This article reminded me of Gentoo Games, the Gentoo Linux sideproject that distributed Linux compatible games as LiveCDs; essentially achieving the same thing as the DISCover system. Unfortunately, gentoogames.com seems to have become a blank website, so the project may have died.
I'm not really following how this DISCover system works. (I only skimmed the article, sorry) It says it uses a custom BIOS and scripts, and it's being used on a Windows Media Center powered machine. So does it fire up a game when you insert a CD while WMC is running and just run some scripts to install it, or does it use some magic to get the game running from boot? I assume this system still requires a Windows install in some way, and thus wouldn't be a viable solution for Linux gaming?
I was in a very similar situation a few years ago at my highschool in Australia. They bought in the CCNA over years 11 and 12. After convincing around 15 students to take the course, some of whom didn't even seem to realise what sort of stuff we would be learning in the course, we were taught by a teacher who had learned CCNA over a few weeks prior (fortunately he was already a computing teacher and does know his stuff.)
I'm pretty sure only the most geeky few of us passed in the end, even after repeated attempts to get the others to pass. This was all with our teacher going pretty soft on us with regards to pass levels, etc. At the end of the course there was maybe 8 students left. The result was maybe 3 passing students who were actually interested in getting a course in IT, and a few more students who probably couldn't have passed the CCNA exam after two years of training. (Albeit mostly because they weren't interested in the subject matter.) Though as I understand it, American schools have a significantly higher amount of students, so it would obviously be more possible to round up a class of motivated geeky students who were actually interested in an IT career.
Incidentally, I have now redone my CCNA training (for curriculum version 3) at an external provider, and work at the same highschool. It looks like the course is getting better and the students are learning. And our (public) school seems to be working hard to develop a decent IT. program.
I was the same thing, mostly with the development and obscure stuff. For example, I imagine there would be alot of people in the current Dreamcast homebrew/emulation scene who would pay a bit for that DC development machine, not to mention the emulation types who might like some of the older development tools there.
I don't suppose anyone knows if it the new Dothan CPUs are compatible with existing Banias notebooks at all? I very much doubt it, but I've not seen it expressly said thus far. It would be nice to be able to upgrade my ~3 month old 1.5ghz Banias to a Dothan, heh.
Also, if they are not compatible, is Intel planning to take the Banias chips further, or will I be stuck at 1.7ghz max (or is it 2.2ghz?) until I buy a new one?
I've noticed it a few times before, and others may have pointed it out. But anyhow...
I can easily see someone like my dad subscribing to the "it's just a phone, all it should do is let me send and recieve calls" opinion, which is, of course a perfectly valid one.
But geeks? Slashdot Geeks!? I mean, features like dog translators are obviously useless crap, but don't geeks (like myself) normally like their tech things to get bigger (smaller), better and faster? Even I use an old Ericsson T39m (calls, address book, bluetooth/IrDA, WAP, email, SMS) and I don't feel the need to upgrade.
Perhaps there's some kind of inbuilt geek mechanism that doesn't trigger for mobile phones but does for PDAs, notebooks, MP3 players, PVRs, etc.:) (Or perhaps it's because the later are often targeted at us, whilst the prior is not.)
