Build a virtual PC on Rackspace, whichever OS you wish, Fedora or Windows Server 2008 R2 among several others, and remote to it. A dollar a day buys you a whole lot of power, and you can buy it by the day.
eball wrote just now of the Combined Community Codec Pack, and on a page on their site is the only set of API-level media player reviews I have ever found. I have been looking for this a very long time, they are covering all of the Windows comprehensive media players I've used. The reviews all start at the API level, and I hope that some more Windows developers out there start to work to the standards recommended; if they do, things will get much better.
Google is #1 in a terribly competitive market, utilizing conceivably the largest non-governmental single enterprise in existence, having kept a number of powerful old-school competitors at bay for quite a few years now. And it is OSS-based.
And IBM is #1 in many unpublicized markets...and is also very OSS-oriented.
I really do wonder if a considerable amount of the diminishment, has to do with the focus of the moguls on single 'idols', rather than good groups. Seems to me that in the past fifty years or so the best music has come from groups, and groups just aren't being sought or promoted, for some reason.
Quite a while ago, musicians were paid very little, and they worked for the joy of it, and listeners shared that joy with them. Then musicians started to get paid a whole lot, and although decline was not immediate, it has occurred. I have hopes that more of the joy of music will return!
Start with the truth: Linux is harder. But then add: It's often worth it. Reliability. Speed. Customizability. Independence from a huge monolith.
Yes, Linux will not do everything yet. But for many things, it is most excellent. And there is no other way to make a completely general-purpose modern desktop out of nine-year-old hardware, because if we accept dependence upon the monolith, it denies us that privilege.
These days, I never take OO out of my mind. I have zero interest in requiring clients at the three small organizations whose PCs I keep, to struggle through a whole new interface in order to do things they know well how to do. And OO is frankly a simple improvement over Microsoft Word in all ways except VBA (and if there were real and good OO BASIC docs maybe I wouldn't say that), and its spreadsheet and presentation capabilities are definitely usable. One of my three has twenty-five workstations to be changed out soon, and I am going to recommend against Microsoft Office entirely, except where Outlook is required. I keep hoping someone really good will build a free-software or low-cost-software Outlook total replacement, but it hasn't quite happened yet.
But I haven't used Microsoft Word at home for more than a year, and I am a power user of Word...and many people have a whole Microsoft Office suite because they want Word, as a result of Microsoft pricing schemes. So I am just overjoyed at the prospect of making life easier for word-processing users with OO, while saving them the dollars too!
http://www.gigablast.com. It has its own crawler system, its database is bigger than Yahoo's, and it is not doing the self-centricity Google for which Google is increasingly famous. Try it next time you search, you will come up with hits which Google buries or does not have at all.
It may be that Autodesk has some new version of DWG which is closed, but older versions have been open for many years, as well as DXF. Google on the words
autocad compatible, and you'll see it.
IntelliCAD, the most prominent AutoCAD-compatible code base, is still being worked on, and there are new versions of it which are very low in cost, and at least one which is donation-ware. There are quite a large number of companies developing this code-base now. I'm certain that other products are easier to use, but you can still do truly excellent 3D work using the modern AutoCAD-type GUI and its venerable command-line system, and industry compatibility is tremendously high. And because of the command-line system, its scriptability is excellent.
I'm not quite sure where Mr. Brin's son was allegedly looking for all those years. Windows 95 and 98 had BASIC on the CDs' extras. Not sure about ME. But BASICs sufficient for math problems have never been absent from the WWW; should I think that Mr. Brin's son was not using the Web in 2002? Anyhow, these days it's quite a lot easier to find a good free BASIC than it has been in years. There are quite a few modern BASICs, more than one of them free, and more than one capable of harnessing the full power of Win32. My favorite is FreeBASIC, but the list on Wikipedia is definitely worth a read.
I've been burned by every single antimalware product I've tried, at least once, except for Avast ( http://www.avast.com/ ) versions 4 and up. I have never, ever, had a problem with Avast, on a horrible variety of machines and platforms, even cases where the machine had 500+ infestations during installation.
What I want to know is, when is someone going to set up a network of this sort where we get paid for the work our machines deliver. I want to put a dozen old PC motherboards on a LAN, hook the LAN to my home broadband, and get paid for keeping everything running!
I'm on my second Visioneer. Their low end scanners don't cost much (my new 7100 USB cost $40), but work very well under XP, as long as you don't need more than 600 DPI. They will deliver more than 600, but not usually to the more automated scanning applications.
