I've lived on a compound in Kazakhstan with 85 other American and Canadian familes for the past 2 years. Since my job is communications, I get questioned about VoIP services all the time.
Many of the folks here use a low speed DSL service (metered) that traverses two satellite hops before it gets to North America. With the satellite delay and congestion the round trip delay can reach 2 seconds at times.
I'm an iConnecthere user and have a Cisco ATA that allows me to get incoming calls. Many others here are Vonage users with several variants of ATA devices. Most folks think it's pretty spooky that someone in the States can dial a US number and it rings half way around the world. I actually got a call one night from a UPS delivery person trying to get in the gate at my father-in-law's house. Wierd.
Generally, the delay is only an issue if you or the people you are calling just can't learn to shut up. You do have to wait for people to finish. The voice quality is variable, but usually amazingly good if you think about what you are doing and how far your voice is actually going.
More recently people have been using Skype. The great advantage is that since it works like an IM service, you don't have to worry about whether people are going to be home to receive your call, or set up some sort of schedule with them. Also, the voice quality of Skype is nothing less than amazing.
So, bottom line is - you pays your money (or not, in the case of Skype) and you makes your choice. There are a lot of options.
So, what's the problem with taking a few of those big-ass ugly wind generators up on the Altamont and sticking them below the Golden Gate Bridge(http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/tidal.htm)? Tide current there can reach 6kts. Or what about off the coast of France, where the tidal currents go up to 8kts?
Sure, we need the energy, but do we have to have these things up where they get in the way of the view?
I use a Sony Clie NX-70 for just that. I know you said you didn't want a "computer", but for me, the Clie has worked out perfectly. I take notes using graffiti and into Documents to Go. When I'm back from the trip, the stuff gets uploaded into MS Word format - *immediately* into OpenOffice.org, and gets cleaned up.
The slow input speed of graffiti actually helps me - I can collect my thoughts while inputting, and in a way it slows me way down, something we all need on vacation.
The other, equally cool thing about the Clie is the built-in camera and relatively large display. I have a great time in on vacations in 3rd world countries, taking little movies of the kids and playing them back on the screen for them.
Then, of course, while in that international airport waiting for the next plane, you can use the WiFi to pick up that last bit of email, or sign on to Slashdot to get great advice like this...
"...buyer must collect the item themselves, and returns will not be accepted."
You mean shipping isn't included?
What a rip-off. I mean, what could be more fun than:
"Hello UPS? Ummm, I have a fairly large object to ship. What are your limits? Uh huh... Uh huh... It's 580 tons. Uh huh... Uh huh... To Lompoc. Uh huh... Uh huh..."
After spending a weekend watching the DVD set, it became pretty clear to me that Fox would be determined to kill it.
In the interviews on the DVD set there were several somewhat veiled comments about Fox wanting to change the show. The right-wing conservatives at Fox couldn't get Josh to stop writing in scenes of Mal with no clothes on or the resident Companion taking a female client.
I lived in Moscow for 6 months and I've lived in Kazakhstan for the past year. I'll share a few thoughts and experiences on Russian cars:
- Ladas basically don't work after they leave the factory in Russia. Even the dealer recommends you take the car directly to a garage to have it fixed after you buy it. Lada set up a second assembly line to fix cars that they intend to export.
- A company in Russia produced an armored Lada for a while. No changes in engine (tiny 4 cly), suspension or anything like that, they just added about 1500 pounds of armor. Can you say "Getaway?".
- Some of my friends here in Kazakhstan drive Ladas. What they usually say is "It is Russian car. After three years, it will have to be replaced."...and my favorite:
- We always start our meetings here with a "Safety Moment" - someone tells about an incident or a potentially unsafe situation that they have observed. At a recent meeting, a person described how he had mistakenly driven his Ford pickup into a puddle, and was surprised to find out that it was so deep that the water almost came in his windows. There was general nodding and agreement about how that was an unsafe situation, and how people shouldn't do that sort of thing.
After a pause, one person said, "Would you please drive my Niva into that puddle?".
One of the things that makes international morse code unique is that is has been used as an international language for years. The Morse "Q" Signals have always helped folks to chat across traditional language barriers.
I agree with the other poster who said that hams' shorthand would put an IM kid to shame! It makes me laugh... (like this............)
