I have 3 Linux devices: 1) My file/torrent/postgresql/coldfusion/apache server 2) My Dell 9300 laptop, which I bring to work to make everyone ooh and ahh. Well and that it extends as my 3rd screen via Synergy; I can surf and IM securely without having to trust the configuration of our work WinXP machines, plus also SSH to my home machine to transfer work back and forth. 3) My Maemo device, a Nokia N810
So I would say I am a Linux user.
However to go from the fact that there are hardly any games installed on my Linux installations to that I don't game is a fallacy.
For hardcore gaming I'll fire up my quad core, watercooled PC/workstation which is running XP and Vista.
Well I'm posting this from my N810 using the little slide out keyboard; I've had it for just 1.5 weeks and I'm seriously impressed with its versatility.
Primarily it was to be an ereader, with evince and fbreader, but then I discovered the gps to be quite decent, plus all the extra benfits of the OS maemo platform.
The screen has a res of 800 x 480, giving us a DPI of 220 or 225. This is way higher than normal LCDs, making it perfect for erading and more.
It really is a fantastic device. With SDict I've got wikipedia on my minisd card, maemo mapper gives me satellite imagery of my current location, adblock plus removes the crap that really slow most sites down (the device is not a quad core pumped up unit like my desktop), I can keep in touch with my family and friends on google talk/im wherever I am in the house, plus plus plus.
I will look to add e.g. an N82 for full 3G internet later. That gives me a compactish phone that can take great photos, plus lending bluetooth internet to my tablet for whenever a wifi is not around. Perfect!:)
These little gadgets are no replacements for full blown laptops when it comes to getting real work done, so I see them more as complementary than anything; at that I must say there's something really warm and fuzzy about having a linux powered wifi device in my pocket that is so versatile!
Seriously, speaking as a Norwegian living in Australia, the US of A is starting to scare me. If not the taser wielding law enforcement officers, then the fact that you are discouraged from helping others in need. Can your society get any more selfish?
I always CBF to unmount my flash drive when transferring files, say a 1gb file from my torrent PC to transport to my HTPC which has a much slower connection.
I transfer the file from my linux PC on my Vista workstation in the same room, wait 5 seconds, pull it out then plug it in downstairs.
Never missed a beat. But I guess I'm still a clueless user?:shrugs:
Haha, funniest reply anyone ever had to any of my posts:)
I actually scored the TC4400 dirt cheap, well relatively so. It retailed at A$3500 but found it at Grays Online for ~$1650. After the "salary sacrifice" tax concession it ended up being around $1100. Much later on I got a 2nd 1GB stick for $150 and the Vista Home Premium OEM (scored through another component purchase) was $170.
I bought it for my wife who is a teacher but now I'm wishing I got two... These things haven't dropped at all in price since last time I checked. The HP/Compaq unit in question is very sturdy, only thing missing is an internal drive ($200 for a Lacie).
The advantages of a tablet may not be apparent at first, but reveal themselves with use. Take reading a PDF document at a plane, scribbling notes in OneNote, making conceptual diagrams of stuff (for those of us who are Visio impaired).
I wanted an electronic reader but now I'm waiting for my FBT tax year so that I can get my own tablet (max of 1 "salary sacrifice" i.e. tax free laptop per year).
They obviously didn't try running Vista on a tablet PC. On my wife's TC4400 with a dual core 1.83ghz celeron and 2GB memory it's the duck's nuts of mobile computing. I absolutely love the upgrade from XP in every aspect - battery performance, usability and especially how wonderful the pen interface is. I've been using it all day to get through a difficult spec and am wondering why I never tried this before - beats the print outs any day.
The only place where WinXP is still better (given reasonable hardware) is games. That'll probably be changed around with 10.1 and the next generation of graphics cards. This is why I multi boot my main PC (3.8ghz Q6600), it's better for games not to have a full application base installed alongside it anyway so a separate partition makes sense.