In traditional Slashdot mannner, I haven't RTFA or even the previous posts (they looked dangerous) but this seems to be an (at least partially) online Scavenger hunt. I imagine this kind of thing would have been alot of fun back when the interweb was in it's infancy, but wouldn't it be rather easy these days with modern search engines such as Google? Or are they in cahoots? >:/
A little long, oh well, you can't be banned from Slashdot? Right? Right..?:/
00:57 (NeGz) god I hate media FUD like that NY Times article on IRC 00:57 (NeGz) just saw it then 00:57 (@Yavin) yer its crazy 00:58 (@Yavin) "this just in, there is a secret BBS on the intarweb!!!!" 00:58 (@Yavin) "crossing LIVE to Trishia Takinawa, with a report on the hotline protocol!" 00:59 (@Yavin) wtlw NYT! 00:59 @Yavin gets all angry 00:59 (@Devar) lol Yavin 00:59 (@Nevyn^) what _are_ you on about 00:59 (NeGz) but you read this shit and you understand why some people will never bank over the net and such:/ 01:00 (@Yavin) this Nevyn^: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/132523 1 01:00 (NeGz) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/technology/circu its/06chat.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5062&en=a1bb0d2c7d 187e80&ex=1084420800&partner=GOOGLE 01:00 @Yavin moderates NeGz -1, Redundant 01:00 (NeGz) sif 01:00 (NeGz) direct link to article 01:00 (NeGz) +5 Informative, every time 01:00 (@Yavin) hehe 01:01 (NeGz) rah 01:02 (NeGz) need an educational campaign 01:02 (NeGz) GAMFUD - Geeks Against Media Fear, Uncertanity and Doubt -_- 01:02 (@Yavin) or we could hire a bus, deck it out in wifi and tour the countryside. paint "The Clue Bus" on it and inform people on why tech isnt evil 01:03 (@Yavin) or we could idle on irc and bitch about stuff 01:03 (NeGz) have the headline of gamfud.org as PEBKAC 01:03 (NeGz) yeah, idling sounds good 01:03 (NeGz) also sleep 01:03 (@Yavin) give articles such as that NYT piece the bigg rubber stamp of FAILURE 01:04 (NeGz) I'm amazed that there are guys in my network security classes at Tafe that won't bank over the net:/ 01:04 (Ultima84) I bank over the net... 01:04 (@Devar) rofl, they wont? man i fucking do everything over the net hey 01:04 (@Yavin) haha yeah 01:04 (NeGz) all you need is enough knowhow to check that you're not being phished/DNS spoofed and that the damn site's SSL cert is legit/secure:/ 01:04 (@Devar) i even applied for an E*TRADE account on the net >_ 01:05 (NeGz) I don't like shopping elsewhere -_- 01:05 (@Devar) mind you i dont have the $1000 minimum to actually OPEN it 01:05 (@Devar) but who cares:D 01:05 (Ultima84) I bought crap off eBay:| 01:05 (NeGz) I've got no car, so going places that aren't on the train line is TME 01:05 (@Devar) hehe NeGz yeah 01:06 (NeGz) should post this convo to slashdot -_- 01:06 (@Yavin) +5 insightful 01:07 (@Devar) haha NeGz go for it, edit it correctly and it'd probably be modded up since its in context LOL 01:08 (NeGz) bags the karma:P
I'm no space geek, but I imagine that if the Chinese technology *is* actually two decades behind the US's, then putting it to use somewhere like, say, space for example could be a bit risky. What happens if their equipment dies whilst interfacing with the ISS? Whilst it's possible that the US are just mean and nasty, perhaps they're doing it because worried about the safety/quality of the Chinese technology.
Granted they're not the fastest cards available, but they're not absolubte rubbish for gaming.
My current laptop (not a Mac) has a 64mb Geforce FX5200 Go. I've been using it over the last few weeks (combined with a Pentium M 1.5 and 512mb of PC2100 DDR) to play Farcry, which seems to be a pretty graphics intensive game.
I've got texture detail set on high with everything else set on either medium or low. The game may not be running at a hojillion frames per second, but it's completely playable with no annoying choppiness or lag.
Incidentally, my notebook's graphics card was advertised as being 64mb (128mb reserve.) Anyone know what this means? Can I buy a memory expansion card for it? There doesn't seem to be a BIOS option to dedicate it more memory.
Note: I have actually got the card overclocked to FX5600 Go clockspeeds, something I don't normally do, but it doesn't seem to be effecting temperature or stability in any noticable way, so I may as well take the bonus.:)
I took the liberty of not reading the majority of previous posts, but this didn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
When someone first (belatedly) spoke of a three headed frog on IRC I assumed they meant a three headed parasitic twin type affair (ie. two useless heads growing out of a frog) but it seems more like siamese triplets to me. I mean, I'm more a tech geek than a science one, but don't most people cover thant kind of stuff in high school? Incorrectly separated embryos and all that.
Incidentally, I'm terrified of both frogs (in general) and parasitic twins (mostly because we had a frog with two legs growing out of it's head in year 8 science class) so I'm gonna have fun sleeping tonight.:)
Hahah, have you seen him in the commentary and suchnot on the end of the Firefly DVDs? The man laughs/smiles at *anything.* I swear he's the real life version Dr. Hibbert from the simpsons.
I still hope he (and especially Alan Tudyk - he's hilarious) return though.
I've just skimmed over the comments, and seen that a few people mention that MySQL is not yet ready for use on a critical server in the real world.
