You guys could have posted a reminder to vote today. The election results are all fine and dandy, but a well-written summary of "Remember to vote," voting locations, etc. posted this morning would have been appreciated.
I'd appreciate it if you could keep this in mind for next year. The more informed voters we have out there, the better. Slashdot could really help get the word out (especially on the issues that matter most to geeks!)
I was really interested in getting a Sony Picturebook. This was about 4-5 months ago, when the latest ones had not yet hit the United States. I asked a client of mine, who is Japanese, to get me pricing. He obliged, but only after warning me about the Transmeta processor. "It doesn't work well when you try to run multiple applications," he said. "Everyone says it's slow."
I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.
I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.
To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.
Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."
Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.
...there will be a day when the NYTimes webmasters figure out what an HTTP referrer is, and start using that to check exactly where the so-called "Google partner links" are originating.
Besides, it "takes all of 60 seconds effort" for you to sign up for a NYTimes account. You already signed up for a/. account, so you're not averse to the whole signing-up-for-an-account business.
Just for the record, I signed up for the NYTimes account (because after all, they are providing quality writing to me for free), and I have yet to receive a single piece of unsolicited email from them.
I wish people would quit trying to circumvent the signup, and just do it. Free, quality content is becoming a rarity on the web, and I prefer signing up to the alternative -- losing that free content for good.
Re:Why I won't switch from IE (yet).
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Thanks for replying.
First of all, I'd recommend that the Edit button be implemented with a click/drop-down list like IE's is. You click on the button and it opens in the default editor for that filetype. Click on the arrow next to it and it displays all the editors on your system that can edit that type of file, and you can choose one from the list. It's useful.
Secondly, I don't know about this Google toolbar replacement thing. Google is pretty much my sole search engine, though I wouldn't mind having dictionary and translate buttons. I'm not convinced that Phoenix's replacement can compare (Mozilla's couldn't.)
Third, a "snappier" UI does not necessarily mean a better UI. A faster UI I can appreciate, but honestly, Mozilla felt clunky to me in more ways than one. I hope Phoenix strives to eliminate this.
A couple of other things I forgot to mention that I also hope Mozilla/Phoenix can rectify:
Use the damn built-in Windows MIME types! Jeez! I shouldn't have to tell Mozilla how to open a.zip file. I think that was the #1 thing (besides the UI) that really turned me off to Mozilla. They're all sitting there in the registry. Please use them. (I sincerely hope this has already been fixed.)
Ctrl+scroll wheel should size text a la IE. I know this was an open bug for a while. Has this been fixed? In my build of Mozilla (which is the original 1.0, I think) it hasn't... although I do appreciate the ability to resize text even when the web developer specifies a point size (something which IE can't currently do.)
And honestly, to be a little evil, I'd like to see a "Windows XP IE clone." I mean, something I could throw at my mother and say, "This is the new version of Internet Explorer!" and she would really believe it. If I'm going to get on the evangelism bandwagon with web browsers again (and I've been off that bandwagon since I stopped being a die-hard Netscape fan in 1998), I want to get people to switch. Obviously, they want something that looks similar to IE. (Keep in mind that IE on XP looks radically different from IE on previous versions of Windows.) I'd welcome a theme like that as well.
I'm rambling. I'm going to stop this and head to bed now. At this point, I hope you have a better idea of what at least one interested party is looking for in a web browser.
Good luck with the Phoenix project, by the way. I think it's a great idea, no matter how it turns out. This market needs a bit of competition.:)
Why I won't switch from IE (yet).
on
Phoenix 0.4 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It's not really that I really love IE. A browser is a browser. That said, there are a lot of people posting on why they switched from IE to Mozilla, so I thought I'd offer the top reasons why I stay with IE. (Note: I've used Mozilla 1.0 and 1.2.)
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow. The buttons just feel "heavy" to me. IE6 feels light and it looks like a Windows program. Plus, it loads more quickly.
2. Google toolbar. Yeah, I've used the mozdev one... and it's just not as impressive. I cannot do the following with the Mozdev bar:
Search images/newsgroups with one click. With IE, I type in a search term and click the image button and voila, I'm searching images.google.com. This might have been fixed recently in Mozdev, but it wasn't the last time I checked.
Of critical importance is the search word and highlight feature. Often I'll search for something like "Linux sendmail configuration." What comes up? Newsgroup posts, and often several LONG pages of them. I search via the toolbar and then click the "sendmail" button on the right, and IE scrolls down to the first occurrence of that word. Put simply, this rocks. It nearly eliminates the need for Ctrl-F and makes my searches at least 10 times as fast (since I don't have to scroll down manually or Ctrl-F and type in the word again.)
Highlight/PageRank. I don't use these as often as the find word feature, but they're still a consideration. I don't want to switch browsers and lose functionality.
3.Edit button. Again, a feature that rocks. I'm not sure how many people use this, but as a web developer, I do on pretty much a daily basis. Example: I need to pull a table from a website I'm working on. One click and the whole HTML source is loaded up in Dreamweaver MX and I'm working on editing the HTML. No FTP'ing the file down and then finding it on my hard drive. I just pull it straight from IE. 4.View Partial Source. Once again, mostly a web developer tool, but an invaluable one at that. I highlight any part of the page, click "View Partial Source", and I'm staring at the source code that created that part of the page. This is part of the IE5 Web Developer Tools add-on, and it works fine with IE6. I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page. (Not sure if Mozilla has that.)
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract. Once again, I cannot recommend this highly enough. In addition to blocking popups, it blocks ALL advertisements. Plus, you can tell it to turn on/off Javascript, cookies, referrers, and pretty much anything else on a per-site basis. Just add the URL to the list and check which things you want to block, and you're set. It's configurable via your systray. This program is awesome.
Here's my page that demonstrates exactly what AdSubtract does. It's so much more powerful than what Mozilla does that I'm amazed more people don't talk about it.;)
I suppose I should add the usual disclaimer that I don't work for any of the above companies, etc. I'm just a PHP/web developer. I thought I should add my reasons for not using Mozilla, though, just so you can have both sides of the story. I'd also hope that any Mozilla developers reading this (Asa?) will take this story into account when it comes time to figure out what features should go into the next version of Mozilla. The features I use in IE may be some of the more obscure ones, but until I see functional equivalents in Mozilla, I won't be switching.
Interestingly enough, I've never had moderator access here on Slashdot, even though I metamod whenever I can.
Well, I clicked on the link to brak, and I immediately got moderator access... except the points say that they expire on 1970-01-03. I also seem to have 30 moderator points. Er, not good.
"Can you explain to me exactly which advanced functionality your bank need to use to make their site work that hasn't been there since HTML 1.0?"
Have you not read the HTML standards? HTML 1.0 didn't support anything but basic hyperlinking and the <PRE> tag. See here for more details. HTML 1.0 didn't support tables, forms, frames, etc. (Warning: Link is extremely dated.)
