Yes, IMHO, this is a UI "mistake" in Firefox 3 Beta 3 - the home button is clearly a navigation button and not a bookmark (if it was a bookmark, it should be in the Bookmarks menu (or one of the bookmark folders), which it certainly wasn't for Firefox 2). Luckily you can customise this:
1. Switch on your bookmarks toolbar with View -> Toolbars -> Bookmarks Toolbar (as you can guess, I have my toolbar permanently switched off - you've got a Bookmarks menu, what the freak do you need a bookmarks toolbar for *as well*?!).
2. Right click on the menu bar and select "Customise..." to bring up the customisation dialogue box.
3. You should hopefully be able to drag the Home icon from the Bookmarks Toolbar to the Navigation Toolbar (if not, drag it to the Customisation dialogue box first).
Got to say all of that is totally non-intuitive to the average user - why do you need the Customise dialogue box up first? Direct drag-n-drop without the dialogue box would be much better, although I suspect that it would be too easy for clumsy users to accidentally re-arrange their icons by mistake then...
Can I point you to CentOS? Based on RHEL, which itself is based on Fedora (albeit a few releases behind), a 7-year support cycle using the same source/binaries that RHEL does and 100% free? Think of Fedora being ultimately a preview of what CentOS will release in 18-24 months' time.
At work, I've standardised on CentOS 5 on both desktops and servers for the very reason that core software will be updated for free for years. It's not completely hassle-free on the desktop - several important packages have to be hand-updated because CentOS won't jump major versions of any package in order to maintain stability. So I manually update Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org to keep those current, but it's a small price to pay.
Just tried one of Hulu's videos thanks to earlier posting by smart2000. No shock that here in the UK, I get the predictable message:
Unfortunately this video is not currently available in your region. We apologize for the inconvenience.
So they'll let me browse the Web site with my UK IP, even let me sign up to the private beta with my UK IP, they'll let me load in the flash video viewer with my UK IP (none of this has warnings to say "go way you UK person"), only to be brought to a halt when I actually try play the video. Nice work there, Hulu.
Yet again US TV companies have no clue when it comes it streaming their content to non-US viewers, so it's off to "other locations on the Net" to get a higher quality, ad-free, non-DRM'ed version of the show within 24 hours of airing...
I remain a bit unconvinced that calendaring should be built into a mail client as standard, but that's exactly why there's extensions available for Thunderbird for the (I suspect minority) who need such a calendaring feature. I'll point you to the Lightning download page: a calendar Thunderbird extension (based on Sunbird) no less. Yes, it's numbered 0.5 at the moment (and there's a 0.7RC1 which you can try if you need newer features), but it's been developed for more than 18 months now and is fairly usable.
Seems to me you're looking at old Oracle pricing w.r.t. cores - back in February this year, Oracle revised it because they were getting hammered by competitors' per-socket licensing.
If you have 1 or 2 CPUs (i.e. you typically run "Standard Edition One" Oracle which limits you to 2 CPU sockets anyway), you are only charged per CPU *socket*, regardless of the number of cores per CPU - here's the details from the horse's mouth.
So a quad core single CPU server will set you back about 3,000 pounds + VAT in the UK in Oracle licencing (note: you've infuriatingly got to add 22% annual updates/support onto the base price - this is a con...you can't just buy annual updates with no support any more [used to be only 6% of purchase price...]).
Oh and in the first year, you can go to an Oracle reseller, who will typically roughly discount the updates/support (about 20%) and that discount is carried through to later years [which slightly strangely are handled by Oracle, not the reseller...].
6 months ago, I was finalising my choice for a laptop - I wanted a Core 2 Duo with a 15.4" screen, didn't care about the OS (was going to put Fedora on whatever I got) and had around 500 pounds (now $1000) to spend. I had a look at the Apple UK site and was totally horrified at the UK pricing of their laptops! The basic entry-level Apple laptop (yes, a Macbook, not a Macbook Pro) was 1,000 pounds ($2000) in the UK and was approximately the same spec as non-Apple laptops at half that price.
Strangely, since then, I can't see any 15" Macbooks any more on the Apple UK site, so if I want a 15" Macbook, we're now talking a minimum of 1300 pounds ($2,600) for the lowest priced Macbook Pro - totally mad!
Needless to say, I settled on a non-Apple laptop and got an Acer (who are very strong in Europe and only just behind HP in European PC/laptop sales now) for under 500 pounds - very happy with it too.
The "2 to 5 seconds" to change the channels on Freeview is nothing to do with decoding times or slow processors in the Freeview set-top boxes. Nope, it's simply because there's more than 9 channels and the channels can indeed be numbered up to 999, which means that up to 3 digits have to be pressed to change channel.
As anyone with a cable or satellite remote control already knows, multi-digit channel numbering means that if you want to hop non-sequentially between channels and the channel numbers are only one or two digits, then the set-top box will pause for a second or so to see if you are adding the second or third digit. If you don't, then it assume that the digits entered so far are the complete channel number and then jump to it.
This is why many Freeview remotes have a "channel plus" and "channel minus" button to get around this problem for channel surfers - just press that to cycle sequentially through the Freeview channels with no digit-delays. I find channel changing to be about one second on the Freeview and IDTV sets using the +/- buttons on the remote, which is OK (but I could believe slower boxes might take 2 seconds, but certainly not 5).