Now, I'm no database expert at all, and I've only ever used MySQL for databases. But as far as I know, slashdot itself runs on MySQL (supporting evidence?). Now, this is a site that gets a hojillion comments per article, several articles per day, with enough viewers to crush lesser sites at will. Surely this suggests that MySQL must be ready for "mission critical" use, at least in some circumstances.
I'm aware of course that you can get much smaller laptops, at the expense of speed or features. I was looking for a halfway point between size and everyday usage requirements.
I'm not a small guy, but I can carry this laptop everyday to and from school and work. After a week or so, I barely noticed it was there. Try taking a look at some of the laptops with equivelant performance based on desktop CPUs such as the P4. Laptops of the same speed and feature set as mine can go from bigger than mine, to something almost warranting your 'whalebook' label. (Check out the Clevo monsters)
I don't see that many other people with laptops, but the 5 or so people I know with laptops with roughly the same feature set as mine are much heavier and thicker. Even my brother's Toshiba 1.2ghz celeron is heavier.
In short, I know my laptop isn't the thinnest or lightest one around but unless you're a 4 foot bag of bones you should have no problem carrying it around with you, and compared to the vast majority of other laptops, I would describe it as thin and light.
I bought myself a sexy iMP 350 about a year ago, and last night negotiated it's sale hoping to put the money towards a Creative Zen Xtra 30gb or MuVo2 1.5gb (anyone know somewhere in America that ships these internationally?) but now I'm having second thoughts.
I love to put alot of research into products before I buy them, and the iRiver is one of the few products I've come across with *very* few negative reviews. It makes changing to a newer player kind of unnerving, especially with the kind of dedication the Firmware developers are putting in. Actually listening to customer requests.
Incidentally, if any iRiver reps are listening, (IMO) you really need to redesign your HDD players, the features are so nice, but the design is so poor. Why an LCD on the main unit with the quality of iRiver remotes?
Alot of the laptops with wider screens have 'full sized' keyboards. I adjusted to mine very rapidly. (hope I don't typo to prove myself wrong)
The kind of laptop I was after was thin and light, but not neccessarily, er, short. So with good design the keys manage to have a good amount of distance when pressed and are spaced well enough for even my big clumsy finger to work.:)
Whilst I can't say much about power usage I can say that a few months ago, I decided that my big old XP1600+ beast had to go and that a quieter, more bedroom friendly solution was required.
I chose a laptop over a small, quiet PC mostly so I could take it to Tafe, Uni, LANs, etc on public transport, which doesn't sound like it will effect you much.
The point is, that it is quite possible to get a laptop to replace your desktop, especially since your computing power requirements seem to be similar to my own.
Personally, I managed to find a nice looking (Mac design clone) laptop with plenty of power for my needs. I was set back $2,600 Australian dollars for a Pentium M 1.5ghz, 512mb RAM, 40gb HDD, Geforce FX5200 Go and a 15.2" widescreen LCD (just as wide onscreen as my 17" CRT, slightly less tall.) Expansion wise, there is the one PCMCIA card and the internal MiniPCI slot which came with an 802.11b card inside.
My needs were also based around portability, and being a thin and light, this notebook weighs 2.7kgs. However, since you'll not likely be walking to the nearest LAN party from that location, I do think a laptop designed for good battery life will obviously use less power. Between the slower hard disk, powersaving, speedstepping CPU and powersaving motherboard, you could be using far less power than all but the best designed MiniPC. Another advantage to the laptop is that you get a few hours battery life in case your power dies or runs out of juice. Perhaps you could even take it out roaming your property if you're into that kind of thing.
Think I've rambled on a bit, but hope it's been helpful.:)
For anyone in Australia, I would highly recommend the standard technical merchandise range of bags. Being a *cough* hip, young */cough* teenager, I really wanted a laptop bag that looked nice.
I ended up going with the STM Alley, a messenger bag type affair. My bags go through alot, as my hole ridden previous backpack would tell you, yet thus far my STM Alley has not a single scratch. The Alley comes in two sizes, one for 12"s and one for up to 15.5"s. My 15.2" Mitac 8060b (sexy, sexy laptop) fits snugly inside along with some thin books, adapters, mouse and a CD wallet in the other compartments. However, if you need to carry any uberfat manuals and such around, a backpack would very likely have more space and be kinder on your back. My laptop is 2.7kg, and I find the combined weight of laptop and bag is fine for me.
