I presume that would work for billboards where 'Google' is prominently displayed somewhere on the billboard. From the images I have seen of the billboards, it ain't there.
Given a Billboard where the only content is a text string '{first 10 digit prime in e}.com' there are three ways to find out that it is a 'google' ad.
1. Solve the puzzle. 2. Bribe the billboard owner. (surely you have seen this billboard advertizing itsel out at one time or another.) 3. Wait till the news breaks that it is a Google Job offer.
Something tells me that Google is more interested in people who quickly solve #1, vs people who can handle #2, or wait for #3.
Part of your concern over others having hard disk crashes, and other issues is taken up by compression and proper distribution of the data.
First you want to backup your critcal data. Usually this is not already compressed information like jpeg images, or mpeg video, or even mp3 audio. It's your working documents, source code, and a subset of your e-mail.
If you compress this data, you are likely to experience a 50% compression ratio or higher. This means that once you chunk that data for distribution, you can send out two copies of everything to the various people providing the server storage.
Is it still possible that you will end up with a situation where you are unable to retrieve information? Yep. And sometimes tapes can't be recovered from, or CD's shatter.
Likewise your own system crashing and burning is going to provide a situation where other people's data gets lost.
An intelegent system would do a quick inventory of the status of each block of data archived in the system, and warn you of any blocks that need to be rebuilt, or even behind the sceens re-duplicate any data that is lost for more than an hour. That feature should be built in, and built at the storage level, not the backup level. i.e. the software managing the 10 gig of space you are providing keeps track of where other systems, that keep duplicates of whatever data it is storing, are and what their condition is.
And yes, over time that will be a lot of network traffic.
Large businesses have a scheduling process and hire people to swap tapes, move tapes in and out of the various facilities, rotate tapes, and replace tapes that are no longer reliable. This process is done on a 24x7x365 (plus leap days) basis. Most of the data is actually being backed up via tape silos and 'robots' to handle the actual tapes while the various backups are hapening, but it is still a significant investment in people.
A small business may be able to get away with burning a CD-R or CD-RW every night with that days transactions, and a small stack of CD-R (or RW) every weekend which they take home and store in a CD spindle in their freezer, or something. Though I think you would be hard pressed to find a small business that actually does that. (I am sure there are some that do.) Monthly or quarterly they should be taking a spindal of archived data to a remote relative's place to provide further archival of data.
Mid sized businesses are in a bit of a quandry. The number of tapes needed for a good backup is more than anyone really wants to haul around, handle and store at home, but they are not sure it is worth the expense of using a comercial off-site backup for either.
A project like this may be just what they are looking for. No tapes or disks to try to keep track of. Everything compressed and encrypted, so it is reasonably secure. Retreival can start as soon as the replacement system is ready to start retreiving it.
I personally think it should be trialed only as a suplement to some other backup strategy, but even then, someone would decide it was either too much of a hassle, or not reliable enough.
There are even people here who think it is 'reasonable' to haul around 160 or 250 Gig hard drives to backup their critical data.
Nah, he or she should just be directed to get a copy of Knoppmyth from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/ and follow the much briefer instructions, as well as any special case instructions by looking at the handi wiki pages that are linked to from there.
Ok, I will have to bring my chainsaw so we can get the leaves to a location where we can actually count them. By that time they will no longer be on the tree outside your building.
QED there are no leaves on that tree.
Did you need me to bring a jack hammer to show that there are no pebbles in the blacktop for your parking lot?
Again with the frikin 'man' command garbage. Yes, 'man $command' will give you all sorts of wonderful information about a known command.
So, I see a 'README' file in the results of a 'ls' command. (how I got to the 'ls' command is beyond explanation, it is not intuitive.) so I decide to type out the file.
$type README|more README is./README
Hmm... that was useless. So what does 'type' actually do?
$man type No manual entry for type
Ok, so not only does the 'type' command not do what I was expecting it to, I can't even find out what it does do.
Eventually I might figure out that I can use the 'more' command directly, but everyone I know who comes from the MS-Dos, or PC-Dos, or even DR-Dos worlds uses the 'more' command as a pipe, not as a direct command. (You can use it directly, and it will work pretty much just the way it works in Linux/Unix, but no one does.)
Now I decide that the document looks like something I might want to have hard copy of. So...
$print README Warning: unknown mime-type for "README" -- using "application/*" Error: no "print" mailcap rules found for type "application/*"
So, 'print' doesn't do what I thought it should either.
