Amen! The company I was working for in 2005 migrated to Notes 6.5 from Outlook 2000...dear god, what a downgrade that was, and I hated Outlook! Notes is incredibly slow, bloated, and obtuse. It was embarrassing how simple functions were just horribly convoluted. I still don't understand why anyone outside of IBM uses it.
Those "terrorist nations" also have significantly less consumer protection in the form of product liability laws. If you want the real reason why chemistry sets have been neutered, look no further than product liability law and the insurance companies, and ultimately ourselves. No company wants the liability of little Johnny burning his face off with his chemistry set - oh, and what's this - the company KNEW this reasonably foreseeable event could happen! And still marketed it! Punitive damages!
You might as well personally send an executive to drive a lawn dart through Johnny's skull.
I was here for some time pre-userids, and I recall registering for an account shortly after seeing a news item about user accounts on the front page, even though I think they were optional for a while, even to post as a non-AC. I never commented very much, but now I actually keep up with slashdot more regularly than I used to in the earlier days actually thanks to RSS feeds.
Actually, I think you can categorize the 3 major ILECs like this:
Verizon: We're at least trying, sort of, in some places. Sucks to be you if you're stuck in god-forsaken ex-GTE area though. Oh, and damn the copper network [this at least I agree with, a little].
AT&T: VDSL ought to be enough for anybody. Please subscribe to our service that may have been impressive had we launched it 5 years ago. Oh, by the way, we've managed to sign up, oh, 50,000 people for it in a year.
Qwest: What? Me worry?
I think cable will eat ILEC lunch for the next 5 years outside of the FiOS areas and at least AT&T and Qwest will be in a far more precarious position. Time will tell.
How is it even possible to have a cable bill approaching a thousand dollars a month? I've never seen packages really ever exceed $200 a month and that was all inclusive of a nearly comprehensive digital cable package with nearly every premium option, voice AND internet. Do people watch that much PPV or something?
1) If you can afford $180 a month for cable, you're not low budget. At least not by any standard I would use.
2) No DSL provider in the continental USA has used internal DSL modems for years. Nearly all use external modems with onboard PPPoE and ethernet connectivity. So, basically, it's no more difficult than setting up a cable modem connection.
3) You could take two months worth of savings from canceling cable and get a new computer.
Miranda is generally good, although I think it's fairly byzantine from a configurability point of view. You can do darn near anything with it, but finding the right place to change such-and-such a setting can be pretty difficult (and a lot of the defaults seem to suck). And unless you're willing to a decent amount of time in it and download and configure modules for it, you're probably better off with something like Pidgin.
Adium X has all the visual and functional appeal of miranda to me only with a lot less required effort. It actually makes being stuck on a slowboat G5 powermac at work bearable. Now I would just like to see a cross-platform version of it...please?
Agreed. I've looked at the mac towers since the early powerpc days whenever I was in the market for a new computer, but I just always ended up gobsmacked at the price premium (always seeming to be in the range of 25%+) that you face for equivalent performance. And it's gotten worse for macs, not better.
When the Yang-tze flooded in China, and when a dam broke-up years ago, the death toll was in excess of 100K. Did you even hear of that?
Uh, no, and that's probably because China was the most closed nation in existence at the time, still a personality cult of chairman Mao. There could have been a nuclear holocaust in the nation and they probably could have hidden it fairly well from the west. The news about the dam breakup (which eventually claimed over 200k lives thanks to ensuing disease and starvation) wasn't really found out by the west until years after the fact. To this day most Western peoples still have never heard of it, despite it being one of the worst human disasters ever.
I think the acceptance of death is more a function of the government's acceptance than the "people's" acceptance, especially in China.
US currency is the most counterfeited for the simple fact it's the MOST POPULAR across the world. It's notable that saddam made off with 900 million USD and 100 million Euro, not the other way around. If the Euro would ever become the most dominant currency, you'd have counterfeited Euros around the world in great numbers no matter what holograms, pretty colors, or radio transmitters you embedded in the 'legitimate bills.' The pros operating out of whatever country will always find a way to counterfeit the currency in question at least so enough people will be fooled for them to get away with it. Having worked in fast food in the US most domestic one-off counterfeits tend to be fairly pathetic. Think president's picture not matching the dollar amount. What's the use of the hologram if no one's going to look for it.