For the record (karma whoring?:P) I also run a Linux server at my home... Whilst nothing fancy it runs postresql, apache, coldfusion plus also ktorrent - I consider myself fairly agnostic.
Mod parent up. I was just going to post the same fact - Vista will actually ask you what you want to do, and to my knowledge it has not once run anything without my explicitly requesting it do so.
Me and my 3.8ghz Q6600 system is quite liking Vista.:)
I had to use AnyDVD HD to rip my legally rented Spiderman 3 (BR) to my HD so that I could watch it with PowerDVD. Some mumbo about the title using a new Java engine menu that wasn't compatible with PowerDVD... and a bunch of other standalone players.
I guess the rip might have taken away some of the junk that prevented playing. Now, the total was ~40GB. I'm sure this could be reduced by taking away unwanted audio codeks and extra material, but still you're looking at ~25GB or more for a rip and a fair amount of work for sure.
Now to my point, for the time being, with the current prices of BR burnables, hard drive space will probably be the greatest deterrent against piracy so far. There are some nice deals on Blu-Rays out there, e.g. 3 for A$70 = $23 each (about US$21) which just almost beats buying removable hard drives used for the purpose of storing rips.
(FWIW: I love Slysoft's program, without which I'd probably throw my rather expensive Pioneer BR player into the trash due to BR's insistence on propagating the region codes. Well worth the money.)
Wow, enjoy the view up there from your high horse?
I consider myself a serious enthusiast. Now, first of all, last time I checked the P5E3 x38 didn't have onboard vga.
Then, I have an Asus Blitz Formula (p35) with a Q6600 and 2gb of memory (DDR2-1066mhz). This board is similar to the one discussed, except that it's using P35 and doesn't have onboard wifi - instead it is probably a bit more focused on overclocking performance. I greatly enjoy having the sata and network controllers built in - would you like those as PCIE/PCI cards too? And what if you have a camera that needs a firewire connection? That's another Asus onboard inclusion.
Also in my system the audio is included but as a tiny device which uses a PCIEx1 slot; it offers most excellent sound for my Logitech Z-5500Ds and I didn't have to pay any extra for it.
For the P5E3 wifi edition; if I was using wifi at home I'd appreciate not having to have another PCIE slot taken. (My Blitz doesn't offer this).
Benefits of integrated designs are: Better air flow thus cooling, reduced system complexity bringing higher stability. Also those tools that were put into the bios and design of my board (e.g. reset CMOS button) make overclocking so much easier. I paid a lot for it, but feel that I'm getting great value in return.
I'm getting the Maximus Formula X38 in a month or so to put the Blitz into my Zalman HD160XT based HTPC and the X38 into my desktop. The only additional card I need to put into it will be a 8600GTS Silent. Compared to the machines of old, I absolutely love the lack of clutter these feature rich motherboards provide.
The #1 top feature for this would be troubleshooting, especially if the user only has one machine with a single OS. As it has been noted, USB key compatibility would make it even better still.
You could also use it as an instant on technique to quickly check a web site, however I'd say just putting Vista* into hibernate would be just as fast. (*The average user who is buying one of these X38 boards would most likely couple it with at least 2GBs of memory and a reasonably good Core2Duo CPU and thus have plenty of resources for Vista.)
Yeah if you are buying quality stuff I'd have to agree with that for production environments. I've seen some rather shocking servers when it comes to thermal management though, where every bit of headroom would surely be pushed to the maximum.
I guess it boils down to allowing the enthusiasts who are going to design well functioning systems to get the most for their money; it certainly doesn't seem to hurt Intel's reputation in the market (I'm leaving AMD out as they're still to come out with a quick running quad core).
I'm still amazed by the "home user" value of the SLACR where only ~$100 of a really good air cooler (e.g. the Thermalright Ultra 120) and fan (Scythe's Sony based ones) plus a case with good air flow like the Nine Hundred will let you run the 2.4ghz CPU at another gigahertz completely stable.
