Have you ever tried to move around using H, J, K and L in a dvorak layout?!
Yeah, for about 8 hours a day. It isn't a problem. k/j (up/down) are right under your left hand, and h/l (left/right) are under your right. It is pretty easy to get used to, and, although not optimal, I find it actually easier than their layout on a QWERTY board.
Yowsa. It is fascinating that 99% of the posts on this message were about some silly comment the reviewer made, rather than the technology itself. Amazing.
In any case, am I mistaken in assuming that this technology would, of necessity, cause a dampening effect, essentially reducing the vibration of the system? This would be a useful side effect in a number of applications.
I can't wait to have these start appearing in all sorts of Palm devices. The processors and screens of these guys have long caught up to the PC's of min 90's, but the sotrage capacities have been hovering around late 80's levels with the micro-drives being too large to fit in.
Yowza, you haven't been paying attention to the Palm market lately.
I'm listening to music on my Palm Tungsten T right now, from a 256MB SD card -- these are the static RAM cards the size of a postage stamp (although thicker). Right now, you can get these SDs for about $70, so this is pretty affordable. You can actually get 512MB SD cards, although they'll set you back closer to $300. I remember 40MB hard drives being pretty decent storage for a PC in the early 90s, so the static storage for Palmtops have certainly surpassed the early 90's PC.
Curiously, the cost curve for static RAM seems to be an inverse bell. The lowest cost point seems to be the just-less-than-the-maximum storage capacity, for SD around $0.27/MB. The maximum is over $0.50/MB, and anythingbelow the second-to-best is between $0.40 and $0.50. I'm not sure why, but this strikes me as odd.
It's based on my impressions as a technical writer, Linux neophyte and curmudgeon.
... It must have a GUI interface for installing and configuring the system. I'm a lousy typist, and text mode is not an efficient way for me to interface with an operating system.
The answers to question #9 got me thinking about Bluecurve again, and the question of per-distribution customization.
All other arguments aside, there's the often overlooked, yet significant, issue of platform consistency. Aaron commented that DEs have a real chance to standardize, or make consistent, the user interface for users, and that he is baffled by distribution's tendancy to change the default behavior of DEs. This is an important point.
I can go from my Gentoo laptop, to my Wife's Mandrake laptop, to my office Redhat desktop; all are running the same major revision of KDE, and I have to search through the menus every time to find the same core KDE applications, because distributions re-organize the default menus. Gentoo uses the default KDE menu layout; Redhat rearranges the menus, and Mandrake has their own truely bizarre layout.
This is more serious than simple look-and-feel changes. L&F can be easily configured, it sticks through upgrades, and in most cases only has minor impact on usability. However, the distributions changing the location of applications in the menus is just plain stupid, and lends a lot to the perception that Linux is difficult to use.
I got one from a reseller at work, and the + media is nearly worthless. +RW isn't readable on anything but the Sony drive. -R had the greatest readability (two DVD players and all models of DVD-R drives I could find).
You keep posting this. Are you a shill for a DVD-R vendor?
I have an external HP DVD+RW, and I love the thing. I have no problem reading either DVD+R or DVD+RW in my Toshiba DVD/CDRW laptop internal drive, or in my no-name DVD ROM desktop drive.
I've always wanted something like this. PCI is nice, but the whole edge card + screw mounting design carried over from the ISA days always bothered me. Not necessarily PCMCIA, but some end-user friendly form factor that I wouldn't need a static bag and a screew driver for.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think there are some pretty good reasons why PCMCIA hasn't taken over the desktop. The first is price: PCMCIA cards are smaller -- you usually pay for the form factor, and PCMCIA card costruction is generally more expensive, having housing and all. You always pay more for a PCMCIA peripheral than an internal PCI card, and I'd guess that the PCMCIA slot itself is more expensive to produce than a PCI slot.
PCMCIA is slower (as has already been mentioned). If you need to hotswap peripherals, it makes sense to use PCMCIA... however, most desktops don't change configuration as much as your average laptop, where you have to swap PCMCIA cards, and this is usually only because you have a limited number of slots.
