It works well on my two Linux systems (granted one is a VMWare Virtual Machine) and my Solaris 10 SPARC system. Very simple, very nice for keeping the bookmarks the same on all of them. However, my Mac running Opera, which I prefer over both Firefox and Safari (just user preference) and Internet Explorer on my Windows laptop (no, I do not have skads of spyware or viruses; common sense prevails) must still be manually updated.
A very good start. But I would like to see it go a step further and include IE, Safari, Mozilla, Opera, and any other modern browsers within reason. Then it would fully live up to its potential.
I agree. I have used Contivity boxes and they are very nice indeed.
They are extremely easy to configure, and with RADIUS support, you can authenticate users off of a Windows Domain, Novell eDirectory, or a Unix system, whatever.
The SSL card should not be totally necessary, depending on how many users, and the smaller onces are quite affordable.
I came into a company that had an outsourced VPN solution that was generating some 20 calls a day to their help desk. The extremely sad fact of the matter was that we only had 80 some (very active) remote users. With painful corrective action required for almost every single call, not to mention the client allowed split tunneling, along with a myriad of other problems from a security standpoint, it was time for something new.
Mere hours of work down the road, and one of their medium size boxes as a main and a smaller one for backup, we were down to maybe 1 call a week, usually related to a VPN users internet service being down, rather than any fault of the client/server. I had the dis-luxury of getting it working with the Novell Clients/Servers in the organization as well, and with some changes to default Novell Client behaviour it worked quite nicely. We also used FreeRADIUS on Linux with the rm_ldap module to authenticate directly to the eDirectory environment.
Simple. Secure. Effortless. And the reduction of calls probably saved lots of money in terms of how much more the techs who were simultaneously filling in as the helpd desk were able to advance the environment, rather than just maintain it, so I am quite sure it was worth it.
Half the world is going to call this a flame, but it is strictly my opinion, so mod me down if you want, but it won't hurt my feelings...
Now, for how I feel; you can shove your corporate speak up your ass.
People can make the falacious arguement that techno speak is the same thing, but it is not. Asshole system admins often use it in the same manner, but they are devoid of intellegence, and are as expendable as most humans in management positions.
Groups (whether they are composed of developers, network administrators/engineers, sysadmins etc.) that converse intelligently using terms related to technology often need to do so to design and implement systems properly. These people should NOT be trying to fling these terms at management in order to keep them uninvolved. Doing so to mask your own incompetence, steer them into making the decisions you want, or otherwise deceive them is completely wrong. Someone in this profession should most definately have the skills required to take what they know in the terms of technology and break it down in a way that management will understand. Give them as much knowledge as they need, in a way that they can understand it, so that they can make informed decisions, ask intelligent questions related to the project/problem at hand, and perform their job to the best of their ability. In terms of management that usually means that the job gets done in the way that most benefits the company. In my previous job, I was frequently used to 'translate' between sysadmins and developers, or between Windows sysadmins and *nix sysadmins (and so on), because they could not understand each others little worlds. My nature as a computer hobbyist and enthusiast has led me down each of these roads to at least a certain extent, so that by no means an expert in most of them, I can at least understand what Joe Unix Admin is trying to say to Bob Windows Admin. If these people cannot even talk to each other (which I consider very distressing), how can they even remotely expect to communicate with management...
Corporate buzz words on the other hand are a pile of smoldering bullshit. touch base? blip on the radar? total cost of ownership? put the ball in their court? mission critical? synergy? bleeding edge? think outside the box? out of the loop?
Right. What a crock of shit. Dealing with corporate types and their eternal lines of shit drove me from the professional field. I now happily go to school for computer science and engineering. It will probably remain an expensive hobby forever. My new job permits me to voice my opinions much more freely. My fellow Marines aren't necessarily the brightest bunch, but none of them are remotely afraid of telling me how it really is (in plain english.) And they aren't afraid to hear how it is from me either. There is something to be envied in that. And as far as I know the only term above that I hear is 'mission critical', because we cannot accomplish our units mission without certain equipment. But then we actually carry out missions. Companies make profits... calling it a mission seems silly after you've been on this side.
