I've also found that this extension works fine with FF2: Tab Minus.
Small,and does the job perfectly.
This was my single-biggest hassle with FF2. I do not understand how quasi-randomly moving the location of an item I use ALL the time is supposed to make things more efficient. Especially when you've opened up a bunch of images or documents in separate tabs and want to quickly scan through them looking for someting. Your eyes have to bounce around the screen, finding the stupid close button.
The old mechanism seemed to work better for that: put your mouse on the close button, and now you can focus on the *data*, not finding the button over and over... With the extension, you don't have to choose: they're both avaiable. Works for me.
I too am suspicious of a graph that shows a very clear trend for a couple of decades, then shows a significant drop virtually at the exact moment the graph goes from showing historical data to showing projections.
That doesn't make his projections wrong, but it's going to take more than pretty graphs to make me believe it.
They won't upgrade from where they are until there's a compelling reason. However, at some point, they will need to upgrade. When they do, we'll upgrade to the latest, and hopefully get 6 more years without major upgrades. If we upgraded to XP, that would cut our possible window for future upgrades in half.
I still keep hoping that there will be realistic alternatives such as OS X or Linux. However, it really isn't even close yet. Maybe in a fully Terminal Server'ed configuration, but then there aren't really any major cost savings to be gotten, so why? I keep hoping, though...:)
We've found it to be the opposite. All engineers, HR, Legal, Tech writers, managers, and most techs, have notebooks. Pays off huge for us.
How so? The volume issue doesn't make sense: whatever volume buying and warranty reductions you get on notebooks you would get on desktops, so it doesn't make one better than the other. The overall cost of the notebooks may be closer to desktops in an absolute sense, but unlikely not dramatically in a relative sense.
Therefore, I would assume that the value you get is in areas not related to the dollars and cents of acquiring and maintaing the machines. Would you care to share some of them?
From my personal experience, I have not seen dramatic productivity gains from giving users notebooks rather than desktops. Just the opposite, in fact: I see computers used as home computers, with all of the negative results that that usually connotes. I see computers that get plugged into every random network connection they can find, and then those same computers get dragged back into the office. Or, that never leave the desk, and become overpriced, underpowered desktops!
While it does give the users the ability to possibly work from home or some other remote location, we find that giving the users access to a Terminal Server gives them the vast majority of the benefits of a notebook computer (access to their office e-mail and files, internal systems, etc.) without the majority of support issues. They can't actually work while "on the road" (unless they use a floater notebook), but they are rarely not able to get in front of a computer enough to run a TS session--especially at home, where they already have a computer!
I would love to know more about the benefits you see in your organization. Most of our clients are small: under 100 computers. In those situations, we just haven't seen any type of reward to justify the difference in cost. Your average notebook is twice the price to buy, twice the price to upgrade, and lasts half as long. That's a lot of expense to overcome from our perspective!:)
So you pay, at a minimum, $600 for that copy of Office. The only way that SA would cost you less is if you upgrade Office every 2 years or less. And exactly how much money would you spend to stay on *that* upgrade treadmill? Why would you even *want* to do that, even if the software were "free"?
I'd believe that with notebooks. I can *easily* get 4-5 years out of a desktop, but notebooks just plain *break* after 3 years: the battery goes, the LCD inverter goes, the case starts to crack (*especially* if it's a Dell), the keyboard is funky at least, and I've probably filled the available memory slots and therefore have to throw away RAM to upgrade.
Unless you *really* need the porability frequently (therefore making a "floating" laptop a hassle), notebooks are a *very* expensive way to outfit an office. There's a reason why the 3-year onsite warranty for a Thinkpad is almost double that of a desktop...
It's funny. *Most* of my clients have made *exactly* the same call regarding XP and 2000. Many of them are running purely Windows 2000--no XP at all, and they will skip XP completely, and we've managed to save them from an *entire* needless upgrade cycle.
I just wish that we could position Linux as a realistic upgrade path from 2000. But unfortunately, it looks like it'll be Vista (but not before middle/end of 2007 at the soonest).