What it boils down to is that the benefits of PCMCIA on a desktop system usually don't offset the extra cost.
At least, it was fairly realistic for the period it was written in, and the type of person it was portraying. The portrayal did't represent a "professional" software developer, but it was pretty accurate for a stereotype. The believability of the story itself is debateable, but consider:
Matthew Broderick's character, David Lightman, was a fairly normal person. Not highly introverted, but very interested in games and tinkering with computers so that he spent his time in arcades, rather than at football games or whatever. As we age, our interest in the games may wane, but I know that I spent a lot of time playing them, both in the arcades and out, and isn't the fundamental essence of a computer geek the desire to tinker with them?
He was not inept with girls. In my memory, the guys who seemed to be really good with girls were the exception, rather than the rule, and the "nerds" weren't any more awkward than the average person.
He was a male. In my computer club in high school, there was one girl, and ten guys. I expect that this has changed by now, but -- again -- you have to consider the period the movie was made in.
He wasn't malicious. He knew he was doing illegal things, but he didn't really consider them to be very serious transgressions, and he wasn't really out to intentionally hurt people... that is, he wasn't doing what he was expressely to harm others.
He wasn't a genius, just clever, and he figured out his problems through research and connections -- not Miraculous Insight. He had one epiphany; the rest was sleuthing.
He knew places that had computers, and people who had to do with computers. Back then, when you were a computer nerd, you sniffed out any publically accessible computer and the people around those computers. I remember roaming the local college buildings looking for computer labs, and rooms with computers in them.
The only two ways his character could have been made more accurate was if he also played role-playing and strategy-and-tactic games, and if he had had a friend who was also into computers. Are there any computer geeks from the 1980's in the audience that didn't also role-play? Anybody who didn't have a friend who was a friend because of the commonality of an interest in computers?
That said, David spent most of his time hacking, rather than programming (it seemed), but if you've ever spent any time watching someone write code, you know that it would be nearly impossible to translate to the big screen without recreating Andy Warhol's "Sleep."
Finally, I'd like to point out that most computer people represented in movies are hackers, not software developers. Hacking can be made interesting, but software development is about as visually interesting as double-entry accounting.
Someone else has mentioned Qli Linux PCs, and I thought I'd post a personal anecdote.
Qli sells new laptops with Linux preinstalled. Their prices range from one thousand to over two, for a fully loaded machine. They don't sell any that are tiny, like the Vaio, but there are othercompanies that do sell refurbished laptops and small form factor laptops with no Windows tax. I chose Qli because I was looking for a particular feature set, and because one of their installation options is Gentoo, which is my current favorite distribution.
I got an 1800MHz, 512MB (2GB max), 15.1" LCD, 20Gb, DVD/CDRW laptop for a shade over $1800. It has onboard ethernet, three USB (one of which is USB 2.0), onboard firewire, and a single CardBus slot. It was, practically, the perfect configuration I was looking for; the price was reasonable, and (as I said) they offered Gentoo as an install option.
My experience with Qli has been good. I agreed that they would install Gentoo 1.4, which is technically still beta, and this was Qli's first 1.4 laptop, so I had to do some work after the machine arrived to get it fully configured. I would expect that if you chose Gentoo 1.2, Mandrake, or Redhat, it would arrive fully configured. Qli provides a large number of installation options, and money you pay for the distribution of your choice (which varies) goes to the distribution.
The best thing about Qli, IME, was the customer service. The staff are extremely knowledgable and helpful, and are good about responding to support requests. They have a good understanding of kernel configurations, from which kernel modules are required to support which features to various configuration options.
I'm also very happy with the hardware. Although it isn't yet supported by Linux, I was pleasantly surprised that the laptop came with an unadvertised MMC/SD slot.
There are a couple of hangups with my particular hardware, but none of it is Qli's fault. The laptop is entirely ACPI, and ACPI support in Linux is immature. Consequently, I can't suspend the laptop (!) -- yet. OpenGL is proved to be a bear to get working, but this is due to my choice of distributions; apparently, Redhat on this laptop has full accellerated GL support out of the box. There is an onboard WinModem, but we know about those.