I'm a United States Marine stationed in Okinawa Japan. My wife is in the United States Navy, stationed on a ship who's home port is in Norfolk Virginia. Her ship often goes out to sea for months at a time, and is due to head out to Iraq for 6-8 months next year. While they are out there floating around they have internet access. I can't fathom at all how an international, worldwide internet could benefit our ability to communicate in any way whatsoever.
Re:Posession of a controlled substance
on
Cocaine Biosensor
·
· Score: 1
The main story page will survive, because everyone will be at this site trying to figure out how they can get a license.
Alienware m51 7700 is a performance beast.
Problems:
It is not doubt heavy for a laptop
Another big problem is overheating. I have to throw something under the front to raise it up about a half, or else the fans underneath don't seem to pull enough air to keep it cool. Having your laptop shut down continuously is a pain in the ass. This only happens when I am playing graphics intensive games, and if I do not tilt it up with something; minor but VERY annoying.
Alienware support sucks a big one too. I sent my laptop in for repairs (ya the damage was COMPLETELY my fault) and they lost my laptop for two weeks after they supposedly 'confirmed' they received it. Parts were backorder for two months, and then they shipped it out saying it could take a month or more to receive it (I am overseas military); it arrived in 6 days. Incompetent to the core.
On the flip side, I definately disagree with the article about being unable to upgrade. The graphics card is a mobile PCI Express daughterboard you can unplug and take out, and therefore replace. I am sure they will offer better graphics cards in the near future from what I bought in mine, and there is nothing stopping me from calling Alienware, buying one, and upgrading it. It's less than 8 screws to do so. It _may_ even be possible to buy a card from a 3 party (have NOT looked into it) and upgrade that way too; there are less options than a desktop to be sure, but definately not impossibe.
The CPU is easily accessible, and I'm sure can be upgraded, though I have not looked to see what processors the motherboard does support.
You have 4 memory slots.
You can insert two mobile HDD and two slimline CD/DVD drives.
You can even upgrade the audio via PCMCIA/USB solutions.
There are 4 USB ports and 2 firewire ports for additional peripherals. That's similar to most desktops, so you can't argue on that from either. I'm not really sure where he was going on that one.
This news isn't entirely new. I remember reading over a year ago, maybe even almost two years ago, reading about 'breakouts' of aspergers syndrome (which is like a milder form of autism) in areas with huge pockets of 'analytically minded' people.
I RTFA but didn't LFTFP (look for the f'in picture); I'm assuming that even though the hub communicates to the PC wirelessly, the devices still need to be plugged into the hub. I'd pay more than $130 to be able to plug a USB dongle into my printer so that it communicated wirelessly to the hub as well.
I have several computers (different architectures); admittedly for purely hobbyist reasons. Other than satisfying my curiosity and self education they don't to too much; nonetheless I do have wires for peripherals splayed everywhere behind my desk; and whenever possible I use wireless technologies (wireless networking, bluetooth mice and keyboards, etc.) to neaten things up; this would reduce several more wires that I can think of; printer, scanner, and joystick to name three.
Anything to reduce the clutter; it would be nice to have the rear of the desk as neat as the front.
I bought an emachine at Best Buy over a year ago. It had something like 5 rebates. Monitor, Computer, Printer manufacturers, Best Buy, the whole nine yards. I just wanted a cheap computer to do some testing with. It took me something like 30 minutes to get all the envelopes stuffed with all the junk, go out to the mail box, and drop them in. To top it off every rebate was processed and back to me within weeks, rather than months.
It was silly, but in the end I was able to give my wife (girlfriend at the time) a printer for free, a friend a monitor he desperately needed to replace something that (its a slight exageration) reminded me of a monochrome CRT, and use the PC myself.
