen very slowly, everyone asking neighbors if they could tell what was going on. At one point early on, when things were still at the hands-on-hips stage, I saw the guy show something to the police standing in front of him (a ticket? dunno.), but I did not see how things progressed from there to full-on fighting.
When the combatants finally filed out about 10 minutes later (with the apparent perpetrator, by now more fully restrained, being carried out completely suspended between two opponents, I counted 12 policemen (plus 2 theater security guys, plus the guy from management). Even in New York, people were willing to express some surprise and excitement at the whole thing, and clapped as the parade exited the theater. I'm curious what the guy was in trouble for in the first place.
So, that was the highlight of the showing.
When the movie eventually started, there was some cheering and tittering at the opening sequence. Everything up to and including the fight between Neo and the Smith-posessed guy was actually decent, if cliche, Sci-Fi drama stuff, like Aliens and a lot of other movies. Most of what happened after that was so lame as to be undeserving of much comment. Starship Troopers' producers in particular should be suing any day now;)
However, I have not spent the last week making a better movie to show by way of comparison what a *good* movie would be like, and in truth I enjoyed watching Revolutions in the way I expected to: eye-candy with some fun fight scenes, fight scenes with some fun eye candy. I'm not rushing out to watch #2 though and see what I missed, cribbed notes are fine.
[Aside: one of the worst Keanu Reeves movies ever produced (and thus one of the worst movies ever produced), and one that makes Keanu's role in The Matrix appear well-acted by comparison, is The Replacements. Make your enemies watch that one, repeatedly. It may just be KR's worst showing, ever. This one shines by comparison.]
the HHK is a membrane keyboard, little collapsing rubber domes rather than a a mechanical-switch design. It's better than many such keyboards are, and is definitely a high-quality device. I'd buy one, if not for the keyfeel, which to me is anything but clicky. Without a jillion little springs, 8lbs of steel and an eye of newt, it will always be a membrane keyboard.
"Anyone that works for a company, allows the company to pay their bills, and then launches a public ad campaign against the company is a low life, scoundrel."
OK. What about his post was negative toward Microsoft?
"Nope, this person is a cretin, collecting a paycheck from a company while trying to damage the company."
How would that picture have damaged the company? Microsoft writes and sells a lot of software for the Mac -- it's not secret that they have Macs with which to develop that software, and not surprising that they take delivery of the latest-n-greatest Apple hardware. They'd be silly not to;)
Violating stated policies ("don't take any pictures of the place for public consumption" or "do not ever discuss what hardware Microsoft uses to develop software") is one thing, even if rules like that tend to be enforced spottily. Looks like in this case, he was the spot.
But from the posted photo and blurb, I don't see any animus against MS. If the guy likes Macs, it seems like a positive statement (from his perspective) that MS seems to agree with him.
1) you can get a nice name-brand x86 laptop, through sites like techbargains.com, for well under a thousand dollars, in some cases less than $700. Not the highest-end, but way better than anything available at anything like that price a year or so ago. March of progress, long may it wave. The cheapest near-equivalent tablets I've seen have been ViewSonic (ever bought a viewsonic computer, as opposed to monitor? I have not, have no idea, but therefore not a *positive* idea of their machines' quality) refurb'd machines at TigerDirect, at $999. Which, really, is not bad, except those particular machines have a huge bezel surrounding the screen, no keyboard (see next point), and battery life isn't great.
2) Some tablets have built-in keyboards that swivel around underneath for tablet view -- now there's an idea;) So they're laptops with a flexible use, you can use as a tablet when necessary. That's a good idea. The ones *without* such a keyboard though, eh... less flexible, and and less protected screen, seems like all the advantages of ripping a laptop apart and gluing it back together with the pieces misaligned and the keyboard broken. "Sorry, Mr. Fratznubble, we put your screen on backwards and broke your keyboard. That'll be $200, please."
3) So far, the power claims aren't great. I'd like to see the upcoming Antaur tablets reach the market... I hope they have decent battery life, and they do have a swivel-away keyboard.