As I said earlier, I code my pages to the XHTML 1.0 standard. That means that Netscape 4.x won't render them properly, as Netscape 4 relies on a number of non-standard HTML tags and attributes (marginwidth, marginheight, height, etc.) In fact, Netscape 4 is so buggy when it comes to CSS that there are whole pages dedicated to its bugginess. (Search Google for more.)
Moral of the story: Code your pages to standards, and make sure they work in IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. Beyond that, it's up to each individual web developer.
"The week before that some black guy complained because I wouldnt serve him - it's my right isnt it?"
I knew someone would bring that up. The difference between this and what browser you use is that your skin color or physical ability usually isn't your choice. Most people don't wake up one day and say "I think I will be disabled today" or "I think I will be a minority race today". You pretty much are or you aren't, and you can't usually change it easily.
The browser you use, on the other hand, is entirely your choice. You do have the ability to use Internet Explorer. (And none of this "I use Linux so I can't use IE" stuff... you chose to use Linux as well.) For the most part, when you switch to a different browser, you are aware that some sites will not work well with that browser.
I code my pages to the XHTML standard. I refuse to support Netscape 4.x because it does not support standards. My pages don't work on Mozilla 1.0 because of a bug in Mozilla 1.0's XHTML rendering. Does that mean I should break my layout because Mozilla 1.0 has a bug, considering Mozilla 1.0 is less than one percent of my readership?
The latest browser stats show that Netscape 4 has 1.2% of the market and that Mozilla 1.x has 0.8% of the market. This means that web developers need to spend more time working with the 94.9% of the population that uses Internet Explorer than the decided minority that uses another browser.
Let's face it -- all browsers have quirks. "Coding to standards" will not always solve the problem (as I mentioned above.) Thus, most web developers code for the 95% of their audience that is on IE first, and then choose to make sites compatible with minority browsers at their discretion. If you spend 50% of your development time working around bugs in Netscape 4.x (which has more market share than either Mozilla 1.x or Opera), is that an effective use of your time? If you "code to standards" and your site still doesn't work in Mozilla or Opera, is troubleshooting the problem an effective use of your time considering that those two browsers count for less than 2% of your audience? Like it or not, the answer is most often "No."
This is being touted as an Exchange killer, yet it costs $1249 for 10 licenses?
I just looked up Exchange 2000 Server pricing. Assuming you're upgrading from Exchange 5.5, the base package for Exchange 2000 Server is $639 and the additional 5 licenses need to bring your server up to 10 licenses are $499, bringing your total to $1138.
You save $111 in license fees by upgrading to Exchange 2000 instead of buying this solution.
So, if cost isn't the advantage here, what is? Exchange 2000 is pretty much guaranteed to have more features and support. I can't see why anyone would want to buy this product.
What is up with these unprofessional "reviews"?
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Two Reviews of Debian 3.0
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a feeling someone will mod me as "troll" for this, but so be it...
I do not understand why so many of these so-called "reviewers" cannot take the time to use a simple spelling and grammar checker. The review from LinuxPlanet was written by the webmaster of LinuxPlanet, yet it contained several grammatical gaffes, including use of "it's" instead of "its" and some misspellings (one of which, "managment", made its way to the front page of Slashdot.)
This seems to be a growing trend in certain review sites. It really bothers me that some of the foremost open-source sites seem to have such a problem with grammar and spelling. This reflects badly not only on those sites, but on open-source and free software itself.
Proper spelling and grammar may be unimportant to you personally, but it makes a lot of people view your site as unprofessional. If you want respect, you need to focus on good grammar and spelling -- or, at the very least, running your articles through a grammar and spelling checker before they are posted. (With that respect comes several bonuses, as well: great goodies such as advertising dollars, free software and hardware to review, and more.)
The fact that most of these sites don't bother to check spelling and grammar before posting "reviews" is one more reason for me to not feel any sympathy when they need those advertising/subscription dollars to stay alive. If you make the effort to use proper grammar and spelling, I'll reward you with visits and subscription money. If you don't, I won't, and neither will most corporations looking for a place to advertise.
As a straight female who plays games, I would have to say that I believe your sexuality does factor into this.
"And btw the idea lately that games need to be made more female friendly p!$$es me off... if I wanted to do girly things, I'd go bake and put on make up or some such crap."
You know, you don't have to put down women just to be accepted in this community. Personally, I think it's incredibly unfair to make such a generalization.
I think the games that "women" like tend to vary quite widely. The reason I put women in quotes is because no one can generalize women as a whole. So, bearing that in mind, here is my experience with what most women like in terms of games.
First of all, most women just generally do not like computers. Or maybe they like computers, but really they like AOL or the Internet or a few web sites. A lot of women just don't seem to be as "into" technology. I don't know if this started because "biggerbetterfaster" tends to inherently appeal to men, or if this is something else completely. Somehow I got the liking-computers gene, but I tell you, even living here in Silicon Valley, there just aren't that many women who enjoy sitting at a computer.
So, of those women who do enjoy sitting at a computer for long periods of time (and I'd say this is maybe 1 or 2 out of every 10 women; I mean, it's rare) the games that I have seen them playing the most are:
1. Solitaire 2. The Sims
Honestly, I pretty much mirror that. I stoppped playing the Sims because I knew it would get addictive. (I got addicted to Sim City 2000 several years ago, and this is worse!) I love old games like Space Invaders or Pacman or Dig Dug. I have all of those arcade games on my computer, and usually on a PDA as well. I played a MUD for a while, but I mostly went there to chat -- playing was a good side effect. I stayed away from Evercrack because I didn't want to get addicted to that, either.:)
I used to have a Nintendo back in 1987 or whenever that was, and my friends and I would play Mario Bros. for hours. Somehow, since then, games seem to have lost their luster for me. Quake? I find it boring, to be honest. Every time I log on, there are a million players who do nothing but rail me as soon as I spawn. There is little interaction between players besides the inevitable "Ha! 0wned!" when someone gets killed. There seems to be little to work toward -- once you've killed everyone (which I don't find appealing in itself -- I'd rather be hunting for a treasure or building a city) -- then what? You change to another map and kill them again.
Having said that, the Lara Croft games don't appeal to me at all. Your goal is to kill people (not interesting to me) and this is combined with "you" getting to be a big-breasted woman. Okay, so two completely non-appealing things. Thanks, but I'd rather feel like I really acheived something when I finally close the window. Perhaps that's why I miss the days of Mario and the get-togethers that he inspired. I enjoyed sitting in the living room with bunch of other people who had a common goal. I don't enjoy sitting alone at my computer toting a railgun.
The vulnerability that this exploits in Outlook and Outlook Express has been patched since March 29, 2001.
