I think it is a holdover from the old "desktop" days where it made sense to have the cable connectors at the back
even so, I noticed the latest set of "internet ready" keyboards we got from HP had a set of extra wires to go in the soundcard (mic and spk) which led to sockets on the keyboard case. you could do something similar with joystick and serial/parallel ports (most of which have off-the-shelf extensions or switches)
In addition, my tower-case's motherboard ports are mostly on extension wires from the motherboard to a standard-slot carrier. assuming the wires would reach, you could mount them on a drive-bay blanking plate reasonably easily.... --
I agree - I was intending to play along with the "$1/chapter" idea until I did the math, and worked out that the resulting ebook provided he completed it and didn't bug out when revenue dropped would cost more than a paperback of the same length, and would still require me to print it out if I wanted to read it away from my screen. --
He said he was getting Cease and Desist EMAILS, which is not the same as getting certified letters.
It's getting increasingly borderline - more countries seem to accept Digital signatures these days, and Receipt of Message notification packets are pretty much built into a lot of email systems. Provided the (Digital) signature is valid under both their and your law, and they can prove you received the message, they may well have a good case. --
I have a feeling that many people are like me, in that they don't always want to be found.. I don't want my work calling me at 10pm, after i've worked 10 hours, and am out on a relaxing walk with my girlfriend..
Yep, my opinion exactly (apart from walking with your girlfriend:+)
Companies seem to be having more and more trouble with the concept of a employee being a human being, not a "component". Witness the increasing encroachment on communications during working hours (it used to be accepted that employees couldn't stop being family members during working hours; they would have to contact doctors, schools, be findable in case of emergency and so forth, in cases where the privacy of the employee would be important to them; increasingly, regardless of how awkward it is, or how much of the normal business day they work, employees are expected to *accept* that any email or phone conversation will be monitored and they will be penalized if they are not using "company resources" for business purposes only.
At one of my previous jobs (which was one of the reasons I left) I resisted giving them my landline number for some time; I was eventually dragged into an upper manager's office and was told I *had a duty of care* to the company that included being reachable out of office hours if needed; needless to say, there was no extra pay or benefits for this "duty" and it didn't show on my contract. You may also safely assume that the few calls I received due to this weren't exactly life threatening - upper management types who couldn't access their email (forgot their passwords *again*) or needed to "do a power breakfast" and therefore needed information sorting out overnight so they could pick it up at the office and go straight to the meeting. I don't work there anymore.
I am a computer geek, check my email every 3 minutes, cary a palm, etc. but I like to "disappear" sometimes.
I am as much of a geek as I can be given I am married - and therefore have demands on my time.
Last week, my friend got a call at 2am in the middle of the forest while camping, one of his companies servers needed rebooted and the tech didn't know the command!! I don't want that.. I wouldn't be *too* surprised to find companies starting to dictate which holidays their employees can or can't take - based on reachability and ability to make it either back to home base or to someplace they can remotely administrate. Decent skilled techs are getting a scarce resource, and the cheaper but semi-skilled paper MSCEs which are so attractive to HR and Upper management fall apart when left to their own devices.
Am i the only one who is offended by the idea of new mobile phones with GPS and blue-tooth in them being able to send you digital cupons as you walk by the store? More because they should not *know* you are walking by their store, and by knowing that they are likely to want a tighter "target" than that - only people who are walking towards their store, and have been in (list of competitors) store in the previous day so are likely to be shopping for similar goods. --
I wouldn't mind so much, if it wasn't for the horribly restrictive version of windows you get. Assuming you order with Win98 (as you won't get it any cheaper without) and strip Win98 with a linux start floppy before you ever see the clicklicence screen. you are now the proud owner of
A full MS licence almost worth the paper it isn't printed on (not only does it restrict their liability to the cost of the software, which the vendor will later claim was "free", but recent Win98 packs I have seen don't even *have* the licence terms on them; it is the click licence or nothing)
a "restricted" version of the licence that binds that copy of Win98 to that one OEM installed machine; you can't use the licence to upgrade an existing machine someplace else on your network
no functional install media - just a "disk image" which will totally destroy your installed software and settings, restoring the machine to a factory-fresh configuration.
