After a sales meeting, we had one of the sales guys come around to the techies offices and tell us that "Even though the sales guys get all the glory" he recognized that the programmers were important too. "Everybody can't be quarterbacks. Without you guys we'd have nothing to sell."
What's scary is that he was genuinely trying to be *nice*.
It may not save you any money. It never does for me.
But I always get a far better machine than I would from any vendor. Comes from being picky about components. Probably why it never saves me any money too.
Umm, I hope this is a typo. We're talking about an LTO drive?
I get about 4.5G in an hour on an OS/2 server running a DDS3 DAT drive, plus about the same for a verify pass. I don't consider this an enterprise level backup (It's for a pretty small business.)
Using 9840 drives over FC at the data center I used to work at, we got 10M/s, best case. 9840 drives are pretty fast, but lots slower than LTO. I'd hope for at least double what the 9840 did.
The only reason I haven't read any Harry Potter is that I haven't gotten around to it yet. It'll happen.
The last used bookstore I was in I was delighted to pick up a hardcopy of _James and the Giant Peach_. It's at the top of my "to read" pile. It'll have been 40 years since I read it the last time.
>Way back when with a 100 USD you actually used to get quite a bit of software.
Way back when it took a good $400 to $800 to get any significant software package. Any word processor (other than maybe PC-Write) was going to cost you at least $400. Ditto any other category of office software, spreadsheets, databases, etc. And this was when the dollar was worth quite a bit more.
Then prices dropped a bunch. Competition. Now they're going back up (no more competition), but they still have a long way to go before they match what they were in the early 80s.
Umm... nsswitch.conf can bite you even if you're not in an NIS environment, particularly if the default installation assumes you are.
If you're working in an environment that was already set up and purring when you got to it, you may never have to look at it. If you have just installed the OS from scratch or it came from the factory set up the way that Sun or HP (or whoever) thinks it should be set up, you may have some surprises in store.
Bear in mind that the last time I really looked at it was version 4.0. I wasn't paying attention and let the deadline for upgrading to 4.5 pass, and 5.0 was a pain to install if you didn't have Windows. Which I didn't (don't.)
There were some niggly little problems, like difficulty resizing windows (you couldn't grab an edge, had to grab a handle) and stuff like that.
I can think of lots of good things about the technical features, even aside from its smoothness. I liked the idea of different desktops with different resolutions and color depths.
But I prefer stuff more text oriented and less GUI/icon oriented. Even gui stuff can benefit from more text orientation. Although Be had a great command line option, it seemed like it was almost unrelated to the way most things worked.
For me, a mouse is mainly something to use to shift focus to the app I want to work in, then I mostly leave it alone.
I was not at all impressed with the "look and feel" of Be. The interface pretty much sucked as far as I was concerned.
But what on behind the scenes was so *smooth*. That was impressive. As you opened up more apps everything just seemed to slow down, but nothing stopped, nothing seemed to stuggle. It just got slower gracefully as you loaded the machine.
I think they're trying to reproduce the wrong part.
There's a "real" resolution and a "logical" resolution.
You can set any resolution you like, up to the maximum, which is the physical or "real" resolution. Any other resolution is an interpolated resolution.
Oh yes, I've added to my music collection, but in general, I do listen to the music I was listening to ten years ago. (And twenty. And thirty.)
Ten years from now, I expect to be listening to the music I have now. There'll be more, of course. I will never stop adding to it.
The point is, you just have to periodically add additional music to the unit -- once it's there, you only need to make changes when new music comes into your life. If you feel compelled to do this daily or weekly, go for it. I tend to buy music in chunks (a dozen CDs or so at a time, every few months) so updating the unit wouldn't be much of a hardship.
I saw the Empeg on Slashdot a couple of years ago and started lusting after it. Out of reach of my pocketbook at the time.
Then I saw the Neo, and thought that it was a much more affordable option. Still couldn't afford it though.