You're pretty new here, relatively speaking, but that's not really important.
Why, back when I was young first posts meant somethin'...oh well...anyway...
Sometimes the best solution may be to use a proprietary product for awhile, while you work on a longer term free software solution.
But let's say you pay some geek $1000 to hack GnuCash to do exactly what you need. You've basically branched out a tree for yourself. Now a new GnuCash release comes out that fixes, say, a few critical bugs and has a few spiffy new features you'd love to have, but now you have to merge this new version into your version. There goes $500 to Mr. Consultant Geek again, and so on and so forth. The flexibility of being able to put in new features is quite nice, but it has a pricetag, and you may create a situation where you have to maintain software in-house or have to pay a consultant $$$ for maintenance. Free, perhaps, but still plenty expensive.
The transatlantic flight I went on (US to france via Delta/airfrance) was served TWO meals -- a (good!) dinner and a continental breakfast. I also was on a france to spain (iberia) flight that was served a really nice lunch. Inter-country air travel seems to be more predisposed towards getting meals on board even though my france to spain flight was only about 3 hours.
But yes, domestic US flights basically are foodless nowadays for all but the longest ones and possibly some shorter first-class.
Just remember, it could all be far, far, far worse. Always remember that. It gives you some scope and perception of the current woes. Oh, and economic indicators tend to flash red sometimes. It's called 'contraction' as opposed to 'expansion'. Both happen all the time whether it's Dubya or The Illuminati in charge. I'd be far more alarmed and suspicious with economic indicators that always were green.
And California, well, they've basically screwed themselves over many times. From 'Oh my?! We have an energy problem?! That's un-possible!' to this. And this ain't New York's first impending bankruptcy. Just don't be so quick to scream TEOTWAWKI.
Seriously, you think the president somehow controls the economy? Alan Greenspan really could never manage it well (he really did try to prevent the dot-com/tech bubble from ever forming but some people just refuse to listen) and he had direct control of a number of key economic controls. And I think you're confusing most of the yelling with all those dire Y2K warnings. And those weren't off at all, were they?
Our basement and first floor of our building was and probably still is about a million times more crowded. We have WALLS of hard drives, WALLS of power supplies, stack after stack after stack of old motherboards and cases. Don't even get me started on keyboard and mice!
That's not to say there wasn't at least some organization -- there was, but it was always a little humbling to go down into a basement where the weight present in IDE cables alone exceeded your own weight.
...Unless, of course, you're using IDE drives, in which case you're screwed.
Not exactly. Every computer I've had since about 1997 with more than one IDE drive in it staggered the spinup of the drives. I assume this is a motherboard/IDE controller function (but not really sure, to be honest) as I've used many combinations of brands and sizes and they always spin up master first in my experience.
Last time I had a computer spin up more than one drive at once was with my IBM PS/1 circa 1994.
Would this be the same 21-inch monitor you didn't regret buying when you wrote that April (?) 1997 Linux Jorunal article about building a linux-friendly PC?
Yeah, my eyesight is shot, but my memory is still great!;D
A-men to that. Who cares if AMD has the fastest or best designed processors if the chipsets driving them are unmitigated GARBAGE? I own an Athlon 950 with a motherboard with the VIA KT133 chipset -- crap crap CRAP. The PCI bus is a terrible mess on that chipset and it strangles any sound card (especially creative) to DEATH. THANKFULLY I didn't have the KT133A or I would have had the joys of data corruption too. While it's no longer "VIA or NOTHING" as it once was for the Athlon I'll take the stability of an Intel processor + intel or sis chipset anyday. I'm writing this on a P4 1.8A with a SiS650-based board. Everything actually WORKS on it which is much more than I can say for my athlon.
Slashdot Mirror
Do yourself a favor and get an inexpensive router so you can get all your PCs online. It will make life much, much easier for you.
Erm, what? I'm on an older G5 right now running an older version of OS X (10.3) and the CPU use doesn't spike doing that.
Amen! The company I was working for in 2005 migrated to Notes 6.5 from Outlook 2000...dear god, what a downgrade that was, and I hated Outlook! Notes is incredibly slow, bloated, and obtuse. It was embarrassing how simple functions were just horribly convoluted. I still don't understand why anyone outside of IBM uses it.