Channels not nicely numbered to allow such +/- surfing? Again, many Freeview boxes/sets allow you to reorder the channel numbering to your preference (e.g. I can only get Welsh Freeview, which insists on putting S4C on channel 4 and English Channel 4 on channel 8, so I swap those over!) and, even better, let you delete channels completely, which I do for all the pay channels, shopping channels etc.
I recently bought an Acer laptop which came with a FAT32 recovery partition and two FAT32 main partitions (one for the Windows OS, the other for data - don't ask me why they ship Windows in FAT32 format - Acer are on drugs, if you ask me). Here's what I did:
1. I attached an external 250GB USB drive, then set the BIOS to boot from the internal DVD drive. I'd put a Linux shell script I'd written to do partition backups on the external drive beforehand.
2. I booted from an Ubuntu live CD, having *never* booted into Windows beforehand. I then ran my backup script from the live CD environment and played several games whilst doing so (gotta love that full live desktop setup). The script dumped bzip'ed copies of the three partitions, plus the MBR and the sfdisk-gen'ed partition layout (and, yes, the script can read all that back and restore - I tested that later on).
3. I then ran the partition editor from Ubuntu and wiped all the partitions off - you seem to have create a small NTFS partition at the start of the disk (Vista won't install onto the first partition, strangely enough), your main Vista NTFS partition as the second one and then the remaining partitions for Linux.
4. You then boot into the Vista installer and plonk Vista on the second NTFS partiton.
5. Finally, you boot back into the Ubuntu live CD and install Ubuntu on the third partition onwards (you may need to go into extended partitions).
When you're done, you have a dual boot system so you can tell your laptop's OEM that you really are running Windows and you'll also have a restorable copy of partitions to wipe your custom install back to factory-new (better than the recovery partition software can do it!), so that they won't know Linux was ever on it should you need to return the laptop...
I can't understand why you're trying to get the design tools that are certified against RHEL 3 and 4 to work in Fedora! Why not use CentOS? It's free and is a near-identical clone of RHEL (only differences are any references to Red Hat and its logos, both of which are trademarked). And, yes, you can install binary kernel drivers intended for RHEL onto equivalent CentOS machines without any compatibility issues.
Funny, whenever my company orders Dell Poweredge servers with the no OS option, that's all I have do (how you can have a "Linux configuration" when there's no OS shipped with it?). Slap on CentOS 4.4 and you have an enterprise level OS (a clone of RHEL 4) for no extra cost. And, yes, the Poweredge hardware is fully supported by the enterprise Linux distros in case you're wondering.
A quick check shows that the "No OS, RHEL $0" and "No OS, Windows $0" options are only on the US www.dell.com site. If you go via the UK www.dell.co.uk site you far more sensibly just get a single "Not included [included in price]" no-cost/no-OS option.
I run an unofficial UK lottery site at http://lottery.merseyworld.com/ which again will probably have a fairly wide demographic and although Firefox usage (slightly boosted by a JavaScript promo link I put in at the bottom of pages) has now reached its highest ever (10.9%), it's been there for months and isn't rising any more.
You suspect that the honeymoon period is now over and it's not picking up large number of new converts any more (and Firefox 2 isn't a big enough leap to change that, IMHO - it's not until Firefox 3 that we'll see another usage spike I suspect). Still, if it stays above 10%, at least Web designers can't ignore it - we *need* a rival to IE that has such a level of market share otherwise the Web will be balkanised as a "works best in Windows/IE" like it was before Mozilla and then Firefox came along.
I must confess that I didn't know US law allows you to sue a "John Doe" where not only their real identity isn't known, but even their *citzenship* (yes, they might not be American) is possibly in doubt.
Also, if Microsoft can't prove that "Viodentia" had access to Microsoft source code (which presumably breaks the law if he/she did - hence the lawsuit), then can Viodentia sue Microsoft for libel? Also, if Microsoft is allowed to sue this John Doe called "Viodentia", then can Viodentia sue Microsoft whilst remaining a John Doe anonymous litigator? If not, then isn't the law very one-sided on this issue where one party is unknown?
Is it just me or is this lawsuit verging on the absolutely ludicrous? Do other countries allow people to sue unknown parties?
If you read the second paragraph very carefully, you can see that the article author actually doesn't refer to just the server market when talking about numbers of Mac OS X machines - he's actually talking about the combined server *and desktop* sales of Mac OS X. That second paragraph actually hides a multitude of sins:
* Refers to "commercial Linux" when it's quite likely the number of non-commercial Linux installs far outweighs the number of commercial Linux installs out there (obviously difficult to get numbers on the former to prove or disprove this though, but free vs. paid for very similar products would logically suggest that more people would install the free version than the paid one).
* Again "rate of revenue growth" is a debatable one - Red Hat in particular has been showing quite nice revenue growth rates, but it's starting from a smaller revenue stream than Apple of course. It's difficult to quantify this when so few desktops come pre-installed with Linux and it's actually possible to buy OS-less servers (yes, even from Dell) and install a free Linux on them later.
* More references to "Apple systems" rather than specifically servers only (servers are where Linux is currently completely and utterly dominating Apple with no current sign of the gap narrowing, which is why the author is loathe to split desktops and servers up in his grand announcement, because he knows Apple are very weak on server sales and quite strong on desktop sales).
* And to hammer the point home again, the final sentence includes "Apple UNIX" vs. "Commercial Linux" and "client and server computing platform". It's using sleight of hand to do such comparisons - leaving out non-commercial Linux and a proper client vs. client / server vs. server comparison.