Just *yesterday* I was looking for *exactly* the same thing: a way to hook up a Gumstix to a display. I would like to use it for a home automation project.
If you use one of the appropriate expansion boards, you can interface a Gumstix to a variety of raw LCD panels: there's even X Windows drivers for it. However, there's nothing for TV out (composite, for example), and there is nothing for VGA out.
The cheapest LCD touch screen I could find is $56 bucks. Then you still have to buy a controller board and LCD interface (about $150 from Gumstix), and a case, cables, etc. It adds up quick.
The more research I do, the more likely I am to do it with Palms: where else can you get a color LCD with touch screen, 200MHz processor, 32MB RAM, etc. for under $100? Palm Z22
I'd love to hear from someone with a better idea...:)
This sounds very much made up to write an article.
Having said that, I have tried to find kid's programming books for my 8-year-old daughter. I started learning computer programming at 8 using my Commodore VIC-20 manual. It had a little cartoon computer character that led you through BASIC programming from the typical 10 PRINT "TIM" 20 GOTO 10 all the way to "advanced" games. As a kid, I absolutely loved it.
However, I have been able to find *nothing* like that for her... Any thoughts out there?
Yes, the UM research stuff. I haven't had any bugs that I've noticed. I'm running FX 1.5.0.6 or so, and haven't seen anything that led me to believe that something was wrong. The stupid control box is kind of ugly and weird, but once I figured out a decent set of settings, it's worked well.
There are two things I really like about it: the ability to quickly open and close posts that I want to read, but aren't on the screen fully, and the ability to close an entire tree that's branched into something off-topic. For example, I can quickly close the entire tree that will be talking about DRM on every story, no matter how unrelated it might be!:)
Part of the need for that is the fact that I tend to have very low standards for what I allow to be fully displayed. Basically, anything that's at 1 or higher is expanded, and anything besides -1's that are even remotely attached to something that's been modded up. That means that the majority of comments are shown fully, and the remaining ones show at least a sentence. So the ability to collapse parts of the tree that have spun out of control is big.
As for the comment about paragraph tags: I'm talking about paragraph breaks in Slashdot. I used to just throw a <P> at the end of the paragraph, like pressing . But that won't work since the CSS redo. Now I actually have to include my text in matching P tags. That's annoying, and I inevitably miss some. I guess I can just enter a double-<BR>... Not a terribly big deal, I guess...
Our company uses LEAF in a number of our customers' firewalls. Is your GUI code available for use with "real" LEAF/Shorewall configurations?
We've used Webconf in a *very* limited number of sites. As a rule, our philosophy is that any kind of remote access to a firewall is more risk than we want. However, I would be *very* interested in seeing how your scripts work, and what you have to have open on the LEAF box. If it's less risky than running an HTTP server, it would be something we would consider.
Of course, it would have been nice to see it in something like, say, Python instead of.NET, but beggars can't be choosers!:)
If you use VMWare heavily, I'm sure you're running ESX, but I'll ask you anyway:
Can you (or anyone else) tell me the recommended way to back up your virtual machines with VMWare Server? All of the documentation I've found talks about ESX Server. They give you 2 choices: 1) Run backup software *inside* of the VM and back it up like any other machine, or 2) Back up the VM files directly. In the case of ESX, you use the Perl API to set up a redo log, but AFAIK that's not possible with Server. Without that, how would I be sure that the image is intact, and not in an unsuable state, especially when backing up multi-gigabyte files will take a while, all the while the VM might be making changes?
I know VMWare needs a carrot to get people to spend the big bucks, but it seems to me there should be *some* way of being able to back up VM images under Server without worrying about them changing while you're backing them up... Does anyone have any suggestions?
I'm participating in an AJAX adaptation of/.'s comment page. It has some functionality for controlling exactly which comments are visible and not. Seeing as I browse at a pretty low level already (not -1, but close), these features have been uninspring for me. But the ability to click on a collapsed comment and get it to come up, or to collapse an entire tree that's spiralled out of control without having to refresh the entire page is *gold*.
P.S.: Does anyone know of a way to get a paragraph break without wrapping the entire paragraph in <P> and </P> tags?
