When you end up with 200 Megs taking up 1Gb on disk I'd say it affects performance. I'm not sure how XP handles fragmentation, but Win2k is just plain BAD once you're below a certiain point (like around 2 GB of free space which is a lot). Not only that, but it always seems like the defragmenter doesn't know what it's doing. It only seems to say you need to defrag a drive when you no longer have enough space because of fragmentation.
I've actually needed an ext2 defragger at one time (due to unusual circumstances) and I also saw the quality in which you speak =P . Eventually I just gave up and moved everything to a different drive and moved it back. I wonder how many other people ended up sort of stuck because of the lack of a ext2 defrag when they needed it.
I don't think so. You CAN compete with Microsoft, look at Quicken, Microsoft, despite their best efforts (and despite the worst bunglings of Intuit) has not been able to unseat them.
Yet. Microsoft's aquisition of Great Plains and almost all competing companies has left it with an abundance of options in that area. It's just a matter of figuring out which one would be best scaled down to compete with quicken, then integrated between visual studio, MS SQL,.Net , and MS Office.
Is "Microsoft Money" a threat? Well probably not, but Microsoft has taken down some very big players in it's time - so a person really starts to wonder.
Just in case you're curious I read in a book that the typical hunter-gatherer worked on average 13 (or 23 I can't remember) hours a week.
In the 50's the average housewife worked over 52 hours per week. It's also interesting that in the same chapter it cited that while people are more affluent then they were 30 years ago, they're also less happy then people used to be.
The fact is, we could only work 30 hours/week and still make a decent living if only we'd prioritize our "needs" over our wants. I'd gladly give up 10 hours of pay a week if it meant I could spend that time doing other stuff that I liked (and if I could learn to actually live within my means..:) ).
Those are priorities specific to the person. I know a lot of people who are just begging for overtime to make more money, despite the fact that they already make enough. They just want MORE for whatever reason. Personally I'm happy with my job - 40 hours a week and no more. I've actually converted a friend (who used to work himself to death) more towards my philosophy of work less live more - and he's actually happier than he's been in years.
That's sort of a side effect of the way our society is going to (American that is). Small grocery stores and corner markets dying out in favor of uber supermarkets. Local hardware stores dying out in favor of huge Walmarts and Home Depot. Local resturants giving way to large food chains.
In each scenario we move away from better service into something similar, but very generic (and bland). Much like music.
I'm curious to see how this will pan out. Each of these countries that moves towards open source will probably develop locally software and infustructure wise, to do many of the same tasks. Will each country keep their own stuff private so only they can use it, or will they pool their resources and share their work for an overall better product?
Obviously AOL is misplacing their resources. They're falling way behind the version war - remember how revolutionary 8 is compaired to 7, or hah hah... I laugh at the thought _6_? Hell emacs is in the 20s and I'd sure as hell rather use emacs (tough sell considering I'm a vi(m) user). AOL needs to move on to version 15 or so to totally blow away MSN. They can then add super championship turbo edition for power users, maybe give redhat kernel versions a run for their money.
That's the part that worries me - the buyiing/sueing of companies who even *look* like they might do something that MS wants (remember how they tried to buy Quicken, and at least that one was nixed?).
Microsft can't stand Quicken, and if I were Quicken - I'd be more than a little worried. Microsoft bought up pretty much everyone else in that market already (Great Plains, etc) and now Quicken pretty much stands alone along with one European company (who's name escapes me at the moment). The difference with what MS has now is that the stuff is made for larger scale companies, but as they have purchased a few rudndant companies in this market, it's only a matter of taking one of their products and scaling it back. Who knows if that's even neccesary since MS is doing stuff like offering SQL server for $49 and stuff now to compete with Linux.
It's a horrible program NOW, but it wasn't back when there was ICQ98. A cute small program that rarely crashed. Then came ICQ 99 and it's exponential bloat. It started really going downhill with the 'everything but the kitchen sink' syndrome - with all sorts of alarms and post-it notes and other crap you don't want in an IM client. After that each version got worse and worse. Thanks AOL =P
Now days I just use Miranda IM on the rare occasion I even use IM anymore. It's actually better than ICQ used to be. Extremely stable, small footprint, and extendable through really cool plugins (including talking to msn messenger clients).
"Unix-like" to me seems more like Linux - built from scratch to emulate Unix, but not really borrowing from Unix at all. If it's based off of FreeBSD which is a Unix then logic sort of follows that it is based off of a unix. It is probably as much of a Unix (many tools and such) as it is not a Unix (stuff apple dumped in there and re-arranged). I recall opening a shell and looking under the hood of OSX for the first time and thinking "what the hell? This isn't like any unix I've ever used..."
Apple could probably easily get themselves out of the mess by claiming that OSX is derived from FreeBSD (true), which is a [$propaganda_terms] unix (also true) - yet does not directly say it is based off of unix. That would probably cut off of a lot of their "unix stability" and such claims though.