So welcome to the brave old world of M$oft marketing - you not only pay for software you don't want or need, but you pay for software you can't legally use, and probably have to hang onto anyhow for warranty reasons....
OTOH, I bought my machine with MS DOS 6.22, which was no cheaper, but came with real install disks and can be used to bootstrap Linux quite well. --
Well, just another reason why UK should switch to the Euro currency like the rest of Europe. It's funny how your fellow countrymen can be so chauvinist that they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot rather than cooperate with their neighbours...
<tone=mildly sarcastic>This would be the one where they had to recently change the entry requirements because so many of the member states hadn't met them?
As far as I know, the long term plan is to join the Ecu system, once it is stable and our exchange rate is good. At the time the decision had to be made however, it appeared that
The UK would struggle to meet the entry requirements (the idea of just having them changed must not have occurred to our politicians)
The UK would enter the fixed relative value with the pound badly positioned against other european currencies; this isn't a terrible thing in the short term, but not something you want to set in stone
The "common man" as guided and instructed by such educational media as "The Sun" were against it to the extent it would cause political trouble - and it was timed to come up close enough to an election that following the view of the hurd may well get the current set of lizards elected for another term)
In any case, it wouldn't help the situation much - the uk banks would merely increase the list of currencies to two - and US banks and firms would still expect the rest of the world to accept their currency. --
Have you thought about getting a US dollar account? I think it's possible here in the UK might be worth talking to your bank?
Yep, it's possible - but unfortunately they would then be *business* accounts, with a minimum balance, monthly and per-transaction charges and all the overheads that go with that (it also couldn't be in my name, unless I claimed to be a sole trader using my own name as a business name)
From one point of view I can see their point - in this case, it was very much a business transaction (I sold knowledge on the net and got back money) but the monthly charges alone would come to more than the 30ukp/quarter I had been paid. They are more geared to international-sales companies than private individuals. --
FWIW I have transfered much larger sums between banks in the UK and other european countries, and payed payed about 1gbp for it. It was an *electronic transfer*
Yep, that would do - or a reverse-transaction onto my credit card. the problem was mostly the site's doing - they hadn't considered having to deal with non-us users, so obviously for them posting out cheques is easier or cheaper, or both. --
You have to consider that you had a *cheque*. That piece of paper had to be *securely* shipped to the US bank, presumably at the expense of the UK bank.
It also isn't done much, so there is no economy of scale.
I would dispute that - given the amount of trade between the US and europe, there must be a fair amount of inter-bank communication (I imagine mostly legal documents much more valuable than my pocket-change cheque). If that wasn't enough, my bank freely admitted that, if the cheque had been written out in UK pounds rather than US dollars, they would have just pushed it into the clearing system as with any other cheque, and it probably would have taken a bit longer to clear, but would not have attracted any special charges (in theory, uk banks charge each other and foreign banks for the service, and are charged in turn by those banks for outbound transactions; in practice, the clearing system assumes that each bank will absorb any fees knowing that, if in the long term things didn't balance out, the bank has bigger problems than a few clearing charges)
I believe the US does not have such a central system, so presumably any deals would have to be made between the english Central Cheque Clearing System and the US bank concerned. --
Expanding to international markets could be difficult since they've chosen to use the American dollar as their "base" currency.
This means that international users would have to constantly be converting based on floating exchange rates.
Yep. There is no way I could possibly handle a micropayment account in the uk - as I found out recently having played with one of those online question/answer sites. I got an accumulated quarter's payment (all 30ukp of it) then found english banks charge a *flat fee* of 8ukp (say 12usd at the time) for handling a US-banked cheque, and *then* give a worse conversion rate than the ones available on the web (they are converted at the holiday-currency exchange rate, which obviously has a built-in profit). of the 30ukp, I saw just over 20ukp - meaning the bank had taken a bigger chunk of the payment than the website had for hosting it (and I didn't *mind* that, given they had to support their own investment of software, net connection and server space).
I don't know about other countries, but in the uk they seem to believe every other currency should be preconverted and drawn on an english bank before they can accept it, which I suppose is another nail in the coffin of this government's much-advertised "make Britain a home for e-commerce" policy they have already shattered with the RIP bill.
Ah, but if you have an account with a US bank you can. I've done business with canadians via PayPal.
