I am sorry I can't be really helpful by recommending something. However, we recently bought a Mitel 3100 IP phone system and I can tell you it's a lemon. Non-intuitive and inflexible voicemail, random misbehaving, Web administration frontend that *require* IE, etc. Avoid it at all cost.
"Well, one big problem is feature creep. Companies feel pressured to add features, because they want to put a check mark in every check box in the product review magazines"
That seems to be true anywhere these days. Feature creep is at least as bad when it comes to software.
How often do you hear "I don't use software X because it lack feature Y". I am not saying it is a good or bad thing but you can't blame developper for giving user what they ask for.
In The Gimp, create a new image with Fill Type set to transparant. Right-click the image, "Image", "Mode", "Indexed". Save as PNG. Bingo, PNG with transparency that work in IE.
More precisely, IE does not support the alpha channel of PNG.
Yep, I second that. Don Becker is one of the most accessible kernel hacker I know of. A colleague here exchanged a few email with him concerning a misbehaving NIC (D-Link DFE-530TX rev A3-1) and he was really helpful. Considering this man earn a living consulting, I think the free help with troubleshooting from his part was very generous. He really have the quality of his driver at heart.
Wrong answer. IE support transparency in PNG when in indexed mode. I have explained how to produce such PNG in The Gimp in an earlier post in this thread. Look it up.
GIF is well-suited for the rendering of static elements with a relatively small palette, like webpage design elements.
So can PNG; it also have an indexed mode that make it very, very similar to GIF. IIRC, you can even have a 1-bit palette for B&W, which can make for very small image indeed. Full transparency (nothing to do with alpha) in indexed work in IE too. The only feature from GIF missing in PNG is animation (that would be MNG). The only thing holding PNG back is inertia from web designer.
No. It understand full-transparency in indexed mode (this is not using the alpha channel). This functionnally the equivalent of GIF. IE throw away the alpha channel entirely, but one of the color in indexed mode can be defined as transparent.
In The Gimp, right-click, "Image", "Mode", "Indexed..." get you the menu to make your image indexed.
But it is true that IE hold us back. Full alpha channel support would do a lot for Web site aesthetic.
I'd like to know whether full de-regulation of the telecommunication industry in the United States has benefited customer service and also what effect it has had on providing innovative services.
Canada telco have been partly deregulate. I say partly because there is still ton of regulation. The only place where I could see that this profited customer is long-distance charges but even that is going up again. IMHO, my telco (Bell Canada) have the worst customer service of all the utility I have to deal with. Strangely, the utility that have the best customer service (again, IMHO, YMMV, etc) is my electricity provider which is owned 100% by the governement.
I have an old SparcStation 10 and HP 712/80 workstation at home. Both have _very_ old monitor that only do 256 colors (at least, I can't find a mode that work with more than 256 colors). Gnome and KDE are unuseable on these machine due to performance. Blackbox would be fine, but it look quite bad in 256 colors.
What would be a good-looking lightweight WM to run in 256 colors ?
This could make an excellent soap opera. All we need now is a love triangle in this SCO/Novell/Linux/UNIX/IBM mess!
You forgot to include Microsoft, the manipulative mother-in-law who could never accept that his retarded son SCO was frolicking with the sexy but defiant Linux.
... and something similar (not trivial) which eludes my mind just now...
SCO was was supposed to released SAR under the Mozilla license, but I can't find what happen about that project. Google only turn up outdated press release from 1999, no project website or anything. Apparently, a company called Starnix was supposed to take care of that.
You are over-generalizing your experience. My electrical utility here is a governement-owned monopoly. It is the least troublesome utility I have to deal with (privately owned cable and telco are real PITA). Not only that, but it also sell the cheapest electricity in North America and make a profit too.
See, governement-owned != bad on the premise of some bad experience you had.
I know you are just trolling, but this is over-generalization.. It really depend on how big the remaining 5% is vs how much it would cost to support them. It may be profitable.