Spend about $75, get an AC isolation transformer -- 450 VA or 450 W minimum -- from eBay. Don't try to get one of this capacity new, you'll spend way too much. Then get an inexpensive UPS new. You'll either have to get both these items compatible with the wall-voltage of your destination (not much more difficult) or run an adaptor that can handle 500W. Once you have it all there, plug the isolation transformer into the wall, plug the UPS into the transformer, and plug the PC into the UPS. The transformer will protect both UPS and PC from spikes, and do it very well; the UPS will protect the PC from power failures.
I have been running an isolation transformer on my home PC for years, and would not have it any other way. I used to get hit by spikes, have not been since the transformer went in. This eBay item would be perfect:
The worst problem reported, in my opinion, is one of the reasons I have not yet been able to install desktop Linux to a single one of my clients: I cannot reliably and repeatedly copy and paste from a good web browser to OpenOffice Writer and/or a worthwhile GUI email client.
I have tried both
http://www.mailcircuit.com
and
http://www.spamcop.net
. Both are usable, neither is good enough yet for all. Mailcircuit ($20/year) will drive fellow email list users ape because it does not allow whitelisting, so its ping-pong email acceptance messages get thrown all over the place, i.e., adding its own spam population. Spamcop ($30/year) does not have ping-ponging, and so does allow three or four garbage messages per month through, but its reliability is excellent. I use Spamcop now, but will switch if I find something different which does everything I want. On the other hand, Spamcop is in heavy development (and it is nonetheless extremely reliable, I get tons of email every week), and their people reliably respond to email queries; whereas Mailcircuit told me they would solve the problems of which I spoke to them, and did not, and belatedly claimed that it was impossible (give me a break).
What is needed, in my opinion, is such a service with (a) whitelists, (b) ping-ponging, (c) blacklists which/dev/null instead of holding, and (d) the ability to do everything through SMTP/POP3, i.e., to never ever have to use webmail or web interaction, to do everything by automated email commands.
...once more and more hardwired IDs come out. In a year or two I wouldn't be surprised if PC ID software similar to this will extract IDs from video chipset, motherboard chipset, CPU, and hard drive, all invisibly and seamlessly. And although crackers will doubtless gleefully vomit out ways to spoof them all to allow criminals to run rampant, most nasties won't bother to use it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Build a virtual PC on Rackspace, whichever OS you wish, Fedora or Windows Server 2008 R2 among several others, and remote to it. A dollar a day buys you a whole lot of power, and you can buy it by the day.
eball wrote just now of the Combined Community Codec Pack, and on a page on their site is the only set of API-level media player reviews I have ever found. I have been looking for this a very long time, they are covering all of the Windows comprehensive media players I've used. The reviews all start at the API level, and I hope that some more Windows developers out there start to work to the standards recommended; if they do, things will get much better.
Google is #1 in a terribly competitive market, utilizing conceivably the largest non-governmental single enterprise in existence, having kept a number of powerful old-school competitors at bay for quite a few years now. And it is OSS-based. And IBM is #1 in many unpublicized markets...and is also very OSS-oriented.
I really do wonder if a considerable amount of the diminishment, has to do with the focus of the moguls on single 'idols', rather than good groups. Seems to me that in the past fifty years or so the best music has come from groups, and groups just aren't being sought or promoted, for some reason.
Quite a while ago, musicians were paid very little, and they worked for the joy of it, and listeners shared that joy with them. Then musicians started to get paid a whole lot, and although decline was not immediate, it has occurred. I have hopes that more of the joy of music will return!
Start with the truth: Linux is harder. But then add: It's often worth it. Reliability. Speed. Customizability. Independence from a huge monolith.
Yes, Linux will not do everything yet. But for many things, it is most excellent. And there is no other way to make a completely general-purpose modern desktop out of nine-year-old hardware, because if we accept dependence upon the monolith, it denies us that privilege.
These days, I never take OO out of my mind. I have zero interest in requiring clients at the three small organizations whose PCs I keep, to struggle through a whole new interface in order to do things they know well how to do. And OO is frankly a simple improvement over Microsoft Word in all ways except VBA (and if there were real and good OO BASIC docs maybe I wouldn't say that), and its spreadsheet and presentation capabilities are definitely usable. One of my three has twenty-five workstations to be changed out soon, and I am going to recommend against Microsoft Office entirely, except where Outlook is required. I keep hoping someone really good will build a free-software or low-cost-software Outlook total replacement, but it hasn't quite happened yet. But I haven't used Microsoft Word at home for more than a year, and I am a power user of Word...and many people have a whole Microsoft Office suite because they want Word, as a result of Microsoft pricing schemes. So I am just overjoyed at the prospect of making life easier for word-processing users with OO, while saving them the dollars too!
http://www.gigablast.com. It has its own crawler system, its database is bigger than Yahoo's, and it is not doing the self-centricity Google for which Google is increasingly famous. Try it next time you search, you will come up with hits which Google buries or does not have at all.
