Users expect more than Windows 2000 in the year 2008. I'd say the KDE 2 UI is more like Windows 2000 than anything else.
I think KDE 3 is pretty polished. It works, and apps written in QT all have a very similar look and feel. And with the theme add-on to make your GTK apps look like your QT apps, it even makes GTK stuff fit in to a good degree.
I think KDE 4 shows a lot of promise. I like the basic idea, and it looks nice. I expect that in a few releases of KDE 4, we'll be looking at a much more stable desktop system that I'll be happy to use. For now, I am using Gnome because it's more stable than KDE 4 but I get annoying with Gnome, so I look forward to perhaps KDE 4.5.
And so does any GUI.. they all have icons, some sort of "OK" buttons, a close button, etc.
KDE 4 is probably more different then Windows then Gnome. Just because Gnome's main "bar" is on the top, doesn't make it somehow completely different than Windows. Move the bar to the bottom, and BAM, you have a Windows-looking UI.
What you conveniently didn't pay attention to were the qualifiers I used such as "generally believed" and "probably."
It's not perfect logic (and it wasn't MY logic to begin with, it was the writer of the article on the web site) - I was simply explaining to the dipshit (read: you) that they missed the point entirely. I didn't come up with the idea. I just understood it, which you apparently still do not.
It's very dependent on the company, all of your questions. For this particular company, especially a small one, they can/will offer a CIO title to someone that will actually be filling an IT Manager position. It sounds like they need someone to select the technical direction of the company, and implement it, but they want to show the world that they are not a small company anymore because they hired a CIO. I expect a few dozen people to be hired/promoted to the VP position soon, along with the unending e-mails to the entire company welcoming them.
Bigger companies use CIO's differently. A CIO doesn't really HAVE to be technical, really. If they are a really good leader and manager, they can effectively do the job with no technical knowledge, and be respected by the IT staff at the same time. These people trust the people he hires to BE the technical people, and can make decisions based on his staffs' recommendations.
And there's a LOT of ground in between. The CIO title is fairly arbitrary. I've met plenty of CIO's that only have five people on the entire IT staff, whom also sit down and manage the system or help deploy new systems. I've also met CIO's that do nothing except decide what IT happenings to report to the board, and ask for reports.
It's a lot of "who you know" for sure. And most people in these positions got there by being lucky - right place, right time.
Plenty of people go to business schools and get business degrees, but only an extremely small handful become CEO's. And yet those same CEO's seem to be able to fail everywhere and still get CEO jobs. So, somewhere along the line, they got lucky - they got promoted to CEO in some company, and once you're in "the club" - you tend to stay there.
Same thing with CIO's - but perhaps even worse. Many CIO's are there because there was no other place to put some guy that a company wanted to promote to senior management. Many of them have ABSOLUTELY NO technical experience. But they're CIO's now, and they can go from company to company as a CIO, no matter how shitty they are. References? A company is likely to give a glowing review to a shitty CIO that they want to get rid of.
And then there's the other side of the coin - technical people that floated up the management chain, with absolutely NO management skills. They don't know the very basics of people management and couldn't oversee a keyboard deployment project, let alone explain it to the board.
You find some good ones, but they're far and few between.
No, vendors aren't inherently bad. Just as lobbyists aren't inherently bad. Lobbyists help get your message across (good or bad) to the politicians, and vendors can offer solutions (good or bad) to IT problems.
Both can be abused. I've worked for companies where there was a perfectly competent IT staff, but management (and it's not just a CIO problem, it can be other management too) constantly seeks out turn-key solutions and outside help for problems that can be (and often ARE) handled by existing staff.
I've worked for both sides of the fence. Some companies want to run things in-house. Others are cluttered by appliances and consultants for all sorts of (often imaginary) problems. Usually, these in-house IT departments run better, for less money, then the ones filled with vendor appliances and staff.
CIO's often cite "We want someone to blame" when choosing a specific vendor's turn-key solution. It's a bullshit argument, because they aren't accountable to you. Sure, you could stop paying them for their solution, but in the meantime you have a problem you can't solve and a bunch of vendors pointing fingers at each other.
There's a middle-ground here, but uninformed and/or non-technical managers can royally fuck things up - and it happens a lot.
That most companies don't produce anything is an indication of the fact that the US is dominated by services companies.
Companies that offer services don't produce anything except the services they provide. There's no "product."
This is certainly dominant in the IT industry. There's really no production at all. I mean, Software companies (sometimes) produce software, but IT companies (IT meaning everything besides programming) just produce working systems (or not. But they try.)