Saved up my pennies and was getting ready to spring for it, but decided to do some research before I bought. After looking around a bit, I figured out that the satisfaction level of existing customers was on the low side, and that the unit had power problems, size restrictions, etc. All solvable, but the realistic price to get it right was in the $600 range -- and I'd have to replace the head unit or use the FM modulator.
Well, if I'm going to spend $600 for something that's OK, it's not that big a stretch to spend $1000 for something that's excellent. I'm not seeing a big price difference here for this class of product. Now that I'm unemployed, the question is kind of moot -- I hope there are still some Empegs available once I become re-employed and recover financially from the downtime.
If you're willing to live with shuffling MP3 CDs, then OK, you can get something less expensive. There are less expensive HD based players, but not a *lot* less expensive.
People *think* they can hear the difference. I'd be very surprised if you could find real people who could really hear sound differences that happened at frequencies above 22kHz. You're not going to find many people that could even hear differences above, say, 18kHz. Power of suggestion may get you people that will claim to hear a difference, but I'm very skeptical that a true double blind test will show you any differences.
The sampling frequency of 44kHz gives an accurate reconstruction of a 22KHz signal. Ever hear of the Nyquist frequency? Sampling in a MHz range certainly won't hurt anything (except storage capacity) but it won't buy you anything either.
Yes, I can hear a difference between my CDs and my MP3s on the home stereo system. A lot of that is the cheapy sound card that's currently on the home system -- CDs played though the computer (into the stereo) don't sound that swell either. (The stereo, btw, is *not* a junk system.)
But a car is not a home stereo. I don't care what you do, you will never eliminate road noise -- and if you do, I don't care to ride with you for safety reasons. MP3 is more than good enough to match a CD in perceptible quality
One of the things that holds me back from getting an aftermarket car stereo as opposed to the factory one in the car is that nearly all of them are full of "extra funky goodies".
No thanks. I perfer a little taste. The Empeg looks fine.
Now if only I were employed and could afford one before they vanish...
The StarOffice numbers are *different* than the Excel numbers. Aside from rounding issues I don't see that they're *worse* -- they fit the criteria you're using just fine.
Furthermore, Sun is very anti-Intel: I've heard
the only place in Sun that they're allowed to
have Intel boxes is is the Solaris x86
development group, so Sun will likely be the
last major workstation/server vendor to make the
switch to hop on the Intel bandwagon.
Their sales guys still tote Windows laptops. Do they use the presentation software that's part of Star Office?
Unless they've cleaned up their act since the last time one came to visit (8 or 9 months ago) they use Powerpoint for their presentations.
As I understand it, Bill Gates carries around next to no money in his wallet. He's well known for having to borrow money from those around him for minor stuff because he can't be bothered to keep cash (or credit cards, etc.) with him. When you've got that kind of money, you don't have to care.
Most of these motherboards have an *option* for you to disable the onboard components. In my experience, these options only give you the warm fuzzy feeling that you have solved the problem -- they make the function go away, but they do *not* make the component invisible. Good luck trying to get the new component you just installed to work -- your software will, like as not, still see only the original built-in, working or not.
Unfortunately, to a large degree they might be right. I've been resisting Office 2k here at work, and insisting that we install Star Office instead. Although some users have been using Star Office successfully, others (primarily those who share files with the outside world) have had lots of trouble. File compatibility is marginal -- you can read the files but the formatting gets scrambled.
I've also gotten lots of complaints that Star Calc doesn't do a lot of what Excel does. I've this nasty feeling that we may have to bite the bullet and start buying Office 2K.
Slashdot Mirror
The folks who write in the trade press that OS/2 is dead don't have a clue what they are talking about.
You could simplify that statement by omitting "that OS/2 is dead".
They're supporting it as well as they ever did.
That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one. The sad thing was they *thought* they were supporting it.
What support we ever got as OS/2 users was mostly under the table support from the developers. They believed in it. IBM as a company never did.
After a sales meeting, we had one of the sales guys come around to the techies offices and tell us that "Even though the sales guys get all the glory" he recognized that the programmers were important too. "Everybody can't be quarterbacks. Without you guys we'd have nothing to sell."