Could I complain? Not really. Sure, it was silly to have to fill that all out to get the money back, but they handed me EVERYTHING I needed at the register, I walked out with a stack of receipts, receipt copies, rebate forms printed out on receipt paper. Everything. The store definately made it clear cut, painless, hid nothing, and created NO loopholes. It did NOT seem like they were trying to hide anything from anyone.
I don't know what main land Japan has, but I am on a Marine Corps base on Okinawa, and the local providers service (Mediatti) is a fucking joke. Marines that have been here longer, say that as little as a year ago, it was worse than dial-up; it's not THAT bad now, but it is slower than any DSL or Cable service I have ever used in the states, and barely if at all worthy of being called 'broadband.'
The only computer I've ever seen come preinstalled with a non-rediculous amount of Software is my most current laptop. It is an Alienware Area 51m 7700. This beast of a laptop came with Windows XP Pro loaded, and not a whole lot else. I think I uninstalled 2 or 3 programs and that was it. One of those was the OEM version of Nero that came with it, only because I had purchased a copy for my previous computer that included more features, so I upgraded, and even that I _think_ though can't clearly remember may have just meant the addition of the serial number, and not a full uninstall/reinstall.
Anyway my point is that this is the ONLY system I have not wiped, and reinstalled right off the bat, because of the frustration caused by the overwhelming task of uninstalling all of the OEM, and third party software. It was a VERY welcome surprise. So on top of putting out a top notch piece of hardware, they have also managed to not clutter it down with a million and one programs. At least SOMEONE has an idea as to how these things SHOULD work.
That depends on how much you are willing to pay for support. At the most basic levels, ya shit. On the higher end, they'll bow down and call you God to fix your problems if that is what it takes. I had the interesting position of working in a company that went from the low end of support to the high end.
The more willingly you devote your soul (i.e. wallet), the better they will support their products.
But I would implore you stay away, especially if you are interested in the possiblity of having users use VPN services to log into your network. We found Novell's VPN solutions to be disgustingly expensive.
Two way overkill Nortel Networks Contivity Switches behaving in a fully redundant setup, both hardware and software, cost us significantly less than Novell's software solution alone. That didn't even count the hardware to run it on.
When we decided to go with an alternate, it became necessary to use an alternate RADIUS solution, because Novell's solution once again turned up to be decidedly expensive.
We're talking in excess of $10,000 for RADIUS services that I ended up setting up for free using FreeRADIUS on preexisting hardware running Linux.
Even after that it took significant tweaking of the Novell Client to work properly. Primarily this was due to the clients default behaviour of caching information about the network, that as far as I am concerned is totally absurd in a modern environment where laptops accessing a network by multiple methods should not only be considered possible, but likely. And in the end we did get it to work quite nicely, to the point where we no longer had any user complaints, but Novell's technical support was COMPLETELY useless, and it took us reading, making educated guesses, and experimenting to acheive this.
Novell's response was that we should have just used their software. They were as into locking us in, in a similar fashion to Microsoft. Sure that IS what I got paid the big bucks for, but then why was the company also paying big bucks for support from Novell.
Novell likes to talk Linux, and talk low costs, and talk simplicity, talk open source, and talk interoperability, but my experience was that in practice, they were phoney on all counts.
The way I see it you are best to seek open source alternatives, or lock yourself into the beast whom everyone's third party applications should reasonably be expected to work with. That might seem like a very much falacious argument, but the way I see it the middle road is not so middle, and you are asking to cause yourself considerable headaches trying to get their solutions to work with software and solutions, you would feel that you should be able to reasonably expect your windows client computers to work with at first glance.
I am a Marine on Okinawa and let me tell you, voice makes everything a lot more tolerable. I play flight sims and first person shooters online with friends back home. I talk to my wife online. I can see her on my webcam and hear her on my speakers. It just makes it so much more tolerable. It's about a 100 steps away from being in the same room as a person, but it makes it feel 100,000 closer than being on the other side of the planet writing letters back and forth, with the occasional phone call in the middle...