I'm not a big fan of asymmetric cryptography for stuff that is going to just sit around. As far as archive stuff, if it doesn't use blowfish, IDEA, or AES I probably just won't use it.
I can't wait for exchange to do even more! Maybe it could open up a few more ports, because the 20 or so that it opens by default just isn't enough. I also look forward to having a wonderful MMC interface to set half of the documented features, and having to enter hex into the registery to enable the rest =P
Okay, I'm joking. But seriously - is it just me or is Exchange really lacking in it's ability to do simple things like scan email and deny based off of attachments. Before someone replies with "that's why they bought them", I might meantion that it's not like MS couldn't have implemented these features like 6 or 7 years ago. It sort of strikes me as odd that they would show an interest in this sort of company now.
"encryption" regarding Winzip is practically a joke. Just look up information on how to password crack a zip archive and typically they talk about how Winzip left "hooks" which makes breaking the encryption far faster. I've actually seen quite a few articles on encryption, citing Winzip's implementation as an example of how to botch encryption.
On the other hand PKWare's method isn't so great either. I've generally gone to using IZArc which can encrypt files using 256bit AES.
dump the caps lock
on
Mac OS X Hints
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Anyone have a reliable method of changing the caps-lock key to a control key on an ibook? I've tried some utility and messing with some various settings but obviously I'm not getting it right. It's easy to do on FreeBSD and Linux; a pain to do on Win2k (but do-able) - now I'm just missing my Mac.
Software companies already make guarantees without following through. I recall having a conversation with a person who claimed that Linux wouldn't go anywhere because of lack of support, and no one claiming responsibility. Support is not an issue. You can pay Red Hat or Microsoft - either will offer support for money. But responsibility? If I have a Microsoft server that gets hacked, or have a critical application that dies because of a bad MS patch, what am I going to do? Yell at Microsoft? Maybe sue them? (heh). Microsoft already has no liability for the software they produce, and people don't seem to be aware of it in the least. People still think they actually *OWN* their copy of Windows. What the end result of all of this will be that people will be boned even more when something goes wrong and they become aware of the rights they never had.
Especially since redhat seems to be version skipping lately. Going from 8 to 9. Where's the stability release? I got bit in the ass pretty hard by 8 and I'm definatly not touching redhat upgrade wise until 9.1
Try reducing the color depth on a png to 8bit (or 4). You will usually get a smaller PNG. I'm not sure how it works in photoshop though, because my friend gets larger PNGs than GIFS. In Paintshop Pro (5) it's always the other way around.
That's only sort of correct. A gif can ONLY do transparency. A PNG allows up to 254 levels of partial transparency per channel, and can have multiple channels.
You want to know what REALLY held PNG back? It was Internet Explorer that STILL doesn't do the transparency right. More eople would start using the format right now if the implementation could do what the spec specifies. You see people all the time finding clever ways to make an image look like it blends into the background - which can be a pain in the ass to line up correctly. Imagine if the images could actually do partial transparency... that would make things easier woudn't it? Oh well, it's still a good lossless algorithm to cart images around with - I use it all the time for personal use and on my website.
Snodgrass's group proposed replacing the company's Microsoft Exchange servers with a Linux-based solution that would have all the same collaboration features and have a cost savings of 70 percent to 80 percent.
Um... Does anyone know exactly what the Linux based solution entails? e-mail is of course trivial, but what exactly the callendar/scheduling and other features ?
Unfortunatly I have a Sony combo drive for which there is there is no firmware flash yet. It doesn't look all that promising either as XVI is mainly only keeping up with powerbooks nowdays.
That was a fundamental difference between Jobs and Woz. Woz not only wanted the thing to be open and free, he actually wanted to include a technical manual documenting all the electronics so you could wire it however you want! It seems that the deeper Jobs got into the Mac side, the less open Apple was about everything. After the Apple ][ team got shoved to the side, that was pretty much the end of that sort of thing. I wonder what Woz thinks about not even being able to control the DVD region on your own iBook DVD player.
If the users on the network I admin actually started compiling their own code, I'd shoot myself. It's bad enough not getting them to click on every attachment. God knows what they would compile on their own.
The open source world can look after itself just fine. It's not like OS projects just don't care about these things. It tends to show a fundamental difference between OS and MS in that MS seems to need initatives in order to focus themselves on getting something customers have been demanding for quite a while, instead of simply listening to what customers wanted and doing it all along. Maybe if MS came up with products that were more appealing to ME instead of appealing to them (and their wallets) I'd be more inclined to go with them. If they come up with a good product at a fair price, then they deserve to get business. I mean that's how competition works right?