Overall, his pronouncement was smoke and mirrors - Apple has a *long* way to go even to rival commercial Linux installs on servers (let alone the likely even higher number of non-commercial Linux server installs). Yes, Mac OS X desktops do outsell Linux desktops, but that's only because virtually no OEM pre-installs Linux at the moment, so getting true figures on Linux [of any type] penetration in the market is quite tough.
...I've got to say that this long-winded dragout of the next Linux version of Flash Player (hey, isn't both 8 final and 9 beta out for Windows already - neither of which we've seen in *any form* for Linux?) is getting rather tiresome. Sadly, the current Linux Flash development "team" (who is involved exactly in writing the Linux-specific code? The article doesn't really spell it out - you do suspect only one person has been assigned to do that and Adobe don't want to publicly admit that) haven't helped by spinning things out with their blog.
I find it amazing that "obvious" steps haven't been taken by the Linux Flash team, namely:
* Some sort of release schedule announcement - don't care if it slips by a few weeks here and there.
* A set of pre-releases (heck, have them time-bomb out if you don't want them being used in the long-term) coming out to showcase its current alpha/beta/RC status. Note here - Windows gets beta releases, why can't Linux?! It's utterly shameful there is no pre-release version for Linux, especially since the latest Linux Flash blog entries brag how stable the player now is at all the major sites it's been tested on!
* A definitive statement on whether they'll support 64-bit (i.e. "it'll be released at the same time as the 32-bit version" or "it'll be released X months after the 32-bit version" or "it'll never be released"). Sadly, Adobe are somewhat pig-ignorant w.r.t. the 64-bit platform and don't even have a 64-bit version for XP!
* Explain the exact differences between, say, Windows Flash 9 and Linux Flash 9 - there's some woolly stuff on this in the article really. After all this time in incubation, you'd have thought that the two platforms would have identical version 9 players, but I wouldn't it past Adobe to release a half-baked Linux Flash 9 player, since they have not yet demonstrated to anyone at all that they take Linux seriously (does the word "vapourware" mean anything to Adobe? That's exactly what Flash 8/9 on Linux currently are).
* Start a merge of the Linux development environment and the Windows one, so that ultimately they work from the same codebase to avoid the ridiculous delays in platform releases we've seen in the past. It's not clear to me if the Linux effort is fragmented - have we been told how much code is common on all platforms and how much is specific to Linux (and how they keep the specific code to a minimum)?
* Open Source the player! If Adobe have coded the entire player in-house (which I believe they have), then why not Open Source it...it's a free download after all! Even if they've patented some methods used in the source code, they own the patents and the copyright on the source code, so that shouldn't stop them open-sourcing it surely? Just exactly what is Adobe's objection to open sourcing the player? Sheer bloody-mindedness?
For what's supposed to be an "accessible" search engine
page, Google
have made pitiful efforts to even bother validating the
XHTML (yes it has DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Transitional).
Check out the W3C's validation of it - 8 errors, including some outrageous typos like "bgtcolor" instead of "bgcolor" and no closing slashes (required for XHTML) in their <br> tags.
I find it amazing that Google would tout such an search engine on its accessibility merits when it doesn't even validate due to blatant errors that are easily fixable.
Ever since I've been alive, television in the UK has *never* been free and I'm not talking about the "obvious" case of advertisements funding the media. In the UK, every household with a television has to pay an annual television license (and several other European countries are similar). This funds the BBC and allows it to run with no advertisements across all its properties (hence why the BBC Website is ad-free for example, though that's about to change with the "international version" I believe).
For a long time, the UK TV license also covered radio as well, but I'm not sure that's the case now (i.e. if you have a radio, but no TV, you no longer need a license). So that's not always been free either. If you really must go on about "free television and radio", please qualify it with the country you're talking about and, of course, feel free to ignore how they aren't actually free anyway (advertisements/sponsors fund them, which ultimate comes out of the public's pocket).
Cheapest I've seen on the Net is ev1servers.net at $14.95 (about 8.50 pounds for UK folks). It works with almost all browsers, except for users running IE 5.0 or older that haven't upgraded the latest root certificate via Windows Update.
What I did is write a script that scanned the access logs for IE 5.0 or older and displayed the percentage of such browsers - when it dipped below 0.1% (which it has already for about half the sites we manage), we switched from Verisign to the ev1servers.net secure cert and saved, wait for it, over 250 pounds per certificate!
I got the CVS cop-out from the cscope maintainer
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Saying it's fixed in CVS is fine, providing there's regular releases afterwards with those CVS fixes in. I reported a problem with cscope to the maintainers of that package (resizing the window causes the application to exit immediately - a pretty major flaw for a stable release) and was told that "this was fixed a long time ago in CVS". Yes, I even sent them a one-line fix (ignore SIGWINCH signal) as a temporary measure too, so I did try to get them to fix their stable version without having to roll out the CVS-based one instead.
Now, yes, they do have regular CVS snapshots I could try (which they actually warn against using!), but the most frustrating thing is that the last stable release - containing this crashing bug they've known about (and already fixed!) for potentially years - was in September 2003, which is *far* too long to go without rolling in CVS fixes and producing a new stable release.
If developers don't regularly release new stable versions (at least every 6-12 months), then it's discouraging to end-users to even bother reporting fixes - it gives the impression that the project is dead and you won't see a new version for years, if ever.
The problem, yet again, is that most users are "scared" to install an OS from scratch, whether it be XP, Mac OS X or Linux. Hence, this reviewer is comparing a pre-installed Windows system (note he went for an "upgrade" to XP, not an install-from-scratch) with Linux DIY installs. OEMs pile shed-loads of "missing" software with their pre-installed Windows and do testing of their hardware and common peripherals with said pre-install. The same isn't true of most Linux distros (yes, Linspire do this to some extent, but they're the exception to the rule).