The setup screen expects you/requires you to enter an address in the united states - I don't know how entering a false address would effect the legality of an account with them, however. --
The company should not be forced to be your phone company or your internet provider. If you could only speak through the workplace, it would be different.
Hmm. I can see this with the internet (while things like online banking make this a borderline decision, as most online banking sites are more convenient than phone banking) I can't agree with the phone - most companies accept that *other* companies don't deal outside of business hours, so employees are likely to need to make the occasional personal call to a bank, utility or doctor that would otherwise need them to travel to the place of business or find a payphone. Some provide a small room with a desk and payphone for "private" calls, but the majority just roll in the small cost of these calls as overheads and ignore them (provided they aren't abused of course).
In fact, a current English law is still pending because in effect, you would require the formal permission of *both* participants in a call not to be committing a crime that carries a jail sentence; they are working on alternative wordings that allow sensible monitoring without allowing anyone but the government a snooper's licence (now that they have one, they are jealous of anyone else getting one).... --
I can think of some many reasons this would be great for mankind and society... unfortunatly, I sincerly doubt the corporations that own these books would be willing to allow such a collection without you paying for each and every book... Such a sad state of affairs.
Even if it was merely restricted to the books no longer in copyright (and/or out of print) it would be a godsend - There are literally thousands of books that would be bought gladly by someone, if he could just find a bookshop with a second-hand copy, because they are out of print - and then there are all the schoolkids reading classics for their lessons; can you imagine what a relief it would be for parents to buy such a gadget ONCE, and have all the set books for their child's entire schooling?
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I was actually quite dissapointed when I read the specs for this. It has an as powerful (or more powerful) a processor than the SNES, better graphics, and certainly there has been an adaptor for SNES systems to play gameboy carts for many years - so why doesn't this thing take SNES cartridges, and come with a SNES > Gameboy colour adaptor?
I would certainly have sprung for the cash to play all my old favourate SNES carts on a handheld; that it could load and play my gameboy carts would have been a bonus, but I *have* a gameboy, and only recently bought a gameboy colour - why should I now buy yet another "improved gameboy" when there will almost certainly be "extended super improved gameboy" or "N64 Gameboy advance adaptor" a year from now which will take my current gameboy cartridges and the new "Game Boy Advance" cartridges (which I *can't* load on anything else at the moment) as well....... It's an incremental improvement that offers little to tempt me - yes, it's better, but not leading edge, even if it is impressive for a handheld. It *could be* and *should be* better, and I am dissapointed in it. --
ROFL!
We should start making a list of fake user agents, and visit some of the more obvious doubleclick sites with them. I wonder how much effort it would be to make the user-agent a configurable parameter in Mozilla?
for that matter, I wonder if I could feed doubleclick some or all of the following:
Hmm. I assume the problem here is that you are tied to the Novell DOS stacks.
I have a couple of similar apps (they require the DOS level IPX stack to operate, and a VLM login) and it took a fair while to find out that, yes, you CAN run the old 16-bit stack under Win95. it isn't easy (and you have to login from the autoexec.bat before bringing up windows) but there is a "shim" NIC driver that will allow you to run standard DOS Novell drivers under a Win95 machine, and still have a Microsoft standard TCP/IP stack for the other stuff.
If you want a *really* strange solution, you can also run a machine with *two* network cards, one for windows95 and one for the DOS drivers. Provided you don't use the Windows95 PNP management stuff, you will be surprised how well it works....... --
Michael Linuxes for business not pleasure
I'm sorry, but I can't see why this is a problem - Dell owns a *very* large computer company; that he retained control when his company GOT to be large is commendable, that he still has a little "play area" right next to his office is almost unheard of.
However, the end result is DELL computers will ship with Redhat and full support. This *is* a business decision, not a geekish one, so how else can you expect him to treat it?
I bet he didn't even partition the hard drive himself. Granted Dell is a hardware supplier, I don't need its CEO to be a Linux efficianado, but some expressions of capability at the top sure would convincing. Well, he claims to have installed Redhat himself (I suppose he could have just overwritten the existing partitions set up by a more competent geek, but odds are good he started with a "clean" unpartitioned disk and let the Redhat bootable CD do the partitioning) and redhat usually makes some reasonable default decisions. However, again, I don't see how this is relevant - He got a Redhat up and running himself, played with it for a bit, and was willing to give an interview praising Linux and advertising that his company feels it is ready to be shipped pre-installed.