Yep, 'man print' refers to 'run-mailcap', with all sorts of other features, but it doesn't tell me how to send a copy of the document to my printer.
I personally am not an advocate of the 'do what I mean, not what I say' philosophy, but one of the things that should be made available for every user, in their local directory is a file that if the user types it's name, gets printed to a printer, or if none is available, opens a file browser to list the text contents of the file which gives the user a high level 'how-to' of simple command line functions the user may want to do. Something like:
To view the contents of a file: ~$ less filename To print a file to the default printer: ~$ lpr filename
Since both type, and print apparently do have functionality given to them, it would not be a good idea to alias these commands to less, more cat, lpr, or other commands. At least in my opinion.
Yes, I personally am quite comfortable using the ls, lpr, less, etc. commands under Linux/Unix. I also run into issues where I end up using these commands under Windows, and get similar responses from Command.com and cmd.exe, in that I don't have executables in my path with these names, and they are not internal commands to the shells in question. Sure I can install Bash and cygwin, but I don't really need to.
Before you claim you don't buy 'import' autos, you need to verify that.
A couple of examples. Mazda Pickups, and Toyota Camreys are largely manufactured in the US.
There are several Ford and Chevrolet cars that are actualy made in Japan.
Dalimer-Chrysler manufactures Mercedes Benz cars in North Carolina. Is it an 'Import'? This is actually the US benifiting from a wage discrepency between the US auto workers, and the German auto workers. And I have not heard many people claiming that US Auto workers are significantly underpayed.
Yep, final cost after the 'lifetime' subscription something like $400, or pay $13 a month, as noted earlier.
Hey, if you really want, you can even get a free pvr from Dish. No idea what the quality is like, but the option is there.
Right up till you want to do HDTV.
Now I grant, there is still a lot fo work to do to get everything right on the HDTV front on Linux, or with MythTV, or one of the other PVR featureing collections of software. I can pretty much gaurantee however that if you want to go the TiVo route, or ReplayTV, or even Dish, you are going to have to pretty much discard all the equipment you are using now, probably at a significant discount over what you paied for it, and get new hardware. Ok, you can probably keep the old hardware too, but do you really want to?
Once the bugs are worked out of capturing HDTV, and if necessary playback of HDTV, via one of the several HDTV tuner/capture cards out there, your entire cost for adding HDTV features to a MythTV box are going to be buying and installing the card, updating the software to use the new card (download and install drivers, update configuration, adjust your scheduling collection, etc.) and you can continue to use the same hardware you have been using all along.
Likewise, you're no longer happy with that 27" TV you have been using for the past 4 years, and want to go with one of those new 42" HDTV screens? Great. I suppose you remembered that those screens require a seprate tuner purchase? No? You didn't? Of course you can just install a video card with DVI out, into a MythTV box, and take full advantage of the resolution of the screen right off the bat. Notice how there is not DVI output on the TiVo or ReplayTV boxes? Well, at least not on the $99 ones anyway.
Now I understand with the Series 2 TiVos, (still not sure about the series 2 DirecTivos) you can spend an additional $50 and get the Home Media Option. I think that means you can play video from other tivos in your house, you can plug your digital camera into the USB port and have a slideshow of the photos on your camera, and a few other nice features. All of which can be done right out of the box for MythTV. If someone wants to compare the TiVo's ability to play music files with the features in MythTV, I might be interested in reading about it, but I haven't seen any writeups lately.
I am not completely happy with it as a DVD player yet, but it's better than when I first tried playing DVDs on a computer.
Will it cost more? Sure in materials and time. Is it a better value? Only if you find the additional features and options of value. Is it a good investment? That I am not sure of. But that's a problem for every 'investment'. For some it will be, they may go on to develop associated skills that will save them money down the road. For others it probably won't be. That's the breaks of the game.
Then again, this is mostly just opinion on my part.
The missing featuer is that the card does not work at all without proprietary drivers. If they want our business, fix that first so that the user can even start using their computer.
If my screen goes blank, and I can't switch to text mode, I don't care if the propietary drivers are perfect, I can't install them.
I think the best feedback you can provide is a note indicating that as a result of the fact that the ATI card you would have liked to use did not work out of the box in a Linux instalation, you have returned it and used the money on an nVidia card instead. Further you are advising your peers that they will get a much better result by using nVidea cards if they choose to run Linux.