If you run Apache and haven't patched since March 2001, you're vulnerable.
If you run OpenSSL and haven't patched since March 2001, you're vulnerable.
If you run WU-FTPd, Sendmail, or any other numerous programs with vulnerabilities and haven't patched since March 2001, you're vulnerable.
At this point, there is no one left to blame but people who simply never update their computers. It's the same g&^damn hole that this exploits every single time, folks. Outlook 2000's patch has been out for well over a year. Outlook XP doesn't even HAVE this vulnerability!
Stop whining about what programs other people choose to run, and encourage them to learn how to patch their systems. No matter what OS you run, patching it is going to be important. Windows XP, Mac OS X, Debian, and Red Hat all make it incredibly easy to patch your system. People spreading this crap around no longer have an excuse.
First of all, here's the full text, since it already seems to be Slashdotted:
"Version 5 of the mesh-AP is a bootable CD which is designed for either SBC systems like the "seahorse" and "starfish" but will work in many laptops and desktop systems. Simply boot the CD and place a wi-fi card in the machine. Driver support for multiple ethernet cards and multiple wi-fi cards. The system contains multiple protocols, assigning dhcp addresses to standard wifi clients at each "cell" cells communicate via mesh routing and form a robust self organising, compressed and encrypted network. There is a DNS proxy and HTTP proxy on each cell and IP is also gatewayed using NAT. See the enclosed word document on the CD for more information. This is a testing release, not suitable for production use, feedback is welcomed and development is ongoing. Requires 64mb of ram, zero harddisk space required. (UPDATED: Several fixes + full gateway discovery and repair)"
Now, for those of us who don't work with wireless networking on a daily basis, does someone care to explain the potential applications of this? Why is it useful? What can someone do with this?
And, finally, a note to the LocustWorld admins: The fact that your site is Slashdotted already should be a good indication of why not to use PHP-Nuke, eh? At first glance, I can't even tell whether this is a Slashdot-like news site or a corporate site. And if it's a corporate site, why do you have a poll on your front page? Since the site crashed, I can't even hit the mission statement.
"I am a student at UCSB and the reason this is being done is because the average user in the dorms does not have the ability to properly secure NT or 2K from its default setup, while the default setup of XP has been deemed more secure."
Oh, boy. You just took that hook, line, and sinker, didn't you? What exploits are running around on a default version of Windows 2000 that would cause problems with your network?
Answer: NONE.
The culprit you're looking for is IIS, which is NOT installed by default on Windows NT Workstation or Windows 2000 Professional. If you install IIS from the Windows 2000 CD, you will be vulnerable until you download the patch -- but to install IIS, you must explictly insert the CD after Windows 2000 is installed, find IIS, and install it. (By the way, this problem could be eliminated other ways, such as not allowing servers on port 80.)
The IIS version that ships with the Windows XP Pro CD is not vulnerable. But to say Windows 2000 is vulnerable to a common remote root exploit out of the box is simply untrue. IIS 5.0 is the scapegoat you're looking for.
The idiocy of some network admins never ceases to amaze me.
"Residents' computers were compromised with several well-known vulnerabilities and used for all manner of unfriendly purposes such as the installation of viruses like Code Red and Nimda on other residents' computers."
Want to know my guess at what happened? Since the admins weren't blocking web servers running on port 80 outside of ResNet, someone set up an IIS server and got nailed with Nimda, which then killed their ResNet web servers (assuming that they hadn't patched their web servers, which isn't much of a leap to make, considering they don't seem to understand the difference between Windows 2000 and IIS.)
"OpenSSL and Apache holes? Wow, let's ban Linux!" That's the same ridiculous leap they made in banning Windows 2000.
"While we understand that it is possible to run a secure Windows 2000 environment, past history has shown that this rarely happens on ResNet."
Nothing like insulting your users AND taking away their right to run a particular OS. You know, this IS an educational institution -- why don't you try educating them? Better yet, cut off ports that are spreading Nimda -- that'll make people figure it out really quickly.
This is ridiculous in every sense of the word, and I hope the students there organize and fight against this. If I lived there, I know I would be.
Seriously. Why do people buy luxury cars when a Honda could get them to work just as easily? Why do people buy large houses? Why do lots of people, for that matter, insist on leasing a new car every two years, even though they own nothing at the end of the lease?
The answer is simple: People perceive it as being of some VALUE. People buy new PCs because they look better, or because Internet Explorer will take less time to load, or because right now it's just taking too damn long to print out that document, or the Internet is too slow. Yes, some of these reasons are misguided, and it's our job as those "in the know" to tell people when they do have a misguided assumption ("A Pentium 4 will make my Internet connction faster...") It's also our job to explain to them how best to spend their money if they ask us for advice -- perhaps their money would be better spent on a broadband connection or a memory upgrade or a better video card. Maybe they don't need a new computer.
Whining about why people buy new computers is futile. People buy new things constantly. Don't forget that people buying and upgrading new computers is what keeps our industry afloat, as well. Not only does it make hardware prices go down, thus benefiting more of us, but we get the added benefit of easier tech support (for the most part, computers have dramatically improved in this area since Windows 95 first hit the shelves) and better software. (My personal favorite is finally dragging those last few holdouts off of Netscape 4.7 so I can make great-looking dynamic websites that actually work with their browser.)
Next time, instead of wringing your hands and saying "Why?!", encourage those who are upgrading to spend their money in the wisest way possible. The more people who enjoy using their computers, the more successful the industry will be as a whole, and the more jobs we will all have as a result.;)
"So you did not check the customer requirements against that what you recomended (sp)?"
Actually, it went something like this:
-- They asked me for a recommendation of a database that could handle 3 million records. -- I suggested Postgres. -- They said, "Oh, but the server it will be running on is Windows." -- D'oh!
I mean, it was a rather casual thing. But the whole problem was that I have no choice but to suggest a commercial database server if the database server platform is Windows. Why are the Postgres people porting to Netware before Windows? I don't know -- I'm not on their team, but it seems a rather strange choice to me.
I figured I'd get the typical "why don't you just format and run Linux" reply as well, so I might as well add that the server was already running a Windows application, and they wanted to just use that one as a database server since it had some extra CPU and memory.
It's just frustrating that the Postgres team decides to port to a platform that is now relatively obscure (Netware) instead of a platform that is one of the top 3 in the database market (Windows.) It seems to be a case of "maybe if we ignore this platform, it will just go away." That attitude is disappointing, especially when it comes from a company that I'd like to support.
I just had a client that needed a database larger than MySQL could capably handle (3 million records.) Since their budget was tight, I went ahead and recommended Postgres.
Oh! Whoops! Postgres doesn't run natively on Windows. This is COMPLETELY unacceptable. Their development environment and about half their servers, including the one allocated for this project, run on Windows. They went with Microsoft SQL Server, which was acceptable, but which ate almost a third of the budget for the project.