Can this DB be corrupted by injecting bogus data ?
on
The Searchable Life
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I have always been annoyed by data harvesting, either from the private sector (credit report, etc) or by the governement (this Life thingy, Echelon, etc). It is pretty much granted that this trend will not revert since the public is apathic and legislators (governements) have a vested interest in these mega DB. Unless you live like an hermit thousands of miles from civilization, it is almost guaranteed that your personnal data will be collected somehow. The only way I can think to fight back (beside complaining to legislator, which have a razor thin chance of changing something) is to somehow find a way to inject bogus data in these collection systems, thus making the whole DB less accurate and reliable. So far, I have not come up with an efficient and legal way to do that. Certainly, there is somebody smarter than I that have tought about it. So, what is your way of fighting back ?
(Raise your hand if you still have RLL or MFM drives... yeah, I thought so.)
Yeah baby... a 40 MB Micropolis full-height (around 4" high) drive complete with a 8 bit ISA MFM controller. When this behemoth is powered down, you can hear the platter selenoid brake squeak.
What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that "freedom" in itself is a justification for this information pollution.
So, if you ever believed that the Internet would make us all free from tyranny, it is dead indeed.
BTW, I would tend to consider The Register part of the "information pollution" problem.
Slashdot Mirror
People bitch about Perl because they can't handle it. Let them rot in their BSDM language.
I am sorry I can't be really helpful by recommending something. However, we recently bought a Mitel 3100 IP phone system and I can tell you it's a lemon. Non-intuitive and inflexible voicemail, random misbehaving, Web administration frontend that *require* IE, etc. Avoid it at all cost.
... a Beowulf cluster of Intellivision running IntyOS ! w00t !
At 395$ for the dual NIC version, I think they are a little pricey. The rated power consumption of 5W is rather impressive, though ...
"Well, one big problem is feature creep. Companies feel pressured to add features, because they want to put a check mark in every check box in the product review magazines" That seems to be true anywhere these days. Feature creep is at least as bad when it comes to software.
How often do you hear "I don't use software X because it lack feature Y". I am not saying it is a good or bad thing but you can't blame developper for giving user what they ask for.
If only IE would support transparent PNG images.
It does, in indexed mode (aka PNG8).
In The Gimp, create a new image with Fill Type set to transparant. Right-click the image, "Image", "Mode", "Indexed". Save as PNG. Bingo, PNG with transparency that work in IE.
More precisely, IE does not support the alpha channel of PNG.
Yep, I second that. Don Becker is one of the most accessible kernel hacker I know of. A colleague here exchanged a few email with him concerning a misbehaving NIC (D-Link DFE-530TX rev A3-1) and he was really helpful. Considering this man earn a living consulting, I think the free help with troubleshooting from his part was very generous. He really have the quality of his driver at heart.
Security is paramount, since there will be a lot of code that, for various contractual reasons, we don't want to share with anyone.
Sorry for nitpicking, but if can't share some part of your code with anyone, how would "reusing" it be any more acceptable ?
Wrong answer. IE support transparency in PNG when in indexed mode. I have explained how to produce such PNG in The Gimp in an earlier post in this thread. Look it up.
I would love to use PNG for everything, except that they look like hell in IE.
Bullshit. Show me a PNG that "look like hell" in IE. Ho! You mean PNG with alpha channel ? Make them indexed and they will look just fine.
PNG have good enough support in IE to be a drop in replacement for GIF, except for animation.
GIF is well-suited for the rendering of static elements with a relatively small palette, like webpage design elements.
So can PNG; it also have an indexed mode that make it very, very similar to GIF. IIRC, you can even have a 1-bit palette for B&W, which can make for very small image indeed. Full transparency (nothing to do with alpha) in indexed work in IE too. The only feature from GIF missing in PNG is animation (that would be MNG). The only thing holding PNG back is inertia from web designer.