I first got a Rocket eBook back in 1999 - I thought it would be a great way getting decent reading material before a 6 month assignment in Moscow. It was great! I used to come in to the office on the weekends to fiddle with my server back at home in California, eventually putting together a bunch of perl scripts that would suck down web content, convert them to Rocket format, and send them to me to read in the taxi on the way back to the hotel.
The REB community was wonderful back then - we even had a one-and-only convention in San Francisco to meet and talk about the electronic publishing business in general. Martin Eberhard - then CEO of Nuvomedia, stopped by and gave us his perspective on the industry.
Then Gemstar jumped in, fired Martin, and made the REB into, well, god knows what. Still, you could get decent content, so before we moved to Kazakhstan last December, my wife and I both got new RCA eBooks. We download new content and get to read real, new books on a device that is made for reading (not those stupid Palms that have type so small you couldn't read them if your life depended on it). I don't even mind paying full book price.
Now, I'm literally half way around the world with a useless piece of plastic - at least in terms of new content. I guess I can still download stuff from Pheonix Library, but I don't think I'll be seeing another William Gibson release anytime soon, or anything from Ludlum or King. This sucks big time.
It is beyond me how something so useful, so easy to use, and so simple could go so terribly wrong. Now I either get to learn how to read Russian, or wait read torn up cast off books from the latest traveller.
Here are my 2 cents worth. I've been in and around this stuff for 26 years (and yes, I do have, what used to be prematurely, grey hair):
1. Put in CAT5, or even CAT6 if you can afford it. Put in twice as much as you think is reasonable. Get it certified and tested. Next time you think you need just those couple of extra pair, you won't regret it. The big hit in any infrastructure installation is labor - you are going to spend about as much for labor to have two CAT6 cables pulled in to a jack as you would pay to have one CAT5.
2. NAT would be a pain in the ass for your users if they want to do anything more complex than web browsing and mail. This sounds like a multi-year project - what do you think people are going to be doing with the Internet in two years? Doing SIP telephony, H.323 multimedia, etc. etc. through a NAT connection borders on impossible for an average user.
3. No matter what you think the skill level is of your users, cut it in half. People seem to get dumber than dirt when they get home at night. I have personal experience - I'm living in a residential compound in Kazakhstan right now. I spend my days working for the Man, nights dealing with residents who stuck floppy disks to their fridges with magnets.
4. All the cool stuff like web cache, proxy servers, even community web sites are very nice. With every single item, just think about who is going to support those things after you make your fortune and move to a grass hut in Tonga? KISS in all things.
5. On the subject of support - residents are 24/7/365. When the Smith family can't have that video conference with Grandma on Christmas morning, who they gonna call? Set up a well understood service level agreement that every resident signs. Make it simple, but clear. The rule of thumb is that if it can be explained in an elevator between floors, it's about right.
6. Fiber isn't that expensive, and there are some cool devices available now for doing lots of fun things with it. Investigate using it for house distribution. In 5 years when those 2mb DSL connections become passe', and folks start wanting those 10-20mb connections, they will look at your portrait on their mantle and smile.
7. Here's a turnaround for you: Have you thought about cable modems? Not only can you do a few channels for high speed data, you can also do digital TV distribution, and telephone distribution. What if the folks had a TV channel for the community front gate, so they could see when the mother-in-law is coming?
Have fun - this if obviously a passion for you. On those all-nighters when you are trying to solve some stupid routing problem, remember it was YOUR idea.
I've been running Linux in one shape or another since 1.4, but no matter how many times I try to NOT use Windows apps, I always find myself setting up some sort of dual boot (either on the same machine, two with a KVM switch, or whatever).
Why? Let's all be very honest with ourselves. As much as we all hate the evil empire, Linux can be a real pain on the desktop. For servers, there's no comparison IMHO - Linux has always served me well as a home server and utility boxes at work when I can slip one in under the radar.
It's the simple stuff, or the stuff that you just want to get going without a lot of hassle, that is often the most flustrating with desktop Linux. Remembering what you did to get Realplayer to play automatically, wondering where that old copy of MusicMatch is (they don't offer it anymore), trying to figure out why your latest Microsoft Office document won't load in OpenOffice, StarOffice, or whatever. Getting flustrated because you can't just install something, you have to build from source or figure out where all the dependencies are for your latest RPM install.
I find as I get older I get even more impatient trying to get things to work. So, generally, it goes like this: If I feel like the intellectual challenge, and the satisfaction, of getting a new application working, I'll boot into Linux and spend a comfortable evening downloading, compiling and looking for help on the net. If I'm in a big hurry, I boot into Windows, install what I need to install, and it just (well, usually) WORKS. I don't like it, I wish I didn't have to ever boot into Windows, but sometimes I just don't have the time to fool with Linux.