Then there's payroll companies, banks, repair shops, postal carriers, transportation companies, etc etc etc.
Many companies that actually manufacture things, do so in poor countries (for obvious reasons) but leave management and infrastructure in the US or other wealthy countries.
Hey dipshit, I guess you're too dense to understand the statement. You must be a CIO.
So, I'll explain it.
1) It's generally believed that most people in the IT profession are fans of Star Trek or some other sort of Science Fiction.
2) If you are in a position of managing IT and the people running your IT systems, you should have a certain level of technical knowledge and background.
3) If you don't, or have never watched Star Trek, you probably aren't into tech
4) If you're not into technology, you shouldn't be a Chief INFORMATION Officer
It has nothing to do with basing decisions on a TV show.
Woah. I underestimated how draining it is to feed trolls like you.
That's actually very similar to conversations I've had.. I think it's actually pretty fun.
Have you ever asked for the "default toppings" when the waitress asked what you wanted on your cheeseburger? I did that by accident once - I got the deer-in-the-headlights face.
With any SAN Storage (be it iSCSI, fiber channel, etc) you can assign the disks/LUN to whichever host you want. Resizing a LUN isn't necessarily something you can do - it depends on the storage unit and the operating system connected to the LUN.
An assigned LUN does appear as a locally attached disk, which allows the operating system on the host to control the LUN at the bit level.
Many "NAS" units now can also provide iSCSI targets, that work in the same way.
Of course, a "NAS" device - in the traditional sense - offers network storage via a higher level protocol such as CIFS or NFS; it provides some mechanisms to control the data on the NAS but not at the filesystem level like a dedicated LUN.
Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. But both offer a similar level of data protection and performance depending on the connection media (Ethernet, Fiber Channel, etc.)
NAS devices have the obvious advantage of allowing access from a virtually unlimited number of devices simultaneously, but limit the control of the data. SAN devices have the advantage of providing bit-level control at the cost of multiple host access (without complex clustering overhead.)
It is my feeling that the SAN and NAS will become one in the same, soon enough. Once 10G Ethernet becomes affordable enough, there won't be much need for Fiber Channel and Fiber switches.
I've been looking at FreeNAS, and I see that it does some sort of basic rSync, but I can't find much more information on it.
Right now, I have a VPN between two friends' houses and my own, and we use Windows Server 2003 R2 file servers with DFS Replication to keep a storage share replicated between each other.
I have not seen anything else, either for Windows or Linux/Unix, that can do what DFS-R can do (which is bit-level TWO-WAY replication.) If you know of anything, or know how FreeNAS could do it, please point me in the right direction!
Saying "Get a SAN instead" is like telling someone to "Get a LAN instead" when they're asking what web server to use.
And really, a SAN Storage device such as a Clariion is pretty much the same as a NAS except the interface is different - and in the case of iSCSI, the interface is actually the same.
The line between "SAN Storage" and "NAS" is really blurred these days.
Re:They should make a concerted effort to drop leg
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
·
· Score: 1
Well, I didn't really mention UNIX compatibility because it's a whole different thing. It goes without saying that open source is the only one true way to ensure that your old applications and data will be available far into the future.
That's not saying that said apps will run out of the box. Shit, some Linux binaries won't even run between minor kernel revisions, or minor updates to libraries. But, if you have the source, you could at least hire some programmer to make your app run, if it were critical to a business operation.
Somewhat off topic: In many ways, I wish "Linux" (or maybe more specifically, "major OSS projects") would stabilize more, but the very nature of it (there is no single entity controlling enough of it) prevents it. Sometimes I think many of the big OSS software falls victim to "Latest and Greatest" syndrome, forcing major system updates on us far too often. It makes binary backward compatibility a near impossibility. But, as you said, the source is available, so it tends not to be a big problem in the end.
Re:They should make a concerted effort to drop leg
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
·
· Score: 1
NT was released in parallel with the 95/98/ME days for quite some time. There's really not a very big distinction between them besides updates to the Win32 API, for most programs. Sure, system utilities and such will usually be dependant on a specific version of the OS, but most normal applications didn't care if they were running on Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
The funny thing is that supporting very old applications, like Win 3.1 apps and DOS apps, is easy and relatively low-impact to the overall system compared to supporting apps that were written for Windows 95.