In summary, I can recommend Qli. You need to evaluate your own requirements, and then send them an email before you buy. They'll give you status reports on various configurations and recommend a system for you.
[Disclaimer] I do not work for Qli, and I don't receive any compensation for recommending them. My only relationship with Qli is that I've recently purchased a laptop from them.
I think stories like this support the proposition that Redhat is doing everything they can to slow the acceptance of KDE. I hesitate to compare RH to Microsoft, because -- really -- it isn't fair to compare RH's petty snipes to Microsoft's heavy-handed monopolistic behaviors; however, this sort of thing is typical of MS behavior. Make the competing software more difficult to use or install than the one you support, and you win mindshare by default.
The economy grew at 4% last quarter [economagic.com]. You do realize the '01 recesion was the shortest in 20 years right?
Narrow your parameters enough and you can get any results you like. Based on the stock market performance over the past week, your 4% growth will probably be reversed by this quarter. Lies, damned lies, and quarterly reports.
By the way, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it is too soon to call the recession "over". The US still has a 6% unemployment rate (an 8 year high). Yes, this is low compared to the 1982 high of 10.8 (whilst R. Reagan (R) was president), and is less than the 7.8% in 1990-1991 (whilst G. Bush Sr. (R) was president), but it hasn't changed significantly since Decemeber 2001.
The absolute size of the defecit isn't important, it's the size of the defecit relative to the size of the economy.
While I can understand your point of view, I disagree. A high debt load is a liability, and is a risk when things like recessions and depressions occur. The size of the deficit affects interest rates and the performance of Wall Street. The national debt is 6.3 trillion dollars. We've spent 118 billion dollars in interest payments on that debt since October 2002. That interest is paid out of taxes. You may be comfortable living with a high debt load, but I'm not, and I don't much appreciate having to pay for poor policy decisions by the current administration.
Actually they are letting them keep more of their own money.
... which results in everybody else having to shoulder more of that budget deficit.
Look, there's a simple, and accurate, analogy: you owe $100 to a bank, and your payments are not even sufficient to pay the monthly interest on that amount, so the amount keeps increasing. Rather than try to pay off the debt, you've decided on a plan of action that will reduce your spending on health insurance, increase your leasure spending, and buy more handguns. Oh, and you've decided to pick a fight with your neighbor because you think he might be planning to pick a fight with you, and you're hemoraging money to support that.
Deplete it of what? And what will be the benefit of a larger supply of oil?
Er... about $9 billion dollars, per month to support the war effort. That's a conservative estimate, and doesn't include the current costs of proparations for the war, which are in the hundreds of millions. The estimates for a total cost for the war are from $50 billion (low, conservative estimate) to $300 billion (high, liberal estimate). The reality is probably around $100 billion. Surely, a drop in the bucket for our current $6 trillion budget deficit.
This is really unfortunate, Tom. I'm sorry to hear this.
The reason why we chose Subversion over Arch, and probably a reason why Arch isn't getting as much attention as Subversion is, is because of Arch's dependancy on shell scripts. This removes any incentive for a heterogeneous software development shop to use it.
I can argue the merits of Subversion over Visual Source Safe to my clients, but Arch is a much harder sell.
I've been carrying a PDA since 1994, and I've used them constantly. My top apps are:
as a password storage device. All of my passwords are randomly generated form numbers, characters, and symbols, and I have a different password for every service I use. Some passwords, for services such as Slashdot, are used infrequently, and I do not remember them.
as an address book. My address book has 188 records in it. About half of them I only use once a year (dentist, etc). Three quarters of the rest I use a bit more frequently, but not "often". Many of them are out of state. None of those can I remember.
as an appointment reminder. As bad as my memory is, my internal clock is worse. I'd miss every haircut appointment if my PDA didn't remind me.
for notes.
as a calculator
Solitaire.
I actually get a lot of use out of the MP3 player, too, but I could live without it.