I've been through both the XP installer and *many* Linux distro installers from scratch many times and Linux is clearly winning the battle of the installers now. Even the Vista installer doesn't improves things much (in fact, did you know you can't install Vista on top of an ext3-formatted partition? That's done deliberately by MS I reckon - early Vista betas could, but the later ones now don't).
After a from-scratch XP installation, you're left with Wordpad, Paint, IE (arrgh!), Notepad, MSN Messenger and Outlook Express - all *horrible* examples of each of their genre. Out of the box, XP has no office suite, no Photoshop-type program, no programming tools whatsoever, no out-of-the-box support for playing DVDs (yes, the OEM may have installed a DVD player with codecs on your machine, but vanilla XP doesn't!), no anti-virus tools (ironically, you get those for Linux as part of an install when it doesn't really need them unless Linux is config'ed as a mail server for other Windows users) and a weak firewall.
XP has very little support out-of-the-box for modern hardware due to being 5 years old - almost every piece of hardware you buy requires an additonal driver CD (often out-of-date and buggy - forcing you to download a more recent one off each of the manufacturers' Websites). XP also has no central update facility for *all* the software (OS, drivers and applications) you have installed on your system and not every app has auto-update checking built in either to compensate for this major shortcoming.
What XP does excel in is being pre-installed by OEMs (who are locked into volume discount schemes they're terrified of losing if they "upset" Microsoft) and having a lot of games available for it, which is why - along with the dreadful "Teletubbies" default XP theme, I consider XP to primarily be a toy OS. Vista? Well, that's looking like a "shinier Teletubbies" version of XP to me...
The final release of Fedora Core 5 has, at long last, fixed the frankly bewildering lack of Firefox 1.5X and Thunderbird 1.5 in the distro. Yes, that's right - despite Fedora Core 4 still being a supported platform and OpenOffice.org 2.X being released for it, the Fedora developers steadfastly refused to upgrade Firefox or Thunderbird to the 1.5 release.
"Ah, but you can always build the Rawhide release on FC4" I hear you cry - sorry, bzzt, neither Firefox nor Thunderbird 1.5 will build without some mods of the respective Rawhide.src.rpm files. A very poor showing from Fedora devs there - let's happily jump to OO.org 2.X in the middle of FC4, but not go up a minor version of Firefox/Thunderbird during the same period.
In the end, I lost patience and packaged up the original mozilla.com binary.tar.gz's into RPMs using Thomas Cheung's Firefox/Thunderbird instructions, but I really shouldn't have to do this!
What I really don't like about Writely (apart from the fact that you really don't want to upload/type in anything confidential into it!) is that it makes a big deal about security:
* Home page says "Store your documents securely online."
So if it's so secure, why isn't SSL used *anywhere* on the site? The even more strange thing is that there is a secure cert on the site at https://www.writely.com/ but nothing actually links to it...ho hum. Yes, you can indeed login via SSL if you want - apparently they're worried about server load if they made SSL the default... Maybe with the Google infrastructure behind them, they can turn on SSL by default?
I use Grip myself too to rip my CD collection (done about 800 so far), but the big problems with this are:
1. Some CDs I have aren't in CDDB, so you have to stop the rip, type the track names, artist and album name in manually and restart the rip again, deleting any "NoArtist/NoTitle" files created by the "empty rip".
2. Some CDs (particularly CD singles) are recognised as entirely different CDs - I suspect this is where the CD ID isn't in CDDB, so it falls back to using track lengths to match a CD. This especially painful when you end up with a Japanese CD single that creates 8-bit filenames...
3. A sadly common problem is where the CD is in CDDB, but the CD title and track titles are misspelled or missing, involving a lot of file renaming later on if you don't spot it before Grip gets to the track(s) involved.
Hence, even "automated" solutions involving big jukeboxes or robot arms will need manual intervention. As other responses have said, pay one or two people to do it (having 2 or 3 PCs available would help speed things up w.r.t. waiting the 5 mins for the rip to finish).
I bought an Acer T140 PC last year and it came with an analogue TV tuner card that I've never hooked up to any aerial or bothered to run any software against (the room I have the PC in doesn't even have an analogue aerial). So the idea of taxing TV tuner cards doesn't work in all scenarios either, particularly when it's bundled with a PC (if you bought it separately then, yes, you're far more likely to use it).
I usually have my Windows "sound effects" all turned off, so when I installed IE7 beta 2 preview, I noticed an irritating "click" noise coming from my speakers whenever I clicked on a link, eventually driving me insane. It turns out IE7 re-enables the Windows Explorer sound effect for Start Navigation that I probably turned off years ago and hoped never to hear again.
Fixed it by selecting Control Panel -> Sounds and Multimedia -> Sounds -> Windows Explorer -> Start Navigation and then using the Name: pop-up menu to select "(None)". Does *anyone* use IE with that sound effect turned on and not go psycho after about a dozen pages?
I must say that it is fun to keep reloading the "Popular" Google Video page and loading in the interesting-looking free videos. Some of them are very well done, although there's some blatant copyright infringement going on (plenty of TV show clips and music video clips in there!). The fact that their Flash player works cross-platform for video and sound (yes, even on Linux!) is very impressive too.