I got my first computer very early in life. Or I should say that my father got his first computer very early in life. God bless the man though, he wanted ME to learn about them, and didn't care if I fucked it up, opened it up, or did whatever. When he bought a sound card an old 8-bit sound blaster, for Christmas, so I could play games with sound, he took so long to install it, that I ended up opening up the computer when he wasn't home, reading the manual, setting the jumpers, installing it, loading the drivers, and get it working.
When he got home, he was a little pissed, and asked if I even knew what I was doing. I said not really, but I learned some things. That kind of put a smile on his face. From then on he pretty much let me fuck with it however I wanted. His brothers (my uncles) used to always give him shit for letting me spend so much time on that bitch, fucking with it.
Further down the road I ended up getting an internship on a help desk, when they outsourced that, rather than fire me, they threw me on the networking team, which was advanced for me, and took a lot of time to catch up on, but within a few years I was making $70,000 and considered a valuable asset to the team.
I ended up forsaking the whole damn thing for a career in the Marine Corps at age 26, but that is a whole entire different story
My uncles in the meantime were trying to push computers on their children, trying to get them to embrace them the way I did, to no avail. I don't know that had they done it when they were younger if they would have taken to it either, but I do know that unless the parents are willing to let them take care of it, let them fix the problems, install the upgrades, and only maybe guide them, they are never going to grow up to be anything more than your typical AIM using, blogging, hig school teen.
I don't know that HAVING a computer alone is the answer. I don't think the average kid is interested in that kind of crap. I know I'm kind of a weird freak...
Meh, just my rambling input into what it did for me to have a computer as a child...
Not that I condone this site at all (it was the first that caught my eye on a google search for 'power supply floppy adapter'), but have you considered something like this at all? Not exactly as screwy or temporary a fix as an external power source, granted it will cost you $6.50 for UPS ground, considering you can't find a site with less rediculous shipping prices.
Anything to do with receiving a shipment of 16,000 lbs. of distilled hardened fatty acid?
I did receive a fax at work for shipment of just such cargo, I think they just faxed it to the wrong number. But just to freak people out I did print it out and stick it on a coworkers desk with a note that said, "Tonight, we make soap!"
He was more than a little freaked out. But I never received the soap. Or did I...
If you right click and customize the menu bar there is an item simply called 'Menu'
Drag it into the bar and you should be able to click on it to see File/Edit/View, etc. This gives more room to the buttons and address bar while still making them available.
As for the google bar, I wish there was something like you could do in IE, with the help of TweakUI (or the registry if you knew the proper entries.
There is the ability in IE to configure a prefix such that when you type it into the address bar (I used to make this the character 'g' for "Google") followed by a space and then a search string you are interested in searching for it would perform a google search.
So, I would simply type 'g Search String' (w/o the quotes) into the address bar and results for a google search on 'Search String' would be displayed. It works with quotes to (where you can enter 'g "Search String"' and get the expected behaviour)
The thing that has kept me away from Firefox and Mozilla is that each has very large menu bars when compared to IE. You have the Standard Menu bar, the back/forward/stop/etc bar, the address bar; it all adds up.
With IE you could always throw them all up on one line with small icons and it took up very little space at the top of your window when you have the browser minimized.
The Compact Menu extension for Firefox allows me to setup the menu bar very similarly; then just use a small icon theme and boom I have almost the same effect.
Now that I can see the screen the way I want I have to admit firefox is indeed a very nice browser.
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It works well on my two Linux systems (granted one is a VMWare Virtual Machine) and my Solaris 10 SPARC system. Very simple, very nice for keeping the bookmarks the same on all of them. However, my Mac running Opera, which I prefer over both Firefox and Safari (just user preference) and Internet Explorer on my Windows laptop (no, I do not have skads of spyware or viruses; common sense prevails) must still be manually updated.
A very good start. But I would like to see it go a step further and include IE, Safari, Mozilla, Opera, and any other modern browsers within reason. Then it would fully live up to its potential.