It may be that Autodesk has some new version of DWG which is closed, but older versions have been open for many years, as well as DXF. Google on the words autocad compatible, and you'll see it.
IntelliCAD, the most prominent AutoCAD-compatible code base, is still being worked on, and there are new versions of it which are very low in cost, and at least one which is donation-ware. There are quite a large number of companies developing this code-base now. I'm certain that other products are easier to use, but you can still do truly excellent 3D work using the modern AutoCAD-type GUI and its venerable command-line system, and industry compatibility is tremendously high. And because of the command-line system, its scriptability is excellent.
I'm not quite sure where Mr. Brin's son was allegedly looking for all those years. Windows 95 and 98 had BASIC on the CDs' extras. Not sure about ME. But BASICs sufficient for math problems have never been absent from the WWW; should I think that Mr. Brin's son was not using the Web in 2002? Anyhow, these days it's quite a lot easier to find a good free BASIC than it has been in years. There are quite a few modern BASICs, more than one of them free, and more than one capable of harnessing the full power of Win32. My favorite is FreeBASIC, but the list on Wikipedia is definitely worth a read.
I've been burned by every single antimalware product I've tried, at least once, except for Avast ( http://www.avast.com/ ) versions 4 and up. I have never, ever, had a problem with Avast, on a horrible variety of machines and platforms, even cases where the machine had 500+ infestations during installation.
What I want to know is, when is someone going to set up a network of this sort where we get paid for the work our machines deliver. I want to put a dozen old PC motherboards on a LAN, hook the LAN to my home broadband, and get paid for keeping everything running!
I wonder if Apple is giving up on QuickTime? The iPod video standards are all non-Apple!
I'm on my second Visioneer. Their low end scanners don't cost much (my new 7100 USB cost $40), but work very well under XP, as long as you don't need more than 600 DPI. They will deliver more than 600, but not usually to the more automated scanning applications.
Spend about $75, get an AC isolation transformer -- 450 VA or 450 W minimum -- from eBay. Don't try to get one of this capacity new, you'll spend way too much. Then get an inexpensive UPS new. You'll either have to get both these items compatible with the wall-voltage of your destination (not much more difficult) or run an adaptor that can handle 500W. Once you have it all there, plug the isolation transformer into the wall, plug the UPS into the transformer, and plug the PC into the UPS. The transformer will protect both UPS and PC from spikes, and do it very well; the UPS will protect the PC from power failures.
I have been running an isolation transformer on my home PC for years, and would not have it any other way. I used to get hit by spikes, have not been since the transformer went in. This eBay item would be perfect:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=4665&item=7504750488&rd=1
This one is questionable. It looks right, but I would have to verify that 13 "AAC" is really 13 amps A.C.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=4665&item=7504750488&rd=1
It's 10 hours to charge! Not 1 hour to charge. Yet another toy, sad to say.
The worst problem reported, in my opinion, is one of the reasons I have not yet been able to install desktop Linux to a single one of my clients: I cannot reliably and repeatedly copy and paste from a good web browser to OpenOffice Writer and/or a worthwhile GUI email client.
C-class motors were used on all of the Estes 'stock' 5500-footers twenty years ago.
I have tried both http://www.mailcircuit.com and http://www.spamcop.net . Both are usable, neither is good enough yet for all. Mailcircuit ($20/year) will drive fellow email list users ape because it does not allow whitelisting, so its ping-pong email acceptance messages get thrown all over the place, i.e., adding its own spam population. Spamcop ($30/year) does not have ping-ponging, and so does allow three or four garbage messages per month through, but its reliability is excellent. I use Spamcop now, but will switch if I find something different which does everything I want. On the other hand, Spamcop is in heavy development (and it is nonetheless extremely reliable, I get tons of email every week), and their people reliably respond to email queries; whereas Mailcircuit told me they would solve the problems of which I spoke to them, and did not, and belatedly claimed that it was impossible (give me a break).
/dev/null instead of holding, and (d) the ability to do everything through SMTP/POP3, i.e., to never ever have to use webmail or web interaction, to do everything by automated email commands.
What is needed, in my opinion, is such a service with (a) whitelists, (b) ping-ponging, (c) blacklists which
...once more and more hardwired IDs come out. In a year or two I wouldn't be surprised if PC ID software similar to this will extract IDs from video chipset, motherboard chipset, CPU, and hard drive, all invisibly and seamlessly. And although crackers will doubtless gleefully vomit out ways to spoof them all to allow criminals to run rampant, most nasties won't bother to use it all.