To quote David Abrash: Profile before you optimize.
I had a very similar experience with a client in 1997 or so. They had an old file server: dual Pentium 133's running Windows NT 3.51 with 6 hot-swap SCSI drives in RAID-5. It would take approximately 45 minutes for a designer to open a single file (about 1GB in size). Their previous consultants told them that their server was hopelessly out-of-date (which it was) and that they needed a new file server: $15,000, please.
I came and did some profiling on their server. Their CPU utilization was about 30% and even their disk utilization was relatively low: they weren't even using the hardware they had! Turns out that they had two hubs: a high-end 10MBit switch with 2 100MBit uplinks, and a 12-port 100Mbit *hub*. This was at a point where 100Mbit switching was very expensive, and Gigabit was fiber-only.
So, we replaced the hub with a Cisco 2924M-XL switch. Instantly the designers were getting a 6x improvement, for only $3500 or so. Further profiling on the server showed that we had *still* not maxed out disk performance: the 6 drives could *easily* pump out the 10MB/s necessary to satuate a full 100Mbit connection, so we decided to go Gigabit by adding a module on the Cisco and a Gigabit . That alone tripled the performance *again*, with their exact same hopelessly old server! And we had spent less than $5000.
If the previous clients would have replaced the old server, my estimation is that things would have run at best about 15% faster: that's all that the old server was adding to the process. When I was done, we had spent 1/3 as much, and had cut the time by 1/18! A process that took 45 minutes now only took 2-3 minutes! And this was for a process (opening or saving a file) that they did 5-10 times a day! We estimated that the upgrade paid for itself in the first week!:)
And the very best part was, 3 months after we finished that, they bought the new server, anyway. Once they saw the tremendous performance improvement, they could *justify* the expense: they were getting so much more work done! (And I ended up putting in a more capable, IBM-brand server for $10,000!).
So, long story short: profile before you optimize.
You have this backwards. Virtual Server is similar to GSX, the non-dedicated VM server software that ran on Windows or Linux. ESX is the dedicated VM server software that runs on its own operating system, and costs boatloads of money.
A writer like Shakespeare was a composer of the highest order. Programming may be abstract and creative, but in the grand scheme of things, to promote it as more creative than the great written works of civilization is laughable.
This is rediculous.
The parent says that programming is like writing or composing. You jump to Shakespeare. Where did he say that *all* programmers are *better* than the *greatest* English writer in the history of time? Could one of the most creative, elegant programmers of all time achieve a level of art greater than that of, say, a dimestore novelist? If so, then his premise is correct.
*How* correct is a matter of opinion. I too feel that computer programming is an art on par with poetry: a highly structured expression that can create a powerful result. In the case of poetry, the result is an emotional response. In the case of code, it's an actual, physical, usable product. Which is more important? More valuable? Depends on the circumstances. But should code be looked upon as lesser because it doesn't immediately cause an *emotional* response?
How about a comparison to music? Some composers write symphonies. Some composers write jingles. Some composers write 3 chords and distortion. You're telling me that *all* of this embodies more artistic expression than is *ever* possible with code? If not, then again, the parent's point is valid: code can be as artistic as music. Not that code is *always* *more* artistic than music.
My wife and I use RPS to determine things *all* the time.
Sometimes they're little things: who has to get up out of bed and turn off the TV when we can't find the remote, or who has to go out in the middle of a rainstorm and get food. Sometimes they're larger things: Where are we going to go on vacation?
We don't use it quite as much now as we did when we were first married (over 9 years ago). Not because we don't think it is effective; rather, because I win probably 70% of the time...:)
I've been impressed with 7's reliability. The client is virtually indistinguishable from 6.5, but it is a little faster and mroe stable. Now, we're grading on a a *bit* of a curve here, but it's probably the best Notes client I've used, ever.
Yes, Outlook 3003 is prettier. It will *always* be prettier. But Notes 7 is extremely usable.
Slashdot Mirror
From the review of FF2: Tab Tweaks.
I've also found that this extension works fine with FF2: Tab Minus.