It's not about religion, it's not about principles. It's just some lousy software that works on the silicon I have here. Let's try not to get too emotional about it, okay?
What worries me most is the comment "many consumer electronics made with these capacitors may also fail prematurely". I'm looking around here, and I'm seeing an awful lot of "mature" consumer electronics.
This stuff could fail at any time! Oh the humanity!
You know, this might be one of thos situations where the real answer has been staring folks in the face for years.
Got a stereo component system? Have a look at the back of your amplifier - particularly those big jobs that are designed to really put out the power. Fins, lots of them. On the high end boxes, the cooling fins sometimes go around three sides of the case. The result is that noisy fans aren't needed (who would buy a stereo component that sounded like a vacuum cleaner (or your average PC)?
I guess the difference is that the nice folks who make stereo components acknowledged a long time ago that cooling was an issue - I think PC manufacturers are still in denial that good, quiet cooling would actually sell more boxes, and keep the things from coming back for repair.
Apple made an attempt with the Cube, but look what happened to that!
There's a good article over at Media Alliance about the efforts of Dewyane Hendricks of the Dandin Group to open up the airwaves for spread spectrum communications.
Dewayne found out that he could prove his concepts in "regulatory havens" like Tonga and tribal lands. This stuff is being done today! Eventually the FCC is going to have to wake up and realize that it actually makes sense, in spite of the lobbys.
I would think that the motivation for something like this would be obvious. For a company to develop drivers, either for their own hardware or someone elses, would be WAY more than $20,000. That's a couple of months of contract time for one person, if you are lucky.
This way, they get the drivers they want, the OSS community gets another wrench for the toolbox, and everybody wins.
Why look a gift horse in the mouth, folks? Get coding!
I ignored my back pain for several months, and finally ended up in the emergency room for 8 hours of screaming, drugs and MRIs. Don't ignore pain - it's the only way your body has of telling you to get off your ass and change something.
My doc told me a little stat that he was fond of: When they compared recoveries of various back pain patients (chiropratic, physio, surgery), they all recovered in almost exactly the same time. The fact is, you do what is best for you, but do SOMETHING.
I went on physio for a while, then to the chiroprator. After a year of the chiroprator telling me that he could cure anything from warts to the common cold (and running out my insurance), I decided to take my physio therapist's advice and do twice daily stretching plus exercise. I found a good bike and started riding to work.
After another year, I was finally without pain. I know, that sounds like a long time, but all that stuff in your back takes a long time to heal.
So, bottom line:
Take care of yourself. Change your lifestyle if you have to.
When it starts to hurt, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT THEN. Don't wait for it to go away
Ice is great. Wrap up a bag of crushed ice and put it on your back. Ahhhhh.
Stretching exercises are one of the best things you can do for yourself. Pelvic rolls kick ass, and hamstring stretches (carefully) will keep things long and flexible
Riding a bike is one of the best back exercises you can do. Stationery, or get outside and smell the fresh air (yes, there is an "outside" - it's not a myth)
Give it time. It takes a while. Just be patient, think good thoughts, and take care of yourself.
Good luck buddy. The one in three people in the US who suffer from back pain are all with you.
For a couple of years, The Garner Group had a presentation at their annual symposium called "The Great Train Wreck". Their premis was fairly simple to understand: Microsoft generally worked it's young software engineers and programmers 24 hours a day for relatively low pay and lots of options. Gartner's case was that as long as Microsoft, and Microsoft stock, continued to grow at 40% per year, those overworked youngsters would stick around with visions of early retirement dancing in their heads. As soon as Microsoft's phenomenal growth slowed to "normal" levels, those talented folks would seek greener pastures. At that point, the quality of Microsoft's product would deteriorate (no jokes about how much worse it can get, please), prices would go up, and schedules would be even harder to meet.
Microsoft's stock has gone down almost 50% from highs of a year ago, and while not going into the toilet like many of the Nasdaq stocks, this performance would give any young programmer pause to think if MS is such a great opportunity after all.
What would you tell the CIO of a fortune 500 company about Microsoft's strategies for keeping good people, and continuing to turn out product?
A complete SDK, called Merlin, has been created in Java, you can get it here. Also, a very good open source html to rb converter called rbmake is available. Both the Merlin and rbmake web pages include explanations on how rb files are complied.