The biggest feature of any PDA, I've learned, is size. I started with a Newton, with which I had a similar experience to others who've posted: carried it around a lot at first, but then started leaving it in the car, at home, etc. The Palm III was the first that I carried with me regularly; the Palm V was in my pocket constantly. A few months age, I bought a Clie T665C; it is almost small enough, but not quite. I'm going back to the Palm line. If the PDA is obtrusive, it ends up being useless (for me, at least).
The fact that the Osprey glides didn't save the people who were killed in the crashes. IMHO, if plane A tends to crash and kill people, and plane B doesn't, then how much better A glides than B is irrelevant.
Should I ever find myself in the unlikely position of having to choose between riding in the Osprey or in the FanWing, I'll base my decision on the ratio of crashes-to-flights.
If your network is fairly homogenous, the most expensive part will be getting the first couple of machines installed and configured. If you're clever about how you do the first few instances, setting up the rest will be (nearly) trivial. There aren't many cases where you'll find reasons to limit yourself to server-only replacements. Linux is capable as a desktop OS, and is much easier to administer than Windows.
IME, getting servers installed and configured is easy. Getting desktops configured is harder, because the focus software tends to be less robust. Getting Wine and various Windows apps installed; making sure the plugins for the browser(s) are installed and working; setting up the default organization desktop with app icons and such; getting the login authentication mechanism configured properly; making sure network printing works... this is the labor-intensive stuff. Again, once you get everything configured properly for the first machine, you can usually clone the configurations to new installs, so all of the work is up-front.
After that, maintenance is fairly easy if you choose the right distribution. Some are better than others in that respect. Actual sysadmin effort tends to grow logarithmically -- rather than linearly -- with the number of machines being supported (again, if they're homogeneous). Help desk support needs are about the same as for any other OS.
Where you'll find the most savings is in licensing and sysadmin costs. If you have heterogeneous hardware, sysadmin costs can go up, although (again) it is the initial installation and configuration that will hurt the most.
IMO, there are two ways this can be answered without getting too mired in sujectivity.
Buy a Mac. Run some apps. Install Yellow Dog on it. Run some apps.
Buy a Mac. Spend the exact same amount of money on the best PC you can get. Run some apps on the Mac. Run some apps on the PC under your favorite operating system.
Personally, I think #2 is perfectly fair, since Apple stopped allowing clones to license the OS for third-party hardware, and I think #2 is what most people are complaining about WRT speed. I doubt that most people get to the second half of #1 -- if you're buying Mac hardware, you're doing it to run Mac software.
What might "kill" PDF is the sneaker-technology, SVG. As anyone who's done a lot of SVG knows, SVG is missing support for only one feature that would enable it to replace HTML and PDF -- support for text flow control. The 2.0 version of the SVG spec (4.2/2/2) will include rules for this support.
Since Adobe itself is heavily into SVG, it (SVG) is positioned to become the leading display document format. This is, in some ways, ironic, because most people think of SVG as an image format.
Consider:
Autotrace will generate PS (PDF's older brother) and SVG (among other things)
FOP will generate document output as PS, PDF, and SVG (among other things).
Most vector graphics programs for Linux have some SVG support, and Sodipodi uses SVG as its native document format. Open/StarOffice will generate SVG as well.
OpenOffice is free, but this is interesting nonetheless.
ser@bean public_html/webcam% emerge search openoffice Searching... [ Results for search key : openoffice ] [ Applications found : 2 ]
* app-office/openoffice Latest version available: 1.0.1-r1 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Homepage: http://www.openoffice.org/ Description: OpenOffice.org, a full office productivity suite.
* app-office/openoffice-bin Latest version available: 1.0.1 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Homepage: http://www.openoffice.org Description: OpenOffice productivity suite
In fact, it is easier for commercial developers to build ebuilds for Gentoo than to build RPMs. RPMs require rebuilding their basic package distribution mechanism; Portage will use whatever they already have (with caveats).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, for about 8 hours a day. It isn't a problem. k/j (up/down) are right under your left hand, and h/l (left/right) are under your right. It is pretty easy to get used to, and, although not optimal, I find it actually easier than their layout on a QWERTY board.