Last count, I had 73. I'll send you a copy of one. :-P
I agree. I have used Contivity boxes and they are very nice indeed.
They are extremely easy to configure, and with RADIUS support, you can authenticate users off of a Windows Domain, Novell eDirectory, or a Unix system, whatever.
The SSL card should not be totally necessary, depending on how many users, and the smaller onces are quite affordable.
I came into a company that had an outsourced VPN solution that was generating some 20 calls a day to their help desk. The extremely sad fact of the matter was that we only had 80 some (very active) remote users. With painful corrective action required for almost every single call, not to mention the client allowed split tunneling, along with a myriad of other problems from a security standpoint, it was time for something new.
Mere hours of work down the road, and one of their medium size boxes as a main and a smaller one for backup, we were down to maybe 1 call a week, usually related to a VPN users internet service being down, rather than any fault of the client/server. I had the dis-luxury of getting it working with the Novell Clients/Servers in the organization as well, and with some changes to default Novell Client behaviour it worked quite nicely. We also used FreeRADIUS on Linux with the rm_ldap module to authenticate directly to the eDirectory environment.
Simple. Secure. Effortless. And the reduction of calls probably saved lots of money in terms of how much more the techs who were simultaneously filling in as the helpd desk were able to advance the environment, rather than just maintain it, so I am quite sure it was worth it.
Half the world is going to call this a flame, but it is strictly my opinion, so mod me down if you want, but it won't hurt my feelings...
Now, for how I feel; you can shove your corporate speak up your ass.
People can make the falacious arguement that techno speak is the same thing, but it is not. Asshole system admins often use it in the same manner, but they are devoid of intellegence, and are as expendable as most humans in management positions.
Groups (whether they are composed of developers, network administrators/engineers, sysadmins etc.) that converse intelligently using terms related to technology often need to do so to design and implement systems properly. These people should NOT be trying to fling these terms at management in order to keep them uninvolved. Doing so to mask your own incompetence, steer them into making the decisions you want, or otherwise deceive them is completely wrong. Someone in this profession should most definately have the skills required to take what they know in the terms of technology and break it down in a way that management will understand. Give them as much knowledge as they need, in a way that they can understand it, so that they can make informed decisions, ask intelligent questions related to the project/problem at hand, and perform their job to the best of their ability. In terms of management that usually means that the job gets done in the way that most benefits the company. In my previous job, I was frequently used to 'translate' between sysadmins and developers, or between Windows sysadmins and *nix sysadmins (and so on), because they could not understand each others little worlds. My nature as a computer hobbyist and enthusiast has led me down each of these roads to at least a certain extent, so that by no means an expert in most of them, I can at least understand what Joe Unix Admin is trying to say to Bob Windows Admin. If these people cannot even talk to each other (which I consider very distressing), how can they even remotely expect to communicate with management...
Corporate buzz words on the other hand are a pile of smoldering bullshit. touch base? blip on the radar? total cost of ownership? put the ball in their court? mission critical? synergy? bleeding edge? think outside the box? out of the loop?
Right. What a crock of shit. Dealing with corporate types and their eternal lines of shit drove me from the professional field. I now happily go to school for computer science and engineering. It will probably remain an expensive hobby forever. My new job permits me to voice my opinions much more freely. My fellow Marines aren't necessarily the brightest bunch, but none of them are remotely afraid of telling me how it really is (in plain english.) And they aren't afraid to hear how it is from me either. There is something to be envied in that. And as far as I know the only term above that I hear is 'mission critical', because we cannot accomplish our units mission without certain equipment. But then we actually carry out missions. Companies make profits... calling it a mission seems silly after you've been on this side.
I'm a United States Marine stationed in Okinawa Japan. My wife is in the United States Navy, stationed on a ship who's home port is in Norfolk Virginia. Her ship often goes out to sea for months at a time, and is due to head out to Iraq for 6-8 months next year. While they are out there floating around they have internet access. I can't fathom at all how an international, worldwide internet could benefit our ability to communicate in any way whatsoever.