STM also make backpacks and laptop inserts, as well as products to store/carry iPods, cameras, etc. Their website is standardtm.com.au . Plus, they're Australian made if that matters to you.
If you're not in Australia, or looking for a larger backpack, I think the Ogio Metro looks very nice.
Hrm, whilst I agree wholeheartedly to the part about Frontpage, I think you'll find that in code view only mode (and a bit of settings tweaking in some cases) Dreamweaver MX can be a very useful tool for creating pleasant, w3 compliant (x)html. I find the site, database and CSS management features really useful, and I'm only a hobbyist when it comes to web design.
I can't really speak for the WYSIWYG mode because I don't think people who can't be bothered learning HTML should be allowed to have websites.:)
I get what you're saying, but you know, all operating systems/GUIs have their quirks and annoyances.
I mean, every few days in Windows my screen turns blue and starts spitting out random nonsense, but I accept it as something Windows does, reboot, and move on.
As for the big problem - the readiness of Free or OS Software for the average user, well, the only thing that comes to mind is my recent experience with Redhat 9. At home my Linux machines run Gentoo, but whilst at TAFE I was bored and decided to check out a copy of RH9 my lecturer had aquired. I installed it, booted it up and had a look at what it had. We had a printer in the room, shared via a Windows machine, so I decided to see if I could do what I had never managed to get working before - print to a Windows shared printer from a Linux machine. Click, Click, Click, Click, done. 10 seconds after logging in I had printed a test page and some random oo.org docs to the printer, and I started to think - maybe there is hope...
No offence intended to thebrain.com, it's a very nice looking navigation system. (Similar to that found on the very cool Visual Thesaurus) However, it's functionality is really equivelent to that of those relatively simple expanding hyperlink menus you have been able to see on many sites for quite awhile. My old high school's website is the only example I can think of off the top of my head.
As for use of the forward button (or back for that matter), well, I wouldn't know - everything is a tab for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be that special grade of 'Slashdot' anal-retentive;
:P
I'm pretty sure it's the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, not the PHP Hypertext Project.
This article reminded me of Gentoo Games, the Gentoo Linux sideproject that distributed Linux compatible games as LiveCDs; essentially achieving the same thing as the DISCover system. Unfortunately, gentoogames.com seems to have become a blank website, so the project may have died.
I'm not really following how this DISCover system works. (I only skimmed the article, sorry) It says it uses a custom BIOS and scripts, and it's being used on a Windows Media Center powered machine. So does it fire up a game when you insert a CD while WMC is running and just run some scripts to install it, or does it use some magic to get the game running from boot? I assume this system still requires a Windows install in some way, and thus wouldn't be a viable solution for Linux gaming?
I was in a very similar situation a few years ago at my highschool in Australia. They bought in the CCNA over years 11 and 12. After convincing around 15 students to take the course, some of whom didn't even seem to realise what sort of stuff we would be learning in the course, we were taught by a teacher who had learned CCNA over a few weeks prior (fortunately he was already a computing teacher and does know his stuff.)
I'm pretty sure only the most geeky few of us passed in the end, even after repeated attempts to get the others to pass. This was all with our teacher going pretty soft on us with regards to pass levels, etc. At the end of the course there was maybe 8 students left. The result was maybe 3 passing students who were actually interested in getting a course in IT, and a few more students who probably couldn't have passed the CCNA exam after two years of training. (Albeit mostly because they weren't interested in the subject matter.) Though as I understand it, American schools have a significantly higher amount of students, so it would obviously be more possible to round up a class of motivated geeky students who were actually interested in an IT career.
Incidentally, I have now redone my CCNA training (for curriculum version 3) at an external provider, and work at the same highschool. It looks like the course is getting better and the students are learning. And our (public) school seems to be working hard to develop a decent IT. program.
As opposed to the hours and hours of battery life that most current (non centrino/apple/ultraportable) high end laptops have? :)
I was the same thing, mostly with the development and obscure stuff. For example, I imagine there would be alot of people in the current Dreamcast homebrew/emulation scene who would pay a bit for that DC development machine, not to mention the emulation types who might like some of the older development tools there.
I don't suppose anyone knows if it the new Dothan CPUs are compatible with existing Banias notebooks at all? I very much doubt it, but I've not seen it expressly said thus far. It would be nice to be able to upgrade my ~3 month old 1.5ghz Banias to a Dothan, heh.