Small,and does the job perfectly. This was my single-biggest hassle with FF2. I do not understand how quasi-randomly moving the location of an item I use ALL the time is supposed to make things more efficient. Especially when you've opened up a bunch of images or documents in separate tabs and want to quickly scan through them looking for someting. Your eyes have to bounce around the screen, finding the stupid close button.
The old mechanism seemed to work better for that: put your mouse on the close button, and now you can focus on the *data*, not finding the button over and over... With the extension, you don't have to choose: they're both avaiable. Works for me.
I too am suspicious of a graph that shows a very clear trend for a couple of decades, then shows a significant drop virtually at the exact moment the graph goes from showing historical data to showing projections.
That doesn't make his projections wrong, but it's going to take more than pretty graphs to make me believe it.
+1 Funny?
They won't upgrade from where they are until there's a compelling reason. However, at some point, they will need to upgrade. When they do, we'll upgrade to the latest, and hopefully get 6 more years without major upgrades. If we upgraded to XP, that would cut our possible window for future upgrades in half.
I still keep hoping that there will be realistic alternatives such as OS X or Linux. However, it really isn't even close yet. Maybe in a fully Terminal Server'ed configuration, but then there aren't really any major cost savings to be gotten, so why? I keep hoping, though... :)
How so? The volume issue doesn't make sense: whatever volume buying and warranty reductions you get on notebooks you would get on desktops, so it doesn't make one better than the other. The overall cost of the notebooks may be closer to desktops in an absolute sense, but unlikely not dramatically in a relative sense.
Therefore, I would assume that the value you get is in areas not related to the dollars and cents of acquiring and maintaing the machines. Would you care to share some of them?
From my personal experience, I have not seen dramatic productivity gains from giving users notebooks rather than desktops. Just the opposite, in fact: I see computers used as home computers, with all of the negative results that that usually connotes. I see computers that get plugged into every random network connection they can find, and then those same computers get dragged back into the office. Or, that never leave the desk, and become overpriced, underpowered desktops!
While it does give the users the ability to possibly work from home or some other remote location, we find that giving the users access to a Terminal Server gives them the vast majority of the benefits of a notebook computer (access to their office e-mail and files, internal systems, etc.) without the majority of support issues. They can't actually work while "on the road" (unless they use a floater notebook), but they are rarely not able to get in front of a computer enough to run a TS session--especially at home, where they already have a computer!
I would love to know more about the benefits you see in your organization. Most of our clients are small: under 100 computers. In those situations, we just haven't seen any type of reward to justify the difference in cost. Your average notebook is twice the price to buy, twice the price to upgrade, and lasts half as long. That's a lot of expense to overcome from our perspective! :)
So you pay, at a minimum, $600 for that copy of Office. The only way that SA would cost you less is if you upgrade Office every 2 years or less. And exactly how much money would you spend to stay on *that* upgrade treadmill? Why would you even *want* to do that, even if the software were "free"?
I'd believe that with notebooks. I can *easily* get 4-5 years out of a desktop, but notebooks just plain *break* after 3 years: the battery goes, the LCD inverter goes, the case starts to crack (*especially* if it's a Dell), the keyboard is funky at least, and I've probably filled the available memory slots and therefore have to throw away RAM to upgrade.
Unless you *really* need the porability frequently (therefore making a "floating" laptop a hassle), notebooks are a *very* expensive way to outfit an office. There's a reason why the 3-year onsite warranty for a Thinkpad is almost double that of a desktop...
It's funny. *Most* of my clients have made *exactly* the same call regarding XP and 2000. Many of them are running purely Windows 2000--no XP at all, and they will skip XP completely, and we've managed to save them from an *entire* needless upgrade cycle.
I just wish that we could position Linux as a realistic upgrade path from 2000. But unfortunately, it looks like it'll be Vista (but not before middle/end of 2007 at the soonest).
Just *yesterday* I was looking for *exactly* the same thing: a way to hook up a Gumstix to a display. I would like to use it for a home automation project.