Compatibility *is* worth it, though. How willing would you be to use a new OS, even if it were from Microsoft, if you couldn't run a single application you use now? You could browse the Internet and check e-mail, but nothing else. Good for some people, but not for most people. So you NEED a level of compatibility.
I truly hope that Microsoft does something interesting (integrated/seamless virtual machine for old software?) the next time around, but who knows if they will. They don't really have to, yet. Not like Apple did. People will still use Windows 7 even if it's just Vista 1.1 - But not if there's zero compatibility. I'd finally make permanent the switch to Linux at that point.
Well said. I don't believe Windows needs a re-write, but I do believe that the massive backwards compatibility holds them back from making any tangible archetecture improvements.
Maybe next time around, they can implement some sort of virtual machine technology since almost all PC's sold these days have enough RAM and CPU horsepower to do that with a good deal of performance.
Re:They should make a concerted effort to drop leg
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
·
· Score: 1
Here's the thing. Backwards compatibility tends to work best on software that's written well. That particular game wasn't - it wasn't checking the right settings to determine the resolutions, or it didn't know what to do when it found that you were running in 16.8M colors. If it did, it would have worked.
You can't blame the OS provider for shitty programming in old apps. And unfortunately, there's a lot of software that has shitty code.
Windows can't really know what version of Windows to "emulate" for many old apps, so in this instance, you were able to turn on a specific compatibility mode to make it run. So, it WAS compatible.
There's backwards compatibility, and there's wishful thinking. Windows is enormously compatible with old applications. Sometimes they take a little tweaking, but I'm still amazed how compatible Windows really is with old stuff. It's a testament to the programmers at Microsoft for sure, but it holds them back at the same time.
Indeed (although, not about the drivers thing so much.. but if you had hardware that only worked on XP/Vista, a pass-though could be implimented to allow that hardware to work ONLY in the virtualized enviornment.)
And Microsoft could release some new API that would allow a VM access the graphics hardware directly (or at least make direct D3D/OpenGL calls), so that old apps could still do accelerated 3D.
Honestly, it wouldn't be the end of the world; with virtualization being so good these days they could implement a VM layer for compatibility pretty easily, and shit, it could even make some XP apps run better on Windows 7 than Vista.
However - all that being said - I don't think Windows requires an entire re-write. The NT kernel isn't bad, it's pretty efficient. The Explorer UI isn't bad. They could trim away ALL of the fat, remove all legacy filesystem nonsense, implement a sane security/user model, and build from there - and still use the VM for backwards compatibility instead of hacks.
I dunno. We'll see. I don't hate Vista, but I do sometimes get disgusted when some things that should JUST FUCKING WORK, don't.
I also don't think that MacOS is some sort of MagicOS with no problems. I've used (and use) Macs extensively, and I've had a lot of bullshit problems with MacOS, too. You know, shit that doesn't work, or shit that's "what in fucks name were they thinking?"
Re:The "7" refers to nothing in particular
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They apparently started NT at version 3 as to keep in line with Windows 3.
I tried something like that once. It was a log rod with a hook on the end, so you can stand on the ground (for lower gutters) or on a ladder and just run it along the gutter.
Unfortunately, it must have been a cheapo one because the hook on the end and started spinning everywhere, getting me real soaked in the process. Not fun when it's nearly freezing outside!
In the end, none of these gadgets work as well as a standard garden hose with a normal trigger-style nozzle while standing on a ladder.
If cleaning your gutters is enough of a problem to have to resort to little R/C gutter cleaners, perhaps a Gutter Helmet would be a better purchase. Never clean your gutters again.
I like the Treo phones; they are capable and the ones with the Palm OS are pretty good. Nice screens, etc.
But, every time I go to shop for a new phone, the Palm PDA-type phones are always so damned expensive. When I can get a Windows Mobile phone for free (or $99 for a delux one) with my plan, paying $600 for a Treo doesn't seem to make much sense.
They've marketed for a fairly small segment it seems, so I don't know why it's a surprise that they're struggling.
I didn't think it was that bad. I thought Doom 3 was pretty good single-player, actually. It was the first decent game to do real lighting and I enjoyed exploring around dark areas with a flashlight casting pretty realistic looking shadows and stuff. It would even startle you at some points.
The thing I didn't like was that later in the game, it just got impossible. A challenge is good, but having to repeat a part of the game 50 times to get past some retardedly hard area isn't fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Users expect more than Windows 2000 in the year 2008. I'd say the KDE 2 UI is more like Windows 2000 than anything else.