In any case, am I mistaken in assuming that this technology would, of necessity, cause a dampening effect, essentially reducing the vibration of the system? This would be a useful side effect in a number of applications.
Yowza, you haven't been paying attention to the Palm market lately.
I'm listening to music on my Palm Tungsten T right now, from a 256MB SD card -- these are the static RAM cards the size of a postage stamp (although thicker). Right now, you can get these SDs for about $70, so this is pretty affordable. You can actually get 512MB SD cards, although they'll set you back closer to $300. I remember 40MB hard drives being pretty decent storage for a PC in the early 90s, so the static storage for Palmtops have certainly surpassed the early 90's PC.
Curiously, the cost curve for static RAM seems to be an inverse bell. The lowest cost point seems to be the just-less-than-the-maximum storage capacity, for SD around $0.27/MB. The maximum is over $0.50/MB, and anything below the second-to-best is between $0.40 and $0.50. I'm not sure why, but this strikes me as odd.
Whew. Talk about bad career choices.
All other arguments aside, there's the often overlooked, yet significant, issue of platform consistency. Aaron commented that DEs have a real chance to standardize, or make consistent, the user interface for users, and that he is baffled by distribution's tendancy to change the default behavior of DEs. This is an important point.
I can go from my Gentoo laptop, to my Wife's Mandrake laptop, to my office Redhat desktop; all are running the same major revision of KDE, and I have to search through the menus every time to find the same core KDE applications, because distributions re-organize the default menus. Gentoo uses the default KDE menu layout; Redhat rearranges the menus, and Mandrake has their own truely bizarre layout.
This is more serious than simple look-and-feel changes. L&F can be easily configured, it sticks through upgrades, and in most cases only has minor impact on usability. However, the distributions changing the location of applications in the menus is just plain stupid, and lends a lot to the perception that Linux is difficult to use.
You keep posting this. Are you a shill for a DVD-R vendor?
I have an external HP DVD+RW, and I love the thing. I have no problem reading either DVD+R or DVD+RW in my Toshiba DVD/CDRW laptop internal drive, or in my no-name DVD ROM desktop drive.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think there are some pretty good reasons why PCMCIA hasn't taken over the desktop. The first is price: PCMCIA cards are smaller -- you usually pay for the form factor, and PCMCIA card costruction is generally more expensive, having housing and all. You always pay more for a PCMCIA peripheral than an internal PCI card, and I'd guess that the PCMCIA slot itself is more expensive to produce than a PCI slot.
PCMCIA is slower (as has already been mentioned). If you need to hotswap peripherals, it makes sense to use PCMCIA... however, most desktops don't change configuration as much as your average laptop, where you have to swap PCMCIA cards, and this is usually only because you have a limited number of slots.
What it boils down to is that the benefits of PCMCIA on a desktop system usually don't offset the extra cost.
The only two ways his character could have been made more accurate was if he also played role-playing and strategy-and-tactic games, and if he had had a friend who was also into computers. Are there any computer geeks from the 1980's in the audience that didn't also role-play? Anybody who didn't have a friend who was a friend because of the commonality of an interest in computers?
That said, David spent most of his time hacking, rather than programming (it seemed), but if you've ever spent any time watching someone write code, you know that it would be nearly impossible to translate to the big screen without recreating Andy Warhol's "Sleep."
Finally, I'd like to point out that most computer people represented in movies are hackers, not software developers. Hacking can be made interesting, but software development is about as visually interesting as double-entry accounting.
This was a great report! My girlfriend and I thoroughly enjoyed it -- we found it entertaining and educational. Good job!
Qli sells new laptops with Linux preinstalled. Their prices range from one thousand to over two, for a fully loaded machine. They don't sell any that are tiny, like the Vaio, but there are other companies that do sell refurbished laptops and small form factor laptops with no Windows tax. I chose Qli because I was looking for a particular feature set, and because one of their installation options is Gentoo, which is my current favorite distribution.