4) I would be much more interested in a tablet style computer if I had a desk stand to put the tablet itself in front of my like a conventiona lLCD monitor, and hook up a USB mouse / keyboard. I don't like most laptop keyboards (ThinkPads being an exception, and my Toshiba isn't *too* awful...), but the real issue is neck position. Laptop use enourages even more slouching and neck craning than I usually do, thanks.
but frankly, I'd rather ask Slashdot on this question;)
I really like dpreview, rely on Phil A. to have in-depth reviews, etc. However, it's a narrow site. This is not to say that all the people who take part in the discussions are themselves narrow, but if you ask on Digital Photography Review whether digital photography is ready to replace film (at least in SLRs: it's easier to "prove" -- as in argue convincingly -- that this has happened already with point-and-shoots), the responses might be even more polarized than they are here.
Both of these projects are so good now, it's great while browsing to run into comments occasionally (going back years) asserting that one or the other would cease to be, or that the presence of both in the world of free / Free software was harmful, because it mean duplication of effort, dilution of attention, etc.
Ha!
Hari Seldon *must* have been involved, to see how much these allegedly self-motivated projects catalyze each other.
However much you like either one, note that KDE now has integrated CD (and DVD!) burning software -- IMO on par with anything I've seen on the commerical side (Nero, etc) whereas before I prefered GnomeToaster to anything else, and GNOME now has a good file-chooser (which had been one of my least favorite points about GNOME apps).
Meanwhile, with the right libraries on your system, the Virtucon-backed fluxbox gives you access to the best of both worlds;)
"I don't doubt that you would have problems with the wireless card, but I find it very unlikely that "much of his hardware" is problematic in Windows. Unless you're using Mac hardware on a Windows machine? Then it could be a problem I suppose."
The things that would not work without major hassle:
- Minolta/QMS color laser printer (now a big heavy paperweight, I think) -- whether the fault is with Windows (as Minolta says) or with Minolta/QMS's drivers, nobody knows, which has a spooler that seems to corrupt itself with every page printed.I have not tried it with recent CUPS, but that is supposed to support it well.
- HP CD-writer (under Windows 98SE; perhaps it works great in XP), and a Teac CD writer for which Teac has since removed the drivers from its site (or buried them), because it's a few years old. Eventually, we got working -- but both of them work out of the box with cdrecord and its various GUIs.
- DLink combo 56K/ethernet PCMCIA card. Eventually got (only) the modem side to work, though the control panel claims to recognize both parts. It just seems whimsical:)
I have no doubt that someone skilled in the art could get all of these things working, but (and this is a frustrating pain esp. with the networking cards) they generally require a driver not currently loaded on the system, whereas ("bloatware" deluxe;)) Knoppix, Red Hat and Mandrake generally find and use them without needing a driver disk. (And since the driver disk for the combo card is long gone, years ago, this is important;))
Note that I am able to break computers by my mere presence, though... the last time I spent much time with Windows, I was installing Windows 98. The install (the install!) hung repeatedly, took about 5 go-throughs before it decided to actually complete. Maybe it was the hardware in that case.
I've found a lot of devices don't work well with Windows, or work only after extensive futzing with options and opaque configuration playing-around. This is largely out of my own ignorance, since I don't see / touch Microsoft Windows machines very often -- but that argues against the "just works" myth. I'm calling it a myth, anyhow!
On visits to my dad's place (his computers have Windows) I have found that much of his hardware does not like the drivers (supplied in the box, labeled as appropriate for the versions of Windows on his computers) supplied with it. For instance: his very common wireless ethernet card (a Linksys) refuses to work on either of two Windows laptops, despite happy-seeming driver installation process. (It even reports good *signal* but does not seem to pass packets. Probably a Windows guru, or the average middle school kid, could fix what me and my electrical-engineer dad can't, but hey.)
Solution? (Not really a solution for him, but interesting anyhow.) Pop in Knoppix, and the wireless card works. On one of his laptops, the internal ethernet flakes out frequenly with Windows, is rock-solid under Knoppix.
Am I a computer idiot? Well, Yeah, I guess so, wish I could lie about it. Most computer interfaces are poorly designed and anti-intuitive, IMO, and most manuals are worse:)
But *for hardware that it works with*, Linux in any of its recent manifestations seems to work more smoothly than Windows past or present. That means popping in an ethernet card doesn't mean installing a driver (though there are exceptions, esp. for I think it's NForce motherboards where on-board ethernet doesn't work without special driver), and CD-Rom drives too pretty much *just work*, no special drivers there either.
There are a lot of areas where Linux hardware support is still poor, but unless you're trolling (vs. just frustrated with Linux, the way I get frustrated with Windows every time I cross its path), I think your description of woe leading to "a dozen or so reboots, and kernel compilations later you decide the device might be defective" is over the top.