Our community needs companies that develop business units whose sole function is to support us (Linux), not just have us tacked on to rest of the OS support department.
Why? few if any companies have a separate support department for NT/Win9x/OS2/Novell so why should they have a separate one for Linux? one of the *big* points that is always made about Linux is that it doesn't need as much support, and that *that* support is often better found from the community anyhow. However, even if that *was* true, you have obviously failed to read that part of the article carefully, as you missed:
We've put support in place; we're building
a dedicated Linux support queue for
customers who call us, just as they
would if they had Novell or they had Windows.
which is pretty much waving the "get your dedicated linux-os support like this" flag at you...
Linux hasn't been easy until now, and we sure aren't doing this on a lark. How about showing some interest before you ask for our money? Sorry Michael, I'm not convinced.
I am sure MIchael will have troubled sleep knowing you don't want his products. --
He has no trouble admitting the shortcomings of Linux, nor any trouble touching on its strengths.
Indeed, although he admits to spending some time "in denial" after Mindcraft <grin>
It is certainly refreshing, and an indicator for an attitude the linux community as a whole seems to have drifted slightly away from - if linux doesn't do a task as good as $FOO, then either fix linux, or accept that $FOO is specialised to do that task and Linux is a general purpose OS. Yes, the fact that Linux wasn't really multi-processor ready for IP-heavy tasks, as the TCP/IP stack could use but a single processor. No, the correct solution isn't to flame the testers, or to stick your fingers in your ears and hope it will go away - Linux can and *will* have those abilities given enough work, so you should either do the work or support those who can. --
Am I the only one who considers Linus one of the most accessible leaders in the tech industry? The man is like the Finish brother in law I never had.
You have to get the WSJ's point of view here - Linus has never gone out of his way to speak to reporters, and probably never will; he is not a "good source" for the reporters as he doesn't need their approval, so won't pander to their needs for snappy soundbytes and copy they can edit however their editor wants the story slanted this week. --
"Mr. Torvalds said tests show the new Linux
compares "really well" with its rivals, including Windows and other versions of Unix. "It is painful for me to go back and use the 2.2 kernel," he said, referring to the current version.
"Mr. Torvalds [co-ordinates linux development], and won't take a stand on such issues as what sort of user interface the software should have.
That is one reason there are now two rival Linux interfaces."
They REALLY don't get it, do they?
I assume the editor had picked up from a piece on Sun's adoption of Gnome (and not KDE) that there were only two possible ways to use Linux. I am forced to assume the concept of a windows manager being interchangable is beyond him. As for the first quote, well, I suspect he is convince that there will be a shiny new "Linux Millenium" on the shelves for xmas, which would fit into his nice tidy microsoft-style image of "the linux product". The idea that the new kernel is already in use across the planet would astonish him..... --
This leads me to believe the working (sale curve increasing) website is one that has a different look and feel to it, thus requiring high degrees of individuality in design.
I would disagree with that strongly. Experience with ANY UI is that users tend to prefer packages that look-and-feel the same as things they already know and use, but with different content - The more consistant your user interface is across different packages in a suite, the more usable it is considered to be (and the more each package adds to the value of the OTHER packages in the suite). There is no reason this isn't valid for websites, and many people already say it is.
If a user is familiar with site a, and does click-pulldown-select-order to get (say) a book, then goes to YOUR site and does click-pulldown-select-order to get (say) a CD, then he will be pleased with himself for how quickly he did that, and state he feels "comfortable" with the site, when in fact he is merely conditioned to the style of the site from elsewhere. If you need proof, think of the time it took to figure out exactly what goes where here on slashdot - then go to any of the Slashcode sites and note how familiar it feels - even though the content and style is different, the interface is reassuringly the same. --
and I dispute the notion that it's more appropriate than a HTML editor for memoranda and specifications.