FWIW, I've seen my completely stock (work) IBM Intellistation blue screen for no good reason whatsoever. Thermal design of the case is abysmal compared to that of my own.
Stability testing is par of the course with any proper overclock... I'm asking about the prospect of if even better price/performance will be attained, as it looks like the new CPUs will be priced higher. And yes, temperature wise you'd think they'd be able to reach much higher speeds with the smaller die.
Just wondering if anyone here thinks the new CPUs will deliver better value than the Q6600 SLACR, which only costs around ~A$350 (US$315) and will easily reach 3ghz with virtually nill effort. Put a little bit of work in it and it will reach 3.4ghz or even 3.6ghz with just a little bit more, on a good air cooler
Whilst the running costs would be lower due to the lower energy usage, I'm just wondering if any of the new CPUs will come anywhere close to the absolutely fantastic performance/value that is currently represented by the SLACR.
I'm looking to buy a new CPU & motherboard for my Zalman HD160XT HTPC case in the next month or so. I already have a Q6600@3GHZ in my self built desktop (based on Asus Blitz Formula in an Antec Nine Hundred w/2GB of RAM) and it is supreme in desktop usage with lots of apps running in Vista, just totally outclassing the Core2Duo 2.67ghz WinXP desktop (IBM IntelliStation M Pro 9229/also 2GB of RAM) which I have at work.
I don't know about that - my new Q6600@3ghz runs Vista just fine with 2GB of memory (@333mhz) and an 8800GTS/320mb display adapter. Performance is, put simply, ripping. On a single core it is, admittedly, a dog - it would appear that it particularly likes the fast memory speed, in addition to the additional cores that handle the otherwise crippling background processes.
I primarily use my Vista "productivity" partitions for MS Studio 08, Office 07, Textpad and lots and lots of browser sessions. I've got a separate partition for Vista DX10 games, and a WinXP for DX9 games. To maintain some Slashdot cred I should probably add I've got a separate box running Linux 24x7... that'd be apache, postgresql, coldfusion plus ktorrent.:)
Man, you nearly made my LCD screens become soaked with coffee. That was too funny.:D
Fwiw I'm one of the many who chipped in a small sum. Just the cost of one lunch, but given the numbers of users, if a few get in on it it will quickly become enough to provide the support that we require.
I believe this case is very important to the Australian online community. Therefore we are taking it quite seriously, as we should.
Now to something completely different; is anyone taking bets on how long 2Clix will stay in business after this? They really must have had just about zero connection with reality when they went up against Whirlpool and thus in effect pretty much the "educated masses" of the Australian online community.
[root@linuxgutt etc]# more mandriva-release Mandriva Linux release 2007.0 (Official) for i586 [root@linuxgutt etc]# uname -a Linux linuxgutt 2.6.17-5mdv #1 SMP Wed Sep 13 14:32:31 EDT 2006 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) GNU/Linux
The issue for me is that there doesn't seem to be an official upgrade path other than a complete reinstall to go from the previous major version to the next? Or am I missing something completely here? Maybe I'm just in the "dumb" category, but the Club website certainly doesn't make it easy.
It would be nice if when paying for the silver service if it actually "worked", e.g. told me the appropriate mirrors for my install and actually did what I thought it was meant to do. I don't want to keep on top of what the latest quarter release is at any old time, I do however want to be told what to do to keep in the update loop. This could very well be managed in a version tracker that links to the customer profile.
I've probably put down about $600 over the last 4-5 years as a support member - (probably more than I've paid for my WinXP Pro OEM and Vista Home Premium OEM licenses;] ), I don't mean to winge about it and hope they've been able to put it to some good use.
I also just noticed that Ubuntu offers "LTS" long term service editions that put them alongside Windows release cycles; this would be perfect for people like me... however the Ubuntu updater looks easy enough that I probably wouldn't need it.
(If Mandriva could offer an update manager like what I'm seeing in the Ubuntu link above then I'd stay on.)