And if you are trolling, my fingers thank you for the exercise on this lovely day.
"What I wanted was a quick way to indicate "I need to see this patch of text here and that patch of text there on the screen at the same time." I wanted to be able to set up several of these viewing relationships concurrently and toggle among the various exposures as my workflow dictated, with a single keystroke if possible."
This sounds like the multiple workspaces you can have under the various Linux desktop environments by default, and under Mac OS X and and Windows with software add-ons. (Unless I'm misreading what you're after.)
I can switch with a keystroke (well, a key combination in my cae, though it could be mapped to a single key...) among several different workspaces, can have the keyboard-rest-time Kbounce on one, email on another, open browser on another...
That wouldn't stop someone from making ugly ones, of course, but the bit-mapped, one-size-for-all-monitors approach is not the only way skins could be. That there are now a few (and soon will be more) vector-based themes for Gnome and KDE is a good sign, IMO.
(But of course, you are right wrt combining fixed skins with scaleable fonts -- except that is at least only *half* brain-dead. Worse is fixed skins plus fixed fonts, an unchangeable glop.)
"It implies Sony has a PVP, when it does not. It's a writer suggesting that they skip ahead to it."
According to the story: "... It looks like they just might do that. A few weeks ago, a prototype of a Sony PVP turned up at the WPC Expo trade show in Tokyo."
And it's a decent HTML composition tool, if you like that sort of thing.
And it includes a quite nice (really!) IRC client. Is it as nice as xchat is on nix? No -- but it's close enough that in a pinch, you need not feel pinched. I used to laugh at the IRC client but use it sometimes anyhow, out of necessity, for instance on a borrowed Windows desktop. Now, it's got a perfectly nice GUI, workable as an all-day client.
And it's a good mail client, with intelligent spam filtering, which is quite presentable to Outlook users.
And bittorrent integrates well.
Blocks popups, handles tabs intelligently (though no accounting for taste, and I have my peeves with this aspect), has a good bookmark-filing system, good keyboard controls...
Plus, if you're dual booting, it's nice to have an app like Mozilla that's so cross platform it's not funny:) You don't have to readjust much to switch between.
"You realize that 99% of government has nothing whatsoever to do with some office worker typing letters in word or open office.
There's metric shitloads of custom code for specific tasks written for Windows. Theres shitloads of it for unix. There's shitloads of it for other mainframe OS's."
Maybe we could do with a few less metric shitloads of government, or at least we could use requirements for openness (Sunshine laws generally, things like the FOIA) to make clear what all those shitloads of custom code are being used to do to the citizenry that paid for them.
Just because the State is presently doing a lot of things (the "tasks at hand") doesn't automatically mean the State is right to do so, or has an automatic right to keep doing them. What tasks? Why are they at hand? They may (occasionally) start out right, looking for tranquility, prosperity, etc, but along the way governments tend to stretch, get bloated, and do a lot of silly or harmful things. Transparency and justification seem a lot more important than up-front costs here, though those matter a lot too.
If they're going to do things with software (and they will, this era -- software is inextricable, as you point out, from the various things States like to do to their humans), governments *in particular* ought to be doing them in the open to the degree compatible with continued human existence and happiness, as well as fiscal prudency.
... and by that I do not mean "profound," though occasionally they are that as well. What I mean is *heavy* and bulky and physical.
Besides which, magazines love to just keep sending (and billing for) magazines you might no longer be fond of. I liked having a subscription to "Thrasher," but my one-year subscription kept coming for more than 2 years. Which is fine, except when it comes time to move, and that little stack of magazines has grown and grown... it's hard to part with them, sometimes, even when there's just one good article in a particular one.
Wired is a good example -- wisely designed, graphically appealing, consistent (and square) spines... they look cool on a shelf, have a lot of eye candy, so they're hard to get rid of.
Thanks for the info re: the anti-state-income-tax movement in MA, which I'd never heard of before. If they can swing the other 3% next time around, I'd put Massachusetts on my list of possibly livable states;)
Flatter taxes are better than steeper ones, fewer are better than more, etc.