IE doesn't do transparency AT ALL for PNG images.
No. It understand full-transparency in indexed mode (this is not using the alpha channel). This functionnally the equivalent of GIF. IE throw away the alpha channel entirely, but one of the color in indexed mode can be defined as transparent.
In The Gimp, right-click, "Image", "Mode", "Indexed ..." get you the menu to make your image indexed.
But it is true that IE hold us back. Full alpha channel support would do a lot for Web site aesthetic.
If nothing else, this book has some great coffee alternatives listed at the end.
Would you mind listing some of them ?
I'd be curious to see just exactly what it is an atheist could possibly believe they are "good enough" at so that they don't need God.
I think you don't quite get atheist. It's not that we are so good that we don't need God, it is that God does not exist wheter we need him or not.
Nice troll, BTW. So good actually that I have biten.
I'd like to know whether full de-regulation of the telecommunication industry in the United States has benefited customer service and also what effect it has had on providing innovative services.
Canada telco have been partly deregulate. I say partly because there is still ton of regulation. The only place where I could see that this profited customer is long-distance charges but even that is going up again. IMHO, my telco (Bell Canada) have the worst customer service of all the utility I have to deal with. Strangely, the utility that have the best customer service (again, IMHO, YMMV, etc) is my electricity provider which is owned 100% by the governement.
I have an old SparcStation 10 and HP 712/80 workstation at home. Both have _very_ old monitor that only do 256 colors (at least, I can't find a mode that work with more than 256 colors). Gnome and KDE are unuseable on these machine due to performance. Blackbox would be fine, but it look quite bad in 256 colors.
What would be a good-looking lightweight WM to run in 256 colors ?
... you insensitive clod !
Hopefully, a karma whore will have posted the full-text of the article.
This could make an excellent soap opera. All we need now is a love triangle in this SCO/Novell/Linux/UNIX/IBM mess!
You forgot to include Microsoft, the manipulative mother-in-law who could never accept that his retarded son SCO was frolicking with the sexy but defiant Linux.
SCO was was supposed to released SAR under the Mozilla license, but I can't find what happen about that project. Google only turn up outdated press release from 1999, no project website or anything. Apparently, a company called Starnix was supposed to take care of that.
You are over-generalizing your experience. My electrical utility here is a governement-owned monopoly. It is the least troublesome utility I have to deal with (privately owned cable and telco are real PITA). Not only that, but it also sell the cheapest electricity in North America and make a profit too.
See, governement-owned != bad on the premise of some bad experience you had.
I know you are just trolling, but this is over-generalization.. It really depend on how big the remaining 5% is vs how much it would cost to support them. It may be profitable.
I have always been annoyed by data harvesting, either from the private sector (credit report, etc) or by the governement (this Life thingy, Echelon, etc). It is pretty much granted that this trend will not revert since the public is apathic and legislators (governements) have a vested interest in these mega DB. Unless you live like an hermit thousands of miles from civilization, it is almost guaranteed that your personnal data will be collected somehow. The only way I can think to fight back (beside complaining to legislator, which have a razor thin chance of changing something) is to somehow find a way to inject bogus data in these collection systems, thus making the whole DB less accurate and reliable. So far, I have not come up with an efficient and legal way to do that. Certainly, there is somebody smarter than I that have tought about it. So, what is your way of fighting back ?
(Raise your hand if you still have RLL or MFM drives... yeah, I thought so.)
Yeah baby ... a 40 MB Micropolis full-height (around 4" high) drive complete with a 8 bit ISA MFM controller. When this behemoth is powered down, you can hear the platter selenoid brake squeak.
Damn I wish I could edit my comment. Sorry for the funky formating.
From The Register article :
What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that "freedom" in itself is a justification for this information pollution.
So, if you ever believed that the Internet would make us all free from tyranny, it is dead indeed.
BTW, I would tend to consider The Register part of the "information pollution" problem.