I'm about to swap to Ubuntu myself. I've been using Mandriva as a paying Silver member for years, but every time I want to go to the next major version [because I can't easily get updates for the old] I've pretty much had to start from scratch. The package / update management is just too hard; I'm running I think a Club/Xmas Edition Mandriva 2007 and whilst I was ok compiling e.g. KTorrent, getting something like Firefox 2.0 installed was a major PITA for my experience level. Everyone had moved up to the next point release and I couldn't find packages for the old.. they were supposed to be there, but the Mandriva Club website was just much work.
So just got a new Q6600 to become my main Vista workstation; my old SC AMD64 will thus have Ubuntu installed for the primary reason of the good stuff I've heard about package management. Also ability to update between major versions is a huge bonus.
Now, did _I_ write that!?!:D We got matching stories all right, pretty interesting to see someone go down exactly the same ergonomics path!:) Yep, I remember the dust sticking properties of the first trackball, I wasn't sad to see it go..! The explorer will need to be cleaned out every few months, but it's a very easy thing to do and there's no steady degradation - it'll just suddenly stop working properly and then you know it's time for a 15 second clean.
I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to use a "lesser" keyboard than the 4000 that's available now, but then again it's probably all about what you're used to etc, and committing a few hours or days to learning touch typing. I'll say it's the best hours you ever spent, but that is of course a quite subjective observation.;)
I started getting RSI like symptoms from mouse usage in 1996. I got a trackball (either Microsoft or Logitech) and a Natural Keyboard. Pain went away overnight. Whenever I've had to use a normal mouse the pain would return after not too much time, so because of this I've stuck to my trackballs. Favourite of all times is the MS Explorer, which they unfortunately discontinued - luckily I have a couple.
Having said all that, when Logitech brought out their G5 laser mouse I decided to give it a try. This has exceptional sensitivity, never misses a beat, and I found that hardly any movement is required to control the mouse. I have now been using it for nearly a year in combination with MS' Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (great, great unit) and have no discomfort whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
I have 3 Linux devices:
1) My file/torrent/postgresql/coldfusion/apache server
2) My Dell 9300 laptop, which I bring to work to make everyone ooh and ahh. Well and that it extends as my 3rd screen via Synergy; I can surf and IM securely without having to trust the configuration of our work WinXP machines, plus also SSH to my home machine to transfer work back and forth.
3) My Maemo device, a Nokia N810
So I would say I am a Linux user.
However to go from the fact that there are hardly any games installed on my Linux installations to that I don't game is a fallacy.
For hardcore gaming I'll fire up my quad core, watercooled PC/workstation which is running XP and Vista.
All about the right tool for the right job.
Well I'm posting this from my N810 using the little slide out keyboard; I've had it for just 1.5 weeks and I'm seriously impressed with its versatility.
:)
Primarily it was to be an ereader, with evince and fbreader, but then I discovered the gps to be quite decent, plus all the extra benfits of the OS maemo platform.
The screen has a res of 800 x 480, giving us a DPI of 220 or 225. This is way higher than normal LCDs, making it perfect for erading and more.
It really is a fantastic device. With SDict I've got wikipedia on my minisd card, maemo mapper gives me satellite imagery of my current location, adblock plus removes the crap that really slow most sites down (the device is not a quad core pumped up unit like my desktop), I can keep in touch with my family and friends on google talk/im wherever I am in the house, plus plus plus.
I will look to add e.g. an N82 for full 3G internet later. That gives me a compactish phone that can take great photos, plus lending bluetooth internet to my tablet for whenever a wifi is not around. Perfect!
These little gadgets are no replacements for full blown laptops when it comes to getting real work done, so I see them more as complementary than anything; at that I must say there's something really warm and fuzzy about having a linux powered wifi device in my pocket that is so versatile!
Your moderations get dropped if you post non-AC in the same thread.
Seriously, speaking as a Norwegian living in Australia, the US of A is starting to scare me. If not the taser wielding law enforcement officers, then the fact that you are discouraged from helping others in need. Can your society get any more selfish?