Thanks for pointing this one out. I vaguely remembered this story (read it in the paper when it was published) but not the specifics. Pretty good capsule summary of what statists believe:)
a) We get to invent the rules b) The more rules, the better c) except for us
wrt point b), notice that many public oafficials like to brag about how many new laws they passed or implemented (depending on whether they're in the stick-em-up or the stick-it-to-ya part of the political spectrum). This is something that they *ought* to shamefacedly cough their way out of answering, not brag about.
If we called them all "rule inventors" and "tattletale," I think the proper perspective would be easier to maintain. Words like "lawmaker" and "executive" sound far too important for these arrogant brats.
Anything that pissed off the Multistate Confiscation Committee is a good thing.
That government is best which governs least, and all that.
To mangle a saying: The Internet interprets [busybody, avaricious, carpetbagging, presumptuous huckster bastards] as damage, and at least tries to route around them.
C'mon, "who needs the Internet?" is a silly question. The Internet is tremendously useful now (and offers lots of "unproductive" stuff, too -- quotes because the line between productive and unproductive is a mostly useless, fuzzy gray line not worth respecting in the way it's usually used) and will be more and more later on. People survived without it, just like you would survive without any of the foods you like best, or without recorded music, or without being able to read... handwringing about their "usefulness" doesn't exactly excite me as an important philosophical point.
I dunno about middle and right buttons, but a standard left click seems to be linked to the numberpad "5" key;)
I had nearly forgotten about this, but your comment reminded me to play with it, and I just posted this comment after jumping around the page with my number pad... and accidentally hit "5.";)
Debian install is now an easy thing, because of Knoppix.
Just boot into Knoppix (which works well for *most* x86 machines with 128MB of RAM or more). From a terminal, type:
# sudo/usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall
to start the script which will install Knoppix to the hard drive. I've done this on several machines, all of which had either completely blank hard drives from the get-go, or I wiped completely whatever distros had been there previously.
Main caveat is that fdisk is no fun, would be very frustrating to someone unclear on how his hard disk should be set up. (Especially someone wanting to dual boot -- I'd have no idea how to do this).
I believe the hardward recognition stuff in Knoppix is mostly from Mandrake, so whatever praise / hatred you have for Mandrake's recognition would probably still apply here.
Slashdot Mirror
Rathumos:
;)
:)
Actually, links like the ones included with your review aren't the real problem. In a very slightly different universe, they'd have been completely fine. Yes, bn.com affliliate links are good for us (Slashdot), both for consistency (good to always have a link at the bottom to the reviewed book so people can find it, and confusing to have more than one) and because they make the site some small amount of money, but the bigger reason to me for not allowing affiliate links is to prevent abuse.
Allowing affiliate links ups the odds of link-stuffing. I don't want to run reviews that are built like Star Wars Episodes 1-3, thinly veiled links to products. You might be amazed by how many affiliate links some people try to jam into a single review
It's a free world though, and when a book is available elsewhere for a lower price, or to folks in e.g. the UK, it usually shows up quickly in the comments. Probably not to bn.com's taste, but Hey, them's the breaks
timothy
I've used several distributions (distribution families, really) over the past few years, and the biggest hassle in switching from one to another is not the data (CD-Rs worked for a while, and now external hard drives), not the baseline apps (most non-specialist distributions, including RH, come with a boatload of included apps), but rather package management.
Since apt4rpm works very well, once installed, have you considered a greater use for apt vs. RPMs in Fedora / future versions of whatever products end up with the Red Hat label? Mandrake's URPMI does a great, similar job, too. I like the automatic dependency checking that this type of package manager brings, and Synaptic is one of the nicest package management front ends I've seen.
timothy
The AI-driven battle simulation software used to create the fighting scenes in the LotR movies now has a greater purpose than merely retelling the saga of how Sauron was defeated, survival of Middle Earth, and all that.
...
Now, the Orcs can have (3D rendered) faces more in keeping with the times. I'm thinking the new enemy could be called the Makbrydes, or perhaps the S'nntogks.