Those "terrorist nations" also have significantly less consumer protection in the form of product liability laws. If you want the real reason why chemistry sets have been neutered, look no further than product liability law and the insurance companies, and ultimately ourselves. No company wants the liability of little Johnny burning his face off with his chemistry set - oh, and what's this - the company KNEW this reasonably foreseeable event could happen! And still marketed it! Punitive damages!
You might as well personally send an executive to drive a lawn dart through Johnny's skull.
You rang?
I was here for some time pre-userids, and I recall registering for an account shortly after seeing a news item about user accounts on the front page, even though I think they were optional for a while, even to post as a non-AC. I never commented very much, but now I actually keep up with slashdot more regularly than I used to in the earlier days actually thanks to RSS feeds.
I'm sure it makes more sense if you're high at the time ...
Well, I am full...is that good enough?
The switch is in Feb of 09, not Feb of 08. Try 18 months.
Actually, I think you can categorize the 3 major ILECs like this:
Verizon: We're at least trying, sort of, in some places. Sucks to be you if you're stuck in god-forsaken ex-GTE area though. Oh, and damn the copper network [this at least I agree with, a little].
AT&T: VDSL ought to be enough for anybody. Please subscribe to our service that may have been impressive had we launched it 5 years ago. Oh, by the way, we've managed to sign up, oh, 50,000 people for it in a year.
Qwest: What? Me worry?
I think cable will eat ILEC lunch for the next 5 years outside of the FiOS areas and at least AT&T and Qwest will be in a far more precarious position. Time will tell.
How is it even possible to have a cable bill approaching a thousand dollars a month? I've never seen packages really ever exceed $200 a month and that was all inclusive of a nearly comprehensive digital cable package with nearly every premium option, voice AND internet. Do people watch that much PPV or something?
Two things:
1) If you can afford $180 a month for cable, you're not low budget. At least not by any standard I would use.
2) No DSL provider in the continental USA has used internal DSL modems for years. Nearly all use external modems with onboard PPPoE and ethernet connectivity. So, basically, it's no more difficult than setting up a cable modem connection.
3) You could take two months worth of savings from canceling cable and get a new computer.
Miranda is generally good, although I think it's fairly byzantine from a configurability point of view. You can do darn near anything with it, but finding the right place to change such-and-such a setting can be pretty difficult (and a lot of the defaults seem to suck). And unless you're willing to a decent amount of time in it and download and configure modules for it, you're probably better off with something like Pidgin.
Adium X has all the visual and functional appeal of miranda to me only with a lot less required effort. It actually makes being stuck on a slowboat G5 powermac at work bearable. Now I would just like to see a cross-platform version of it...please?
Yeah, right. By the time you crack my 63-random character key, the Sun will have long gone dark. All the computers in the world won't be able to help.
Agreed. I've looked at the mac towers since the early powerpc days whenever I was in the market for a new computer, but I just always ended up gobsmacked at the price premium (always seeming to be in the range of 25%+) that you face for equivalent performance. And it's gotten worse for macs, not better.
When the Yang-tze flooded in China, and when a dam broke-up years ago, the death toll was in excess of 100K. Did you even hear of that?
Uh, no, and that's probably because China was the most closed nation in existence at the time, still a personality cult of chairman Mao. There could have been a nuclear holocaust in the nation and they probably could have hidden it fairly well from the west. The news about the dam breakup (which eventually claimed over 200k lives thanks to ensuing disease and starvation) wasn't really found out by the west until years after the fact. To this day most Western peoples still have never heard of it, despite it being one of the worst human disasters ever.
I think the acceptance of death is more a function of the government's acceptance than the "people's" acceptance, especially in China.
US currency is the most counterfeited for the simple fact it's the MOST POPULAR across the world. It's notable that saddam made off with 900 million USD and 100 million Euro, not the other way around. If the Euro would ever become the most dominant currency, you'd have counterfeited Euros around the world in great numbers no matter what holograms, pretty colors, or radio transmitters you embedded in the 'legitimate bills.' The pros operating out of whatever country will always find a way to counterfeit the currency in question at least so enough people will be fooled for them to get away with it. Having worked in fast food in the US most domestic one-off counterfeits tend to be fairly pathetic. Think president's picture not matching the dollar amount. What's the use of the hologram if no one's going to look for it.