You may want to note that you would be happy to help them test their cards and drivers under Linux, but if you are going to do that you expect to be paid for the work.
friends and I happen to like rock climbing. It's a sport with a lot of potential hazards. I know that I don't have to climb rocks, and if I don't do that I will probably be at a lot lower risk of getting hurt.
If I say that, then ask if anyone has found some safer ways of climbing rocks, I will just think you are a blow hard if the only thing you recomend is "don't climb rocks." I have already agreed with you that it would be safer. I have also indicated that I don't consider the response you give as being in any way helpful.
Likewise if someone is looking for a way to cut down the light polution in his room, and he has already considered turning everything off, and decided that that solution is not workable, telling him to 'turn everything off' in a public forum is simply telling the world that you don't care that he has already considered that solution and decided it was not viable. In other words you are not offering a new solution.
Now, if you were to itemize the list of items he is talking about, provide some estimate of the power they are drawing, calculate the related cost, and explain that such a cost is affecting his tuition, or rent, or even is a significant part of his monthly electric bill, and show that in many cases he very likely is using less than 20% of that expense directly, demonstrate that his hardware will last longer, and be more reliable, you might get a reasonable reaction from people like me who would happen to agree. What you won't get is a 'What you can't read TFQ?' response.
First of all we have the responses that say 'Do what you told us you don't want to do. Turn the stuff off."
Next up are the 'Cover those lights with some sort of tape that will leave a residue that pretty much can't be washed off.' with variations such as 'use a black sharpy or other marker'
Of course you have the other variations on this, such as the 'post-it' notes, or other obstructions directly attached to the device.
Lastly you find the people advocating taking the equipment appart and (in most cases) desoldering the led's, or clipping their leads.
So, Rusty0101, what kind of solution do you have?
Regardless of whether the monitor you have is a flat panle LCD, plasma, or CRT, in most cases you don't need it on when you are trying to sleep, and if it isn't integrated into a computer you want left on 24x7, you can probably turn it off.
For the equipment that you want placed up high, but don't want to see the lights from, get the rough dimmensions, then head to a dollar store, or possibly a household goods store, and pick up some opaque storage boxes to put them in. Plastic and cardboard are often opaque to light, but transparent to microwave frequencies, so your 802.11abg equipment should continue to run just fine. If you are concerned about heat, place a piece of black paper over the equipment and leave the box top off. Remember to lable the box so you know what's in it, and if there is room for other stuff as well.
That nice bright light on the front of the laptop? While you are at the dollar store, pick up a plate holder. When you are done with the laptop for the day, and fold it up, set it in the plateholder so that the front led is facing down, (behind a book or something.) If you have a power book, or something with leds at the back of it instead, find (or get your craft inclined so to make) a laptop sleeve that you put your laptop in, and which wraps around any plugs that generate light.
Base computers? If you assemble your own, you know how to disable the leds on the front. This doesn't help for those nice self lit cooling fans, but we'll get to that. Ok for those, get the dimensions of your pc, and make a wooden box with a light baffled slot at the top back of the box, open most of the bottom, and get a 9" fan fitted to that opening, drawing air from below. Filter this properly so you are not picking up all kinds of dirt. Make sure that the holes for cables is also light baffled, and can be accessed easily with the top of the box off. I personally recomend lining the insides of this box with egg separators to baffle the noise as well, but that's your business.
Mice. Get or make a black box, just large enough to drop the mouse into, and just deep enough to hide the led. Replace your mouse with a trackball. Replace your mouse with a Wacom tablet, and do not leave the mouse thingie on the tablet. (usually this activates a 'sensor' led on the tablet which is otherwise off.)
Printers: see monitors or base units. My own experience is that the Samsung ML-1750 turns all leds off when in sleep mode, which it automatically goes into about ten minutes after it is done printing. Ink jets have such a short expected lifetime these days, I am not opposed to covering the leds with something you can easily peel away to see what is happening when needed.
If you are handy with tools, you might be able to make a roll top 'top' for your desk that would hide all of this for you on demand, and if you used light enough materials it would not cause signal degredation for things like wifi equipment.
As a last option, if you have a closet, or can make a large enough storage cabinet for your dorm, get a 'long' kvm extension and only have the mouse, keyboard and monitor sitting on the desk, everything else tucked away. Just make sure that the closet does not get too hot, and do not throw dirty clothes and stuff on top of your electronics. So it isn't the best gaming option? So what. you are looking for a peaceful way to get some sleep.