Click this button to begin the Linux-powered renderfarm
timothy
Saw "Revolutions" on Wednesday night with some friends, on the basis that at the very least it would be *fun* to see, in the same way that, say, "The Mummy" would be fun to see. Special effects and campy dialog would be enough, along with the excitement of seeing a move on release day, etc. In other words, the movie did not have a high threshold to meet ;
... If if sounds like a lot of people to restrain one guy, it is. As the reinforcements streamed in, many people stood up to get a better view, and nearly everyone turned around (including us). It never was clear what they guy was in trouble for, but he was certainly not going without a fight; after he was restrained (handcuffs? plastic ziptie?) it appeared to us that he tried to squirm under the seats in an effort to evade the cops / theater security. The whole thing seemed to happen very slowly, everyone asking neighbors if they could tell what was going on. At one point early on, when things were still at the hands-on-hips stage, I saw the guy show something to the police standing in front of him (a ticket? dunno.), but I did not see how things progressed from there to full-on fighting.
;)
Context: I saw the first one, in a dollar theater, and was not disappointed enough to bother fighting for the change I felt I was owed. For a dollar, in fact, it was nearly a fair deal. Trite story hinging on many plot holes, bad actor in the alleged lead role, but Hey, cool special effects! The slumber-party bull-session philosophy was eh, so-so. Overwrought and not exactly profound, even though it touches on profound subjects like consciousness, free will, etc. Did not see the second one, so cannot comment fairly on it.
The most exciting thing about the new one, to me and I think everyone in the same theater, was the very exciting fight scene near the beginning. Unless you were at the Theater 5, 10 o'clock showing at some theater ("E-Walk"?) on Times Square, you missed this one, though. It involved some guy (or perhaps a couple of guys, but one main participant) in the back row of the theater. The main participant (we smelled marrijawanna in the air; perhaps he was the source of that?) was engaged in a confrontation with a theater employee and -- I think -- at least one from theater security; then came a bigwig (portly, in a suit) from theater management, then came a few cops, then came more and more cops
When the combatants finally filed out about 10 minutes later (with the apparent perpetrator, by now more fully restrained, being carried out completely suspended between two opponents, I counted 12 policemen (plus 2 theater security guys, plus the guy from management). Even in New York, people were willing to express some surprise and excitement at the whole thing, and clapped as the parade exited the theater. I'm curious what the guy was in trouble for in the first place.
So, that was the highlight of the showing.
When the movie eventually started, there was some cheering and tittering at the opening sequence. Everything up to and including the fight between Neo and the Smith-posessed guy was actually decent, if cliche, Sci-Fi drama stuff, like Aliens and a lot of other movies. Most of what happened after that was so lame as to be undeserving of much comment. Starship Troopers' producers in particular should be suing any day now
However, I have not spent the last week making a better movie to show by way of comparison what a *good* movie would be like, and in truth I enjoyed watching Revolutions in the way I expected to: eye-candy with some fun fight scenes, fight scenes with some fun eye candy. I'm not rushing out to watch #2 though and see what I missed, cribbed notes are fine.
[Aside: one of the worst Keanu Reeves movies ever produced (and thus one of the worst movies ever produced), and one that makes Keanu's role in The Matrix appear well-acted by comparison, is The Replacements. Make your enemies watch that one, repeatedly. It may just be KR's worst showing, ever. This one shines by comparison.]
timothy
the HHK is a membrane keyboard, little collapsing rubber domes rather than a a mechanical-switch design. It's better than many such keyboards are, and is definitely a high-quality device. I'd buy one, if not for the keyfeel, which to me is anything but clicky. Without a jillion little springs, 8lbs of steel and an eye of newt, it will always be a membrane keyboard.
:)
Clicky? Model M
timothy
"Anyone that works for a company, allows the company to pay their bills, and then launches a public ad campaign against the company is a low life, scoundrel."
;)
OK. What about his post was negative toward Microsoft?
"Nope, this person is a cretin, collecting a paycheck from a company while trying to damage the company."
How would that picture have damaged the company? Microsoft writes and sells a lot of software for the Mac -- it's not secret that they have Macs with which to develop that software, and not surprising that they take delivery of the latest-n-greatest Apple hardware. They'd be silly not to
Violating stated policies ("don't take any pictures of the place for public consumption" or "do not ever discuss what hardware Microsoft uses to develop software") is one thing, even if rules like that tend to be enforced spottily. Looks like in this case, he was the spot.
But from the posted photo and blurb, I don't see any animus against MS. If the guy likes Macs, it seems like a positive statement (from his perspective) that MS seems to agree with him.
timothy
As usual, Neal Stephenson beatchya there ;)
"You'll be hearing from me again very soon, I'm sure."
timothy
Random tablet thoughts:
;) So they're laptops with a flexible use, you can use as a tablet when necessary. That's a good idea. The ones *without* such a keyboard though, eh ... less flexible, and and less protected screen, seems like all the advantages of ripping a laptop apart and gluing it back together with the pieces misaligned and the keyboard broken. "Sorry, Mr. Fratznubble, we put your screen on backwards and broke your keyboard. That'll be $200, please."