However, the paid video stuff is a total embarrassment and arguably the worst thing that Google have ever released in their entire history. It's overpriced, not available outside of North America in many cases [yes, Google blocks some paid content to non-US/Canadian countries!], DRM-restricted (often with "you can only watch for a day" limits too!), requires Windows, can't be viewed offline (online streaming only), is often "old" material and is annoyingly mixed in the "Popular" page with the free ones (are you *seriously* telling me that the most popular paid ones are loaded anywhere near as many times as the most popular free ones?).
Apart from the utterly lousy presentation/DRM/etc. of the Google Video paid material, there's not much of it either (I mean, one episode of CSI so far for $1.99 - one-day pass on Windows only, blocked to European users (!!) and you've got to be online and can't copy it to any other device? How many times can you say "WTF?!"?).
And, of course, we can't go without mentioning BitTorrent/P2P - which is the #1 rival to *any* paid video streaming business. We're seeing downloadable, DRM-free, HD/widescreen, DivX-encoded TV content literally 2 or so hours after the programme finishes. I know which one I'd prefer to see (and if it could be done legally, I'd be willing to subscribe on a per-month basis).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, IMHO, this is a UI "mistake" in Firefox 3 Beta 3 - the home button is clearly a navigation button and not a bookmark (if it was a bookmark, it should be in the Bookmarks menu (or one of the bookmark folders), which it certainly wasn't for Firefox 2). Luckily you can customise this:
1. Switch on your bookmarks toolbar with View -> Toolbars -> Bookmarks Toolbar (as you can guess, I have my toolbar permanently switched off - you've got a Bookmarks menu, what the freak do you need a bookmarks toolbar for *as well*?!).
2. Right click on the menu bar and select "Customise..." to bring up the customisation dialogue box.
3. You should hopefully be able to drag the Home icon from the Bookmarks Toolbar to the Navigation Toolbar (if not, drag it to the Customisation dialogue box first).
Got to say all of that is totally non-intuitive to the average user - why do you need the Customise dialogue box up first? Direct drag-n-drop without the dialogue box would be much better, although I suspect that it would be too easy for clumsy users to accidentally re-arrange their icons by mistake then...
At work, I've standardised on CentOS 5 on both desktops and servers for the very reason that core software will be updated for free for years. It's not completely hassle-free on the desktop - several important packages have to be hand-updated because CentOS won't jump major versions of any package in order to maintain stability. So I manually update Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org to keep those current, but it's a small price to pay.
Unfortunately this video is not currently available in your region. We apologize for the inconvenience.
So they'll let me browse the Web site with my UK IP, even let me sign up to the private beta with my UK IP, they'll let me load in the flash video viewer with my UK IP (none of this has warnings to say "go way you UK person"), only to be brought to a halt when I actually try play the video. Nice work there, Hulu.
Yet again US TV companies have no clue when it comes it streaming their content to non-US viewers, so it's off to "other locations on the Net" to get a higher quality, ad-free, non-DRM'ed version of the show within 24 hours of airing...
I remain a bit unconvinced that calendaring should be built into a mail client as standard, but that's exactly why there's extensions available for Thunderbird for the (I suspect minority) who need such a calendaring feature. I'll point you to the Lightning download page: a calendar Thunderbird extension (based on Sunbird) no less. Yes, it's numbered 0.5 at the moment (and there's a 0.7RC1 which you can try if you need newer features), but it's been developed for more than 18 months now and is fairly usable.
If you have 1 or 2 CPUs (i.e. you typically run "Standard Edition One" Oracle which limits you to 2 CPU sockets anyway), you are only charged per CPU *socket*, regardless of the number of cores per CPU - here's the details from the horse's mouth.
So a quad core single CPU server will set you back about 3,000 pounds + VAT in the UK in Oracle licencing (note: you've infuriatingly got to add 22% annual updates/support onto the base price - this is a con...you can't just buy annual updates with no support any more [used to be only 6% of purchase price...]).
Oh and in the first year, you can go to an Oracle reseller, who will typically roughly discount the updates/support (about 20%) and that discount is carried through to later years [which slightly strangely are handled by Oracle, not the reseller...].
6 months ago, I was finalising my choice for a laptop - I wanted a Core 2 Duo with a 15.4" screen, didn't care about the OS (was going to put Fedora on whatever I got) and had around 500 pounds (now $1000) to spend. I had a look at the Apple UK site and was totally horrified at the UK pricing of their laptops! The basic entry-level Apple laptop (yes, a Macbook, not a Macbook Pro) was 1,000 pounds ($2000) in the UK and was approximately the same spec as non-Apple laptops at half that price.
Strangely, since then, I can't see any 15" Macbooks any more on the Apple UK site, so if I want a 15" Macbook, we're now talking a minimum of 1300 pounds ($2,600) for the lowest priced Macbook Pro - totally mad!
Needless to say, I settled on a non-Apple laptop and got an Acer (who are very strong in Europe and only just behind HP in European PC/laptop sales now) for under 500 pounds - very happy with it too.
The "2 to 5 seconds" to change the channels on Freeview is nothing to do with decoding times or slow processors in the Freeview set-top boxes. Nope, it's simply because there's more than 9 channels and the channels can indeed be numbered up to 999, which means that up to 3 digits have to be pressed to change channel.
As anyone with a cable or satellite remote control already knows, multi-digit channel numbering means that if you want to hop non-sequentially between channels and the channel numbers are only one or two digits, then the set-top box will pause for a second or so to see if you are adding the second or third digit. If you don't, then it assume that the digits entered so far are the complete channel number and then jump to it.