He knows that in 2 years his bosses are not going to be the least bit concerned about the fact that they should be 20% closer to the goal of a secure Windows platform. Neither his bosses, nor he himself expect to be in the positions they now hold.
One of three things will have happened. They will have had a promotion to a different position, with different responsibilities, and reportables. They will be working for some other company doing something completely different. They will be out of work because Microsoft will have outsourced their job to some country that we don't even think has a technological presence today.
Standard ISO images don't lock the user into the proprietary tools that the proprietary software company wants the end user to buy as add-ons or upgrades to the free copy of whatever they got with the DVD(+|_|+_)(R|RW) burner the user bought.
That isn't to say that the proprietary varient isn't a simple variation of the ISO image, (perhaps both an md5 and/or sha1 signature attached to the end of the image to assure integrity, or additional information the tool does not use in the actual burning, but may update each time the image is used, or even checked to see if the user is 'authorized' to burn this iso, say a hash of the authorization key for the product.
From what I have seen, all of the burners out there can use the ISO format to burn CDs and DVDs, but everyone seems to like vendor lock in for some reason, and may not provide the ability to create an ISO in the 'free' version included with drives.
WinFS is simply the latest itteration of the concept of a database based file system that Microsoft has been touting as the next great thing to be included with Windows, since they started promoting the upcomming Windows 2000. (possibly earlier). The fact that Microsoft has not come up with a workable solution tells me that non-file related features are of greater importance to the marketing people than getting something out the door.
Actually, my own hope is that the home market for Linux is recognized as large enough to support game developers writing their games for Linux as a primary distribution route, and advising Windows users to use a bare bones Linux install to run their game under, to provide an online gaming platform that is less likely to be compromised by Windows viruses while playing online.
Do I see this as being likely to happen? No. But I think it would be a better route.
I know a few people who were bying IBM laptops a few years back who would have been really happpy to see an 'everything worked out of the box' review. They were seeing worse than a 25% DOA.
That was on Windows, so I have no stats for their Linux systems, though I don't think they were selling laptops with Linux on them at the time.
My own experience with IBM laptops has been very good, but I don't tend to by new laptops all that often.
Just remember, 'NT was 100% new code" to Microsoft. The fact that the underlying concepts, design, and function calls all were derived, and even copied from existing code means nothing to Microsoft. Prior to it comming in the door, it didn't exist at Microsoft, therefor it was '100% new' to them.
It all depends upon how the search is actually set up. If the system is set up to index the contents of all files on some schedule, (or even just index each file as it is being saved) it could replace the 'grep' functionality, by making all files across the system searchable. If it tries to search all files every time you instantiate a search, it will be no different than grep.
An option that would make it more 'google' like would be if files had hyperlinks embeded in them referencing other files, (e-mail referencing earlier x-id's, personal wiki pages, etc) that would provide a priority system to the searches, that my help.
Another option would be to bump up keyword matches based upon the document 'keywords' that they user can set the for the 'properties' information set by applications such as OpenOffice.org, or Star Office.
Once you get beyond that, it's anyone's guess.
'Google' like could mean that you get a web browser page with hits, sorted by some 'match' percentage that launches whatever application is correct for the document in question, via the mime type settings.
Nope. It means HP feels that since Linux is Free Software (as in speach) and they do own HP-UX, they have every right to go through the Operating System source code, write and compile tht tools, utilities, and features they are interested in testing for both Linux and HP-UX, but they are unable to do the same for Windows, because Windows is neither their own product, nor is it an Open Source product that they can do these things with.
The Network stack portion of Windows may be based upon one of the BSD varients, and as a result HP could very possibly test their ideas on all of the BSD varients and see if it works there as well, but there is no assurance that such a change would be possible to roll into Windows as an updated dll for netwroking, or any other fix.
They are claiming to own HP-UX (and from my perspective there are welcome to keep it!) but they make no claims to owning Linux.
Since they are shelving this idea, I doubt that the patchs, or source they wrote for these updates will ever be made available to the Linux community. Then again, perhaps they all ready have been, and I just don't know it.
Slashdot Mirror
I presume that would work for billboards where 'Google' is prominently displayed somewhere on the billboard. From the images I have seen of the billboards, it ain't there.
Given a Billboard where the only content is a text string '{first 10 digit prime in e}.com' there are three ways to find out that it is a 'google' ad.
