Yeah, this probably isn't true. But for the price it costs me, why not post just in case? I mean, a Slashdot subscription, that's got to be worth something, right?:-)
For myself, the only Windows program I still run frequently is Listen.com's Rhapsody. This allows me to access a ton of music through their streaming service for a monthly fee.
Trying to get this running under Wine or WineX (yes, I do know how to use CVS thank you) has been nigh on impossible. I'd love to hear that someone who has paid for this has gotten it running, so I could justify the subscription fee for WineX.
Windows installs stuff easily and just works? Really? Let me tell you about some of MY experience.
On the work side I get to be in all sorts of interesting environments, and having an external USB wireless device gives me the most flexibility. Our standard is the Linksys WUSB11 series. Now, when I'm running under Linux I have to load a driver, but done once on a machine and I'm through. On Windows, I have to be very careful with the order it's installed, make sure that there isn't another network device on the machine, and still be careful as to my configuration. Very careful actually...
Much worse has been my firewire (1394) experience with hard drives and video capture devices. Both Windows and Linux will usually recognize the devices at first, but with Windows it is very typical to get all sorts of write errors if you're moving a lot of data back and forth - particularly if (horrors) you want to read and write to multiple firewire drives. I've done this with several laptop and desktop machines through various cards, and Windows just goofs this up big time.
Using many of those same machines, the reads and writes have been bulletproof under Linux. Oh, and in Linux I can set the hard drives up as a Software RAID 5 set - something XP won't let you do as part of the way MS upsells you to their server product.
Sorry, but I think the hardware compatibility issues of Linux are vastly overstated.
Just to confirm - this is supposed to be a geek friendly game that runs on an operating system most geeks don't use. So your target audience is folks who should know better but spend the money anyway...... oh, I see:-)
If there was anything in the article that screamed "bogus" to me it was the following quote:
"We can get to the point where the initial cost can be competitive with the electric grid," McGahn told UPI. "If we had a 10-mile-by-10-mile square, we could power the country."
Excuse me? Really? I have a hard time believing that there aren't a couple power utilities snapping this up if it's true. I suspect this is at best a bit of hyperbole. And as such have to question the reliability of a reporter that would print such a statement unchallenged.
But maybe I'm just cranky at having an 8 pound laptop with half the weight being battery...
Nice, but about those 802.11a/b/g cards...
on
Open Source Hotspots
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's nice to see that Linux is helping some folks out with their connectivity issues. However, the article doesn't address the number one problem I've seen on most Linux user forums - which is how to get the dang card recognized and configured in the first place.
Myself, I have a Linksys WUSB11 v 2.8 wireless device. Linksys, the consumer arm of Cisco, is not exactly a small player. But to get my card to work I have to go to the Berlios.de site, do a CVS checkout (if I want 2.6 kernel support), and make sure I have kernel source around to build the driver.
Someone who can simplify THAT is going to make a lot more headway with the average user.
I ran a BBS using a C64 with 4 of the 1541 drives that, as you point out, tended to overheat. My solution was to get four of the ever popular muffin fans, and put one on top of each drive to pull the air through.
Of course, with that as my comparison point, you can imagine why I consider my current PC to be quiet enough...
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this as it was the one thing that finally moved me off satellite.
Twice a year, near (but not on) the equinox you will have a period of about a week where the sun appears to be lined up with the satellite and you will have low to no signal. Generally this is during daytime hours, and so folks who only use the system at night may not have noticed. But boy it made my life "fun" for a while.
As other posters have suggested, you might want to see if there's fixed wireless available near you, or if you can find someone line-of-sight who can access DSL or Cable who'd be willing to let you setup a link much as Bob Cringely described a year or two ago on his site.
Let me start with the obligatory link to a program designed to help address the problem of poverty in these current United States.
With that out of the way, as one of the other posters has shown there are a number of factors that lead to poverty in the current world. There is no reason to believe in the kind of future that this trilogy describes that any of those factors would still apply. In fact I've been very disappointed that the author seems to allow people to "edit out" advertising but doesn't seem to consider that you can "edit out" knowing about people better or worse off than you. IOW, in that society why would I care to know I wasn't rich?