(Just had to be said)
I always CBF to unmount my flash drive when transferring files, say a 1gb file from my torrent PC to transport to my HTPC which has a much slower connection.
:shrugs:
I transfer the file from my linux PC on my Vista workstation in the same room, wait 5 seconds, pull it out then plug it in downstairs.
Never missed a beat. But I guess I'm still a clueless user?
Haha, funniest reply anyone ever had to any of my posts :)
I actually scored the TC4400 dirt cheap, well relatively so. It retailed at A$3500 but found it at Grays Online for ~$1650. After the "salary sacrifice" tax concession it ended up being around $1100. Much later on I got a 2nd 1GB stick for $150 and the Vista Home Premium OEM (scored through another component purchase) was $170.
I bought it for my wife who is a teacher but now I'm wishing I got two... These things haven't dropped at all in price since last time I checked. The HP/Compaq unit in question is very sturdy, only thing missing is an internal drive ($200 for a Lacie).
The advantages of a tablet may not be apparent at first, but reveal themselves with use. Take reading a PDF document at a plane, scribbling notes in OneNote, making conceptual diagrams of stuff (for those of us who are Visio impaired).
I wanted an electronic reader but now I'm waiting for my FBT tax year so that I can get my own tablet (max of 1 "salary sacrifice" i.e. tax free laptop per year).
I'm slightly sick of the Slashdot MS bashing.
:P) I also run a Linux server at my home... Whilst nothing fancy it runs postresql, apache, coldfusion plus also ktorrent - I consider myself fairly agnostic.
They obviously didn't try running Vista on a tablet PC. On my wife's TC4400 with a dual core 1.83ghz celeron and 2GB memory it's the duck's nuts of mobile computing. I absolutely love the upgrade from XP in every aspect - battery performance, usability and especially how wonderful the pen interface is. I've been using it all day to get through a difficult spec and am wondering why I never tried this before - beats the print outs any day.
The only place where WinXP is still better (given reasonable hardware) is games. That'll probably be changed around with 10.1 and the next generation of graphics cards. This is why I multi boot my main PC (3.8ghz Q6600), it's better for games not to have a full application base installed alongside it anyway so a separate partition makes sense.
For the record (karma whoring?
(Insightful)
Mod parent up. I was just going to post the same fact - Vista will actually ask you what you want to do, and to my knowledge it has not once run anything without my explicitly requesting it do so.
:)
Me and my 3.8ghz Q6600 system is quite liking Vista.
I had to use AnyDVD HD to rip my legally rented Spiderman 3 (BR) to my HD so that I could watch it with PowerDVD. Some mumbo about the title using a new Java engine menu that wasn't compatible with PowerDVD... and a bunch of other standalone players.
I guess the rip might have taken away some of the junk that prevented playing. Now, the total was ~40GB. I'm sure this could be reduced by taking away unwanted audio codeks and extra material, but still you're looking at ~25GB or more for a rip and a fair amount of work for sure.
Now to my point, for the time being, with the current prices of BR burnables, hard drive space will probably be the greatest deterrent against piracy so far. There are some nice deals on Blu-Rays out there, e.g. 3 for A$70 = $23 each (about US$21) which just almost beats buying removable hard drives used for the purpose of storing rips.
(FWIW: I love Slysoft's program, without which I'd probably throw my rather expensive Pioneer BR player into the trash due to BR's insistence on propagating the region codes. Well worth the money.)
Wow, enjoy the view up there from your high horse?
I consider myself a serious enthusiast. Now, first of all, last time I checked the P5E3 x38 didn't have onboard vga.
Then, I have an Asus Blitz Formula (p35) with a Q6600 and 2gb of memory (DDR2-1066mhz). This board is similar to the one discussed, except that it's using P35 and doesn't have onboard wifi - instead it is probably a bit more focused on overclocking performance. I greatly enjoy having the sata and network controllers built in - would you like those as PCIE/PCI cards too? And what if you have a camera that needs a firewire connection? That's another Asus onboard inclusion.