I would go with RTF, rather than HTML, but [HT|X]ML is definitely the way Word itself is going (with a few proprietory extensions so MS can embrace and extend of course). The real bugbear though is MS's "Html mail" which is the worst idea I have ever seen - how to modify email to encapsulate the worst excesses of web browser bugs, make your machine hang for minutes if you read email offline, and generally make the most open, standards based communications system on the internet dependent on using an MS client. --
Slashdot Mirror
even so, I noticed the latest set of "internet ready" keyboards we got from HP had a set of extra wires to go in the soundcard (mic and spk) which led to sockets on the keyboard case. you could do something similar with joystick and serial/parallel ports (most of which have off-the-shelf extensions or switches)
In addition, my tower-case's motherboard ports are mostly on extension wires from the motherboard to a standard-slot carrier. assuming the wires would reach, you could mount them on a drive-bay blanking plate reasonably easily....
--
They interoperate seamlessly with the exception that I couldn't import my ultra-huge GPG secret key into PGP.
Did you try one of the CKT variants?
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I agree - I was intending to play along with the "$1/chapter" idea until I did the math, and worked out that the resulting ebook provided he completed it and didn't bug out when revenue dropped would cost more than a paperback of the same length, and would still require me to print it out if I wanted to read it away from my screen.
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ah, found their website here. I will ask them directly - but thanks for the tip, the US dollar account looks to be spot on...
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Sounds cool - do they have any branches outside of london? I could do with someplace within travel of Manchester.
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He said he was getting Cease and Desist EMAILS, which is not the same as getting certified letters.
It's getting increasingly borderline - more countries seem to accept Digital signatures these days, and Receipt of Message notification packets are pretty much built into a lot of email systems. Provided the (Digital) signature is valid under both their and your law, and they can prove you received the message, they may well have a good case.
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Yep, my opinion exactly (apart from walking with your girlfriend
Companies seem to be having more and more trouble with the concept of a employee being a human being, not a "component". Witness the increasing encroachment on communications during working hours (it used to be accepted that employees couldn't stop being family members during working hours; they would have to contact doctors, schools, be findable in case of emergency and so forth, in cases where the privacy of the employee would be important to them; increasingly, regardless of how awkward it is, or how much of the normal business day they work, employees are expected to *accept* that any email or phone conversation will be monitored and they will be penalized if they are not using "company resources" for business purposes only.
At one of my previous jobs (which was one of the reasons I left) I resisted giving them my landline number for some time; I was eventually dragged into an upper manager's office and was told I *had a duty of care* to the company that included being reachable out of office hours if needed; needless to say, there was no extra pay or benefits for this "duty" and it didn't show on my contract. You may also safely assume that the few calls I received due to this weren't exactly life threatening - upper management types who couldn't access their email (forgot their passwords *again*) or needed to "do a power breakfast" and therefore needed information sorting out overnight so they could pick it up at the office and go straight to the meeting. I don't work there anymore.
I am a computer geek, check my email every 3 minutes, cary a palm, etc. but I like to "disappear" sometimes.
I am as much of a geek as I can be given I am married - and therefore have demands on my time.
Last week, my friend got a call at 2am in the middle of the forest while camping, one of his companies servers needed rebooted and the tech didn't know the command!! I don't want that..
I wouldn't be *too* surprised to find companies starting to dictate which holidays their employees can or can't take - based on reachability and ability to make it either back to home base or to someplace they can remotely administrate. Decent skilled techs are getting a scarce resource, and the cheaper but semi-skilled paper MSCEs which are so attractive to HR and Upper management fall apart when left to their own devices.
Am i the only one who is offended by the idea of new mobile phones with GPS and blue-tooth in them being able to send you digital cupons as you walk by the store?
More because they should not *know* you are walking by their store, and by knowing that they are likely to want a tighter "target" than that - only people who are walking towards their store, and have been in (list of competitors) store in the previous day so are likely to be shopping for similar goods.
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- A full MS licence almost worth the paper it isn't printed on (not only does it restrict their liability to the cost of the software, which the vendor will later claim was "free", but recent Win98 packs I have seen don't even *have* the licence terms on them; it is the click licence or nothing)
- a "restricted" version of the licence that binds that copy of Win98 to that one OEM installed machine; you can't use the licence to upgrade an existing machine someplace else on your network
- no functional install media - just a "disk image" which will totally destroy your installed software and settings, restoring the machine to a factory-fresh configuration.