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When you end up with 200 Megs taking up 1Gb on disk I'd say it affects performance. I'm not sure how XP handles fragmentation, but Win2k is just plain BAD once you're below a certiain point (like around 2 GB of free space which is a lot). Not only that, but it always seems like the defragmenter doesn't know what it's doing. It only seems to say you need to defrag a drive when you no longer have enough space because of fragmentation.
I've actually needed an ext2 defragger at one time (due to unusual circumstances) and I also saw the quality in which you speak =P . Eventually I just gave up and moved everything to a different drive and moved it back. I wonder how many other people ended up sort of stuck because of the lack of a ext2 defrag when they needed it.
I don't think so. You CAN compete with Microsoft, look at Quicken, Microsoft, despite their best efforts (and despite the worst bunglings of Intuit) has not been able to unseat them.
.Net , and MS Office.
Yet.
Microsoft's aquisition of Great Plains and almost all competing companies has left it with an abundance of options in that area. It's just a matter of figuring out which one would be best scaled down to compete with quicken, then integrated between visual studio, MS SQL,
Is "Microsoft Money" a threat? Well probably not, but Microsoft has taken down some very big players in it's time - so a person really starts to wonder.
Just in case you're curious I read in a book that the typical hunter-gatherer worked on average 13 (or 23 I can't remember) hours a week.
:) ).
In the 50's the average housewife worked over 52 hours per week. It's also interesting that in the same chapter it cited that while people are more affluent then they were 30 years ago, they're also less happy then people used to be.
The fact is, we could only work 30 hours/week and still make a decent living if only we'd prioritize our "needs" over our wants. I'd gladly give up 10 hours of pay a week if it meant I could spend that time doing other stuff that I liked (and if I could learn to actually live within my means..
Those are priorities specific to the person. I know a lot of people who are just begging for overtime to make more money, despite the fact that they already make enough. They just want MORE for whatever reason. Personally I'm happy with my job - 40 hours a week and no more. I've actually converted a friend (who used to work himself to death) more towards my philosophy of work less live more - and he's actually happier than he's been in years.
That's sort of a side effect of the way our society is going to (American that is). Small grocery stores and corner markets dying out in favor of uber supermarkets. Local hardware stores dying out in favor of huge Walmarts and Home Depot. Local resturants giving way to large food chains.
In each scenario we move away from better service into something similar, but very generic (and bland). Much like music.
You better pray you don't get a wedgie, because that would probably involve a hospital visit to fix =P
I'm curious to see how this will pan out. Each of these countries that moves towards open source will probably develop locally software and infustructure wise, to do many of the same tasks. Will each country keep their own stuff private so only they can use it, or will they pool their resources and share their work for an overall better product?
Obviously AOL is misplacing their resources. They're falling way behind the version war - remember how revolutionary 8 is compaired to 7, or hah hah... I laugh at the thought _6_? Hell emacs is in the 20s and I'd sure as hell rather use emacs (tough sell considering I'm a vi(m) user). AOL needs to move on to version 15 or so to totally blow away MSN. They can then add super championship turbo edition for power users, maybe give redhat kernel versions a run for their money.
That's the part that worries me - the buyiing/sueing of companies who even *look* like they might do something that MS wants (remember how they tried to buy Quicken, and at least that one was nixed?).
Microsft can't stand Quicken, and if I were Quicken - I'd be more than a little worried. Microsoft bought up pretty much everyone else in that market already (Great Plains, etc) and now Quicken pretty much stands alone along with one European company (who's name escapes me at the moment). The difference with what MS has now is that the stuff is made for larger scale companies, but as they have purchased a few rudndant companies in this market, it's only a matter of taking one of their products and scaling it back. Who knows if that's even neccesary since MS is doing stuff like offering SQL server for $49 and stuff now to compete with Linux.
It's a horrible program NOW, but it wasn't back when there was ICQ98. A cute small program that rarely crashed. Then came ICQ 99 and it's exponential bloat. It started really going downhill with the 'everything but the kitchen sink' syndrome - with all sorts of alarms and post-it notes and other crap you don't want in an IM client. After that each version got worse and worse. Thanks AOL =P
Now days I just use Miranda IM on the rare occasion I even use IM anymore. It's actually better than ICQ used to be. Extremely stable, small footprint, and extendable through really cool plugins (including talking to msn messenger clients).
"Unix-like" to me seems more like Linux - built from scratch to emulate Unix, but not really borrowing from Unix at all. If it's based off of FreeBSD which is a Unix then logic sort of follows that it is based off of a unix. It is probably as much of a Unix (many tools and such) as it is not a Unix (stuff apple dumped in there and re-arranged). I recall opening a shell and looking under the hood of OSX for the first time and thinking "what the hell? This isn't like any unix I've ever used..."