With all that, I'd have to give these titles more of a mixed review. I think that the author has spent a fair bit of time coming up with some cool ideas. However, as with much of the genre, the characters seem dedicated to giving an excuse for the author to expound on the ideas than to actually giving us well-rounded characters who might make us learn or feel something new about the human condition.
Seems to me this is the perfect solution to someone who's hands are always cold while in the office, and also wants to overclock their computer. For that matter, you could add some support in the wrist section and do a number on carpal tunnel syndrome as well.
Now, we get those shoes with the crystalline soles that generate a little electricity every time you flex them and...
You know, I think writing this burned out more brain cells than I realized;-)
Seems to me that one way to spread adoption would be to come up with a version of KDE that could run in place of the Windows UI but still give you the core Windows code. Meaning you can move your users that much closer to an MS free existence without losing much compatibility.
Re:Trilogy books that don't stand on their own...
on
Coalescent
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· Score: 1
I figured someone would bring up LOTR. But I would venture that if all you ever had of LOTR was the first book that you would feel you had a fairly good read on it's own. Yes, there are several questions you would like answered, but you don't feel the sense that the book couldn't stand on it's own. The second book in the trilogy might be a little hard to argue the same.
Then you have the Hitchhiker series where it's very obvious that each book (except possibly the last one) could qualify as a good book on it's own.
I didn't get the same feeling from this book, but as always YMMV.
Trilogy books that don't stand on their own...
on
Coalescent
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
... shouldn't be written as trilogies. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they shouldn't be published seperately. I don't mind reading book 1 in a trilogy and waiting to find out more if the book would have been a good read on it's own. But this book comes across as a novel that is more than a little unsatisfying without the following books.
As far as dealing with the unemployed, there once was an SF story (sorry, I don't remember which) where the author posited an agreement that each employee who was replaced by a robot received a share of the company's profits based on the robot's productivity. This tended to keep folks busy making sure their robots were in good working order, and had some workers saving part of the money to upgrade their robots to be more productive.
Not saying that's the best solution, but it is A solution - to show that full-scale unemployment due to an automated workforce is not an unsolvable problem.
I think the general uncertainty in the market will prevent 2004 from being any more the Year of Linux than 2003 was. Not to say there wasn't any growth in the last year or that there won't be more this next year.
I certainly think that Microsoft sending out numerous free copies of Small Business Server 2003 shows that they are taking Linux much more seriously than previously. And I think when we hit 2005 and companies have to make a big decision either way that if the Linux offerings by then for the small shop and desktop have improved their UIs so that virtually anyone can setup Linux on their current machines as easily as or more easily than a Longhorn upgrade, THEN you will see the mass migration.
Actually what you want is a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 Portable Computer. I used one of these when I was in College, and not only are they cheap (about $30 on ebay), but they were designed for text processing by reporters.
Assuming you ever consented to a movie being produced from the Sandman series, would you see it being an animated film or a "live"-action like Spiderman?
If You're Doing standard things they're OK...
on
Two Books On Red Hat 9
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My complaint about both books (which I have looked at as part of a departmental purchase) is that they're very good if you're doing the same sorts of things that the authors are. IOW, using Linux as a personal server or such.
However, you want to use some external firewire drives? Do some video capture? Write to a DVD? Neither book addresses these issues to any depth. And some of the things they do put in there to make their "heavy enough to justify the price" length verge on silly. I really don't expect to see a page on Xine if I can get a URL to the home site and be more up to date.
In both cases, the book seems like a way to sell RH CDs at a decent price and with a "Help" manual. For that they are adequate. But I'm still looking for the RH (or Mandrake) book that can get into the challenges my team faces.
Re:If I try it, will I like it?
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
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· Score: 1
Understand that the kernel has a lot to do with it. But different distributions also have different programs that come with them and different default configurations. In my case I'd like to know if this latest version of Mandrake is going to install with minimal fuss and still let me do what I do in XP now? If there are things that won't work out of the box, getting a heads up from the folks here would also be helpful. Hence the post:-)
If I try it, will I like it?