1. Solve the puzzle.
2. Bribe the billboard owner. (surely you have seen this billboard advertizing itsel out at one time or another.)
3. Wait till the news breaks that it is a Google Job offer.
Something tells me that Google is more interested in people who quickly solve #1, vs people who can handle #2, or wait for #3.
-Rusty
Part of your concern over others having hard disk crashes, and other issues is taken up by compression and proper distribution of the data.
First you want to backup your critcal data. Usually this is not already compressed information like jpeg images, or mpeg video, or even mp3 audio. It's your working documents, source code, and a subset of your e-mail.
If you compress this data, you are likely to experience a 50% compression ratio or higher. This means that once you chunk that data for distribution, you can send out two copies of everything to the various people providing the server storage.
Is it still possible that you will end up with a situation where you are unable to retrieve information? Yep. And sometimes tapes can't be recovered from, or CD's shatter.
Likewise your own system crashing and burning is going to provide a situation where other people's data gets lost.
An intelegent system would do a quick inventory of the status of each block of data archived in the system, and warn you of any blocks that need to be rebuilt, or even behind the sceens re-duplicate any data that is lost for more than an hour. That feature should be built in, and built at the storage level, not the backup level. i.e. the software managing the 10 gig of space you are providing keeps track of where other systems, that keep duplicates of whatever data it is storing, are and what their condition is.
And yes, over time that will be a lot of network traffic.
-Rusty
That depends upon what you consider 'better'.
Large businesses have a scheduling process and hire people to swap tapes, move tapes in and out of the various facilities, rotate tapes, and replace tapes that are no longer reliable. This process is done on a 24x7x365 (plus leap days) basis. Most of the data is actually being backed up via tape silos and 'robots' to handle the actual tapes while the various backups are hapening, but it is still a significant investment in people.
A small business may be able to get away with burning a CD-R or CD-RW every night with that days transactions, and a small stack of CD-R (or RW) every weekend which they take home and store in a CD spindle in their freezer, or something. Though I think you would be hard pressed to find a small business that actually does that. (I am sure there are some that do.) Monthly or quarterly they should be taking a spindal of archived data to a remote relative's place to provide further archival of data.
Mid sized businesses are in a bit of a quandry. The number of tapes needed for a good backup is more than anyone really wants to haul around, handle and store at home, but they are not sure it is worth the expense of using a comercial off-site backup for either.
A project like this may be just what they are looking for. No tapes or disks to try to keep track of. Everything compressed and encrypted, so it is reasonably secure. Retreival can start as soon as the replacement system is ready to start retreiving it.
I personally think it should be trialed only as a suplement to some other backup strategy, but even then, someone would decide it was either too much of a hassle, or not reliable enough.
There are even people here who think it is 'reasonable' to haul around 160 or 250 Gig hard drives to backup their critical data.
-Rusty
Nah, he or she should just be directed to get a copy of Knoppmyth from http://www.mysettopbox.tv/ and follow the much briefer instructions, as well as any special case instructions by looking at the handi wiki pages that are linked to from there.
Zero.
You need proof?
Ok, I will have to bring my chainsaw so we can get the leaves to a location where we can actually count them. By that time they will no longer be on the tree outside your building.
QED there are no leaves on that tree.
Did you need me to bring a jack hammer to show that there are no pebbles in the blacktop for your parking lot?
-Rusty
And some Anonymous Coward pans the article without suggesting a usable reference for Linux/Unix newbies.
So, I see a 'README' file in the results of a 'ls' command. (how I got to the 'ls' command is beyond explanation, it is not intuitive.) so I decide to type out the file.
$type README|more
README is
Hmm... that was useless. So what does 'type' actually do?
$man type
No manual entry for type
Ok, so not only does the 'type' command not do what I was expecting it to, I can't even find out what it does do.
Eventually I might figure out that I can use the 'more' command directly, but everyone I know who comes from the MS-Dos, or PC-Dos, or even DR-Dos worlds uses the 'more' command as a pipe, not as a direct command. (You can use it directly, and it will work pretty much just the way it works in Linux/Unix, but no one does.)
Now I decide that the document looks like something I might want to have hard copy of. So...
$print README
Warning: unknown mime-type for "README" -- using "application/*"
Error: no "print" mailcap rules found for type "application/*"
So, 'print' doesn't do what I thought it should either.
Yep, 'man print' refers to 'run-mailcap', with all sorts of other features, but it doesn't tell me how to send a copy of the document to my printer.