Rocket (now RCA) eBooks kick butt - I've had one for over a year and it's by far the best way to get up-to-date english language reading when you are stuck in a foreign country for 6 months or so.
The original version of Rocket Librarian (for Windows) included an HTML to rb converter. Gemstar seems to have excluded that feature with the software they released for the 1100, but with rbmake, you can do the same thing.
Now, if someone would just create a nice Gnome or KDE client, I would be a happy camper.
Slashdot Mirror
"Okay honey, don't worry, we can outrun it. WHAT THE F***?!?!"
I've lived on a compound in Kazakhstan with 85 other American and Canadian familes for the past 2 years. Since my job is communications, I get questioned about VoIP services all the time.
Many of the folks here use a low speed DSL service (metered) that traverses two satellite hops before it gets to North America. With the satellite delay and congestion the round trip delay can reach 2 seconds at times.
I'm an iConnecthere user and have a Cisco ATA that allows me to get incoming calls. Many others here are Vonage users with several variants of ATA devices. Most folks think it's pretty spooky that someone in the States can dial a US number and it rings half way around the world. I actually got a call one night from a UPS delivery person trying to get in the gate at my father-in-law's house. Wierd.
Generally, the delay is only an issue if you or the people you are calling just can't learn to shut up. You do have to wait for people to finish. The voice quality is variable, but usually amazingly good if you think about what you are doing and how far your voice is actually going.
More recently people have been using Skype. The great advantage is that since it works like an IM service, you don't have to worry about whether people are going to be home to receive your call, or set up some sort of schedule with them. Also, the voice quality of Skype is nothing less than amazing.
So, bottom line is - you pays your money (or not, in the case of Skype) and you makes your choice. There are a lot of options.
Sure, we need the energy, but do we have to have these things up where they get in the way of the view?
Atyrau, to be exact, at the top of the Caspian sea. Slashdot is my home page.
I use a Sony Clie NX-70 for just that. I know you said you didn't want a "computer", but for me, the Clie has worked out perfectly. I take notes using graffiti and into Documents to Go. When I'm back from the trip, the stuff gets uploaded into MS Word format - *immediately* into OpenOffice.org, and gets cleaned up.
The slow input speed of graffiti actually helps me - I can collect my thoughts while inputting, and in a way it slows me way down, something we all need on vacation.
The other, equally cool thing about the Clie is the built-in camera and relatively large display. I have a great time in on vacations in 3rd world countries, taking little movies of the kids and playing them back on the screen for them.
Then, of course, while in that international airport waiting for the next plane, you can use the WiFi to pick up that last bit of email, or sign on to Slashdot to get great advice like this...
You mean shipping isn't included?
What a rip-off. I mean, what could be more fun than:
"Hello UPS? Ummm, I have a fairly large object to ship. What are your limits? Uh huh... Uh huh... It's 580 tons. Uh huh... Uh huh... To Lompoc. Uh huh... Uh huh..."
Check out Tony Buzan's work. He doesn't seem bored.
Or try stand-up comedy.
After spending a weekend watching the DVD set, it became pretty clear to me that Fox would be determined to kill it.
In the interviews on the DVD set there were several somewhat veiled comments about Fox wanting to change the show. The right-wing conservatives at Fox couldn't get Josh to stop writing in scenes of Mal with no clothes on or the resident Companion taking a female client.
Ooops
Kenwood 5900M
Why not just get a DVD Jukebox?
j sp?productTypeId=25&sortBy=price&productId=782"><K enwood DV-5900M> looks interesting.
The <href="http://www.kenwoodusa.com/product/product.
I lived in Moscow for 6 months and I've lived in Kazakhstan for the past year. I'll share a few thoughts and experiences on Russian cars:
...and my favorite:
- Ladas basically don't work after they leave the factory in Russia. Even the dealer recommends you take the car directly to a garage to have it fixed after you buy it. Lada set up a second assembly line to fix cars that they intend to export.
- A company in Russia produced an armored Lada for a while. No changes in engine (tiny 4 cly), suspension or anything like that, they just added about 1500 pounds of armor. Can you say "Getaway?".
- Some of my friends here in Kazakhstan drive Ladas. What they usually say is "It is Russian car. After three years, it will have to be replaced."