This is why many Freeview remotes have a "channel plus" and "channel minus" button to get around this problem for channel surfers - just press that to cycle sequentially through the Freeview channels with no digit-delays. I find channel changing to be about one second on the Freeview and IDTV sets using the +/- buttons on the remote, which is OK (but I could believe slower boxes might take 2 seconds, but certainly not 5).
Channels not nicely numbered to allow such +/- surfing? Again, many Freeview boxes/sets allow you to reorder the channel numbering to your preference (e.g. I can only get Welsh Freeview, which insists on putting S4C on channel 4 and English Channel 4 on channel 8, so I swap those over!) and, even better, let you delete channels completely, which I do for all the pay channels, shopping channels etc.
I recently bought an Acer laptop which came with a FAT32 recovery partition and two FAT32 main partitions (one for the Windows OS, the other for data - don't ask me why they ship Windows in FAT32 format - Acer are on drugs, if you ask me). Here's what I did:
1. I attached an external 250GB USB drive, then set the BIOS to boot from the internal DVD drive. I'd put a Linux shell script I'd written to do partition backups on the external drive beforehand.
2. I booted from an Ubuntu live CD, having *never* booted into Windows beforehand. I then ran my backup script from the live CD environment and played several games whilst doing so (gotta love that full live desktop setup). The script dumped bzip'ed copies of the three partitions, plus the MBR and the sfdisk-gen'ed partition layout (and, yes, the script can read all that back and restore - I tested that later on).
3. I then ran the partition editor from Ubuntu and wiped all the partitions off - you seem to have create a small NTFS partition at the start of the disk (Vista won't install onto the first partition, strangely enough), your main Vista NTFS partition as the second one and then the remaining partitions for Linux.
4. You then boot into the Vista installer and plonk Vista on the second NTFS partiton.
5. Finally, you boot back into the Ubuntu live CD and install Ubuntu on the third partition onwards (you may need to go into extended partitions).
When you're done, you have a dual boot system so you can tell your laptop's OEM that you really are running Windows and you'll also have a restorable copy of partitions to wipe your custom install back to factory-new (better than the recovery partition software can do it!), so that they won't know Linux was ever on it should you need to return the laptop...
I can't understand why you're trying to get the design tools that are certified against RHEL 3 and 4 to work in Fedora! Why not use CentOS? It's free and is a near-identical clone of RHEL (only differences are any references to Red Hat and its logos, both of which are trademarked). And, yes, you can install binary kernel drivers intended for RHEL onto equivalent CentOS machines without any compatibility issues.
A quick check shows that the "No OS, RHEL $0" and "No OS, Windows $0" options are only on the US www.dell.com site. If you go via the UK www.dell.co.uk site you far more sensibly just get a single "Not included [included in price]" no-cost/no-OS option.
I run an unofficial UK lottery site at http://lottery.merseyworld.com/ which again will probably have a fairly wide demographic and although Firefox usage (slightly boosted by a JavaScript promo link I put in at the bottom of pages) has now reached its highest ever (10.9%), it's been there for months and isn't rising any more.
You suspect that the honeymoon period is now over and it's not picking up large number of new converts any more (and Firefox 2 isn't a big enough leap to change that, IMHO - it's not until Firefox 3 that we'll see another usage spike I suspect). Still, if it stays above 10%, at least Web designers can't ignore it - we *need* a rival to IE that has such a level of market share otherwise the Web will be balkanised as a "works best in Windows/IE" like it was before Mozilla and then Firefox came along.
I must confess that I didn't know US law allows you to sue a "John Doe" where not only their real identity isn't known, but even their *citzenship* (yes, they might not be American) is possibly in doubt.
Also, if Microsoft can't prove that "Viodentia" had access to Microsoft source code (which presumably breaks the law if he/she did - hence the lawsuit), then can Viodentia sue Microsoft for libel? Also, if Microsoft is allowed to sue this John Doe called "Viodentia", then can Viodentia sue Microsoft whilst remaining a John Doe anonymous litigator? If not, then isn't the law very one-sided on this issue where one party is unknown?
Is it just me or is this lawsuit verging on the absolutely ludicrous? Do other countries allow people to sue unknown parties?
If you read the second paragraph very carefully, you can see that the article author actually doesn't refer to just the server market when talking about numbers of Mac OS X machines - he's actually talking about the combined server *and desktop* sales of Mac OS X. That second paragraph actually hides a multitude of sins:
* Refers to "commercial Linux" when it's quite likely the number of non-commercial Linux installs far outweighs the number of commercial Linux installs out there (obviously difficult to get numbers on the former to prove or disprove this though, but free vs. paid for very similar products would logically suggest that more people would install the free version than the paid one).
* Again "rate of revenue growth" is a debatable one - Red Hat in particular has been showing quite nice revenue growth rates, but it's starting from a smaller revenue stream than Apple of course. It's difficult to quantify this when so few desktops come pre-installed with Linux and it's actually possible to buy OS-less servers (yes, even from Dell) and install a free Linux on them later.
* More references to "Apple systems" rather than specifically servers only (servers are where Linux is currently completely and utterly dominating Apple with no current sign of the gap narrowing, which is why the author is loathe to split desktops and servers up in his grand announcement, because he knows Apple are very weak on server sales and quite strong on desktop sales).
* And to hammer the point home again, the final sentence includes "Apple UNIX" vs. "Commercial Linux" and "client and server computing platform". It's using sleight of hand to do such comparisons - leaving out non-commercial Linux and a proper client vs. client / server vs. server comparison.