... I hope they have decent battery life, and they do have a swivel-away keyboard.
...), but the real issue is neck position. Laptop use enourages even more slouching and neck craning than I usually do, thanks.
1) you can get a nice name-brand x86 laptop, through sites like techbargains.com, for well under a thousand dollars, in some cases less than $700. Not the highest-end, but way better than anything available at anything like that price a year or so ago. March of progress, long may it wave. The cheapest near-equivalent tablets I've seen have been ViewSonic (ever bought a viewsonic computer, as opposed to monitor? I have not, have no idea, but therefore not a *positive* idea of their machines' quality) refurb'd machines at TigerDirect, at $999. Which, really, is not bad, except those particular machines have a huge bezel surrounding the screen, no keyboard (see next point), and battery life isn't great.
2) Some tablets have built-in keyboards that swivel around underneath for tablet view -- now there's an idea
3) So far, the power claims aren't great. I'd like to see the upcoming Antaur tablets reach the market
4) I would be much more interested in a tablet style computer if I had a desk stand to put the tablet itself in front of my like a conventiona lLCD monitor, and hook up a USB mouse / keyboard. I don't like most laptop keyboards (ThinkPads being an exception, and my Toshiba isn't *too* awful
timothy
but frankly, I'd rather ask Slashdot on this question ;)
I really like dpreview, rely on Phil A. to have in-depth reviews, etc. However, it's a narrow site. This is not to say that all the people who take part in the discussions are themselves narrow, but if you ask on Digital Photography Review whether digital photography is ready to replace film (at least in SLRs: it's easier to "prove" -- as in argue convincingly -- that this has happened already with point-and-shoots), the responses might be even more polarized than they are here.
timothy
["KDE Sucks! GNOME rules!" (reverse, repeat)] (reverse, repeat)
;)
Both of these projects are so good now, it's great while browsing to run into comments occasionally (going back years) asserting that one or the other would cease to be, or that the presence of both in the world of free / Free software was harmful, because it mean duplication of effort, dilution of attention, etc.
Ha!
Hari Seldon *must* have been involved, to see how much these allegedly self-motivated projects catalyze each other.
However much you like either one, note that KDE now has integrated CD (and DVD!) burning software -- IMO on par with anything I've seen on the commerical side (Nero, etc) whereas before I prefered GnomeToaster to anything else, and GNOME now has a good file-chooser (which had been one of my least favorite points about GNOME apps).
Meanwhile, with the right libraries on your system, the Virtucon-backed fluxbox gives you access to the best of both worlds
timothy
"The cause isn't state control, it's having a single point of failure."
:)
I think I can identify a single point of failure here
timothy
"I don't doubt that you would have problems with the wireless card, but I find it very unlikely that "much of his hardware" is problematic in Windows. Unless you're using Mac hardware on a Windows machine? Then it could be a problem I suppose."
:)
;)) Knoppix, Red Hat and Mandrake generally find and use them without needing a driver disk. (And since the driver disk for the combo card is long gone, years ago, this is important ;))
... the last time I spent much time with Windows, I was installing Windows 98. The install (the install!) hung repeatedly, took about 5 go-throughs before it decided to actually complete. Maybe it was the hardware in that case.
The things that would not work without major hassle:
- Minolta/QMS color laser printer (now a big heavy paperweight, I think) -- whether the fault is with Windows (as Minolta says) or with Minolta/QMS's drivers, nobody knows, which has a spooler that seems to corrupt itself with every page printed.I have not tried it with recent CUPS, but that is supposed to support it well.
- HP CD-writer (under Windows 98SE; perhaps it works great in XP), and a Teac CD writer for which Teac has since removed the drivers from its site (or buried them), because it's a few years old. Eventually, we got working -- but both of them work out of the box with cdrecord and its various GUIs.
- DLink combo 56K/ethernet PCMCIA card. Eventually got (only) the modem side to work, though the control panel claims to recognize both parts. It just seems whimsical
I have no doubt that someone skilled in the art could get all of these things working, but (and this is a frustrating pain esp. with the networking cards) they generally require a driver not currently loaded on the system, whereas ("bloatware" deluxe
Note that I am able to break computers by my mere presence, though
timothy
blixel:
:)
Mileage varies, as the saying goes.