Many companies use a Windows development environment and/or Windows servers. It's stupid to ignore or shrug off the platform that runs at least 25% of the world's web servers and many more file, print, and email servers at businesses -- not to mention 95% of the clients out there, at least some of which are being used for local database development.
I cannot seriously recommend a product that ignores these numbers. Yeah, maybe they aren't out to make money, and so they don't care about losing "business" per se. But they lost my recommendation for projects that MySQL just can't handle. For me, now, it's either MySQL or a commercial database, and frankly, I am disgusted and disappointed to not have a Free alternative in between those two.
Do you REALLY think that everyone running Windows has these same problems? Do you really think that someone at Microsoft sat there and said, "Well, you know what, maybe we'll just make life miserable for everyone. How about we program a BSOD to occur with random frequency somewhere between every 3 and 5 days, just so people don't get too used to that 'stability' thing."
Hello! Earth to Linux user! You have a driver problem. Most Windows boxes do NOT have these problems, and if they do, the person using the box calls up his/her computer person and it's fixed the next day. Go check your system log (you DO know where that is in Windows 2000, right?) and figure out what's causing the problem. Then troubleshoot it and fix it.
I swear, Linux has a problem with a driver and you guys are out there doing everything from installing driver after driver to freakin' recompiling the kernel. Windows 2000 has a problem and your first response is "Wow, Microsoft sucks! I don't know what to do! Um, how about I just complain on Slashdot about how much Microsoft sucks!"
Here's a hint: Learn how to troubleshoot your system (besides upgrading to Service Pack 2, because that probably won't fix a driver problem. You did listen to those warnings about installing unsigned drivers, right?) If you've looked at the system log and really can't figure out what could be causing the problem, go get on Google Groups and hit up the microsoft.public.* newsgroups. There are some really great people on there who volunteer their time to help you with problems like this.
So yes, that's my rant, and I decided not to post anonymously because I really think more people need to hear this. Mod me down as a troll or whatever, but you know if the guy was having the same problems with Linux, the person who posted the solution (even if it WAS just "RTFM") would get modded up.:-/
I used to be the Windows system administrator at a small (300-person) company. Before we got mail filters installed on our server, we would just get nailed with viruses. We were on about our third round of Melissa at that point, and each time, I would send out a company-wide email telling people not to click on attachments.
Well, I knew most of the people in the company quite well, including the sales guys. One of the sales guys happened to be a pretty close friend of mine, and the thought he really knew a lot of computers. In fact, he was so cocky about the belief that he would never get a virus that he didn't usually read my emails.
In this particular case, I happened to be sitting a few feet away from him when he was going through his email. He came upon my email and asked me if he could delete it. I said, "Sure, as long as you don't click on attachments." Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him delete the email and click on the next email in his box. Then I watched him double-click on the attachment and immediately get nailed by the virus.
I sprung into action. "What are you doing? That's the virus!" I yelled. I disconnected his Ethernet cord so he wouldn't spread it, and spent the next 20 minutes cleaning the damn thing off his computer.
This company was full of people who really thought they knew their stuff when it came to computers. I watched one of the Linux gurus there sheepishly admit that he didn't know that removing an NT box from a domain removed his ability to log in with his domain account. (Since the IT staff was the only group with the local administrator password, he actually had to log a helpdesk ticket saying that he couldn't log in to his NT box.) I watched our VP of sales call our network admin away from an off-site meeting because "ALL OF MY EMAIL HAS DISAPPEARED! OH MY GOD! YOU DELETED IT!" (In actuality, he had scrolled all the way to the right in the pane that showed his mailboxes, so he couldn't see any of his mailboxes. One very pissed network administrator had to explain to him that there was a scrollbar at the bottom of the screen that he needed to scroll back to the left.)
It happens all the time, but before you spout off that those users are stupid, I must remind you that we all have those things we know nothing about. Do you know the correct usage for its vs. it's? (Hint: Only use it's in place of it is -- no other time.) Can you fix your car every time something goes wrong, or do you take it into a mechanic? Do you know how to ballroom dance?
The moral of the story: We're all stupid sometimes. Learn to laugh about it. Heck, that's the only way you're ever going to get through a single day as a sysadmin.;)
"In Virginia, when one small town, Bristol, wanted to set up its own broadband system, Verizon lobbyists persuaded the pliant, Republican-controlled state legislature to pass a law prohibiting any town from doing so."
I found that quote very disturbing. Fortunately, I read more on the subject and found out that Bristol won a lawsuit that overturned the decision. The state is appealing the decision (imagine that), but for now, Bristol has set a precedent that says that municipalities can set up their own broadband service. It's insane that Bristol even has to go to these lengths, but at least they won.
I feel the need to clarify on the following statement:
"The legal profession still relies on it - your lawyer uses WordPerfect and most legal forms are available in that format."
This is absolutely not true.
Now, you may definitely argue that a larger proportion of the legal community relies on WordPerfect than does the general office community. However, the legal profession itself does not rely on WordPerfect.
My father is a lawyer. I set up his law firm's computers. I've known many other lawyers and set up their law firm's networks. What you said was true 3-5 years ago, but most of them have now switched to Word.
And as for legal forms being in WordPerfect format, with the hundreds of legal forms I have had to use, they have been in one of three formats:
a) Hard Copy (as in, a piece of paper that you have to use a typewriter to type on) or, more often, b) PDF or c) a proprietary format that has to be used with a $5,000-$50,000 piece of crappy software.
ALL of the government forms that a law firm needs are in PDF. Most of the other things that lawyers used to get in hard copy (for instance, the legal books that you see in their offices) are now available for a subscription fee via sites like FindLaw.com. About 50% of the forms that come through a lawyer's office are hard copy, 40% are PDF, and 10% are proprietary, and honestly, I haven't seen a WordPerfect law document in years. Most of the hard copy ones are saved directly to either Microsoft Word or PDF via Acrobat, so the number of hard copy forms will continue to decrease.
From reading your post, it sounds like you haven't encountered WordPerfect in a couple of years, either, and are basing your opinions on what you saw a few years ago. The Internet is becoming quite integral to any lawyer these days, and as such, the number of non-Word proprietary formats for documents is decreasing rapidly (especially since there was a huge government initiative to convert everything to PDF.) Thus, your post was accurate as of a few years ago, but is no longer the case.
Seriously, though, would it be too much effort to say "three Kahn titles: Title 1, Title 2, and Title 3"? As it is, it's annoying because you have no idea where each of the three links points. Come on, editors, you can do better than this.
I don't really agree that money is the true factor. I think, to partially answer my own question, that the "good enough" factor kicks in after a while. I suppose at this point people just expect computers to crash once a day (or more). It's a frustrating attitude, but it shows that "more stability" apparently isn't compelling enough to get Grandma to upgrade.