I think KDE 3 is pretty polished. It works, and apps written in QT all have a very similar look and feel. And with the theme add-on to make your GTK apps look like your QT apps, it even makes GTK stuff fit in to a good degree.
I think KDE 4 shows a lot of promise. I like the basic idea, and it looks nice. I expect that in a few releases of KDE 4, we'll be looking at a much more stable desktop system that I'll be happy to use. For now, I am using Gnome because it's more stable than KDE 4 but I get annoying with Gnome, so I look forward to perhaps KDE 4.5.
And so does any GUI.. they all have icons, some sort of "OK" buttons, a close button, etc.
KDE 4 is probably more different then Windows then Gnome. Just because Gnome's main "bar" is on the top, doesn't make it somehow completely different than Windows. Move the bar to the bottom, and BAM, you have a Windows-looking UI.
You must be the Anonymous Coward I replied to.
What you conveniently didn't pay attention to were the qualifiers I used such as "generally believed" and "probably."
It's not perfect logic (and it wasn't MY logic to begin with, it was the writer of the article on the web site) - I was simply explaining to the dipshit (read: you) that they missed the point entirely. I didn't come up with the idea. I just understood it, which you apparently still do not.
It's very dependent on the company, all of your questions. For this particular company, especially a small one, they can/will offer a CIO title to someone that will actually be filling an IT Manager position. It sounds like they need someone to select the technical direction of the company, and implement it, but they want to show the world that they are not a small company anymore because they hired a CIO. I expect a few dozen people to be hired/promoted to the VP position soon, along with the unending e-mails to the entire company welcoming them.
Bigger companies use CIO's differently. A CIO doesn't really HAVE to be technical, really. If they are a really good leader and manager, they can effectively do the job with no technical knowledge, and be respected by the IT staff at the same time. These people trust the people he hires to BE the technical people, and can make decisions based on his staffs' recommendations.
And there's a LOT of ground in between. The CIO title is fairly arbitrary. I've met plenty of CIO's that only have five people on the entire IT staff, whom also sit down and manage the system or help deploy new systems. I've also met CIO's that do nothing except decide what IT happenings to report to the board, and ask for reports.
It's a lot of "who you know" for sure. And most people in these positions got there by being lucky - right place, right time.
Plenty of people go to business schools and get business degrees, but only an extremely small handful become CEO's. And yet those same CEO's seem to be able to fail everywhere and still get CEO jobs. So, somewhere along the line, they got lucky - they got promoted to CEO in some company, and once you're in "the club" - you tend to stay there.
Same thing with CIO's - but perhaps even worse. Many CIO's are there because there was no other place to put some guy that a company wanted to promote to senior management. Many of them have ABSOLUTELY NO technical experience. But they're CIO's now, and they can go from company to company as a CIO, no matter how shitty they are. References? A company is likely to give a glowing review to a shitty CIO that they want to get rid of.
And then there's the other side of the coin - technical people that floated up the management chain, with absolutely NO management skills. They don't know the very basics of people management and couldn't oversee a keyboard deployment project, let alone explain it to the board.
You find some good ones, but they're far and few between.
Pfft. Newbie. I'm still using AOL floppy disks for coasters.
No, vendors aren't inherently bad. Just as lobbyists aren't inherently bad. Lobbyists help get your message across (good or bad) to the politicians, and vendors can offer solutions (good or bad) to IT problems.
Both can be abused. I've worked for companies where there was a perfectly competent IT staff, but management (and it's not just a CIO problem, it can be other management too) constantly seeks out turn-key solutions and outside help for problems that can be (and often ARE) handled by existing staff.
I've worked for both sides of the fence. Some companies want to run things in-house. Others are cluttered by appliances and consultants for all sorts of (often imaginary) problems. Usually, these in-house IT departments run better, for less money, then the ones filled with vendor appliances and staff.
CIO's often cite "We want someone to blame" when choosing a specific vendor's turn-key solution. It's a bullshit argument, because they aren't accountable to you. Sure, you could stop paying them for their solution, but in the meantime you have a problem you can't solve and a bunch of vendors pointing fingers at each other.
There's a middle-ground here, but uninformed and/or non-technical managers can royally fuck things up - and it happens a lot.
That most companies don't produce anything is an indication of the fact that the US is dominated by services companies.
Companies that offer services don't produce anything except the services they provide. There's no "product."
This is certainly dominant in the IT industry. There's really no production at all. I mean, Software companies (sometimes) produce software, but IT companies (IT meaning everything besides programming) just produce working systems (or not. But they try.)