You're pretty new here, relatively speaking, but that's not really important.
Why, back when I was young first posts meant somethin'...oh well...anyway...
Sometimes the best solution may be to use a proprietary product for awhile, while you work on a longer term free software solution.
But let's say you pay some geek $1000 to hack GnuCash to do exactly what you need. You've basically branched out a tree for yourself. Now a new GnuCash release comes out that fixes, say, a few critical bugs and has a few spiffy new features you'd love to have, but now you have to merge this new version into your version. There goes $500 to Mr. Consultant Geek again, and so on and so forth. The flexibility of being able to put in new features is quite nice, but it has a pricetag, and you may create a situation where you have to maintain software in-house or have to pay a consultant $$$ for maintenance. Free, perhaps, but still plenty expensive.
The transatlantic flight I went on (US to france via Delta/airfrance) was served TWO meals -- a (good!) dinner and a continental breakfast. I also was on a france to spain (iberia) flight that was served a really nice lunch. Inter-country air travel seems to be more predisposed towards getting meals on board even though my france to spain flight was only about 3 hours.
But yes, domestic US flights basically are foodless nowadays for all but the longest ones and possibly some shorter first-class.
Just remember, it could all be far, far, far worse. Always remember that. It gives you some scope and perception of the current woes. Oh, and economic indicators tend to flash red sometimes. It's called 'contraction' as opposed to 'expansion'. Both happen all the time whether it's Dubya or The Illuminati in charge. I'd be far more alarmed and suspicious with economic indicators that always were green.
And California, well, they've basically screwed themselves over many times. From 'Oh my?! We have an energy problem?! That's un-possible!' to this. And this ain't New York's first impending bankruptcy. Just don't be so quick to scream TEOTWAWKI.
In appropriate MST3K voice....
Gary North?!
Seriously, you think the president somehow controls the economy? Alan Greenspan really could never manage it well (he really did try to prevent the dot-com/tech bubble from ever forming but some people just refuse to listen) and he had direct control of a number of key economic controls. And I think you're confusing most of the yelling with all those dire Y2K warnings. And those weren't off at all, were they?
not the lowest now ;)
There's at least one guy in 3xx I remember seeing somewhat regularly.
Although I unfortunately have no pictures of it, I used to volunteer at a place called OTAP (Ohio Technology Access Project) in Dayton, Ohio where we would (and still do) take pretty much anything we're given and refurbish for usage by poor/disadvantaged.
Our basement and first floor of our building was and probably still is about a million times more crowded. We have WALLS of hard drives, WALLS of power supplies, stack after stack after stack of old motherboards and cases. Don't even get me started on keyboard and mice!
That's not to say there wasn't at least some organization -- there was, but it was always a little humbling to go down into a basement where the weight present in IDE cables alone exceeded your own weight.
...Unless, of course, you're using IDE drives, in which case you're screwed.
Not exactly. Every computer I've had since about 1997 with more than one IDE drive in it staggered the spinup of the drives. I assume this is a motherboard/IDE controller function (but not really sure, to be honest) as I've used many combinations of brands and sizes and they always spin up master first in my experience.
Last time I had a computer spin up more than one drive at once was with my IBM PS/1 circa 1994.
You've taken five years away from my life and I want them back now!
*Hans Moleman voice* oh...I'd only waste them.
Would this be the same 21-inch monitor you didn't regret buying when you wrote that April (?) 1997 Linux Jorunal article about building a linux-friendly PC?
;D
Yeah, my eyesight is shot, but my memory is still great!
A-men to that. Who cares if AMD has the fastest or best designed processors if the chipsets driving them are unmitigated GARBAGE? I own an Athlon 950 with a motherboard with the VIA KT133 chipset -- crap crap CRAP. The PCI bus is a terrible mess on that chipset and it strangles any sound card (especially creative) to DEATH. THANKFULLY I didn't have the KT133A or I would have had the joys of data corruption too. While it's no longer "VIA or NOTHING" as it once was for the Athlon I'll take the stability of an Intel processor + intel or sis chipset anyday. I'm writing this on a P4 1.8A with a SiS650-based board. Everything actually WORKS on it which is much more than I can say for my athlon.