:)
Also, if they are not compatible, is Intel planning to take the Banias chips further, or will I be stuck at 1.7ghz max (or is it 2.2ghz?) until I buy a new one?
Excuse me for being a little ignorant.
I've noticed it a few times before, and others may have pointed it out. But anyhow...
:) (Or perhaps it's because the later are often targeted at us, whilst the prior is not.)
I can easily see someone like my dad subscribing to the "it's just a phone, all it should do is let me send and recieve calls" opinion, which is, of course a perfectly valid one.
But geeks? Slashdot Geeks!? I mean, features like dog translators are obviously useless crap, but don't geeks (like myself) normally like their tech things to get bigger (smaller), better and faster? Even I use an old Ericsson T39m (calls, address book, bluetooth/IrDA, WAP, email, SMS) and I don't feel the need to upgrade.
Perhaps there's some kind of inbuilt geek mechanism that doesn't trigger for mobile phones but does for PDAs, notebooks, MP3 players, PVRs, etc.
In traditional Slashdot mannner, I haven't RTFA or even the previous posts (they looked dangerous) but this seems to be an (at least partially) online Scavenger hunt. I imagine this kind of thing would have been alot of fun back when the interweb was in it's infancy, but wouldn't it be rather easy these days with modern search engines such as Google? Or are they in cahoots? >:/
A little long, oh well, you can't be banned from Slashdot? Right? Right..? :/
:/3 1u its/06chat.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5062&en=a1bb0d2c7d 187e80&ex=1084420800&partner=GOOGLE :/ :/ :D :| :P
00:57 (NeGz) god I hate media FUD like that NY Times article on IRC
00:57 (NeGz) just saw it then
00:57 (@Yavin) yer its crazy
00:58 (@Yavin) "this just in, there is a secret BBS on the intarweb!!!!"
00:58 (@Yavin) "crossing LIVE to Trishia Takinawa, with a report on the hotline protocol!"
00:59 (@Yavin) wtlw NYT!
00:59 @Yavin gets all angry
00:59 (@Devar) lol Yavin
00:59 (@Nevyn^) what _are_ you on about
00:59 (NeGz) but you read this shit and you understand why some people will never bank over the net and such
01:00 (@Yavin) this Nevyn^: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/06/13252
01:00 (NeGz) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/technology/circ
01:00 @Yavin moderates NeGz -1, Redundant
01:00 (NeGz) sif
01:00 (NeGz) direct link to article
01:00 (NeGz) +5 Informative, every time
01:00 (@Yavin) hehe
01:01 (NeGz) rah
01:02 (NeGz) need an educational campaign
01:02 (NeGz) GAMFUD - Geeks Against Media Fear, Uncertanity and Doubt -_-
01:02 (@Yavin) or we could hire a bus, deck it out in wifi and tour the countryside. paint "The Clue Bus" on it and inform people on why tech isnt evil
01:03 (@Yavin) or we could idle on irc and bitch about stuff
01:03 (NeGz) have the headline of gamfud.org as PEBKAC
01:03 (NeGz) yeah, idling sounds good
01:03 (NeGz) also sleep
01:03 (@Yavin) give articles such as that NYT piece the bigg rubber stamp of FAILURE
01:04 (NeGz) I'm amazed that there are guys in my network security classes at Tafe that won't bank over the net
01:04 (Ultima84) I bank over the net...
01:04 (@Devar) rofl, they wont? man i fucking do everything over the net hey
01:04 (@Yavin) haha yeah
01:04 (NeGz) all you need is enough knowhow to check that you're not being phished/DNS spoofed and that the damn site's SSL cert is legit/secure
01:04 (@Devar) i even applied for an E*TRADE account on the net >_
01:05 (NeGz) I don't like shopping elsewhere -_-
01:05 (@Devar) mind you i dont have the $1000 minimum to actually OPEN it
01:05 (@Devar) but who cares
01:05 (Ultima84) I bought crap off eBay
01:05 (NeGz) I've got no car, so going places that aren't on the train line is TME
01:05 (@Devar) hehe NeGz yeah
01:06 (NeGz) should post this convo to slashdot -_-
01:06 (@Yavin) +5 insightful
01:07 (@Devar) haha NeGz go for it, edit it correctly and it'd probably be modded up since its in context LOL
01:08 (NeGz) bags the karma
but what if they have a point?