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Tried the distribution some time ago. Seeing that a new one is out, I'm tempted to give it a run. But will it work in my situation:
Could someone review the following and tell me which pieces are going to be problematic (or impossible):
Computer: Compaq Presario 1720US Laptop (PIII 1 GhZ, 384 Meg RAM, 60 Gig HD, ATI Radeon Mobility Video, Built-in DVD/CD-RW)
Attached Ethernet (Wired) to a Windows machine without monitor (need some way to run that in a virtual console)
Attached Linksys Wireless Card (11b) in PC Card slot which is the only Internet connection
Attached Firewire HD (LaCie 360 Gig)
Attached Firewire DVD Burner (4xDVD-R)
Attached TV via S-Video TV/Out
Shared Printer/Scanner - Lexmark X75 PrinTrio
So, is this going to be a worthwhile investment of my time, or is some/most of the above going to stop working? While I'd like to get off my MS Habit, I have this need to use most of the above that keeps pulling me back:-)
In the Hitchhiker's Series, Douglas Adams had a character who had accidentally been made an immortal. Having quickly grown bored with everything (quickly as compared to infinity of course), he decided to set a life goal of individually visiting every being of the Universe to insult them.
Nice to see that once again Mr. Adams was ahead of the pack...
Ahem... I think that the writer above is engaging in arrogance that is at least as "stunning and overwhelming" as the interviewee.
Science has destroyed everything? Really? I assume you're using a computer only because someone is standing over your shoulder planning to hit you for using a pencil and paper?
Or lets get a little more into how science affects life. My middle daughter is alive today because of some of the other benefits of Einstein's discoveries and those of the pharmacists and drug research companies that were able to make sensors to discover what was wrong and then treat her condition.
Now, perhaps you've never had to take advantage of science to make a living, or to prepare a meal, or travel to a special event, or to survive a life threatening disease - and let me point our that if you've ever used an antibiotic then you've qualified for the latter. But I'm betting that if you use electricity then you qualify under the above.
Friend, you want to wail about how science could do more to make our lives more bearable and sustainable and I'll be happy to sign up. But if all you can do is equate science with murder than I think you need to spend a little time with your history books and see how comfortable you'd feel living back in the 1000's - assuming you're young enough that you'd even still be alive back then.
This is the question that knocks around my head when I am feeling particularly inquisitive. It seems that any theory of existence gets to a point where you have to posit the creation of something (an atom, a particle, a strange something or other) from nothing. Given that, why is there anything at all to have a history of to begin with. Why isn't it all nothingness?
Saw the story announcement and followed the link. Demo certainly looks interesting. Went to the Lycoris store, and no listing showing the product available. Started scanning through the site, and no evidence that it could be DL'd anywhere.
Shouldn't a product actually be available before being promoted so heavily?
Slashdot Mirror
Per another posting...
:-)
Yeah, this probably isn't true. But for the price it costs me, why not post just in case? I mean, a Slashdot subscription, that's got to be worth something, right?
For myself, the only Windows program I still run frequently is Listen.com's Rhapsody. This allows me to access a ton of music through their streaming service for a monthly fee.
Trying to get this running under Wine or WineX (yes, I do know how to use CVS thank you) has been nigh on impossible. I'd love to hear that someone who has paid for this has gotten it running, so I could justify the subscription fee for WineX.
TIA,
Ewan
Windows installs stuff easily and just works? Really? Let me tell you about some of MY experience.
On the work side I get to be in all sorts of interesting environments, and having an external USB wireless device gives me the most flexibility. Our standard is the Linksys WUSB11 series. Now, when I'm running under Linux I have to load a driver, but done once on a machine and I'm through. On Windows, I have to be very careful with the order it's installed, make sure that there isn't another network device on the machine, and still be careful as to my configuration. Very careful actually...
Much worse has been my firewire (1394) experience with hard drives and video capture devices. Both Windows and Linux will usually recognize the devices at first, but with Windows it is very typical to get all sorts of write errors if you're moving a lot of data back and forth - particularly if (horrors) you want to read and write to multiple firewire drives. I've done this with several laptop and desktop machines through various cards, and Windows just goofs this up big time.
Using many of those same machines, the reads and writes have been bulletproof under Linux. Oh, and in Linux I can set the hard drives up as a Software RAID 5 set - something XP won't let you do as part of the way MS upsells you to their server product.