So welcome to the brave old world of M$oft marketing - you not only pay for software you don't want or need, but you pay for software you can't legally use, and probably have to hang onto anyhow for warranty reasons....OTOH, I bought my machine with MS DOS 6.22, which was no cheaper, but came with real install disks and can be used to bootstrap Linux quite well.
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<tone=mildly sarcastic>This would be the one where they had to recently change the entry requirements because so many of the member states hadn't met them?
As far as I know, the long term plan is to join the Ecu system, once it is stable and our exchange rate is good. At the time the decision had to be made however, it appeared that
- The UK would struggle to meet the entry requirements (the idea of just having them changed must not have occurred to our politicians)
- The UK would enter the fixed relative value with the pound badly positioned against other european currencies; this isn't a terrible thing in the short term, but not something you want to set in stone
- The "common man" as guided and instructed by such educational media as "The Sun" were against it to the extent it would cause political trouble - and it was timed to come up close enough to an election that following the view of the hurd may well get the current set of lizards elected for another term)
In any case, it wouldn't help the situation much - the uk banks would merely increase the list of currencies to two - and US banks and firms would still expect the rest of the world to accept their currency.--
Have you thought about getting a US dollar account? I think it's possible here in the UK might be worth talking to your bank?
Yep, it's possible - but unfortunately they would then be *business* accounts, with a minimum balance, monthly and per-transaction charges and all the overheads that go with that (it also couldn't be in my name, unless I claimed to be a sole trader using my own name as a business name)
From one point of view I can see their point - in this case, it was very much a business transaction (I sold knowledge on the net and got back money) but the monthly charges alone would come to more than the 30ukp/quarter I had been paid. They are more geared to international-sales companies than private individuals.
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FWIW I have transfered much larger sums between banks in the UK and other european countries, and payed payed about 1gbp for it. It was an *electronic transfer*
Yep, that would do - or a reverse-transaction onto my credit card. the problem was mostly the site's doing - they hadn't considered having to deal with non-us users, so obviously for them posting out cheques is easier or cheaper, or both.
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It also isn't done much, so there is no economy of scale.
I would dispute that - given the amount of trade between the US and europe, there must be a fair amount of inter-bank communication (I imagine mostly legal documents much more valuable than my pocket-change cheque). If that wasn't enough, my bank freely admitted that, if the cheque had been written out in UK pounds rather than US dollars, they would have just pushed it into the clearing system as with any other cheque, and it probably would have taken a bit longer to clear, but would not have attracted any special charges (in theory, uk banks charge each other and foreign banks for the service, and are charged in turn by those banks for outbound transactions; in practice, the clearing system assumes that each bank will absorb any fees knowing that, if in the long term things didn't balance out, the bank has bigger problems than a few clearing charges)
I believe the US does not have such a central system, so presumably any deals would have to be made between the english Central Cheque Clearing System and the US bank concerned.
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This means that international users would have to constantly be converting based on floating exchange rates.
Yep. There is no way I could possibly handle a micropayment account in the uk - as I found out recently having played with one of those online question/answer sites. I got an accumulated quarter's payment (all 30ukp of it) then found english banks charge a *flat fee* of 8ukp (say 12usd at the time) for handling a US-banked cheque, and *then* give a worse conversion rate than the ones available on the web (they are converted at the holiday-currency exchange rate, which obviously has a built-in profit). of the 30ukp, I saw just over 20ukp - meaning the bank had taken a bigger chunk of the payment than the website had for hosting it (and I didn't *mind* that, given they had to support their own investment of software, net connection and server space).
I don't know about other countries, but in the uk they seem to believe every other currency should be preconverted and drawn on an english bank before they can accept it, which I suppose is another nail in the coffin of this government's much-advertised "make Britain a home for e-commerce" policy they have already shattered with the RIP bill.
<sigh>
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Ah, but if you have an account with a US bank you can. I've done business with canadians via PayPal.
The setup screen expects you/requires you to enter an address in the united states - I don't know how entering a false address would effect the legality of an account with them, however.
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The company should not be forced to be your phone company or your internet provider. If you could only speak through the workplace, it would be different.