Also in my system the audio is included but as a tiny device which uses a PCIEx1 slot; it offers most excellent sound for my Logitech Z-5500Ds and I didn't have to pay any extra for it.
For the P5E3 wifi edition; if I was using wifi at home I'd appreciate not having to have another PCIE slot taken. (My Blitz doesn't offer this).
Benefits of integrated designs are: Better air flow thus cooling, reduced system complexity bringing higher stability. Also those tools that were put into the bios and design of my board (e.g. reset CMOS button) make overclocking so much easier. I paid a lot for it, but feel that I'm getting great value in return.
I'm getting the Maximus Formula X38 in a month or so to put the Blitz into my Zalman HD160XT based HTPC and the X38 into my desktop. The only additional card I need to put into it will be a 8600GTS Silent. Compared to the machines of old, I absolutely love the lack of clutter these feature rich motherboards provide.
The #1 top feature for this would be troubleshooting, especially if the user only has one machine with a single OS. As it has been noted, USB key compatibility would make it even better still.
You could also use it as an instant on technique to quickly check a web site, however I'd say just putting Vista* into hibernate would be just as fast. (*The average user who is buying one of these X38 boards would most likely couple it with at least 2GBs of memory and a reasonably good Core2Duo CPU and thus have plenty of resources for Vista.)
Yeah if you are buying quality stuff I'd have to agree with that for production environments. I've seen some rather shocking servers when it comes to thermal management though, where every bit of headroom would surely be pushed to the maximum.
I guess it boils down to allowing the enthusiasts who are going to design well functioning systems to get the most for their money; it certainly doesn't seem to hurt Intel's reputation in the market (I'm leaving AMD out as they're still to come out with a quick running quad core).
I'm still amazed by the "home user" value of the SLACR where only ~$100 of a really good air cooler (e.g. the Thermalright Ultra 120) and fan (Scythe's Sony based ones) plus a case with good air flow like the Nine Hundred will let you run the 2.4ghz CPU at another gigahertz completely stable.
FWIW, I've seen my completely stock (work) IBM Intellistation blue screen for no good reason whatsoever. Thermal design of the case is abysmal compared to that of my own.
Stability testing is par of the course with any proper overclock...
I'm asking about the prospect of if even better price/performance will be attained, as it looks like the new CPUs will be priced higher.
And yes, temperature wise you'd think they'd be able to reach much higher speeds with the smaller die.
Just wondering if anyone here thinks the new CPUs will deliver better value than the Q6600 SLACR, which only costs around ~A$350 (US$315) and will easily reach 3ghz with virtually nill effort. Put a little bit of work in it and it will reach 3.4ghz or even 3.6ghz with just a little bit more, on a good air cooler
Whilst the running costs would be lower due to the lower energy usage, I'm just wondering if any of the new CPUs will come anywhere close to the absolutely fantastic performance/value that is currently represented by the SLACR.
I'm looking to buy a new CPU & motherboard for my Zalman HD160XT HTPC case in the next month or so. I already have a Q6600@3GHZ in my self built desktop (based on Asus Blitz Formula in an Antec Nine Hundred w/2GB of RAM) and it is supreme in desktop usage with lots of apps running in Vista, just totally outclassing the Core2Duo 2.67ghz WinXP desktop (IBM IntelliStation M Pro 9229/also 2GB of RAM) which I have at work.
I don't know about that - my new Q6600@3ghz runs Vista just fine with 2GB of memory (@333mhz) and an 8800GTS/320mb display adapter.
... that'd be apache, postgresql, coldfusion plus ktorrent. :)
Performance is, put simply, ripping. On a single core it is, admittedly, a dog - it would appear that it particularly likes the fast memory speed, in addition to the additional cores that handle the otherwise crippling background processes.