I got an 1800MHz, 512MB (2GB max), 15.1" LCD, 20Gb, DVD/CDRW laptop for a shade over $1800. It has onboard ethernet, three USB (one of which is USB 2.0), onboard firewire, and a single CardBus slot. It was, practically, the perfect configuration I was looking for; the price was reasonable, and (as I said) they offered Gentoo as an install option.
My experience with Qli has been good. I agreed that they would install Gentoo 1.4, which is technically still beta, and this was Qli's first 1.4 laptop, so I had to do some work after the machine arrived to get it fully configured. I would expect that if you chose Gentoo 1.2, Mandrake, or Redhat, it would arrive fully configured. Qli provides a large number of installation options, and money you pay for the distribution of your choice (which varies) goes to the distribution.
The best thing about Qli, IME, was the customer service. The staff are extremely knowledgable and helpful, and are good about responding to support requests. They have a good understanding of kernel configurations, from which kernel modules are required to support which features to various configuration options.
I'm also very happy with the hardware. Although it isn't yet supported by Linux, I was pleasantly surprised that the laptop came with an unadvertised MMC/SD slot.
There are a couple of hangups with my particular hardware, but none of it is Qli's fault. The laptop is entirely ACPI, and ACPI support in Linux is immature. Consequently, I can't suspend the laptop (!) -- yet. OpenGL is proved to be a bear to get working, but this is due to my choice of distributions; apparently, Redhat on this laptop has full accellerated GL support out of the box. There is an onboard WinModem, but we know about those.
In summary, I can recommend Qli. You need to evaluate your own requirements, and then send them an email before you buy. They'll give you status reports on various configurations and recommend a system for you.
[Disclaimer] I do not work for Qli, and I don't receive any compensation for recommending them. My only relationship with Qli is that I've recently purchased a laptop from them.
However, I'd debate that it was not only not "obviously right", but that it may not even have been "right", full stop.
I think stories like this support the proposition that Redhat is doing everything they can to slow the acceptance of KDE. I hesitate to compare RH to Microsoft, because -- really -- it isn't fair to compare RH's petty snipes to Microsoft's heavy-handed monopolistic behaviors; however, this sort of thing is typical of MS behavior. Make the competing software more difficult to use or install than the one you support, and you win mindshare by default.
All of the stink and cancer of regular cigarettes, with none of the fun! Woohoo!
Narrow your parameters enough and you can get any results you like. Based on the stock market performance over the past week, your 4% growth will probably be reversed by this quarter. Lies, damned lies, and quarterly reports.
By the way, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it is too soon to call the recession "over". The US still has a 6% unemployment rate (an 8 year high). Yes, this is low compared to the 1982 high of 10.8 (whilst R. Reagan (R) was president), and is less than the 7.8% in 1990-1991 (whilst G. Bush Sr. (R) was president), but it hasn't changed significantly since Decemeber 2001.
While I can understand your point of view, I disagree. A high debt load is a liability, and is a risk when things like recessions and depressions occur. The size of the deficit affects interest rates and the performance of Wall Street. The national debt is 6.3 trillion dollars. We've spent 118 billion dollars in interest payments on that debt since October 2002. That interest is paid out of taxes. You may be comfortable living with a high debt load, but I'm not, and I don't much appreciate having to pay for poor policy decisions by the current administration.
Look, there's a simple, and accurate, analogy: you owe $100 to a bank, and your payments are not even sufficient to pay the monthly interest on that amount, so the amount keeps increasing. Rather than try to pay off the debt, you've decided on a plan of action that will reduce your spending on health insurance, increase your leasure spending, and buy more handguns. Oh, and you've decided to pick a fight with your neighbor because you think he might be planning to pick a fight with you, and you're hemoraging money to support that.
Er... about $9 billion dollars, per month to support the war effort. That's a conservative estimate, and doesn't include the current costs of proparations for the war, which are in the hundreds of millions. The estimates for a total cost for the war are from $50 billion (low, conservative estimate) to $300 billion (high, liberal estimate). The reality is probably around $100 billion. Surely, a drop in the bucket for our current $6 trillion budget deficit.