Overall, his pronouncement was smoke and mirrors - Apple has a *long* way to go even to rival commercial Linux installs on servers (let alone the likely even higher number of non-commercial Linux server installs). Yes, Mac OS X desktops do outsell Linux desktops, but that's only because virtually no OEM pre-installs Linux at the moment, so getting true figures on Linux [of any type] penetration in the market is quite tough.
...I've got to say that this long-winded dragout of the next Linux version of Flash Player (hey, isn't both 8 final and 9 beta out for Windows already - neither of which we've seen in *any form* for Linux?) is getting rather tiresome. Sadly, the current Linux Flash development "team" (who is involved exactly in writing the Linux-specific code? The article doesn't really spell it out - you do suspect only one person has been assigned to do that and Adobe don't want to publicly admit that) haven't helped by spinning things out with their blog.
I find it amazing that "obvious" steps haven't been taken by the Linux Flash team, namely:
* Some sort of release schedule announcement - don't care if it slips by a few weeks here and there.
* A set of pre-releases (heck, have them time-bomb out if you don't want them being used in the long-term) coming out to showcase its current alpha/beta/RC status. Note here - Windows gets beta releases, why can't Linux?! It's utterly shameful there is no pre-release version for Linux, especially since the latest Linux Flash blog entries brag how stable the player now is at all the major sites it's been tested on!
* A definitive statement on whether they'll support 64-bit (i.e. "it'll be released at the same time as the 32-bit version" or "it'll be released X months after the 32-bit version" or "it'll never be released"). Sadly, Adobe are somewhat pig-ignorant w.r.t. the 64-bit platform and don't even have a 64-bit version for XP!
* Explain the exact differences between, say, Windows Flash 9 and Linux Flash 9 - there's some woolly stuff on this in the article really. After all this time in incubation, you'd have thought that the two platforms would have identical version 9 players, but I wouldn't it past Adobe to release a half-baked Linux Flash 9 player, since they have not yet demonstrated to anyone at all that they take Linux seriously (does the word "vapourware" mean anything to Adobe? That's exactly what Flash 8/9 on Linux currently are).
* Start a merge of the Linux development environment and the Windows one, so that ultimately they work from the same codebase to avoid the ridiculous delays in platform releases we've seen in the past. It's not clear to me if the Linux effort is fragmented - have we been told how much code is common on all platforms and how much is specific to Linux (and how they keep the specific code to a minimum)?
* Open Source the player! If Adobe have coded the entire player in-house (which I believe they have), then why not Open Source it...it's a free download after all! Even if they've patented some methods used in the source code, they own the patents and the copyright on the source code, so that shouldn't stop them open-sourcing it surely? Just exactly what is Adobe's objection to open sourcing the player? Sheer bloody-mindedness?
For what's supposed to be an "accessible" search engine page, Google have made pitiful efforts to even bother validating the XHTML (yes it has DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Transitional). Check out the W3C's validation of it - 8 errors, including some outrageous typos like "bgtcolor" instead of "bgcolor" and no closing slashes (required for XHTML) in their <br> tags. I find it amazing that Google would tout such an search engine on its accessibility merits when it doesn't even validate due to blatant errors that are easily fixable.
Ever since I've been alive, television in the UK has *never* been free and I'm not talking about the "obvious" case of advertisements funding the media. In the UK, every household with a television has to pay an annual television license (and several other European countries are similar). This funds the BBC and allows it to run with no advertisements across all its properties (hence why the BBC Website is ad-free for example, though that's about to change with the "international version" I believe).
For a long time, the UK TV license also covered radio as well, but I'm not sure that's the case now (i.e. if you have a radio, but no TV, you no longer need a license). So that's not always been free either. If you really must go on about "free television and radio", please qualify it with the country you're talking about and, of course, feel free to ignore how they aren't actually free anyway (advertisements/sponsors fund them, which ultimate comes out of the public's pocket).
Cheapest I've seen on the Net is ev1servers.net at $14.95 (about 8.50 pounds for UK folks). It works with almost all browsers, except for users running IE 5.0 or older that haven't upgraded the latest root certificate via Windows Update. What I did is write a script that scanned the access logs for IE 5.0 or older and displayed the percentage of such browsers - when it dipped below 0.1% (which it has already for about half the sites we manage), we switched from Verisign to the ev1servers.net secure cert and saved, wait for it, over 250 pounds per certificate!
Now, yes, they do have regular CVS snapshots I could try (which they actually warn against using!), but the most frustrating thing is that the last stable release - containing this crashing bug they've known about (and already fixed!) for potentially years - was in September 2003, which is *far* too long to go without rolling in CVS fixes and producing a new stable release.
If developers don't regularly release new stable versions (at least every 6-12 months), then it's discouraging to end-users to even bother reporting fixes - it gives the impression that the project is dead and you won't see a new version for years, if ever.
The problem, yet again, is that most users are "scared" to install an OS from scratch, whether it be XP, Mac OS X or Linux. Hence, this reviewer is comparing a pre-installed Windows system (note he went for an "upgrade" to XP, not an install-from-scratch) with Linux DIY installs. OEMs pile shed-loads of "missing" software with their pre-installed Windows and do testing of their hardware and common peripherals with said pre-install. The same isn't true of most Linux distros (yes, Linspire do this to some extent, but they're the exception to the rule).