I primarily use my Vista "productivity" partitions for MS Studio 08, Office 07, Textpad and lots and lots of browser sessions. I've got a separate partition for Vista DX10 games, and a WinXP for DX9 games. To maintain some Slashdot cred I should probably add I've got a separate box running Linux 24x7
Man, you nearly made my LCD screens become soaked with coffee. That was too funny. :D
Fwiw I'm one of the many who chipped in a small sum. Just the cost of one lunch, but given the numbers of users, if a few get in on it it will quickly become enough to provide the support that we require.
I believe this case is very important to the Australian online community. Therefore we are taking it quite seriously, as we should.
Now to something completely different; is anyone taking bets on how long 2Clix will stay in business after this? They really must have had just about zero connection with reality when they went up against Whirlpool and thus in effect pretty much the "educated masses" of the Australian online community.
The issue for me is that there doesn't seem to be an official upgrade path other than a complete reinstall to go from the previous major version to the next? Or am I missing something completely here? Maybe I'm just in the "dumb" category, but the Club website certainly doesn't make it easy.
It would be nice if when paying for the silver service if it actually "worked", e.g. told me the appropriate mirrors for my install and actually did what I thought it was meant to do. I don't want to keep on top of what the latest quarter release is at any old time, I do however want to be told what to do to keep in the update loop. This could very well be managed in a version tracker that links to the customer profile.
I've probably put down about $600 over the last 4-5 years as a support member - (probably more than I've paid for my WinXP Pro OEM and Vista Home Premium OEM licenses
However in Ubuntu it just looks extremely easy:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/upgrade-ubuntu-610-edgy
I also just noticed that Ubuntu offers "LTS" long term service editions that put them alongside Windows release cycles; this would be perfect for people like me... however the Ubuntu updater looks easy enough that I probably wouldn't need it.
(If Mandriva could offer an update manager like what I'm seeing in the Ubuntu link above then I'd stay on.)
I'm about to swap to Ubuntu myself. I've been using Mandriva as a paying Silver member for years, but every time I want to go to the next major version [because I can't easily get updates for the old] I've pretty much had to start from scratch. The package / update management is just too hard; I'm running I think a Club/Xmas Edition Mandriva 2007 and whilst I was ok compiling e.g. KTorrent, getting something like Firefox 2.0 installed was a major PITA for my experience level. Everyone had moved up to the next point release and I couldn't find packages for the old.. they were supposed to be there, but the Mandriva Club website was just much work.
So just got a new Q6600 to become my main Vista workstation; my old SC AMD64 will thus have Ubuntu installed for the primary reason of the good stuff I've heard about package management. Also ability to update between major versions is a huge bonus.
I wish... Here it's more like 10-15 _seconds_.
God knows they can afford it ... and bloody hell they deserve it! It'd be poetic justice if they had to pay up.
Would your real name by any chance be Lestat?
Now, did _I_ write that!?! :D We got matching stories all right, pretty interesting to see someone go down exactly the same ergonomics path! :) Yep, I remember the dust sticking properties of the first trackball, I wasn't sad to see it go..! The explorer will need to be cleaned out every few months, but it's a very easy thing to do and there's no steady degradation - it'll just suddenly stop working properly and then you know it's time for a 15 second clean.
;)
I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want to use a "lesser" keyboard than the 4000 that's available now, but then again it's probably all about what you're used to etc, and committing a few hours or days to learning touch typing. I'll say it's the best hours you ever spent, but that is of course a quite subjective observation.
I started getting RSI like symptoms from mouse usage in 1996. I got a trackball (either Microsoft or Logitech) and a Natural Keyboard. Pain went away overnight. Whenever I've had to use a normal mouse the pain would return after not too much time, so because of this I've stuck to my trackballs. Favourite of all times is the MS Explorer, which they unfortunately discontinued - luckily I have a couple.
Having said all that, when Logitech brought out their G5 laser mouse I decided to give it a try. This has exceptional sensitivity, never misses a beat, and I found that hardly any movement is required to control the mouse. I have now been using it for nearly a year in combination with MS' Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (great, great unit) and have no discomfort whatsoever.