I've found a lot of devices don't work well with Windows, or work only after extensive futzing with options and opaque configuration playing-around. This is largely out of my own ignorance, since I don't see / touch Microsoft Windows machines very often -- but that argues against the "just works" myth. I'm calling it a myth, anyhow!
On visits to my dad's place (his computers have Windows) I have found that much of his hardware does not like the drivers (supplied in the box, labeled as appropriate for the versions of Windows on his computers) supplied with it. For instance: his very common wireless ethernet card (a Linksys) refuses to work on either of two Windows laptops, despite happy-seeming driver installation process. (It even reports good *signal* but does not seem to pass packets. Probably a Windows guru, or the average middle school kid, could fix what me and my electrical-engineer dad can't, but hey.)
Solution? (Not really a solution for him, but interesting anyhow.) Pop in Knoppix, and the wireless card works. On one of his laptops, the internal ethernet flakes out frequenly with Windows, is rock-solid under Knoppix.
Am I a computer idiot? Well, Yeah, I guess so, wish I could lie about it. Most computer interfaces are poorly designed and anti-intuitive, IMO, and most manuals are worse
But *for hardware that it works with*, Linux in any of its recent manifestations seems to work more smoothly than Windows past or present. That means popping in an ethernet card doesn't mean installing a driver (though there are exceptions, esp. for I think it's NForce motherboards where on-board ethernet doesn't work without special driver), and CD-Rom drives too pretty much *just work*, no special drivers there either.
There are a lot of areas where Linux hardware support is still poor, but unless you're trolling (vs. just frustrated with Linux, the way I get frustrated with Windows every time I cross its path), I think your description of woe leading to "a dozen or so reboots, and kernel compilations later you decide the device might be defective" is over the top.
And if you are trolling, my fingers thank you for the exercise on this lovely day.
timothy
"What I wanted was a quick way to indicate "I need to see this patch of text here and that patch of text there on the screen at the same time." I wanted to be able to set up several of these viewing relationships concurrently and toggle among the various exposures as my workflow dictated, with a single keystroke if possible."
...) among several different workspaces, can have the keyboard-rest-time Kbounce on one, email on another, open browser on another ...
:)
This sounds like the multiple workspaces you can have under the various Linux desktop environments by default, and under Mac OS X and and Windows with software add-ons. (Unless I'm misreading what you're after.)
I can switch with a keystroke (well, a key combination in my cae, though it could be mapped to a single key
Fluxbox is a nice clean way to do this, IMO
timothy
(If they're based on vector graphics)
That wouldn't stop someone from making ugly ones, of course, but the bit-mapped, one-size-for-all-monitors approach is not the only way skins could be. That there are now a few (and soon will be more) vector-based themes for Gnome and KDE is a good sign, IMO.
(But of course, you are right wrt combining fixed skins with scaleable fonts -- except that is at least only *half* brain-dead. Worse is fixed skins plus fixed fonts, an unchangeable glop.)
timothy
"It implies Sony has a PVP, when it does not. It's a writer suggesting that they skip ahead to it."
According to the story: "... It looks like they just might do that. A few weeks ago, a prototype of a Sony PVP turned up at the WPC Expo trade show in Tokyo."
timothy
Yes, Mozilla is a nice web browser.
...
:) You don't have to readjust much to switch between.
And it's a decent HTML composition tool, if you like that sort of thing.
And it includes a quite nice (really!) IRC client. Is it as nice as xchat is on nix? No -- but it's close enough that in a pinch, you need not feel pinched. I used to laugh at the IRC client but use it sometimes anyhow, out of necessity, for instance on a borrowed Windows desktop. Now, it's got a perfectly nice GUI, workable as an all-day client.
And it's a good mail client, with intelligent spam filtering, which is quite presentable to Outlook users.
And bittorrent integrates well.
Blocks popups, handles tabs intelligently (though no accounting for taste, and I have my peeves with this aspect), has a good bookmark-filing system, good keyboard controls
Plus, if you're dual booting, it's nice to have an app like Mozilla that's so cross platform it's not funny
timothy
"You realize that 99% of government has nothing whatsoever to do with some office worker typing letters in word or open office.