If you use one of the appropriate expansion boards, you can interface a Gumstix to a variety of raw LCD panels: there's even X Windows drivers for it. However, there's nothing for TV out (composite, for example), and there is nothing for VGA out.
The cheapest LCD touch screen I could find is $56 bucks. Then you still have to buy a controller board and LCD interface (about $150 from Gumstix), and a case, cables, etc. It adds up quick.
The more research I do, the more likely I am to do it with Palms: where else can you get a color LCD with touch screen, 200MHz processor, 32MB RAM, etc. for under $100? Palm Z22
I'd love to hear from someone with a better idea... :)
This sounds very much made up to write an article.
Having said that, I have tried to find kid's programming books for my 8-year-old daughter. I started learning computer programming at 8 using my Commodore VIC-20 manual. It had a little cartoon computer character that led you through BASIC programming from the typical 10 PRINT "TIM" 20 GOTO 10 all the way to "advanced" games. As a kid, I absolutely loved it.
However, I have been able to find *nothing* like that for her... Any thoughts out there?
Second: Notes for Mac.
Third: Notes for *Linux*. And it's Eclipse-based.
And they're all 7.0-level clients. The Linux client is actually a preview of the 8.0 Notes client (called Hanover)! So, no need for sympathy! :)
It's probably too late to reply to this...
Yes, the UM research stuff. I haven't had any bugs that I've noticed. I'm running FX 1.5.0.6 or so, and haven't seen anything that led me to believe that something was wrong. The stupid control box is kind of ugly and weird, but once I figured out a decent set of settings, it's worked well.
There are two things I really like about it: the ability to quickly open and close posts that I want to read, but aren't on the screen fully, and the ability to close an entire tree that's branched into something off-topic. For example, I can quickly close the entire tree that will be talking about DRM on every story, no matter how unrelated it might be! :)
Part of the need for that is the fact that I tend to have very low standards for what I allow to be fully displayed. Basically, anything that's at 1 or higher is expanded, and anything besides -1's that are even remotely attached to something that's been modded up. That means that the majority of comments are shown fully, and the remaining ones show at least a sentence. So the ability to collapse parts of the tree that have spun out of control is big.
As for the comment about paragraph tags: I'm talking about paragraph breaks in Slashdot. I used to just throw a <P> at the end of the paragraph, like pressing . But that won't work since the CSS redo. Now I actually have to include my text in matching P tags. That's annoying, and I inevitably miss some. I guess I can just enter a double-<BR>... Not a terribly big deal, I guess...Our company uses LEAF in a number of our customers' firewalls. Is your GUI code available for use with "real" LEAF/Shorewall configurations?
We've used Webconf in a *very* limited number of sites. As a rule, our philosophy is that any kind of remote access to a firewall is more risk than we want. However, I would be *very* interested in seeing how your scripts work, and what you have to have open on the LEAF box. If it's less risky than running an HTTP server, it would be something we would consider.
Of course, it would have been nice to see it in something like, say, Python instead of .NET, but beggars can't be choosers! :)
If you use VMWare heavily, I'm sure you're running ESX, but I'll ask you anyway:
Can you (or anyone else) tell me the recommended way to back up your virtual machines with VMWare Server? All of the documentation I've found talks about ESX Server. They give you 2 choices: 1) Run backup software *inside* of the VM and back it up like any other machine, or 2) Back up the VM files directly. In the case of ESX, you use the Perl API to set up a redo log, but AFAIK that's not possible with Server. Without that, how would I be sure that the image is intact, and not in an unsuable state, especially when backing up multi-gigabyte files will take a while, all the while the VM might be making changes?
I know VMWare needs a carrot to get people to spend the big bucks, but it seems to me there should be *some* way of being able to back up VM images under Server without worrying about them changing while you're backing them up... Does anyone have any suggestions?
They're working on it.
I'm participating in an AJAX adaptation of /.'s comment page. It has some functionality for controlling exactly which comments are visible and not. Seeing as I browse at a pretty low level already (not -1, but close), these features have been uninspring for me. But the ability to click on a collapsed comment and get it to come up, or to collapse an entire tree that's spiralled out of control without having to refresh the entire page is *gold*.