I personally am not an advocate of the 'do what I mean, not what I say' philosophy, but one of the things that should be made available for every user, in their local directory is a file that if the user types it's name, gets printed to a printer, or if none is available, opens a file browser to list the text contents of the file which gives the user a high level 'how-to' of simple command line functions the user may want to do. Something like:
Since both type, and print apparently do have functionality given to them, it would not be a good idea to alias these commands to less, more cat, lpr, or other commands. At least in my opinion.
Yes, I personally am quite comfortable using the ls, lpr, less, etc. commands under Linux/Unix. I also run into issues where I end up using these commands under Windows, and get similar responses from Command.com and cmd.exe, in that I don't have executables in my path with these names, and they are not internal commands to the shells in question. Sure I can install Bash and cygwin, but I don't really need to.
-Rusty
Before you claim you don't buy 'import' autos, you need to verify that.
A couple of examples. Mazda Pickups, and Toyota Camreys are largely manufactured in the US.
There are several Ford and Chevrolet cars that are actualy made in Japan.
Dalimer-Chrysler manufactures Mercedes Benz cars in North Carolina. Is it an 'Import'? This is actually the US benifiting from a wage discrepency between the US auto workers, and the German auto workers. And I have not heard many people claiming that US Auto workers are significantly underpayed.
Enjoy.
-Rusty
You can use supermount to automatically mount the drive.
Under Mandrake 9.1 and later it drops a 'removable' icon on the user's desktop and gives the user read/write permission to the drive as well.
-Rusty
e of pi
Yep, final cost after the 'lifetime' subscription something like $400, or pay $13 a month, as noted earlier.
Hey, if you really want, you can even get a free pvr from Dish. No idea what the quality is like, but the option is there.
Right up till you want to do HDTV.
Now I grant, there is still a lot fo work to do to get everything right on the HDTV front on Linux, or with MythTV, or one of the other PVR featureing collections of software. I can pretty much gaurantee however that if you want to go the TiVo route, or ReplayTV, or even Dish, you are going to have to pretty much discard all the equipment you are using now, probably at a significant discount over what you paied for it, and get new hardware. Ok, you can probably keep the old hardware too, but do you really want to?
Once the bugs are worked out of capturing HDTV, and if necessary playback of HDTV, via one of the several HDTV tuner/capture cards out there, your entire cost for adding HDTV features to a MythTV box are going to be buying and installing the card, updating the software to use the new card (download and install drivers, update configuration, adjust your scheduling collection, etc.) and you can continue to use the same hardware you have been using all along.
Likewise, you're no longer happy with that 27" TV you have been using for the past 4 years, and want to go with one of those new 42" HDTV screens? Great. I suppose you remembered that those screens require a seprate tuner purchase? No? You didn't? Of course you can just install a video card with DVI out, into a MythTV box, and take full advantage of the resolution of the screen right off the bat. Notice how there is not DVI output on the TiVo or ReplayTV boxes? Well, at least not on the $99 ones anyway.
Now I understand with the Series 2 TiVos, (still not sure about the series 2 DirecTivos) you can spend an additional $50 and get the Home Media Option. I think that means you can play video from other tivos in your house, you can plug your digital camera into the USB port and have a slideshow of the photos on your camera, and a few other nice features. All of which can be done right out of the box for MythTV. If someone wants to compare the TiVo's ability to play music files with the features in MythTV, I might be interested in reading about it, but I haven't seen any writeups lately.
I am not completely happy with it as a DVD player yet, but it's better than when I first tried playing DVDs on a computer.
Will it cost more? Sure in materials and time. Is it a better value? Only if you find the additional features and options of value. Is it a good investment? That I am not sure of. But that's a problem for every 'investment'. For some it will be, they may go on to develop associated skills that will save them money down the road. For others it probably won't be. That's the breaks of the game.
Then again, this is mostly just opinion on my part.
-Rusty
The missing featuer is that the card does not work at all without proprietary drivers. If they want our business, fix that first so that the user can even start using their computer.
If my screen goes blank, and I can't switch to text mode, I don't care if the propietary drivers are perfect, I can't install them.
I think the best feedback you can provide is a note indicating that as a result of the fact that the ATI card you would have liked to use did not work out of the box in a Linux instalation, you have returned it and used the money on an nVidia card instead. Further you are advising your peers that they will get a much better result by using nVidea cards if they choose to run Linux.