Then there's payroll companies, banks, repair shops, postal carriers, transportation companies, etc etc etc.
Many companies that actually manufacture things, do so in poor countries (for obvious reasons) but leave management and infrastructure in the US or other wealthy countries.
Hey dipshit, I guess you're too dense to understand the statement. You must be a CIO.
So, I'll explain it.
1) It's generally believed that most people in the IT profession are fans of Star Trek or some other sort of Science Fiction.
2) If you are in a position of managing IT and the people running your IT systems, you should have a certain level of technical knowledge and background.
3) If you don't, or have never watched Star Trek, you probably aren't into tech
4) If you're not into technology, you shouldn't be a Chief INFORMATION Officer
It has nothing to do with basing decisions on a TV show.
Woah. I underestimated how draining it is to feed trolls like you.
That's actually very similar to conversations I've had.. I think it's actually pretty fun.
Have you ever asked for the "default toppings" when the waitress asked what you wanted on your cheeseburger? I did that by accident once - I got the deer-in-the-headlights face.
Bah, it wasn't +Anything at the time. And based on yhe +5 Insightful on my reply, I wasn't the only one that missed the attempt at a joke.
Yea, I guess you're right. I'm not into the Hollywood Ghetto Hip-Hop scene, so it went right straight over my head =)
Yea, you're right. But I wasn't really posting for the sake of answering the original question.
It's a discussion. I was just adding to the discussion.
With any SAN Storage (be it iSCSI, fiber channel, etc) you can assign the disks/LUN to whichever host you want. Resizing a LUN isn't necessarily something you can do - it depends on the storage unit and the operating system connected to the LUN.
An assigned LUN does appear as a locally attached disk, which allows the operating system on the host to control the LUN at the bit level.
Many "NAS" units now can also provide iSCSI targets, that work in the same way.
Of course, a "NAS" device - in the traditional sense - offers network storage via a higher level protocol such as CIFS or NFS; it provides some mechanisms to control the data on the NAS but not at the filesystem level like a dedicated LUN.
Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. But both offer a similar level of data protection and performance depending on the connection media (Ethernet, Fiber Channel, etc.)
NAS devices have the obvious advantage of allowing access from a virtually unlimited number of devices simultaneously, but limit the control of the data. SAN devices have the advantage of providing bit-level control at the cost of multiple host access (without complex clustering overhead.)
It is my feeling that the SAN and NAS will become one in the same, soon enough. Once 10G Ethernet becomes affordable enough, there won't be much need for Fiber Channel and Fiber switches.
I've been looking at FreeNAS, and I see that it does some sort of basic rSync, but I can't find much more information on it.
Right now, I have a VPN between two friends' houses and my own, and we use Windows Server 2003 R2 file servers with DFS Replication to keep a storage share replicated between each other.
I have not seen anything else, either for Windows or Linux/Unix, that can do what DFS-R can do (which is bit-level TWO-WAY replication.) If you know of anything, or know how FreeNAS could do it, please point me in the right direction!
Saying "Get a SAN instead" is like telling someone to "Get a LAN instead" when they're asking what web server to use.
And really, a SAN Storage device such as a Clariion is pretty much the same as a NAS except the interface is different - and in the case of iSCSI, the interface is actually the same.
The line between "SAN Storage" and "NAS" is really blurred these days.
Well, I didn't really mention UNIX compatibility because it's a whole different thing. It goes without saying that open source is the only one true way to ensure that your old applications and data will be available far into the future.
That's not saying that said apps will run out of the box. Shit, some Linux binaries won't even run between minor kernel revisions, or minor updates to libraries. But, if you have the source, you could at least hire some programmer to make your app run, if it were critical to a business operation.
Somewhat off topic: In many ways, I wish "Linux" (or maybe more specifically, "major OSS projects") would stabilize more, but the very nature of it (there is no single entity controlling enough of it) prevents it. Sometimes I think many of the big OSS software falls victim to "Latest and Greatest" syndrome, forcing major system updates on us far too often. It makes binary backward compatibility a near impossibility. But, as you said, the source is available, so it tends not to be a big problem in the end.
NT was released in parallel with the 95/98/ME days for quite some time. There's really not a very big distinction between them besides updates to the Win32 API, for most programs. Sure, system utilities and such will usually be dependant on a specific version of the OS, but most normal applications didn't care if they were running on Windows 98 or Windows 2000.