P.S.: Does anyone know of a way to get a paragraph break without wrapping the entire paragraph in <P> and </P> tags?
Never mind...
I had a very similar experience with a client in 1997 or so. They had an old file server: dual Pentium 133's running Windows NT 3.51 with 6 hot-swap SCSI drives in RAID-5. It would take approximately 45 minutes for a designer to open a single file (about 1GB in size). Their previous consultants told them that their server was hopelessly out-of-date (which it was) and that they needed a new file server: $15,000, please.
I came and did some profiling on their server. Their CPU utilization was about 30% and even their disk utilization was relatively low: they weren't even using the hardware they had! Turns out that they had two hubs: a high-end 10MBit switch with 2 100MBit uplinks, and a 12-port 100Mbit *hub*. This was at a point where 100Mbit switching was very expensive, and Gigabit was fiber-only.
So, we replaced the hub with a Cisco 2924M-XL switch. Instantly the designers were getting a 6x improvement, for only $3500 or so. Further profiling on the server showed that we had *still* not maxed out disk performance: the 6 drives could *easily* pump out the 10MB/s necessary to satuate a full 100Mbit connection, so we decided to go Gigabit by adding a module on the Cisco and a Gigabit . That alone tripled the performance *again*, with their exact same hopelessly old server! And we had spent less than $5000.
If the previous clients would have replaced the old server, my estimation is that things would have run at best about 15% faster: that's all that the old server was adding to the process. When I was done, we had spent 1/3 as much, and had cut the time by 1/18! A process that took 45 minutes now only took 2-3 minutes! And this was for a process (opening or saving a file) that they did 5-10 times a day! We estimated that the upgrade paid for itself in the first week! :)
And the very best part was, 3 months after we finished that, they bought the new server, anyway. Once they saw the tremendous performance improvement, they could *justify* the expense: they were getting so much more work done! (And I ended up putting in a more capable, IBM-brand server for $10,000!).
So, long story short: profile before you optimize.
Oh, and *always* use SCSI! :)
You have this backwards. Virtual Server is similar to GSX, the non-dedicated VM server software that ran on Windows or Linux. ESX is the dedicated VM server software that runs on its own operating system, and costs boatloads of money.
This is a decendent of TransHab: the article you linked to discusses that. Bigelow bought the rights to the design, and Genesis was born.
What was the question again?
This is rediculous.
The parent says that programming is like writing or composing. You jump to Shakespeare. Where did he say that *all* programmers are *better* than the *greatest* English writer in the history of time? Could one of the most creative, elegant programmers of all time achieve a level of art greater than that of, say, a dimestore novelist? If so, then his premise is correct.
*How* correct is a matter of opinion. I too feel that computer programming is an art on par with poetry: a highly structured expression that can create a powerful result. In the case of poetry, the result is an emotional response. In the case of code, it's an actual, physical, usable product. Which is more important? More valuable? Depends on the circumstances. But should code be looked upon as lesser because it doesn't immediately cause an *emotional* response?
How about a comparison to music? Some composers write symphonies. Some composers write jingles. Some composers write 3 chords and distortion. You're telling me that *all* of this embodies more artistic expression than is *ever* possible with code? If not, then again, the parent's point is valid: code can be as artistic as music. Not that code is *always* *more* artistic than music.
I see the same thing happening at Dell with Linux when you target it at Joe End User...
Sometimes they're little things: who has to get up out of bed and turn off the TV when we can't find the remote, or who has to go out in the middle of a rainstorm and get food. Sometimes they're larger things: Where are we going to go on vacation?
We don't use it quite as much now as we did when we were first married (over 9 years ago). Not because we don't think it is effective; rather, because I win probably 70% of the time... :)
I've been impressed with 7's reliability. The client is virtually indistinguishable from 6.5, but it is a little faster and mroe stable. Now, we're grading on a a *bit* of a curve here, but it's probably the best Notes client I've used, ever.
Yes, Outlook 3003 is prettier. It will *always* be prettier. But Notes 7 is extremely usable.