Sorry, but I think the hardware compatibility issues of Linux are vastly overstated.
Just to confirm - this is supposed to be a geek friendly game that runs on an operating system most geeks don't use. So your target audience is folks who should know better but spend the money anyway... ... oh, I see :-)
If there was anything in the article that screamed "bogus" to me it was the following quote:
"We can get to the point where the initial cost can be competitive with the electric grid," McGahn told UPI. "If we had a 10-mile-by-10-mile square, we could power the country."
Excuse me? Really? I have a hard time believing that there aren't a couple power utilities snapping this up if it's true. I suspect this is at best a bit of hyperbole. And as such have to question the reliability of a reporter that would print such a statement unchallenged.
But maybe I'm just cranky at having an 8 pound laptop with half the weight being battery...
It's nice to see that Linux is helping some folks out with their connectivity issues. However, the article doesn't address the number one problem I've seen on most Linux user forums - which is how to get the dang card recognized and configured in the first place.
.02 worth...
Myself, I have a Linksys WUSB11 v 2.8 wireless device. Linksys, the consumer arm of Cisco, is not exactly a small player. But to get my card to work I have to go to the Berlios.de site, do a CVS checkout (if I want 2.6 kernel support), and make sure I have kernel source around to build the driver.
Someone who can simplify THAT is going to make a lot more headway with the average user.
My
Amusing that you would bring this up :-)
I ran a BBS using a C64 with 4 of the 1541 drives that, as you point out, tended to overheat. My solution was to get four of the ever popular muffin fans, and put one on top of each drive to pull the air through.
Of course, with that as my comparison point, you can imagine why I consider my current PC to be quiet enough...
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this as it was the one thing that finally moved me off satellite.
Twice a year, near (but not on) the equinox you will have a period of about a week where the sun appears to be lined up with the satellite and you will have low to no signal. Generally this is during daytime hours, and so folks who only use the system at night may not have noticed. But boy it made my life "fun" for a while.
As other posters have suggested, you might want to see if there's fixed wireless available near you, or if you can find someone line-of-sight who can access DSL or Cable who'd be willing to let you setup a link much as Bob Cringely described a year or two ago on his site.
FWIW...
With that out of the way, as one of the other posters has shown there are a number of factors that lead to poverty in the current world. There is no reason to believe in the kind of future that this trilogy describes that any of those factors would still apply. In fact I've been very disappointed that the author seems to allow people to "edit out" advertising but doesn't seem to consider that you can "edit out" knowing about people better or worse off than you. IOW, in that society why would I care to know I wasn't rich?
With all that, I'd have to give these titles more of a mixed review. I think that the author has spent a fair bit of time coming up with some cool ideas. However, as with much of the genre, the characters seem dedicated to giving an excuse for the author to expound on the ideas than to actually giving us well-rounded characters who might make us learn or feel something new about the human condition.
Just my .02 worth.
Now, we get those shoes with the crystalline soles that generate a little electricity every time you flex them and...
You know, I think writing this burned out more brain cells than I realized ;-)
Of course, I'm a bit known for tilting at windmills
I figured someone would bring up LOTR. But I would venture that if all you ever had of LOTR was the first book that you would feel you had a fairly good read on it's own. Yes, there are several questions you would like answered, but you don't feel the sense that the book couldn't stand on it's own. The second book in the trilogy might be a little hard to argue the same.
Then you have the Hitchhiker series where it's very obvious that each book (except possibly the last one) could qualify as a good book on it's own.
I didn't get the same feeling from this book, but as always YMMV.
... shouldn't be written as trilogies. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they shouldn't be published seperately. I don't mind reading book 1 in a trilogy and waiting to find out more if the book would have been a good read on it's own. But this book comes across as a novel that is more than a little unsatisfying without the following books.
.02 worth
My
As far as dealing with the unemployed, there once was an SF story (sorry, I don't remember which) where the author posited an agreement that each employee who was replaced by a robot received a share of the company's profits based on the robot's productivity. This tended to keep folks busy making sure their robots were in good working order, and had some workers saving part of the money to upgrade their robots to be more productive.
Not saying that's the best solution, but it is A solution - to show that full-scale unemployment due to an automated workforce is not an unsolvable problem.