So how do you get Grandma to upgrade? What features of Linux can you sell Grandma on? Or do you just let her keep runnning Windows 98 and expecting it to crash once a day?
Slashdot Mirror
You guys could have posted a reminder to vote today. The election results are all fine and dandy, but a well-written summary of "Remember to vote," voting locations, etc. posted this morning would have been appreciated.
I'd appreciate it if you could keep this in mind for next year. The more informed voters we have out there, the better. Slashdot could really help get the word out (especially on the issues that matter most to geeks!)
I was really interested in getting a Sony Picturebook. This was about 4-5 months ago, when the latest ones had not yet hit the United States. I asked a client of mine, who is Japanese, to get me pricing. He obliged, but only after warning me about the Transmeta processor. "It doesn't work well when you try to run multiple applications," he said. "Everyone says it's slow."
I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.
I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.
To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.
Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."
Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.
"If I was me (and I am)..."
;)
Thanks for clarifying that.
...there will be a day when the NYTimes webmasters figure out what an HTTP referrer is, and start using that to check exactly where the so-called "Google partner links" are originating.
/. account, so you're not averse to the whole signing-up-for-an-account business.
Besides, it "takes all of 60 seconds effort" for you to sign up for a NYTimes account. You already signed up for a
Just for the record, I signed up for the NYTimes account (because after all, they are providing quality writing to me for free), and I have yet to receive a single piece of unsolicited email from them.
I wish people would quit trying to circumvent the signup, and just do it. Free, quality content is becoming a rarity on the web, and I prefer signing up to the alternative -- losing that free content for good.
Thanks for replying.
.zip file. I think that was the #1 thing (besides the UI) that really turned me off to Mozilla. They're all sitting there in the registry. Please use them. (I sincerely hope this has already been fixed.)
:)
First of all, I'd recommend that the Edit button be implemented with a click/drop-down list like IE's is. You click on the button and it opens in the default editor for that filetype. Click on the arrow next to it and it displays all the editors on your system that can edit that type of file, and you can choose one from the list. It's useful.
Secondly, I don't know about this Google toolbar replacement thing. Google is pretty much my sole search engine, though I wouldn't mind having dictionary and translate buttons. I'm not convinced that Phoenix's replacement can compare (Mozilla's couldn't.)
Third, a "snappier" UI does not necessarily mean a better UI. A faster UI I can appreciate, but honestly, Mozilla felt clunky to me in more ways than one. I hope Phoenix strives to eliminate this.
A couple of other things I forgot to mention that I also hope Mozilla/Phoenix can rectify:
Use the damn built-in Windows MIME types! Jeez! I shouldn't have to tell Mozilla how to open a
Ctrl+scroll wheel should size text a la IE. I know this was an open bug for a while. Has this been fixed? In my build of Mozilla (which is the original 1.0, I think) it hasn't... although I do appreciate the ability to resize text even when the web developer specifies a point size (something which IE can't currently do.)
And honestly, to be a little evil, I'd like to see a "Windows XP IE clone." I mean, something I could throw at my mother and say, "This is the new version of Internet Explorer!" and she would really believe it. If I'm going to get on the evangelism bandwagon with web browsers again (and I've been off that bandwagon since I stopped being a die-hard Netscape fan in 1998), I want to get people to switch. Obviously, they want something that looks similar to IE. (Keep in mind that IE on XP looks radically different from IE on previous versions of Windows.) I'd welcome a theme like that as well.
I'm rambling. I'm going to stop this and head to bed now. At this point, I hope you have a better idea of what at least one interested party is looking for in a web browser.
Good luck with the Phoenix project, by the way. I think it's a great idea, no matter how it turns out. This market needs a bit of competition.
1. Mozilla interface feels "heavy" and slow. The buttons just feel "heavy" to me. IE6 feels light and it looks like a Windows program. Plus, it loads more quickly.
2. Google toolbar. Yeah, I've used the mozdev one... and it's just not as impressive. I cannot do the following with the Mozdev bar:
3.Edit button. Again, a feature that rocks. I'm not sure how many people use this, but as a web developer, I do on pretty much a daily basis. Example: I need to pull a table from a website I'm working on. One click and the whole HTML source is loaded up in Dreamweaver MX and I'm working on editing the HTML. No FTP'ing the file down and then finding it on my hard drive. I just pull it straight from IE.
4.View Partial Source. Once again, mostly a web developer tool, but an invaluable one at that. I highlight any part of the page, click "View Partial Source", and I'm staring at the source code that created that part of the page. This is part of the IE5 Web Developer Tools add-on, and it works fine with IE6. I also use Images List to see all the images and their sizes in a certain page. (Not sure if Mozilla has that.)
As far as popup blocking goes, I use AdSubtract. Once again, I cannot recommend this highly enough. In addition to blocking popups, it blocks ALL advertisements. Plus, you can tell it to turn on/off Javascript, cookies, referrers, and pretty much anything else on a per-site basis. Just add the URL to the list and check which things you want to block, and you're set. It's configurable via your systray. This program is awesome.
Here's my page that demonstrates exactly what AdSubtract does. It's so much more powerful than what Mozilla does that I'm amazed more people don't talk about it.
I suppose I should add the usual disclaimer that I don't work for any of the above companies, etc. I'm just a PHP/web developer. I thought I should add my reasons for not using Mozilla, though, just so you can have both sides of the story. I'd also hope that any Mozilla developers reading this (Asa?) will take this story into account when it comes time to figure out what features should go into the next version of Mozilla. The features I use in IE may be some of the more obscure ones, but until I see functional equivalents in Mozilla, I won't be switching.
Interestingly enough, I've never had moderator access here on Slashdot, even though I metamod whenever I can.
;)
Well, I clicked on the link to brak, and I immediately got moderator access... except the points say that they expire on 1970-01-03. I also seem to have 30 moderator points. Er, not good.
I'll use my points anyway...
"Can you explain to me exactly which advanced functionality your bank need to use to make their site work that hasn't been there since HTML 1.0?"
Have you not read the HTML standards? HTML 1.0 didn't support anything but basic hyperlinking and the <PRE> tag. See here for more details. HTML 1.0 didn't support tables, forms, frames, etc. (Warning: Link is extremely dated.)
As I said earlier, I code my pages to the XHTML 1.0 standard. That means that Netscape 4.x won't render them properly, as Netscape 4 relies on a number of non-standard HTML tags and attributes (marginwidth, marginheight, height, etc.) In fact, Netscape 4 is so buggy when it comes to CSS that there are whole pages dedicated to its bugginess. (Search Google for more.)
Moral of the story: Code your pages to standards, and make sure they work in IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. Beyond that, it's up to each individual web developer.
"The week before that some black guy complained because I wouldnt serve him - it's my right isnt it?"