The main story page will survive, because everyone will be at this site trying to figure out how they can get a license.
Alienware m51 7700 is a performance beast. Problems: It is not doubt heavy for a laptop Another big problem is overheating. I have to throw something under the front to raise it up about a half, or else the fans underneath don't seem to pull enough air to keep it cool. Having your laptop shut down continuously is a pain in the ass. This only happens when I am playing graphics intensive games, and if I do not tilt it up with something; minor but VERY annoying. Alienware support sucks a big one too. I sent my laptop in for repairs (ya the damage was COMPLETELY my fault) and they lost my laptop for two weeks after they supposedly 'confirmed' they received it. Parts were backorder for two months, and then they shipped it out saying it could take a month or more to receive it (I am overseas military); it arrived in 6 days. Incompetent to the core. On the flip side, I definately disagree with the article about being unable to upgrade. The graphics card is a mobile PCI Express daughterboard you can unplug and take out, and therefore replace. I am sure they will offer better graphics cards in the near future from what I bought in mine, and there is nothing stopping me from calling Alienware, buying one, and upgrading it. It's less than 8 screws to do so. It _may_ even be possible to buy a card from a 3 party (have NOT looked into it) and upgrade that way too; there are less options than a desktop to be sure, but definately not impossibe. The CPU is easily accessible, and I'm sure can be upgraded, though I have not looked to see what processors the motherboard does support. You have 4 memory slots. You can insert two mobile HDD and two slimline CD/DVD drives. You can even upgrade the audio via PCMCIA/USB solutions. There are 4 USB ports and 2 firewire ports for additional peripherals. That's similar to most desktops, so you can't argue on that from either. I'm not really sure where he was going on that one.
This news isn't entirely new. I remember reading over a year ago, maybe even almost two years ago, reading about 'breakouts' of aspergers syndrome (which is like a milder form of autism) in areas with huge pockets of 'analytically minded' people.
They can finally claim to have had sex after interacting with another player in a round of violent online gaming after this law is passed.
I RTFA but didn't LFTFP (look for the f'in picture); I'm assuming that even though the hub communicates to the PC wirelessly, the devices still need to be plugged into the hub. I'd pay more than $130 to be able to plug a USB dongle into my printer so that it communicated wirelessly to the hub as well. I have several computers (different architectures); admittedly for purely hobbyist reasons. Other than satisfying my curiosity and self education they don't to too much; nonetheless I do have wires for peripherals splayed everywhere behind my desk; and whenever possible I use wireless technologies (wireless networking, bluetooth mice and keyboards, etc.) to neaten things up; this would reduce several more wires that I can think of; printer, scanner, and joystick to name three. Anything to reduce the clutter; it would be nice to have the rear of the desk as neat as the front.
I bought an emachine at Best Buy over a year ago. It had something like 5 rebates. Monitor, Computer, Printer manufacturers, Best Buy, the whole nine yards. I just wanted a cheap computer to do some testing with. It took me something like 30 minutes to get all the envelopes stuffed with all the junk, go out to the mail box, and drop them in. To top it off every rebate was processed and back to me within weeks, rather than months. It was silly, but in the end I was able to give my wife (girlfriend at the time) a printer for free, a friend a monitor he desperately needed to replace something that (its a slight exageration) reminded me of a monochrome CRT, and use the PC myself. Could I complain? Not really. Sure, it was silly to have to fill that all out to get the money back, but they handed me EVERYTHING I needed at the register, I walked out with a stack of receipts, receipt copies, rebate forms printed out on receipt paper. Everything. The store definately made it clear cut, painless, hid nothing, and created NO loopholes. It did NOT seem like they were trying to hide anything from anyone.
I don't know what main land Japan has, but I am on a Marine Corps base on Okinawa, and the local providers service (Mediatti) is a fucking joke. Marines that have been here longer, say that as little as a year ago, it was worse than dial-up; it's not THAT bad now, but it is slower than any DSL or Cable service I have ever used in the states, and barely if at all worthy of being called 'broadband.'