You may want to note that you would be happy to help them test their cards and drivers under Linux, but if you are going to do that you expect to be paid for the work.
-Rusty
Perhaps, but it won't be a USA development. See This earlier story
friends and I happen to like rock climbing. It's a sport with a lot of potential hazards. I know that I don't have to climb rocks, and if I don't do that I will probably be at a lot lower risk of getting hurt.
If I say that, then ask if anyone has found some safer ways of climbing rocks, I will just think you are a blow hard if the only thing you recomend is "don't climb rocks." I have already agreed with you that it would be safer. I have also indicated that I don't consider the response you give as being in any way helpful.
Likewise if someone is looking for a way to cut down the light polution in his room, and he has already considered turning everything off, and decided that that solution is not workable, telling him to 'turn everything off' in a public forum is simply telling the world that you don't care that he has already considered that solution and decided it was not viable. In other words you are not offering a new solution.
Now, if you were to itemize the list of items he is talking about, provide some estimate of the power they are drawing, calculate the related cost, and explain that such a cost is affecting his tuition, or rent, or even is a significant part of his monthly electric bill, and show that in many cases he very likely is using less than 20% of that expense directly, demonstrate that his hardware will last longer, and be more reliable, you might get a reasonable reaction from people like me who would happen to agree. What you won't get is a 'What you can't read TFQ?' response.
-Rusty
First of all we have the responses that say 'Do what you told us you don't want to do. Turn the stuff off."
Next up are the 'Cover those lights with some sort of tape that will leave a residue that pretty much can't be washed off.' with variations such as 'use a black sharpy or other marker'
Of course you have the other variations on this, such as the 'post-it' notes, or other obstructions directly attached to the device.
Lastly you find the people advocating taking the equipment appart and (in most cases) desoldering the led's, or clipping their leads.
So, Rusty0101, what kind of solution do you have?
Regardless of whether the monitor you have is a flat panle LCD, plasma, or CRT, in most cases you don't need it on when you are trying to sleep, and if it isn't integrated into a computer you want left on 24x7, you can probably turn it off.
For the equipment that you want placed up high, but don't want to see the lights from, get the rough dimmensions, then head to a dollar store, or possibly a household goods store, and pick up some opaque storage boxes to put them in. Plastic and cardboard are often opaque to light, but transparent to microwave frequencies, so your 802.11abg equipment should continue to run just fine. If you are concerned about heat, place a piece of black paper over the equipment and leave the box top off. Remember to lable the box so you know what's in it, and if there is room for other stuff as well.
That nice bright light on the front of the laptop? While you are at the dollar store, pick up a plate holder. When you are done with the laptop for the day, and fold it up, set it in the plateholder so that the front led is facing down, (behind a book or something.) If you have a power book, or something with leds at the back of it instead, find (or get your craft inclined so to make) a laptop sleeve that you put your laptop in, and which wraps around any plugs that generate light.
Base computers? If you assemble your own, you know how to disable the leds on the front. This doesn't help for those nice self lit cooling fans, but we'll get to that. Ok for those, get the dimensions of your pc, and make a wooden box with a light baffled slot at the top back of the box, open most of the bottom, and get a 9" fan fitted to that opening, drawing air from below. Filter this properly so you are not picking up all kinds of dirt. Make sure that the holes for cables is also light baffled, and can be accessed easily with the top of the box off. I personally recomend lining the insides of this box with egg separators to baffle the noise as well, but that's your business.
Mice. Get or make a black box, just large enough to drop the mouse into, and just deep enough to hide the led. Replace your mouse with a trackball. Replace your mouse with a Wacom tablet, and do not leave the mouse thingie on the tablet. (usually this activates a 'sensor' led on the tablet which is otherwise off.)
Printers: see monitors or base units. My own experience is that the Samsung ML-1750 turns all leds off when in sleep mode, which it automatically goes into about ten minutes after it is done printing. Ink jets have such a short expected lifetime these days, I am not opposed to covering the leds with something you can easily peel away to see what is happening when needed.
If you are handy with tools, you might be able to make a roll top 'top' for your desk that would hide all of this for you on demand, and if you used light enough materials it would not cause signal degredation for things like wifi equipment.
As a last option, if you have a closet, or can make a large enough storage cabinet for your dorm, get a 'long' kvm extension and only have the mouse, keyboard and monitor sitting on the desk, everything else tucked away. Just make sure that the closet does not get too hot, and do not throw dirty clothes and stuff on top of your electronics. So it isn't the best gaming option? So what. you are looking for a peaceful way to get some sleep.