- We always start our meetings here with a "Safety Moment" - someone tells about an incident or a potentially unsafe situation that they have observed. At a recent meeting, a person described how he had mistakenly driven his Ford pickup into a puddle, and was surprised to find out that it was so deep that the water almost came in his windows. There was general nodding and agreement about how that was an unsafe situation, and how people shouldn't do that sort of thing.
After a pause, one person said, "Would you please drive my Niva into that puddle?".
Andy
One of the things that makes international morse code unique is that is has been used as an international language for years. The Morse "Q" Signals have always helped folks to chat across traditional language barriers.
I agree with the other poster who said that hams' shorthand would put an IM kid to shame! It makes me laugh... (like this .... .. .... ..)
WD6CWR
Well, as a Rolla grad and the spouse of a beautiful Rolla student (from 26 years ago, no less), they aren't ugly.
My wife drank me under the table on our first date. It was love at first shot...
Whoohooo! You want a party, go to Rolla on St. Pats day. They, literally, paint the streets green.
Go MINERS!
I first got a Rocket eBook back in 1999 - I thought it would be a great way getting decent reading material before a 6 month assignment in Moscow. It was great! I used to come in to the office on the weekends to fiddle with my server back at home in California, eventually putting together a bunch of perl scripts that would suck down web content, convert them to Rocket format, and send them to me to read in the taxi on the way back to the hotel.
The REB community was wonderful back then - we even had a one-and-only convention in San Francisco to meet and talk about the electronic publishing business in general. Martin Eberhard - then CEO of Nuvomedia, stopped by and gave us his perspective on the industry.
Then Gemstar jumped in, fired Martin, and made the REB into, well, god knows what. Still, you could get decent content, so before we moved to Kazakhstan last December, my wife and I both got new RCA eBooks. We download new content and get to read real, new books on a device that is made for reading (not those stupid Palms that have type so small you couldn't read them if your life depended on it). I don't even mind paying full book price.
Now, I'm literally half way around the world with a useless piece of plastic - at least in terms of new content. I guess I can still download stuff from Pheonix Library, but I don't think I'll be seeing another William Gibson release anytime soon, or anything from Ludlum or King. This sucks big time.
It is beyond me how something so useful, so easy to use, and so simple could go so terribly wrong. Now I either get to learn how to read Russian, or wait read torn up cast off books from the latest traveller.
Here are my 2 cents worth. I've been in and around this stuff for 26 years (and yes, I do have, what used to be prematurely, grey hair):
1. Put in CAT5, or even CAT6 if you can afford it. Put in twice as much as you think is reasonable. Get it certified and tested. Next time you think you need just those couple of extra pair, you won't regret it. The big hit in any infrastructure installation is labor - you are going to spend about as much for labor to have two CAT6 cables pulled in to a jack as you would pay to have one CAT5.
2. NAT would be a pain in the ass for your users if they want to do anything more complex than web browsing and mail. This sounds like a multi-year project - what do you think people are going to be doing with the Internet in two years? Doing SIP telephony, H.323 multimedia, etc. etc. through a NAT connection borders on impossible for an average user.
3. No matter what you think the skill level is of your users, cut it in half. People seem to get dumber than dirt when they get home at night. I have personal experience - I'm living in a residential compound in Kazakhstan right now. I spend my days working for the Man, nights dealing with residents who stuck floppy disks to their fridges with magnets.
4. All the cool stuff like web cache, proxy servers, even community web sites are very nice. With every single item, just think about who is going to support those things after you make your fortune and move to a grass hut in Tonga? KISS in all things.
5. On the subject of support - residents are 24/7/365. When the Smith family can't have that video conference with Grandma on Christmas morning, who they gonna call? Set up a well understood service level agreement that every resident signs. Make it simple, but clear. The rule of thumb is that if it can be explained in an elevator between floors, it's about right.
6. Fiber isn't that expensive, and there are some cool devices available now for doing lots of fun things with it. Investigate using it for house distribution. In 5 years when those 2mb DSL connections become passe', and folks start wanting those 10-20mb connections, they will look at your portrait on their mantle and smile.
7. Here's a turnaround for you: Have you thought about cable modems? Not only can you do a few channels for high speed data, you can also do digital TV distribution, and telephone distribution. What if the folks had a TV channel for the community front gate, so they could see when the mother-in-law is coming?
Have fun - this if obviously a passion for you. On those all-nighters when you are trying to solve some stupid routing problem, remember it was YOUR idea.