Hmm. I can see this with the internet (while things like online banking make this a borderline decision, as most online banking sites are more convenient than phone banking) I can't agree with the phone - most companies accept that *other* companies don't deal outside of business hours, so employees are likely to need to make the occasional personal call to a bank, utility or doctor that would otherwise need them to travel to the place of business or find a payphone. Some provide a small room with a desk and payphone for "private" calls, but the majority just roll in the small cost of these calls as overheads and ignore them (provided they aren't abused of course).
In fact, a current English law is still pending because in effect, you would require the formal permission of *both* participants in a call not to be committing a crime that carries a jail sentence; they are working on alternative wordings that allow sensible monitoring without allowing anyone but the government a snooper's licence (now that they have one, they are jealous of anyone else getting one)....
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I can think of some many reasons this would be great for mankind and society... unfortunatly, I sincerly doubt the corporations that own these books would be willing to allow such a collection without you paying for each and every book... Such a sad state of affairs.
Even if it was merely restricted to the books no longer in copyright (and/or out of print) it would be a godsend - There are literally thousands of books that would be bought gladly by someone, if he could just find a bookshop with a second-hand copy, because they are out of print - and then there are all the schoolkids reading classics for their lessons; can you imagine what a relief it would be for parents to buy such a gadget ONCE, and have all the set books for their child's entire schooling?
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I was actually quite dissapointed when I read the specs for this. It has an as powerful (or more powerful) a processor than the SNES, better graphics, and certainly there has been an adaptor for SNES systems to play gameboy carts for many years - so why doesn't this thing take SNES cartridges, and come with a SNES > Gameboy colour adaptor?
I would certainly have sprung for the cash to play all my old favourate SNES carts on a handheld; that it could load and play my gameboy carts would have been a bonus, but I *have* a gameboy, and only recently bought a gameboy colour - why should I now buy yet another "improved gameboy" when there will almost certainly be "extended super improved gameboy" or "N64 Gameboy advance adaptor" a year from now which will take my current gameboy cartridges and the new "Game Boy Advance" cartridges (which I *can't* load on anything else at the moment) as well.......
It's an incremental improvement that offers little to tempt me - yes, it's better, but not leading edge, even if it is impressive for a handheld. It *could be* and *should be* better, and I am dissapointed in it.
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We should start making a list of fake user agents, and visit some of the more obvious doubleclick sites with them. I wonder how much effort it would be to make the user-agent a configurable parameter in Mozilla? for that matter, I wonder if I could feed doubleclick some or all of the following:
user-agent Moz/4.0 (Compatable; IE 7.0 MS-internal only; Linux 2.2.13/FreeX86)l anning/corporate_targets_list.htm
username B.Gates@microsoft.com
referrer: http://internal.planning.microsoft.com/business_p
<grin>
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Hmm. I assume the problem here is that you are tied to the Novell DOS stacks.
I have a couple of similar apps (they require the DOS level IPX stack to operate, and a VLM login) and it took a fair while to find out that, yes, you CAN run the old 16-bit stack under Win95. it isn't easy (and you have to login from the autoexec.bat before bringing up windows) but there is a "shim" NIC driver that will allow you to run standard DOS Novell drivers under a Win95 machine, and still have a Microsoft standard TCP/IP stack for the other stuff.
If you want a *really* strange solution, you can also run a machine with *two* network cards, one for windows95 and one for the DOS drivers. Provided you don't use the Windows95 PNP management stuff, you will be surprised how well it works.......
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I'm sorry, but I can't see why this is a problem - Dell owns a *very* large computer company; that he retained control when his company GOT to be large is commendable, that he still has a little "play area" right next to his office is almost unheard of.
However, the end result is DELL computers will ship with Redhat and full support. This *is* a business decision, not a geekish one, so how else can you expect him to treat it?
I bet he didn't even partition the hard drive himself. Granted Dell is a hardware supplier, I don't need its CEO to be a Linux efficianado, but some expressions of capability at the top sure would convincing.
Well, he claims to have installed Redhat himself (I suppose he could have just overwritten the existing partitions set up by a more competent geek, but odds are good he started with a "clean" unpartitioned disk and let the Redhat bootable CD do the partitioning) and redhat usually makes some reasonable default decisions. However, again, I don't see how this is relevant - He got a Redhat up and running himself, played with it for a bit, and was willing to give an interview praising Linux and advertising that his company feels it is ready to be shipped pre-installed.