For lower gas prices.
Jesus.
The reason why we chose Subversion over Arch, and probably a reason why Arch isn't getting as much attention as Subversion is, is because of Arch's dependancy on shell scripts. This removes any incentive for a heterogeneous software development shop to use it.
I can argue the merits of Subversion over Visual Source Safe to my clients, but Arch is a much harder sell.
Good luck on finding employment, by the way!
But, they're threatening people with the DMCA... so they're bad, right?
Augh!
- as a password storage device. All of my passwords are randomly generated form numbers, characters, and symbols, and I have a different password for every service I use. Some passwords, for services such as Slashdot, are used infrequently, and I do not remember them.
- as an address book. My address book has 188 records in it. About half of them I only use once a year (dentist, etc). Three quarters of the rest I use a bit more frequently, but not "often". Many of them are out of state. None of those can I remember.
- as an appointment reminder. As bad as my memory is, my internal clock is worse. I'd miss every haircut appointment if my PDA didn't remind me.
- for notes.
- as a calculator
- Solitaire.
I actually get a lot of use out of the MP3 player, too, but I could live without it.The biggest feature of any PDA, I've learned, is size. I started with a Newton, with which I had a similar experience to others who've posted: carried it around a lot at first, but then started leaving it in the car, at home, etc. The Palm III was the first that I carried with me regularly; the Palm V was in my pocket constantly. A few months age, I bought a Clie T665C; it is almost small enough, but not quite. I'm going back to the Palm line. If the PDA is obtrusive, it ends up being useless (for me, at least).
Should I ever find myself in the unlikely position of having to choose between riding in the Osprey or in the FanWing, I'll base my decision on the ratio of crashes-to-flights.
Ob-link
If your network is fairly homogenous, the most expensive part will be getting the first couple of machines installed and configured. If you're clever about how you do the first few instances, setting up the rest will be (nearly) trivial. There aren't many cases where you'll find reasons to limit yourself to server-only replacements. Linux is capable as a desktop OS, and is much easier to administer than Windows.
IME, getting servers installed and configured is easy. Getting desktops configured is harder, because the focus software tends to be less robust. Getting Wine and various Windows apps installed; making sure the plugins for the browser(s) are installed and working; setting up the default organization desktop with app icons and such; getting the login authentication mechanism configured properly; making sure network printing works... this is the labor-intensive stuff. Again, once you get everything configured properly for the first machine, you can usually clone the configurations to new installs, so all of the work is up-front.
After that, maintenance is fairly easy if you choose the right distribution. Some are better than others in that respect. Actual sysadmin effort tends to grow logarithmically -- rather than linearly -- with the number of machines being supported (again, if they're homogeneous). Help desk support needs are about the same as for any other OS.
Where you'll find the most savings is in licensing and sysadmin costs. If you have heterogeneous hardware, sysadmin costs can go up, although (again) it is the initial installation and configuration that will hurt the most.
Buy a Mac. Run some apps. Install Yellow Dog on it. Run some apps.
Buy a Mac. Spend the exact same amount of money on the best PC you can get. Run some apps on the Mac. Run some apps on the PC under your favorite operating system.
Personally, I think #2 is perfectly fair, since Apple stopped allowing clones to license the OS for third-party hardware, and I think #2 is what most people are complaining about WRT speed. I doubt that most people get to the second half of #1 -- if you're buying Mac hardware, you're doing it to run Mac software.
Since Adobe itself is heavily into SVG, it (SVG) is positioned to become the leading display document format. This is, in some ways, ironic, because most people think of SVG as an image format.
Consider:
No, what really sucks is that anybody has to pay sales taxes in the first place.
That's what I did. They didn't even look at my computer. Of course, I wasn't lying, but that's not relevant.
In fact, it is easier for commercial developers to build ebuilds for Gentoo than to build RPMs. RPMs require rebuilding their basic package distribution mechanism; Portage will use whatever they already have (with caveats).