I've been through both the XP installer and *many* Linux distro installers from scratch many times and Linux is clearly winning the battle of the installers now. Even the Vista installer doesn't improves things much (in fact, did you know you can't install Vista on top of an ext3-formatted partition? That's done deliberately by MS I reckon - early Vista betas could, but the later ones now don't).
After a from-scratch XP installation, you're left with Wordpad, Paint, IE (arrgh!), Notepad, MSN Messenger and Outlook Express - all *horrible* examples of each of their genre. Out of the box, XP has no office suite, no Photoshop-type program, no programming tools whatsoever, no out-of-the-box support for playing DVDs (yes, the OEM may have installed a DVD player with codecs on your machine, but vanilla XP doesn't!), no anti-virus tools (ironically, you get those for Linux as part of an install when it doesn't really need them unless Linux is config'ed as a mail server for other Windows users) and a weak firewall.
XP has very little support out-of-the-box for modern hardware due to being 5 years old - almost every piece of hardware you buy requires an additonal driver CD (often out-of-date and buggy - forcing you to download a more recent one off each of the manufacturers' Websites). XP also has no central update facility for *all* the software (OS, drivers and applications) you have installed on your system and not every app has auto-update checking built in either to compensate for this major shortcoming.
What XP does excel in is being pre-installed by OEMs (who are locked into volume discount schemes they're terrified of losing if they "upset" Microsoft) and having a lot of games available for it, which is why - along with the dreadful "Teletubbies" default XP theme, I consider XP to primarily be a toy OS. Vista? Well, that's looking like a "shinier Teletubbies" version of XP to me...
"Ah, but you can always build the Rawhide release on FC4" I hear you cry - sorry, bzzt, neither Firefox nor Thunderbird 1.5 will build without some mods of the respective Rawhide .src.rpm files. A very poor showing from Fedora devs there - let's happily jump to OO.org 2.X in the middle of FC4, but not go up a minor version of Firefox/Thunderbird during the same period.
In the end, I lost patience and packaged up the original mozilla.com binary .tar.gz's into RPMs using Thomas Cheung's Firefox/Thunderbird instructions, but I really shouldn't have to do this!
* Home page says "Store your documents securely online."
* Sign-in page says "Simple & secure document collaboration and publishing"
So if it's so secure, why isn't SSL used *anywhere* on the site? The even more strange thing is that there is a secure cert on the site at https://www.writely.com/ but nothing actually links to it...ho hum. Yes, you can indeed login via SSL if you want - apparently they're worried about server load if they made SSL the default... Maybe with the Google infrastructure behind them, they can turn on SSL by default?
I use Grip myself too to rip my CD collection (done about 800 so far), but the big problems with this are:
1. Some CDs I have aren't in CDDB, so you have to stop the rip, type the track names, artist and album name in manually and restart the rip again, deleting any "NoArtist/NoTitle" files created by the "empty rip".
2. Some CDs (particularly CD singles) are recognised as entirely different CDs - I suspect this is where the CD ID isn't in CDDB, so it falls back to using track lengths to match a CD. This especially painful when you end up with a Japanese CD single that creates 8-bit filenames...
3. A sadly common problem is where the CD is in CDDB, but the CD title and track titles are misspelled or missing, involving a lot of file renaming later on if you don't spot it before Grip gets to the track(s) involved.
Hence, even "automated" solutions involving big jukeboxes or robot arms will need manual intervention. As other responses have said, pay one or two people to do it (having 2 or 3 PCs available would help speed things up w.r.t. waiting the 5 mins for the rip to finish).
I bought an Acer T140 PC last year and it came with an analogue TV tuner card that I've never hooked up to any aerial or bothered to run any software against (the room I have the PC in doesn't even have an analogue aerial). So the idea of taxing TV tuner cards doesn't work in all scenarios either, particularly when it's bundled with a PC (if you bought it separately then, yes, you're far more likely to use it).
I usually have my Windows "sound effects" all turned off, so when I installed IE7 beta 2 preview, I noticed an irritating "click" noise coming from my speakers whenever I clicked on a link, eventually driving me insane. It turns out IE7 re-enables the Windows Explorer sound effect for Start Navigation that I probably turned off years ago and hoped never to hear again.
Fixed it by selecting Control Panel -> Sounds and Multimedia -> Sounds -> Windows Explorer -> Start Navigation and then using the Name: pop-up menu to select "(None)". Does *anyone* use IE with that sound effect turned on and not go psycho after about a dozen pages?
However, the paid video stuff is a total embarrassment and arguably the worst thing that Google have ever released in their entire history. It's overpriced, not available outside of North America in many cases [yes, Google blocks some paid content to non-US/Canadian countries!], DRM-restricted (often with "you can only watch for a day" limits too!), requires Windows, can't be viewed offline (online streaming only), is often "old" material and is annoyingly mixed in the "Popular" page with the free ones (are you *seriously* telling me that the most popular paid ones are loaded anywhere near as many times as the most popular free ones?).
Apart from the utterly lousy presentation/DRM/etc. of the Google Video paid material, there's not much of it either (I mean, one episode of CSI so far for $1.99 - one-day pass on Windows only, blocked to European users (!!) and you've got to be online and can't copy it to any other device? How many times can you say "WTF?!"?).
And, of course, we can't go without mentioning BitTorrent/P2P - which is the #1 rival to *any* paid video streaming business. We're seeing downloadable, DRM-free, HD/widescreen, DivX-encoded TV content literally 2 or so hours after the programme finishes. I know which one I'd prefer to see (and if it could be done legally, I'd be willing to subscribe on a per-month basis).