There's metric shitloads of custom code for specific tasks written for Windows. Theres shitloads of it for unix. There's shitloads of it for other mainframe OS's."
Maybe we could do with a few less metric shitloads of government, or at least we could use requirements for openness (Sunshine laws generally, things like the FOIA) to make clear what all those shitloads of custom code are being used to do to the citizenry that paid for them.
Just because the State is presently doing a lot of things (the "tasks at hand") doesn't automatically mean the State is right to do so, or has an automatic right to keep doing them. What tasks? Why are they at hand? They may (occasionally) start out right, looking for tranquility, prosperity, etc, but along the way governments tend to stretch, get bloated, and do a lot of silly or harmful things. Transparency and justification seem a lot more important than up-front costs here, though those matter a lot too.
If they're going to do things with software (and they will, this era -- software is inextricable, as you point out, from the various things States like to do to their humans), governments *in particular* ought to be doing them in the open to the degree compatible with continued human existence and happiness, as well as fiscal prudency.
timothy
... and by that I do not mean "profound," though occasionally they are that as well. What I mean is *heavy* and bulky and physical.
... it's hard to part with them, sometimes, even when there's just one good article in a particular one.
... they look cool on a shelf, have a lot of eye candy, so they're hard to get rid of.
Besides which, magazines love to just keep sending (and billing for) magazines you might no longer be fond of. I liked having a subscription to "Thrasher," but my one-year subscription kept coming for more than 2 years. Which is fine, except when it comes time to move, and that little stack of magazines has grown and grown
Wired is a good example -- wisely designed, graphically appealing, consistent (and square) spines
Bah! Bulk! Weight! Heft!
timothy
Thanks for the info re: the anti-state-income-tax movement in MA, which I'd never heard of before. If they can swing the other 3% next time around, I'd put Massachusetts on my list of possibly livable states ;)
Flatter taxes are better than steeper ones, fewer are better than more, etc.
timothy
Thanks for pointing this one out. I vaguely remembered this story (read it in the paper when it was published) but not the specifics. Pretty good capsule summary of what statists believe :)
a) We get to invent the rules
b) The more rules, the better
c) except for us
wrt point b), notice that many public oafficials like to brag about how many new laws they passed or implemented (depending on whether they're in the stick-em-up or the stick-it-to-ya part of the political spectrum). This is something that they *ought* to shamefacedly cough their way out of answering, not brag about.
If we called them all "rule inventors" and "tattletale," I think the proper perspective would be easier to maintain. Words like "lawmaker" and "executive" sound far too important for these arrogant brats.
What, me venty?
timothy
Anything that pissed off the Multistate Confiscation Committee is a good thing.
That government is best which governs least, and all that.
To mangle a saying: The Internet interprets [busybody, avaricious, carpetbagging, presumptuous huckster bastards] as damage, and at least tries to route around them.
timothy
Google.
... handwringing about their "usefulness" doesn't exactly excite me as an important philosophical point.
Exchanging email with family.
Finding recipes.
Reading people's websites.
C'mon, "who needs the Internet?" is a silly question. The Internet is tremendously useful now (and offers lots of "unproductive" stuff, too -- quotes because the line between productive and unproductive is a mostly useless, fuzzy gray line not worth respecting in the way it's usually used) and will be more and more later on. People survived without it, just like you would survive without any of the foods you like best, or without recorded music, or without being able to read
timothy
I dunno about middle and right buttons, but a standard left click seems to be linked to the numberpad "5" key ;)
... and accidentally hit "5." ;)
I had nearly forgotten about this, but your comment reminded me to play with it, and I just posted this comment after jumping around the page with my number pad
timothy
Debian install is now an easy thing, because of Knoppix.
/usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall
Just boot into Knoppix (which works well for *most* x86 machines with 128MB of RAM or more). From a terminal, type:
# sudo
to start the script which will install Knoppix to the hard drive. I've done this on several machines, all of which had either completely blank hard drives from the get-go, or I wiped completely whatever distros had been there previously.
Main caveat is that fdisk is no fun, would be very frustrating to someone unclear on how his hard disk should be set up. (Especially someone wanting to dual boot -- I'd have no idea how to do this).
I believe the hardward recognition stuff in Knoppix is mostly from Mandrake, so whatever praise / hatred you have for Mandrake's recognition would probably still apply here.
timothy