What's scary is that he was genuinely trying to be *nice*.
It may not save you any money. It never does for me.
But I always get a far better machine than I would from any vendor. Comes from being picky about components. Probably why it never saves me any money too.
>1hr 15min. per Gig
Umm, I hope this is a typo. We're talking about an LTO drive?
I get about 4.5G in an hour on an OS/2 server running a DDS3 DAT drive, plus about the same for a verify pass. I don't consider this an enterprise level backup (It's for a pretty small business.)
Using 9840 drives over FC at the data center I used to work at, we got 10M/s, best case. 9840 drives are pretty fast, but lots slower than LTO. I'd hope for at least double what the 9840 did.
The only reason I haven't read any Harry Potter is that I haven't gotten around to it yet. It'll happen.
The last used bookstore I was in I was delighted to pick up a hardcopy of _James and the Giant Peach_. It's at the top of my "to read" pile. It'll have been 40 years since I read it the last time.
I don't care what anybody says.
Nuclear weapons are an overreaction to spam.
Well, usually, anyway.
Put it in a Lagrangian point. L5. That's as stable as you could ask for, and should be able to cover a good chunk of Farside.
>Way back when with a 100 USD you actually used to get quite a bit of software.
Way back when it took a good $400 to $800 to get any significant software package. Any word processor (other than maybe PC-Write) was going to cost you at least $400. Ditto any other category of office software, spreadsheets, databases, etc. And this was when the dollar was worth quite a bit more.
Then prices dropped a bunch. Competition. Now they're going back up (no more competition), but they still have a long way to go before they match what they were in the early 80s.
Umm... nsswitch.conf can bite you even if you're not in an NIS environment, particularly if the default installation assumes you are.
If you're working in an environment that was already set up and purring when you got to it, you may never have to look at it. If you have just installed the OS from scratch or it came from the factory set up the way that Sun or HP (or whoever) thinks it should be set up, you may have some surprises in store.
Probably it's too "Mac like".
Bear in mind that the last time I really looked at it was version 4.0. I wasn't paying attention and let the deadline for upgrading to 4.5 pass, and 5.0 was a pain to install if you didn't have Windows. Which I didn't (don't.)
There were some niggly little problems, like difficulty resizing windows (you couldn't grab an edge, had to grab a handle) and stuff like that.
I can think of lots of good things about the technical features, even aside from its smoothness. I liked the idea of different desktops with different resolutions and color depths.
But I prefer stuff more text oriented and less GUI/icon oriented. Even gui stuff can benefit from more text orientation. Although Be had a great command line option, it seemed like it was almost unrelated to the way most things worked.
For me, a mouse is mainly something to use to shift focus to the app I want to work in, then I mostly leave it alone.
I was not at all impressed with the "look and feel" of Be. The interface pretty much sucked as far as I was concerned.
But what on behind the scenes was so *smooth*. That was impressive. As you opened up more apps everything just seemed to slow down, but nothing stopped, nothing seemed to stuggle. It just got slower gracefully as you loaded the machine.
I think they're trying to reproduce the wrong part.
There's a "real" resolution and a "logical" resolution.
You can set any resolution you like, up to the maximum, which is the physical or "real" resolution. Any other resolution is an interpolated resolution.
It's viruses. Ain't no such thing as "virii".
Believe it or not, some clarity in communications really does increase your credibility.
This happens to be true.
Oh yes, I've added to my music collection, but in general, I do listen to the music I was listening to ten years ago. (And twenty. And thirty.)
Ten years from now, I expect to be listening to the music I have now. There'll be more, of course. I will never stop adding to it.
The point is, you just have to periodically add additional music to the unit -- once it's there, you only need to make changes when new music comes into your life. If you feel compelled to do this daily or weekly, go for it. I tend to buy music in chunks (a dozen CDs or so at a time, every few months) so updating the unit wouldn't be much of a hardship.