I knew someone would bring that up. The difference between this and what browser you use is that your skin color or physical ability usually isn't your choice. Most people don't wake up one day and say "I think I will be disabled today" or "I think I will be a minority race today". You pretty much are or you aren't, and you can't usually change it easily.
The browser you use, on the other hand, is entirely your choice. You do have the ability to use Internet Explorer. (And none of this "I use Linux so I can't use IE" stuff... you chose to use Linux as well.) For the most part, when you switch to a different browser, you are aware that some sites will not work well with that browser.
I code my pages to the XHTML standard. I refuse to support Netscape 4.x because it does not support standards. My pages don't work on Mozilla 1.0 because of a bug in Mozilla 1.0's XHTML rendering. Does that mean I should break my layout because Mozilla 1.0 has a bug, considering Mozilla 1.0 is less than one percent of my readership?
The latest browser stats show that Netscape 4 has 1.2% of the market and that Mozilla 1.x has 0.8% of the market. This means that web developers need to spend more time working with the 94.9% of the population that uses Internet Explorer than the decided minority that uses another browser.
Let's face it -- all browsers have quirks. "Coding to standards" will not always solve the problem (as I mentioned above.) Thus, most web developers code for the 95% of their audience that is on IE first, and then choose to make sites compatible with minority browsers at their discretion. If you spend 50% of your development time working around bugs in Netscape 4.x (which has more market share than either Mozilla 1.x or Opera), is that an effective use of your time? If you "code to standards" and your site still doesn't work in Mozilla or Opera, is troubleshooting the problem an effective use of your time considering that those two browsers count for less than 2% of your audience? Like it or not, the answer is most often "No."
This is being touted as an Exchange killer, yet it costs $1249 for 10 licenses?
I just looked up Exchange 2000 Server pricing. Assuming you're upgrading from Exchange 5.5, the base package for Exchange 2000 Server is $639 and the additional 5 licenses need to bring your server up to 10 licenses are $499, bringing your total to $1138.
You save $111 in license fees by upgrading to Exchange 2000 instead of buying this solution.
Here is where I got my prices for Exchange. Note that I have no affiliation with this company and have never bought software there; I found them on a Google search.
So, if cost isn't the advantage here, what is? Exchange 2000 is pretty much guaranteed to have more features and support. I can't see why anyone would want to buy this product.
I have a feeling someone will mod me as "troll" for this, but so be it...
I do not understand why so many of these so-called "reviewers" cannot take the time to use a simple spelling and grammar checker. The review from LinuxPlanet was written by the webmaster of LinuxPlanet, yet it contained several grammatical gaffes, including use of "it's" instead of "its" and some misspellings (one of which, "managment", made its way to the front page of Slashdot.)
This seems to be a growing trend in certain review sites. It really bothers me that some of the foremost open-source sites seem to have such a problem with grammar and spelling. This reflects badly not only on those sites, but on open-source and free software itself.
Proper spelling and grammar may be unimportant to you personally, but it makes a lot of people view your site as unprofessional. If you want respect, you need to focus on good grammar and spelling -- or, at the very least, running your articles through a grammar and spelling checker before they are posted. (With that respect comes several bonuses, as well: great goodies such as advertising dollars, free software and hardware to review, and more.)
The fact that most of these sites don't bother to check spelling and grammar before posting "reviews" is one more reason for me to not feel any sympathy when they need those advertising/subscription dollars to stay alive. If you make the effort to use proper grammar and spelling, I'll reward you with visits and subscription money. If you don't, I won't, and neither will most corporations looking for a place to advertise.
As a straight female who plays games, I would have to say that I believe your sexuality does factor into this.
:)
"And btw the idea lately that games need to be made more female friendly p!$$es me off... if I wanted to do girly things, I'd go bake and put on make up or some such crap."
You know, you don't have to put down women just to be accepted in this community. Personally, I think it's incredibly unfair to make such a generalization.
I think the games that "women" like tend to vary quite widely. The reason I put women in quotes is because no one can generalize women as a whole. So, bearing that in mind, here is my experience with what most women like in terms of games.
First of all, most women just generally do not like computers. Or maybe they like computers, but really they like AOL or the Internet or a few web sites. A lot of women just don't seem to be as "into" technology. I don't know if this started because "biggerbetterfaster" tends to inherently appeal to men, or if this is something else completely. Somehow I got the liking-computers gene, but I tell you, even living here in Silicon Valley, there just aren't that many women who enjoy sitting at a computer.
So, of those women who do enjoy sitting at a computer for long periods of time (and I'd say this is maybe 1 or 2 out of every 10 women; I mean, it's rare) the games that I have seen them playing the most are:
1. Solitaire
2. The Sims
Honestly, I pretty much mirror that. I stoppped playing the Sims because I knew it would get addictive. (I got addicted to Sim City 2000 several years ago, and this is worse!) I love old games like Space Invaders or Pacman or Dig Dug. I have all of those arcade games on my computer, and usually on a PDA as well. I played a MUD for a while, but I mostly went there to chat -- playing was a good side effect. I stayed away from Evercrack because I didn't want to get addicted to that, either.
I used to have a Nintendo back in 1987 or whenever that was, and my friends and I would play Mario Bros. for hours. Somehow, since then, games seem to have lost their luster for me. Quake? I find it boring, to be honest. Every time I log on, there are a million players who do nothing but rail me as soon as I spawn. There is little interaction between players besides the inevitable "Ha! 0wned!" when someone gets killed. There seems to be little to work toward -- once you've killed everyone (which I don't find appealing in itself -- I'd rather be hunting for a treasure or building a city) -- then what? You change to another map and kill them again.
Having said that, the Lara Croft games don't appeal to me at all. Your goal is to kill people (not interesting to me) and this is combined with "you" getting to be a big-breasted woman. Okay, so two completely non-appealing things. Thanks, but I'd rather feel like I really acheived something when I finally close the window. Perhaps that's why I miss the days of Mario and the get-togethers that he inspired. I enjoyed sitting in the living room with bunch of other people who had a common goal. I don't enjoy sitting alone at my computer toting a railgun.
The vulnerability that this exploits in Outlook and Outlook Express has been patched since March 29, 2001.
If you run Apache and haven't patched since March 2001, you're vulnerable.
If you run OpenSSL and haven't patched since March 2001, you're vulnerable.
If you run WU-FTPd, Sendmail, or any other numerous programs with vulnerabilities and haven't patched since March 2001, you're vulnerable.
At this point, there is no one left to blame but people who simply never update their computers. It's the same g&^damn hole that this exploits every single time, folks. Outlook 2000's patch has been out for well over a year. Outlook XP doesn't even HAVE this vulnerability!
Stop whining about what programs other people choose to run, and encourage them to learn how to patch their systems. No matter what OS you run, patching it is going to be important. Windows XP, Mac OS X, Debian, and Red Hat all make it incredibly easy to patch your system. People spreading this crap around no longer have an excuse.