I'm no space geek, but I imagine that if the Chinese technology *is* actually two decades behind the US's, then putting it to use somewhere like, say, space for example could be a bit risky. What happens if their equipment dies whilst interfacing with the ISS? Whilst it's possible that the US are just mean and nasty, perhaps they're doing it because worried about the safety/quality of the Chinese technology.
Granted they're not the fastest cards available, but they're not absolubte rubbish for gaming.
:)
My current laptop (not a Mac) has a 64mb Geforce FX5200 Go. I've been using it over the last few weeks (combined with a Pentium M 1.5 and 512mb of PC2100 DDR) to play Farcry, which seems to be a pretty graphics intensive game.
I've got texture detail set on high with everything else set on either medium or low. The game may not be running at a hojillion frames per second, but it's completely playable with no annoying choppiness or lag.
Incidentally, my notebook's graphics card was advertised as being 64mb (128mb reserve.) Anyone know what this means? Can I buy a memory expansion card for it? There doesn't seem to be a BIOS option to dedicate it more memory.
Note: I have actually got the card overclocked to FX5600 Go clockspeeds, something I don't normally do, but it doesn't seem to be effecting temperature or stability in any noticable way, so I may as well take the bonus.
I took the liberty of not reading the majority of previous posts, but this didn't seem like that big of a deal to me.
:)
When someone first (belatedly) spoke of a three headed frog on IRC I assumed they meant a three headed parasitic twin type affair (ie. two useless heads growing out of a frog) but it seems more like siamese triplets to me. I mean, I'm more a tech geek than a science one, but don't most people cover thant kind of stuff in high school? Incorrectly separated embryos and all that.
Incidentally, I'm terrified of both frogs (in general) and parasitic twins (mostly because we had a frog with two legs growing out of it's head in year 8 science class) so I'm gonna have fun sleeping tonight.
Hahah, have you seen him in the commentary and suchnot on the end of the Firefly DVDs? The man laughs/smiles at *anything.* I swear he's the real life version Dr. Hibbert from the simpsons.
I still hope he (and especially Alan Tudyk - he's hilarious) return though.
I've just skimmed over the comments, and seen that a few people mention that MySQL is not yet ready for use on a critical server in the real world.
:)
Now, I'm no database expert at all, and I've only ever used MySQL for databases. But as far as I know, slashdot itself runs on MySQL (supporting evidence?). Now, this is a site that gets a hojillion comments per article, several articles per day, with enough viewers to crush lesser sites at will. Surely this suggests that MySQL must be ready for "mission critical" use, at least in some circumstances.
Just an observation from a database newbie.
Oooer, I've been trolled.
I'm aware of course that you can get much smaller laptops, at the expense of speed or features. I was looking for a halfway point between size and everyday usage requirements.
I'm not a small guy, but I can carry this laptop everyday to and from school and work. After a week or so, I barely noticed it was there. Try taking a look at some of the laptops with equivelant performance based on desktop CPUs such as the P4. Laptops of the same speed and feature set as mine can go from bigger than mine, to something almost warranting your 'whalebook' label. (Check out the Clevo monsters)
I don't see that many other people with laptops, but the 5 or so people I know with laptops with roughly the same feature set as mine are much heavier and thicker. Even my brother's Toshiba 1.2ghz celeron is heavier.
In short, I know my laptop isn't the thinnest or lightest one around but unless you're a 4 foot bag of bones you should have no problem carrying it around with you, and compared to the vast majority of other laptops, I would describe it as thin and light.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=whilst
Does Winamp 2(.81 and above, iirc) not come with ogg support as standard?
I bought myself a sexy iMP 350 about a year ago, and last night negotiated it's sale hoping to put the money towards a Creative Zen Xtra 30gb or MuVo2 1.5gb (anyone know somewhere in America that ships these internationally?) but now I'm having second thoughts.
I love to put alot of research into products before I buy them, and the iRiver is one of the few products I've come across with *very* few negative reviews. It makes changing to a newer player kind of unnerving, especially with the kind of dedication the Firmware developers are putting in. Actually listening to customer requests.
Incidentally, if any iRiver reps are listening, (IMO) you really need to redesign your HDD players, the features are so nice, but the design is so poor. Why an LCD on the main unit with the quality of iRiver remotes?