The only computer I've ever seen come preinstalled with a non-rediculous amount of Software is my most current laptop. It is an Alienware Area 51m 7700. This beast of a laptop came with Windows XP Pro loaded, and not a whole lot else. I think I uninstalled 2 or 3 programs and that was it. One of those was the OEM version of Nero that came with it, only because I had purchased a copy for my previous computer that included more features, so I upgraded, and even that I _think_ though can't clearly remember may have just meant the addition of the serial number, and not a full uninstall/reinstall.
Anyway my point is that this is the ONLY system I have not wiped, and reinstalled right off the bat, because of the frustration caused by the overwhelming task of uninstalling all of the OEM, and third party software. It was a VERY welcome surprise. So on top of putting out a top notch piece of hardware, they have also managed to not clutter it down with a million and one programs. At least SOMEONE has an idea as to how these things SHOULD work.
That depends on how much you are willing to pay for support. At the most basic levels, ya shit. On the higher end, they'll bow down and call you God to fix your problems if that is what it takes. I had the interesting position of working in a company that went from the low end of support to the high end.
The more willingly you devote your soul (i.e. wallet), the better they will support their products.
But I would implore you stay away, especially if you are interested in the possiblity of having users use VPN services to log into your network. We found Novell's VPN solutions to be disgustingly expensive.
Two way overkill Nortel Networks Contivity Switches behaving in a fully redundant setup, both hardware and software, cost us significantly less than Novell's software solution alone. That didn't even count the hardware to run it on. When we decided to go with an alternate, it became necessary to use an alternate RADIUS solution, because Novell's solution once again turned up to be decidedly expensive.
We're talking in excess of $10,000 for RADIUS services that I ended up setting up for free using FreeRADIUS on preexisting hardware running Linux.
Even after that it took significant tweaking of the Novell Client to work properly. Primarily this was due to the clients default behaviour of caching information about the network, that as far as I am concerned is totally absurd in a modern environment where laptops accessing a network by multiple methods should not only be considered possible, but likely. And in the end we did get it to work quite nicely, to the point where we no longer had any user complaints, but Novell's technical support was COMPLETELY useless, and it took us reading, making educated guesses, and experimenting to acheive this.
Novell's response was that we should have just used their software. They were as into locking us in, in a similar fashion to Microsoft. Sure that IS what I got paid the big bucks for, but then why was the company also paying big bucks for support from Novell.
Novell likes to talk Linux, and talk low costs, and talk simplicity, talk open source, and talk interoperability, but my experience was that in practice, they were phoney on all counts.
The way I see it you are best to seek open source alternatives, or lock yourself into the beast whom everyone's third party applications should reasonably be expected to work with. That might seem like a very much falacious argument, but the way I see it the middle road is not so middle, and you are asking to cause yourself considerable headaches trying to get their solutions to work with software and solutions, you would feel that you should be able to reasonably expect your windows client computers to work with at first glance.
Just my not so humble two cents.
In my civilian life I had a reputation of drinking more coffee than most people could stomach without puking.
In my military career I have a reputation of drinking more coffee than most people can stomach without puking.
So, lets recap. The potential positive side effects of drinking coffee are as follows:
Rduces risk of cancer
Reduces risk of heart disease
Reduces risk of type II Diabetes
Can increase alertness and improve short-term recall.
May fight Parkinson's s disease
May fight Alzeihmer's disease
May reduce the risk of cirrhosis of the liver among heavy drinkers.
Fights asthma in some circumstances
Antioxidents keep you looking young
One or two of these pro's are not from this article but you can do a search (i.e. coffee alzeihmer's on google) and find some for yourself.
So, 4 to 5 cups a day is a good thing.
In truth my 24 oz X-LG coffee each morning hardly counts as one coffee, but now we can see why I'm such a healthy stud.