The funny thing is that supporting very old applications, like Win 3.1 apps and DOS apps, is easy and relatively low-impact to the overall system compared to supporting apps that were written for Windows 95.
Compatibility *is* worth it, though. How willing would you be to use a new OS, even if it were from Microsoft, if you couldn't run a single application you use now? You could browse the Internet and check e-mail, but nothing else. Good for some people, but not for most people. So you NEED a level of compatibility.
I truly hope that Microsoft does something interesting (integrated/seamless virtual machine for old software?) the next time around, but who knows if they will. They don't really have to, yet. Not like Apple did. People will still use Windows 7 even if it's just Vista 1.1 - But not if there's zero compatibility. I'd finally make permanent the switch to Linux at that point.
Well said. I don't believe Windows needs a re-write, but I do believe that the massive backwards compatibility holds them back from making any tangible archetecture improvements.
Maybe next time around, they can implement some sort of virtual machine technology since almost all PC's sold these days have enough RAM and CPU horsepower to do that with a good deal of performance.
Here's the thing. Backwards compatibility tends to work best on software that's written well. That particular game wasn't - it wasn't checking the right settings to determine the resolutions, or it didn't know what to do when it found that you were running in 16.8M colors. If it did, it would have worked.
You can't blame the OS provider for shitty programming in old apps. And unfortunately, there's a lot of software that has shitty code.
Windows can't really know what version of Windows to "emulate" for many old apps, so in this instance, you were able to turn on a specific compatibility mode to make it run. So, it WAS compatible.
There's backwards compatibility, and there's wishful thinking. Windows is enormously compatible with old applications. Sometimes they take a little tweaking, but I'm still amazed how compatible Windows really is with old stuff. It's a testament to the programmers at Microsoft for sure, but it holds them back at the same time.
A new approach will be necessary in the future.
Indeed (although, not about the drivers thing so much.. but if you had hardware that only worked on XP/Vista, a pass-though could be implimented to allow that hardware to work ONLY in the virtualized enviornment.)
And Microsoft could release some new API that would allow a VM access the graphics hardware directly (or at least make direct D3D/OpenGL calls), so that old apps could still do accelerated 3D.
Honestly, it wouldn't be the end of the world; with virtualization being so good these days they could implement a VM layer for compatibility pretty easily, and shit, it could even make some XP apps run better on Windows 7 than Vista.
However - all that being said - I don't think Windows requires an entire re-write. The NT kernel isn't bad, it's pretty efficient. The Explorer UI isn't bad. They could trim away ALL of the fat, remove all legacy filesystem nonsense, implement a sane security/user model, and build from there - and still use the VM for backwards compatibility instead of hacks.
I dunno. We'll see. I don't hate Vista, but I do sometimes get disgusted when some things that should JUST FUCKING WORK, don't.
I also don't think that MacOS is some sort of MagicOS with no problems. I've used (and use) Macs extensively, and I've had a lot of bullshit problems with MacOS, too. You know, shit that doesn't work, or shit that's "what in fucks name were they thinking?"
They apparently started NT at version 3 as to keep in line with Windows 3.
I tried something like that once. It was a log rod with a hook on the end, so you can stand on the ground (for lower gutters) or on a ladder and just run it along the gutter.
Unfortunately, it must have been a cheapo one because the hook on the end and started spinning everywhere, getting me real soaked in the process. Not fun when it's nearly freezing outside!
In the end, none of these gadgets work as well as a standard garden hose with a normal trigger-style nozzle while standing on a ladder.
If cleaning your gutters is enough of a problem to have to resort to little R/C gutter cleaners, perhaps a Gutter Helmet would be a better purchase. Never clean your gutters again.
I like the Treo phones; they are capable and the ones with the Palm OS are pretty good. Nice screens, etc.
But, every time I go to shop for a new phone, the Palm PDA-type phones are always so damned expensive. When I can get a Windows Mobile phone for free (or $99 for a delux one) with my plan, paying $600 for a Treo doesn't seem to make much sense.
They've marketed for a fairly small segment it seems, so I don't know why it's a surprise that they're struggling.
I didn't think it was that bad. I thought Doom 3 was pretty good single-player, actually. It was the first decent game to do real lighting and I enjoyed exploring around dark areas with a flashlight casting pretty realistic looking shadows and stuff. It would even startle you at some points.
The thing I didn't like was that later in the game, it just got impossible. A challenge is good, but having to repeat a part of the game 50 times to get past some retardedly hard area isn't fun.