Alot of the laptops with wider screens have 'full sized' keyboards. I adjusted to mine very rapidly. (hope I don't typo to prove myself wrong)
:)
The kind of laptop I was after was thin and light, but not neccessarily, er, short. So with good design the keys manage to have a good amount of distance when pressed and are spaced well enough for even my big clumsy finger to work.
Whilst I can't say much about power usage I can say that a few months ago, I decided that my big old XP1600+ beast had to go and that a quieter, more bedroom friendly solution was required.
:)
I chose a laptop over a small, quiet PC mostly so I could take it to Tafe, Uni, LANs, etc on public transport, which doesn't sound like it will effect you much.
The point is, that it is quite possible to get a laptop to replace your desktop, especially since your computing power requirements seem to be similar to my own.
Personally, I managed to find a nice looking (Mac design clone) laptop with plenty of power for my needs. I was set back $2,600 Australian dollars for a Pentium M 1.5ghz, 512mb RAM, 40gb HDD, Geforce FX5200 Go and a 15.2" widescreen LCD (just as wide onscreen as my 17" CRT, slightly less tall.) Expansion wise, there is the one PCMCIA card and the internal MiniPCI slot which came with an 802.11b card inside.
My needs were also based around portability, and being a thin and light, this notebook weighs 2.7kgs. However, since you'll not likely be walking to the nearest LAN party from that location, I do think a laptop designed for good battery life will obviously use less power. Between the slower hard disk, powersaving, speedstepping CPU and powersaving motherboard, you could be using far less power than all but the best designed MiniPC. Another advantage to the laptop is that you get a few hours battery life in case your power dies or runs out of juice. Perhaps you could even take it out roaming your property if you're into that kind of thing.
Think I've rambled on a bit, but hope it's been helpful.
For anyone in Australia, I would highly recommend the standard technical merchandise range of bags. Being a *cough* hip, young */cough* teenager, I really wanted a laptop bag that looked nice.
I ended up going with the STM Alley, a messenger bag type affair. My bags go through alot, as my hole ridden previous backpack would tell you, yet thus far my STM Alley has not a single scratch. The Alley comes in two sizes, one for 12"s and one for up to 15.5"s. My 15.2" Mitac 8060b (sexy, sexy laptop) fits snugly inside along with some thin books, adapters, mouse and a CD wallet in the other compartments. However, if you need to carry any uberfat manuals and such around, a backpack would very likely have more space and be kinder on your back. My laptop is 2.7kg, and I find the combined weight of laptop and bag is fine for me.
STM also make backpacks and laptop inserts, as well as products to store/carry iPods, cameras, etc. Their website is standardtm.com.au . Plus, they're Australian made if that matters to you.
If you're not in Australia, or looking for a larger backpack, I think the Ogio Metro looks very nice.
Hrm, whilst I agree wholeheartedly to the part about Frontpage, I think you'll find that in code view only mode (and a bit of settings tweaking in some cases) Dreamweaver MX can be a very useful tool for creating pleasant, w3 compliant (x)html. I find the site, database and CSS management features really useful, and I'm only a hobbyist when it comes to web design.
:)
I can't really speak for the WYSIWYG mode because I don't think people who can't be bothered learning HTML should be allowed to have websites.
I'm quite sure they have fixed the label= fstab thing, considering RH9 uses that method in it's own fstab.
I get what you're saying, but you know, all operating systems/GUIs have their quirks and annoyances.
I mean, every few days in Windows my screen turns blue and starts spitting out random nonsense, but I accept it as something Windows does, reboot, and move on.
As for the big problem - the readiness of Free or OS Software for the average user, well, the only thing that comes to mind is my recent experience with Redhat 9. At home my Linux machines run Gentoo, but whilst at TAFE I was bored and decided to check out a copy of RH9 my lecturer had aquired. I installed it, booted it up and had a look at what it had. We had a printer in the room, shared via a Windows machine, so I decided to see if I could do what I had never managed to get working before - print to a Windows shared printer from a Linux machine. Click, Click, Click, Click, done. 10 seconds after logging in I had printed a test page and some random oo.org docs to the printer, and I started to think - maybe there is hope...
No offence intended to thebrain.com, it's a very nice looking navigation system. (Similar to that found on the very cool Visual Thesaurus) However, it's functionality is really equivelent to that of those relatively simple expanding hyperlink menus you have been able to see on many sites for quite awhile. My old high school's website is the only example I can think of off the top of my head.
As for use of the forward button (or back for that matter), well, I wouldn't know - everything is a tab for me.