I saw the Empeg on Slashdot a couple of years ago and started lusting after it. Out of reach of my pocketbook at the time.
Then I saw the Neo, and thought that it was a much more affordable option. Still couldn't afford it though.
Saved up my pennies and was getting ready to spring for it, but decided to do some research before I bought. After looking around a bit, I figured out that the satisfaction level of existing customers was on the low side, and that the unit had power problems, size restrictions, etc. All solvable, but the realistic price to get it right was in the $600 range -- and I'd have to replace the head unit or use the FM modulator.
Well, if I'm going to spend $600 for something that's OK, it's not that big a stretch to spend $1000 for something that's excellent. I'm not seeing a big price difference here for this class of product. Now that I'm unemployed, the question is kind of moot -- I hope there are still some Empegs available once I become re-employed and recover financially from the downtime.
If you're willing to live with shuffling MP3 CDs, then OK, you can get something less expensive. There are less expensive HD based players, but not a *lot* less expensive.
People *think* they can hear the difference. I'd be very surprised if you could find real people who could really hear sound differences that happened at frequencies above 22kHz. You're not going to find many people that could even hear differences above, say, 18kHz. Power of suggestion may get you people that will claim to hear a difference, but I'm very skeptical that a true double blind test will show you any differences.
The sampling frequency of 44kHz gives an accurate reconstruction of a 22KHz signal. Ever hear of the Nyquist frequency? Sampling in a MHz range certainly won't hurt anything (except storage capacity) but it won't buy you anything either.
Yes, I can hear a difference between my CDs and my MP3s on the home stereo system. A lot of that is the cheapy sound card that's currently on the home system -- CDs played though the computer (into the stereo) don't sound that swell either. (The stereo, btw, is *not* a junk system.)
But a car is not a home stereo. I don't care what you do, you will never eliminate road noise -- and if you do, I don't care to ride with you for safety reasons. MP3 is more than good enough to match a CD in perceptible quality
"Extra funky goodies?"
One of the things that holds me back from getting an aftermarket car stereo as opposed to the factory one in the car is that nearly all of them are full of "extra funky goodies".
No thanks. I perfer a little taste. The Empeg looks fine.
Now if only I were employed and could afford one before they vanish...
The StarOffice numbers are *different* than the Excel numbers. Aside from rounding issues I don't see that they're *worse* -- they fit the criteria you're using just fine.
What's the problem with them?
Furthermore, Sun is very anti-Intel: I've heard
the only place in Sun that they're allowed to
have Intel boxes is is the Solaris x86
development group, so Sun will likely be the
last major workstation/server vendor to make the
switch to hop on the Intel bandwagon.
Their sales guys still tote Windows laptops. Do they use the presentation software that's part of Star Office?
Unless they've cleaned up their act since the last time one came to visit (8 or 9 months ago) they use Powerpoint for their presentations.
Don't you just hate it when you get modded up for the wrong reasons?
Nope, a bit later than that. I remember it was in 73-74. I was just graduating from high school, and gas jumped from $0.30 to nearly $1 per gallon.
Just picking a nit:
As I understand it, Bill Gates carries around next to no money in his wallet. He's well known for having to borrow money from those around him for minor stuff because he can't be bothered to keep cash (or credit cards, etc.) with him. When you've got that kind of money, you don't have to care.
Most of these motherboards have an *option* for you to disable the onboard components. In my experience, these options only give you the warm fuzzy feeling that you have solved the problem -- they make the function go away, but they do *not* make the component invisible. Good luck trying to get the new component you just installed to work -- your software will, like as not, still see only the original built-in, working or not.
Unfortunately, to a large degree they might be right. I've been resisting Office 2k here at work, and insisting that we install Star Office instead. Although some users have been using Star Office successfully, others (primarily those who share files with the outside world) have had lots of trouble. File compatibility is marginal -- you can read the files but the formatting gets scrambled.
I've also gotten lots of complaints that Star Calc doesn't do a lot of what Excel does. I've this nasty feeling that we may have to bite the bullet and start buying Office 2K.