... get one of these
For a lot less money and still have one-touch convienence, less electricity usage, and much quieter operation?
I think the general uncertainty in the market will prevent 2004 from being any more the Year of Linux than 2003 was. Not to say there wasn't any growth in the last year or that there won't be more this next year.
I certainly think that Microsoft sending out numerous free copies of Small Business Server 2003 shows that they are taking Linux much more seriously than previously. And I think when we hit 2005 and companies have to make a big decision either way that if the Linux offerings by then for the small shop and desktop have improved their UIs so that virtually anyone can setup Linux on their current machines as easily as or more easily than a Longhorn upgrade, THEN you will see the mass migration.
FWIW...
Actually what you want is a Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 Portable Computer. I used one of these when I was in College, and not only are they cheap (about $30 on ebay), but they were designed for text processing by reporters.
Assuming you ever consented to a movie being produced from the Sandman series, would you see it being an animated film or a "live"-action like Spiderman?
However, you want to use some external firewire drives? Do some video capture? Write to a DVD? Neither book addresses these issues to any depth. And some of the things they do put in there to make their "heavy enough to justify the price" length verge on silly. I really don't expect to see a page on Xine if I can get a URL to the home site and be more up to date.
In both cases, the book seems like a way to sell RH CDs at a decent price and with a "Help" manual. For that they are adequate. But I'm still looking for the RH (or Mandrake) book that can get into the challenges my team faces.
Understand that the kernel has a lot to do with it. But different distributions also have different programs that come with them and different default configurations. In my case I'd like to know if this latest version of Mandrake is going to install with minimal fuss and still let me do what I do in XP now? If there are things that won't work out of the box, getting a heads up from the folks here would also be helpful. Hence the post :-)
Could someone review the following and tell me which pieces are going to be problematic (or impossible):
Computer: Compaq Presario 1720US Laptop (PIII 1 GhZ, 384 Meg RAM, 60 Gig HD, ATI Radeon Mobility Video, Built-in DVD/CD-RW)
Attached Ethernet (Wired) to a Windows machine without monitor (need some way to run that in a virtual console)
Attached Linksys Wireless Card (11b) in PC Card slot which is the only Internet connection
Attached Firewire HD (LaCie 360 Gig)
Attached Firewire DVD Burner (4xDVD-R)
Attached TV via S-Video TV/Out
Shared Printer/Scanner - Lexmark X75 PrinTrio
So, is this going to be a worthwhile investment of my time, or is some/most of the above going to stop working? While I'd like to get off my MS Habit, I have this need to use most of the above that keeps pulling me back :-)
Nice to see that once again Mr. Adams was ahead of the pack...
Ahem... I think that the writer above is engaging in arrogance that is at least as "stunning and overwhelming" as the interviewee.
.03 worth,
Science has destroyed everything? Really? I assume you're using a computer only because someone is standing over your shoulder planning to hit you for using a pencil and paper?
Or lets get a little more into how science affects life. My middle daughter is alive today because of some of the other benefits of Einstein's discoveries and those of the pharmacists and drug research companies that were able to make sensors to discover what was wrong and then treat her condition.
Now, perhaps you've never had to take advantage of science to make a living, or to prepare a meal, or travel to a special event, or to survive a life threatening disease - and let me point our that if you've ever used an antibiotic then you've qualified for the latter. But I'm betting that if you use electricity then you qualify under the above.
Friend, you want to wail about how science could do more to make our lives more bearable and sustainable and I'll be happy to sign up. But if all you can do is equate science with murder than I think you need to spend a little time with your history books and see how comfortable you'd feel living back in the 1000's - assuming you're young enough that you'd even still be alive back then.
Just my
Ewan
This is the question that knocks around my head when I am feeling particularly inquisitive. It seems that any theory of existence gets to a point where you have to posit the creation of something (an atom, a particle, a strange something or other) from nothing. Given that, why is there anything at all to have a history of to begin with. Why isn't it all nothingness?
Saw the story announcement and followed the link. Demo certainly looks interesting. Went to the Lycoris store, and no listing showing the product available. Started scanning through the site, and no evidence that it could be DL'd anywhere.
Shouldn't a product actually be available before being promoted so heavily?