Apple could probably easily get themselves out of the mess by claiming that OSX is derived from FreeBSD (true), which is a [$propaganda_terms] unix (also true) - yet does not directly say it is based off of unix. That would probably cut off of a lot of their "unix stability" and such claims though.
only two eh, mr high and mighty.? Good old batch files not good enough for you? =P
I'm not a big fan of asymmetric cryptography for stuff that is going to just sit around. As far as archive stuff, if it doesn't use blowfish, IDEA, or AES I probably just won't use it.
I can't wait for exchange to do even more! Maybe it could open up a few more ports, because the 20 or so that it opens by default just isn't enough. I also look forward to having a wonderful MMC interface to set half of the documented features, and having to enter hex into the registery to enable the rest =P
Okay, I'm joking. But seriously - is it just me or is Exchange really lacking in it's ability to do simple things like scan email and deny based off of attachments. Before someone replies with "that's why they bought them", I might meantion that it's not like MS couldn't have implemented these features like 6 or 7 years ago. It sort of strikes me as odd that they would show an interest in this sort of company now.
"encryption" regarding Winzip is practically a joke. Just look up information on how to password crack a zip archive and typically they talk about how Winzip left "hooks" which makes breaking the encryption far faster. I've actually seen quite a few articles on encryption, citing Winzip's implementation as an example of how to botch encryption.
On the other hand PKWare's method isn't so great either. I've generally gone to using IZArc which can encrypt files using 256bit AES.
Anyone have a reliable method of changing the caps-lock key to a control key on an ibook? I've tried some utility and messing with some various settings but obviously I'm not getting it right. It's easy to do on FreeBSD and Linux; a pain to do on Win2k (but do-able) - now I'm just missing my Mac.
Software companies already make guarantees without following through. I recall having a conversation with a person who claimed that Linux wouldn't go anywhere because of lack of support, and no one claiming responsibility. Support is not an issue. You can pay Red Hat or Microsoft - either will offer support for money. But responsibility? If I have a Microsoft server that gets hacked, or have a critical application that dies because of a bad MS patch, what am I going to do? Yell at Microsoft? Maybe sue them? (heh). Microsoft already has no liability for the software they produce, and people don't seem to be aware of it in the least. People still think they actually *OWN* their copy of Windows. What the end result of all of this will be that people will be boned even more when something goes wrong and they become aware of the rights they never had.
Especially since redhat seems to be version skipping lately. Going from 8 to 9. Where's the stability release? I got bit in the ass pretty hard by 8 and I'm definatly not touching redhat upgrade wise until 9.1
Try reducing the color depth on a png to 8bit (or 4). You will usually get a smaller PNG. I'm not sure how it works in photoshop though, because my friend gets larger PNGs than GIFS. In Paintshop Pro (5) it's always the other way around.
That's only sort of correct. A gif can ONLY do transparency. A PNG allows up to 254 levels of partial transparency per channel, and can have multiple channels.
You want to know what REALLY held PNG back? It was Internet Explorer that STILL doesn't do the transparency right. More eople would start using the format right now if the implementation could do what the spec specifies. You see people all the time finding clever ways to make an image look like it blends into the background - which can be a pain in the ass to line up correctly. Imagine if the images could actually do partial transparency... that would make things easier woudn't it? Oh well, it's still a good lossless algorithm to cart images around with - I use it all the time for personal use and on my website.
It's ironic because Alanis Morissette managed to single handily confuse people with what occasion they should use the word "oddly".
Snodgrass's group proposed replacing the company's Microsoft Exchange servers with a Linux-based solution that would have all the same collaboration features and have a cost savings of 70 percent to 80 percent.
Um... Does anyone know exactly what the Linux based solution entails? e-mail is of course trivial, but what exactly the callendar/scheduling and other features ?
Unfortunatly I have a Sony combo drive for which there is there is no firmware flash yet. It doesn't look all that promising either as XVI is mainly only keeping up with powerbooks nowdays.
That was a fundamental difference between Jobs and Woz. Woz not only wanted the thing to be open and free, he actually wanted to include a technical manual documenting all the electronics so you could wire it however you want! It seems that the deeper Jobs got into the Mac side, the less open Apple was about everything. After the Apple ][ team got shoved to the side, that was pretty much the end of that sort of thing. I wonder what Woz thinks about not even being able to control the DVD region on your own iBook DVD player.
If the users on the network I admin actually started compiling their own code, I'd shoot myself. It's bad enough not getting them to click on every attachment. God knows what they would compile on their own.
The open source world can look after itself just fine. It's not like OS projects just don't care about these things. It tends to show a fundamental difference between OS and MS in that MS seems to need initatives in order to focus themselves on getting something customers have been demanding for quite a while, instead of simply listening to what customers wanted and doing it all along. Maybe if MS came up with products that were more appealing to ME instead of appealing to them (and their wallets) I'd be more inclined to go with them. If they come up with a good product at a fair price, then they deserve to get business. I mean that's how competition works right?