First of all, here's the full text, since it already seems to be Slashdotted:
"Version 5 of the mesh-AP is a bootable CD which is designed for either SBC systems like the "seahorse" and "starfish" but will work in many laptops and desktop systems. Simply boot the CD and place a wi-fi card in the machine. Driver support for multiple ethernet cards and multiple wi-fi cards. The system contains multiple protocols, assigning dhcp addresses to standard wifi clients at each "cell" cells communicate via mesh routing and form a robust self organising, compressed and encrypted network. There is a DNS proxy and HTTP proxy on each cell and IP is also gatewayed using NAT. See the enclosed word document on the CD for more information. This is a testing release, not suitable for production use, feedback is welcomed and development is ongoing. Requires 64mb of ram, zero harddisk space required. (UPDATED: Several fixes + full gateway discovery and repair)"
Now, for those of us who don't work with wireless networking on a daily basis, does someone care to explain the potential applications of this? Why is it useful? What can someone do with this?
And, finally, a note to the LocustWorld admins: The fact that your site is Slashdotted already should be a good indication of why not to use PHP-Nuke, eh? At first glance, I can't even tell whether this is a Slashdot-like news site or a corporate site. And if it's a corporate site, why do you have a poll on your front page? Since the site crashed, I can't even hit the mission statement.
"I am a student at UCSB and the reason this is being done is because the average user in the dorms does not have the ability to properly secure NT or 2K from its default setup, while the default setup of XP has been deemed more secure."
Oh, boy. You just took that hook, line, and sinker, didn't you? What exploits are running around on a default version of Windows 2000 that would cause problems with your network?
Answer: NONE.
The culprit you're looking for is IIS, which is NOT installed by default on Windows NT Workstation or Windows 2000 Professional. If you install IIS from the Windows 2000 CD, you will be vulnerable until you download the patch -- but to install IIS, you must explictly insert the CD after Windows 2000 is installed, find IIS, and install it. (By the way, this problem could be eliminated other ways, such as not allowing servers on port 80.)
The IIS version that ships with the Windows XP Pro CD is not vulnerable. But to say Windows 2000 is vulnerable to a common remote root exploit out of the box is simply untrue. IIS 5.0 is the scapegoat you're looking for.
The idiocy of some network admins never ceases to amaze me.
"Residents' computers were compromised with several well-known vulnerabilities and used for all manner of unfriendly purposes such as the installation of viruses like Code Red and Nimda on other residents' computers."
Oh, so you really meant to ban IIS, which is, after all, the software that contributed to most of these worms. Ironically, www.resnet.ucsb.edu is running IIS 5.0 on that very same evil Windows 2000 OS.
Want to know my guess at what happened? Since the admins weren't blocking web servers running on port 80 outside of ResNet, someone set up an IIS server and got nailed with Nimda, which then killed their ResNet web servers (assuming that they hadn't patched their web servers, which isn't much of a leap to make, considering they don't seem to understand the difference between Windows 2000 and IIS.)
"OpenSSL and Apache holes? Wow, let's ban Linux!" That's the same ridiculous leap they made in banning Windows 2000.
"While we understand that it is possible to run a secure Windows 2000 environment, past history has shown that this rarely happens on ResNet."
Nothing like insulting your users AND taking away their right to run a particular OS. You know, this IS an educational institution -- why don't you try educating them? Better yet, cut off ports that are spreading Nimda -- that'll make people figure it out really quickly.
This is ridiculous in every sense of the word, and I hope the students there organize and fight against this. If I lived there, I know I would be.
Seriously. Why do people buy luxury cars when a Honda could get them to work just as easily? Why do people buy large houses? Why do lots of people, for that matter, insist on leasing a new car every two years, even though they own nothing at the end of the lease?
;)
The answer is simple: People perceive it as being of some VALUE. People buy new PCs because they look better, or because Internet Explorer will take less time to load, or because right now it's just taking too damn long to print out that document, or the Internet is too slow. Yes, some of these reasons are misguided, and it's our job as those "in the know" to tell people when they do have a misguided assumption ("A Pentium 4 will make my Internet connction faster...") It's also our job to explain to them how best to spend their money if they ask us for advice -- perhaps their money would be better spent on a broadband connection or a memory upgrade or a better video card. Maybe they don't need a new computer.
Whining about why people buy new computers is futile. People buy new things constantly. Don't forget that people buying and upgrading new computers is what keeps our industry afloat, as well. Not only does it make hardware prices go down, thus benefiting more of us, but we get the added benefit of easier tech support (for the most part, computers have dramatically improved in this area since Windows 95 first hit the shelves) and better software. (My personal favorite is finally dragging those last few holdouts off of Netscape 4.7 so I can make great-looking dynamic websites that actually work with their browser.)
Next time, instead of wringing your hands and saying "Why?!", encourage those who are upgrading to spend their money in the wisest way possible. The more people who enjoy using their computers, the more successful the industry will be as a whole, and the more jobs we will all have as a result.
"So you did not check the customer requirements against that what you recomended (sp)?"
Actually, it went something like this:
-- They asked me for a recommendation of a database that could handle 3 million records.
-- I suggested Postgres.
-- They said, "Oh, but the server it will be running on is Windows."
-- D'oh!
I mean, it was a rather casual thing. But the whole problem was that I have no choice but to suggest a commercial database server if the database server platform is Windows. Why are the Postgres people porting to Netware before Windows? I don't know -- I'm not on their team, but it seems a rather strange choice to me.
I figured I'd get the typical "why don't you just format and run Linux" reply as well, so I might as well add that the server was already running a Windows application, and they wanted to just use that one as a database server since it had some extra CPU and memory.
It's just frustrating that the Postgres team decides to port to a platform that is now relatively obscure (Netware) instead of a platform that is one of the top 3 in the database market (Windows.) It seems to be a case of "maybe if we ignore this platform, it will just go away." That attitude is disappointing, especially when it comes from a company that I'd like to support.
I am so furious with Postgres at this point.
I just had a client that needed a database larger than MySQL could capably handle (3 million records.) Since their budget was tight, I went ahead and recommended Postgres.
Oh! Whoops! Postgres doesn't run natively on Windows. This is COMPLETELY unacceptable. Their development environment and about half their servers, including the one allocated for this project, run on Windows. They went with Microsoft SQL Server, which was acceptable, but which ate almost a third of the budget for the project.
Many companies use a Windows development environment and/or Windows servers. It's stupid to ignore or shrug off the platform that runs at least 25% of the world's web servers and many more file, print, and email servers at businesses -- not to mention 95% of the clients out there, at least some of which are being used for local database development.