Andy
I've been running Linux in one shape or another since 1.4, but no matter how many times I try to NOT use Windows apps, I always find myself setting up some sort of dual boot (either on the same machine, two with a KVM switch, or whatever).
Why? Let's all be very honest with ourselves. As much as we all hate the evil empire, Linux can be a real pain on the desktop. For servers, there's no comparison IMHO - Linux has always served me well as a home server and utility boxes at work when I can slip one in under the radar.
It's the simple stuff, or the stuff that you just want to get going without a lot of hassle, that is often the most flustrating with desktop Linux. Remembering what you did to get Realplayer to play automatically, wondering where that old copy of MusicMatch is (they don't offer it anymore), trying to figure out why your latest Microsoft Office document won't load in OpenOffice, StarOffice, or whatever. Getting flustrated because you can't just install something, you have to build from source or figure out where all the dependencies are for your latest RPM install.
I find as I get older I get even more impatient trying to get things to work. So, generally, it goes like this: If I feel like the intellectual challenge, and the satisfaction, of getting a new application working, I'll boot into Linux and spend a comfortable evening downloading, compiling and looking for help on the net. If I'm in a big hurry, I boot into Windows, install what I need to install, and it just (well, usually) WORKS. I don't like it, I wish I didn't have to ever boot into Windows, but sometimes I just don't have the time to fool with Linux.
It's not about religion, it's not about principles. It's just some lousy software that works on the silicon I have here. Let's try not to get too emotional about it, okay?
What worries me most is the comment "many consumer electronics made with these capacitors may also fail prematurely". I'm looking around here, and I'm seeing an awful lot of "mature" consumer electronics.
This stuff could fail at any time! Oh the humanity!
Got a stereo component system? Have a look at the back of your amplifier - particularly those big jobs that are designed to really put out the power. Fins, lots of them. On the high end boxes, the cooling fins sometimes go around three sides of the case. The result is that noisy fans aren't needed (who would buy a stereo component that sounded like a vacuum cleaner (or your average PC)?
I guess the difference is that the nice folks who make stereo components acknowledged a long time ago that cooling was an issue - I think PC manufacturers are still in denial that good, quiet cooling would actually sell more boxes, and keep the things from coming back for repair.
Apple made an attempt with the Cube, but look what happened to that!
There's a good article over at Media Alliance about the efforts of Dewyane Hendricks of the Dandin Group to open up the airwaves for spread spectrum communications.
Dewayne found out that he could prove his concepts in "regulatory havens" like Tonga and tribal lands. This stuff is being done today! Eventually the FCC is going to have to wake up and realize that it actually makes sense, in spite of the lobbys.
I would think that the motivation for something like this would be obvious. For a company to develop drivers, either for their own hardware or someone elses, would be WAY more than $20,000. That's a couple of months of contract time for one person, if you are lucky.
This way, they get the drivers they want, the OSS community gets another wrench for the toolbox, and everybody wins.
Why look a gift horse in the mouth, folks? Get coding!
I guess I would rather sit in a beautiful old forest, reading from my ebook, than sit among stumps flipping the paper pages of an old fashoned book.
My doc told me a little stat that he was fond of: When they compared recoveries of various back pain patients (chiropratic, physio, surgery), they all recovered in almost exactly the same time. The fact is, you do what is best for you, but do SOMETHING.
I went on physio for a while, then to the chiroprator. After a year of the chiroprator telling me that he could cure anything from warts to the common cold (and running out my insurance), I decided to take my physio therapist's advice and do twice daily stretching plus exercise. I found a good bike and started riding to work.
After another year, I was finally without pain. I know, that sounds like a long time, but all that stuff in your back takes a long time to heal.
So, bottom line:
Good luck buddy. The one in three people in the US who suffer from back pain are all with you.
Microsoft's stock has gone down almost 50% from highs of a year ago, and while not going into the toilet like many of the Nasdaq stocks, this performance would give any young programmer pause to think if MS is such a great opportunity after all.
What would you tell the CIO of a fortune 500 company about Microsoft's strategies for keeping good people, and continuing to turn out product?
Rocket (now RCA) eBooks kick butt - I've had one for over a year and it's by far the best way to get up-to-date english language reading when you are stuck in a foreign country for 6 months or so.
The original version of Rocket Librarian (for Windows) included an HTML to rb converter. Gemstar seems to have excluded that feature with the software they released for the 1100, but with rbmake, you can do the same thing.
Now, if someone would just create a nice Gnome or KDE client, I would be a happy camper.