Our community needs companies that develop business units whose sole function is to support us (Linux), not just have us tacked on to rest of the OS support department.
Why? few if any companies have a separate support department for NT/Win9x/OS2/Novell so why should they have a separate one for Linux? one of the *big* points that is always made about Linux is that it doesn't need as much support, and that *that* support is often better found from the community anyhow. However, even if that *was* true, you have obviously failed to read that part of the article carefully, as you missed:
which is pretty much waving the "get your dedicated linux-os support like this" flag at you...
Linux hasn't been easy until now, and we sure aren't doing this on a lark. How about showing some interest before you ask for our money? Sorry Michael, I'm not convinced.
I am sure MIchael will have troubled sleep knowing you don't want his products.
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He has no trouble admitting the shortcomings of Linux, nor any trouble touching on its strengths.
Indeed, although he admits to spending some time "in denial" after Mindcraft <grin>
It is certainly refreshing, and an indicator for an attitude the linux community as a whole seems to have drifted slightly away from - if linux doesn't do a task as good as $FOO, then either fix linux, or accept that $FOO is specialised to do that task and Linux is a general purpose OS. Yes, the fact that Linux wasn't really multi-processor ready for IP-heavy tasks, as the TCP/IP stack could use but a single processor. No, the correct solution isn't to flame the testers, or to stick your fingers in your ears and hope it will go away - Linux can and *will* have those abilities given enough work, so you should either do the work or support those who can.
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Am I the only one who considers Linus one of the most accessible leaders in the tech industry? The man is like the Finish brother in law I never had.
You have to get the WSJ's point of view here - Linus has never gone out of his way to speak to reporters, and probably never will; he is not a "good source" for the reporters as he doesn't need their approval, so won't pander to their needs for snappy soundbytes and copy they can edit however their editor wants the story slanted this week.
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"Mr. Torvalds said tests show the new Linux compares "really well" with its rivals, including Windows and other versions of Unix. "It is painful for me to go back and use the 2.2 kernel," he said, referring to the current version.
"Mr. Torvalds [co-ordinates linux development], and won't take a stand on such issues as what sort of user interface the software should have.
That is one reason there are now two rival Linux interfaces."
They REALLY don't get it, do they?
I assume the editor had picked up from a piece on Sun's adoption of Gnome (and not KDE) that there were only two possible ways to use Linux. I am forced to assume the concept of a windows manager being interchangable is beyond him. As for the first quote, well, I suspect he is convince that there will be a shiny new "Linux Millenium" on the shelves for xmas, which would fit into his nice tidy microsoft-style image of "the linux product". The idea that the new kernel is already in use across the planet would astonish him.....
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This leads me to believe the working (sale curve increasing) website is one that has a different look and feel to it, thus requiring high degrees of individuality in design.
I would disagree with that strongly. Experience with ANY UI is that users tend to prefer packages that look-and-feel the same as things they already know and use, but with different content - The more consistant your user interface is across different packages in a suite, the more usable it is considered to be (and the more each package adds to the value of the OTHER packages in the suite). There is no reason this isn't valid for websites, and many people already say it is.
If a user is familiar with site a, and does click-pulldown-select-order to get (say) a book, then goes to YOUR site and does click-pulldown-select-order to get (say) a CD, then he will be pleased with himself for how quickly he did that, and state he feels "comfortable" with the site, when in fact he is merely conditioned to the style of the site from elsewhere. If you need proof, think of the time it took to figure out exactly what goes where here on slashdot - then go to any of the Slashcode sites and note how familiar it feels - even though the content and style is different, the interface is reassuringly the same.
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and I dispute the notion that it's more appropriate than a HTML editor for memoranda and specifications.
I would go with RTF, rather than HTML, but [HT|X]ML is definitely the way Word itself is going (with a few proprietory extensions so MS can embrace and extend of course). The real bugbear though is MS's "Html mail" which is the worst idea I have ever seen - how to modify email to encapsulate the worst excesses of web browser bugs, make your machine hang for minutes if you read email offline, and generally make the most open, standards based communications system on the internet dependent on using an MS client.
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