I cannot seriously recommend a product that ignores these numbers. Yeah, maybe they aren't out to make money, and so they don't care about losing "business" per se. But they lost my recommendation for projects that MySQL just can't handle. For me, now, it's either MySQL or a commercial database, and frankly, I am disgusted and disappointed to not have a Free alternative in between those two.
Forgive the rant, but this NEEDS to be said.
:-/
Do you REALLY think that everyone running Windows has these same problems? Do you really think that someone at Microsoft sat there and said, "Well, you know what, maybe we'll just make life miserable for everyone. How about we program a BSOD to occur with random frequency somewhere between every 3 and 5 days, just so people don't get too used to that 'stability' thing."
Hello! Earth to Linux user! You have a driver problem. Most Windows boxes do NOT have these problems, and if they do, the person using the box calls up his/her computer person and it's fixed the next day. Go check your system log (you DO know where that is in Windows 2000, right?) and figure out what's causing the problem. Then troubleshoot it and fix it.
I swear, Linux has a problem with a driver and you guys are out there doing everything from installing driver after driver to freakin' recompiling the kernel. Windows 2000 has a problem and your first response is "Wow, Microsoft sucks! I don't know what to do! Um, how about I just complain on Slashdot about how much Microsoft sucks!"
Here's a hint: Learn how to troubleshoot your system (besides upgrading to Service Pack 2, because that probably won't fix a driver problem. You did listen to those warnings about installing unsigned drivers, right?) If you've looked at the system log and really can't figure out what could be causing the problem, go get on Google Groups and hit up the microsoft.public.* newsgroups. There are some really great people on there who volunteer their time to help you with problems like this.
So yes, that's my rant, and I decided not to post anonymously because I really think more people need to hear this. Mod me down as a troll or whatever, but you know if the guy was having the same problems with Linux, the person who posted the solution (even if it WAS just "RTFM") would get modded up.
I used to be the Windows system administrator at a small (300-person) company. Before we got mail filters installed on our server, we would just get nailed with viruses. We were on about our third round of Melissa at that point, and each time, I would send out a company-wide email telling people not to click on attachments.
;)
Well, I knew most of the people in the company quite well, including the sales guys. One of the sales guys happened to be a pretty close friend of mine, and the thought he really knew a lot of computers. In fact, he was so cocky about the belief that he would never get a virus that he didn't usually read my emails.
In this particular case, I happened to be sitting a few feet away from him when he was going through his email. He came upon my email and asked me if he could delete it. I said, "Sure, as long as you don't click on attachments." Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him delete the email and click on the next email in his box. Then I watched him double-click on the attachment and immediately get nailed by the virus.
I sprung into action. "What are you doing? That's the virus!" I yelled. I disconnected his Ethernet cord so he wouldn't spread it, and spent the next 20 minutes cleaning the damn thing off his computer.
This company was full of people who really thought they knew their stuff when it came to computers. I watched one of the Linux gurus there sheepishly admit that he didn't know that removing an NT box from a domain removed his ability to log in with his domain account. (Since the IT staff was the only group with the local administrator password, he actually had to log a helpdesk ticket saying that he couldn't log in to his NT box.) I watched our VP of sales call our network admin away from an off-site meeting because "ALL OF MY EMAIL HAS DISAPPEARED! OH MY GOD! YOU DELETED IT!" (In actuality, he had scrolled all the way to the right in the pane that showed his mailboxes, so he couldn't see any of his mailboxes. One very pissed network administrator had to explain to him that there was a scrollbar at the bottom of the screen that he needed to scroll back to the left.)
It happens all the time, but before you spout off that those users are stupid, I must remind you that we all have those things we know nothing about. Do you know the correct usage for its vs. it's? (Hint: Only use it's in place of it is -- no other time.) Can you fix your car every time something goes wrong, or do you take it into a mechanic? Do you know how to ballroom dance?
The moral of the story: We're all stupid sometimes. Learn to laugh about it. Heck, that's the only way you're ever going to get through a single day as a sysadmin.
"In Virginia, when one small town, Bristol, wanted to set up its own broadband system, Verizon lobbyists persuaded the pliant, Republican-controlled state legislature to pass a law prohibiting any town from doing so."
I found that quote very disturbing. Fortunately, I read more on the subject and found out that Bristol won a lawsuit that overturned the decision. The state is appealing the decision (imagine that), but for now, Bristol has set a precedent that says that municipalities can set up their own broadband service. It's insane that Bristol even has to go to these lengths, but at least they won.
I feel the need to clarify on the following statement:
"The legal profession still relies on it - your lawyer uses WordPerfect and most legal forms are available in that format."
This is absolutely not true.
Now, you may definitely argue that a larger proportion of the legal community relies on WordPerfect than does the general office community. However, the legal profession itself does not rely on WordPerfect.
My father is a lawyer. I set up his law firm's computers. I've known many other lawyers and set up their law firm's networks. What you said was true 3-5 years ago, but most of them have now switched to Word.
And as for legal forms being in WordPerfect format, with the hundreds of legal forms I have had to use, they have been in one of three formats:
a) Hard Copy (as in, a piece of paper that you have to use a typewriter to type on)
or, more often,
b) PDF
or
c) a proprietary format that has to be used with a $5,000-$50,000 piece of crappy software.
ALL of the government forms that a law firm needs are in PDF. Most of the other things that lawyers used to get in hard copy (for instance, the legal books that you see in their offices) are now available for a subscription fee via sites like FindLaw.com. About 50% of the forms that come through a lawyer's office are hard copy, 40% are PDF, and 10% are proprietary, and honestly, I haven't seen a WordPerfect law document in years. Most of the hard copy ones are saved directly to either Microsoft Word or PDF via Acrobat, so the number of hard copy forms will continue to decrease.
From reading your post, it sounds like you haven't encountered WordPerfect in a couple of years, either, and are basing your opinions on what you saw a few years ago. The Internet is becoming quite integral to any lawyer these days, and as such, the number of non-Word proprietary formats for documents is decreasing rapidly (especially since there was a huge government initiative to convert everything to PDF.) Thus, your post was accurate as of a few years ago, but is no longer the case.
I really wish that article submitters would not put ambiguous links in the
article.
Seriously, though, would it be too much effort to say "three Kahn titles: Title 1, Title 2, and Title 3"? As it is, it's annoying because you have no idea where each of the three links points. Come on, editors, you can do better than this.
that Amazon.com has the Windows XP Home Edition upgrade for $79.00.
I don't really agree that money is the true factor. I think, to partially answer my own question, that the "good enough" factor kicks in after a while. I suppose at this point people just expect computers to crash once a day (or more). It's a frustrating attitude, but it shows that "more stability" apparently isn't compelling enough to get Grandma to upgrade.
So how do you get Grandma to upgrade? What features of Linux can you sell Grandma on? Or do you just let her keep runnning Windows 98 and expecting it to crash once a day?