-Rusty
You are missing a critical element.
He knows that in 2 years his bosses are not going to be the least bit concerned about the fact that they should be 20% closer to the goal of a secure Windows platform. Neither his bosses, nor he himself expect to be in the positions they now hold.
One of three things will have happened. They will have had a promotion to a different position, with different responsibilities, and reportables. They will be working for some other company doing something completely different. They will be out of work because Microsoft will have outsourced their job to some country that we don't even think has a technological presence today.
-Rusty
I don't know, have you figured out how you are supposed to add new software?
And where can I find a list of available software to install?
[/sarcasm]
Standard ISO images don't lock the user into the proprietary tools that the proprietary software company wants the end user to buy as add-ons or upgrades to the free copy of whatever they got with the DVD(+|_|+_)(R|RW) burner the user bought.
That isn't to say that the proprietary varient isn't a simple variation of the ISO image, (perhaps both an md5 and/or sha1 signature attached to the end of the image to assure integrity, or additional information the tool does not use in the actual burning, but may update each time the image is used, or even checked to see if the user is 'authorized' to burn this iso, say a hash of the authorization key for the product.
From what I have seen, all of the burners out there can use the ISO format to burn CDs and DVDs, but everyone seems to like vendor lock in for some reason, and may not provide the ability to create an ISO in the 'free' version included with drives.
Then again, what do I know.
-Rusty
WinFS is simply the latest itteration of the concept of a database based file system that Microsoft has been touting as the next great thing to be included with Windows, since they started promoting the upcomming Windows 2000. (possibly earlier). The fact that Microsoft has not come up with a workable solution tells me that non-file related features are of greater importance to the marketing people than getting something out the door.
Actually, my own hope is that the home market for Linux is recognized as large enough to support game developers writing their games for Linux as a primary distribution route, and advising Windows users to use a bare bones Linux install to run their game under, to provide an online gaming platform that is less likely to be compromised by Windows viruses while playing online.
Do I see this as being likely to happen? No. But I think it would be a better route.
-Rusty
I know a few people who were bying IBM laptops a few years back who would have been really happpy to see an 'everything worked out of the box' review. They were seeing worse than a 25% DOA.
That was on Windows, so I have no stats for their Linux systems, though I don't think they were selling laptops with Linux on them at the time.
My own experience with IBM laptops has been very good, but I don't tend to by new laptops all that often.
-Rusty
Just remember, 'NT was 100% new code" to Microsoft. The fact that the underlying concepts, design, and function calls all were derived, and even copied from existing code means nothing to Microsoft. Prior to it comming in the door, it didn't exist at Microsoft, therefor it was '100% new' to them.
-Rusty
It all depends upon how the search is actually set up. If the system is set up to index the contents of all files on some schedule, (or even just index each file as it is being saved) it could replace the 'grep' functionality, by making all files across the system searchable. If it tries to search all files every time you instantiate a search, it will be no different than grep.
An option that would make it more 'google' like would be if files had hyperlinks embeded in them referencing other files, (e-mail referencing earlier x-id's, personal wiki pages, etc) that would provide a priority system to the searches, that my help.
Another option would be to bump up keyword matches based upon the document 'keywords' that they user can set the for the 'properties' information set by applications such as OpenOffice.org, or Star Office.
Once you get beyond that, it's anyone's guess.
'Google' like could mean that you get a web browser page with hits, sorted by some 'match' percentage that launches whatever application is correct for the document in question, via the mime type settings.
-Rusty
Nope. It means HP feels that since Linux is Free Software (as in speach) and they do own HP-UX, they have every right to go through the Operating System source code, write and compile tht tools, utilities, and features they are interested in testing for both Linux and HP-UX, but they are unable to do the same for Windows, because Windows is neither their own product, nor is it an Open Source product that they can do these things with.
The Network stack portion of Windows may be based upon one of the BSD varients, and as a result HP could very possibly test their ideas on all of the BSD varients and see if it works there as well, but there is no assurance that such a change would be possible to roll into Windows as an updated dll for netwroking, or any other fix.
They are claiming to own HP-UX (and from my perspective there are welcome to keep it!) but they make no claims to owning Linux.
Since they are shelving this idea, I doubt that the patchs, or source they wrote for these updates will ever be made available to the Linux community. Then again, perhaps they all ready have been, and I just don't know it.
-Rusty