I am a Marine on Okinawa and let me tell you, voice makes everything a lot more tolerable. I play flight sims and first person shooters online with friends back home. I talk to my wife online. I can see her on my webcam and hear her on my speakers. It just makes it so much more tolerable. It's about a 100 steps away from being in the same room as a person, but it makes it feel 100,000 closer than being on the other side of the planet writing letters back and forth, with the occasional phone call in the middle...
... that I am smarter than her. Maybe she is right, maybe she is not.
But few would debate the fact that she is the superior human being.
I got my first computer very early in life. Or I should say that my father got his first computer very early in life. God bless the man though, he wanted ME to learn about them, and didn't care if I fucked it up, opened it up, or did whatever. When he bought a sound card an old 8-bit sound blaster, for Christmas, so I could play games with sound, he took so long to install it, that I ended up opening up the computer when he wasn't home, reading the manual, setting the jumpers, installing it, loading the drivers, and get it working.
When he got home, he was a little pissed, and asked if I even knew what I was doing. I said not really, but I learned some things. That kind of put a smile on his face. From then on he pretty much let me fuck with it however I wanted. His brothers (my uncles) used to always give him shit for letting me spend so much time on that bitch, fucking with it.
Further down the road I ended up getting an internship on a help desk, when they outsourced that, rather than fire me, they threw me on the networking team, which was advanced for me, and took a lot of time to catch up on, but within a few years I was making $70,000 and considered a valuable asset to the team.
I ended up forsaking the whole damn thing for a career in the Marine Corps at age 26, but that is a whole entire different story
My uncles in the meantime were trying to push computers on their children, trying to get them to embrace them the way I did, to no avail. I don't know that had they done it when they were younger if they would have taken to it either, but I do know that unless the parents are willing to let them take care of it, let them fix the problems, install the upgrades, and only maybe guide them, they are never going to grow up to be anything more than your typical AIM using, blogging, hig school teen.
I don't know that HAVING a computer alone is the answer. I don't think the average kid is interested in that kind of crap. I know I'm kind of a weird freak... Meh, just my rambling input into what it did for me to have a computer as a child...
that reads a little poorly; change considering to if, then I will be happier with the statement I made.
Not that I condone this site at all (it was the first that caught my eye on a google search for 'power supply floppy adapter'), but have you considered something like this at all? Not exactly as screwy or temporary a fix as an external power source, granted it will cost you $6.50 for UPS ground, considering you can't find a site with less rediculous shipping prices.
Anything to do with receiving a shipment of 16,000 lbs. of distilled hardened fatty acid?
I did receive a fax at work for shipment of just such cargo, I think they just faxed it to the wrong number. But just to freak people out I did print it out and stick it on a coworkers desk with a note that said, "Tonight, we make soap!"
He was more than a little freaked out. But I never received the soap. Or did I...
Most excellent. This works perfectly. Thank you!
If you right click and customize the menu bar there is an item simply called 'Menu'
Drag it into the bar and you should be able to click on it to see File/Edit/View, etc. This gives more room to the buttons and address bar while still making them available.
As for the google bar, I wish there was something like you could do in IE, with the help of TweakUI (or the registry if you knew the proper entries.
There is the ability in IE to configure a prefix such that when you type it into the address bar (I used to make this the character 'g' for "Google") followed by a space and then a search string you are interested in searching for it would perform a google search.
So, I would simply type 'g Search String' (w/o the quotes) into the address bar and results for a google search on 'Search String' would be displayed. It works with quotes to (where you can enter 'g "Search String"' and get the expected behaviour)
The thing that has kept me away from Firefox and Mozilla is that each has very large menu bars when compared to IE. You have the Standard Menu bar, the back/forward/stop/etc bar, the address bar; it all adds up.
With IE you could always throw them all up on one line with small icons and it took up very little space at the top of your window when you have the browser minimized.
The Compact Menu extension for Firefox allows me to setup the menu bar very similarly; then just use a small icon theme and boom I have almost the same effect.
Now that I can see the screen the way I want I have to admit firefox is indeed a very nice browser.