Sounds like you need to make the default OS Linux in the bootloader. So then they won't have to figure out the complicated operation of rebooting and selecting "Linux".
Just make sure the install is slick and has all the tools (OO, Firefox, GAIM, etc) that the user expects and in a way they can find it, and you might have some impressive results.
And oh, "Redhat"??? Is that actually commercial stuff from the last few years, or are the Linux installs really that old? Sounds like it is time for an upgrade to Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSe, KUbuntu or something... nothing less exciting than showing off a 2, 3 or 4 year old Linux desktop (eeek).
"Please note that these files are drivers only and do not include any scanning software. They will allow you to use your DocuPen with your mac if your mac has OS 10 and a TWAIN compliant imaging software such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Acrobat Writer among others."
Unfortunately, no mention of Linux, so it is not an interesting product, afterall.
It scares me. You could then be held liable, if someone broke into your system and "stole" some of the watermarked works and then proceeded to "share" them with others. Even worse, someone could frame someone else by simply re-watermarking media to have it point to someone else.
Although it sounds like a very attractive alternative to DRM, there are some serious security issues that would have to be adequately addressed.
>Funny how altruistic and open a company seems at first, until wide-eyed slashdot/linux fans realize that they have just been bamboozled by yet another open-sourced hype.
>Nokia 770 --- is NOT a cell phone. It is yet another PR hype that wide-eyed linux fans believe as true.
Funny how I know exactly what one is, I own one, I love it, they have sold way beyond what Nokia thought would sell, there are lots of FOSS projects for it already, and it is neither hype nor fantasy.
Don't be so bitter- it is a great device... a little underpowered, but otherwise great!
It is not in Motorola's best interest to allow open development and they know it- because that is what their buyers (the phone service companies) tell them. They probably love the low cost and flexibility of Linux but really are not all that interested in seeing much development outside of what THEY want.
Funny how altruistic and "open" a company seems at first, until they realize they might lose control of their "baby".
Now contrast this with the Nokia 770 and you can see that Nokia has a different beast alltogether. How will this affect future Nokia phone development? Hard to say. But if you ask me, they are using the 770 as a big testbed for a total Linux switch-over. Can they then fend off the phone service companies? Again, hard to say...
>Your use of the word "sheep" is not only practically devoid of content, it's also chock full of self-important arrogance. "Oh, the sheep are so stupid! If only everyone was as smart as me!"
I never called people stupid nor implied I had all the answers. But there is a large segment of the population that does exactly what they are told without questioning anything. I see it all the time. I don't have all the answers, but I do hope to at least incite people to think about the ramifications of their choices. Sure, I could have done it better, but it is a slashdot post, not an article or book!
>If you are actually a remotely intelligent person, the least insightful thing you could be doing (yes, even less so than bothering to address some netizen about the failings of their public writing)
Oh, savior of the mediocrity, seems to me that you are more interested in picking on spelling and word choice than addressing content. Maybe if you stuck to the topic and less to personal attacks and I worked more on better word choice, then we wouldn't be wasting time on this exchange.
Actually, you are probably right about it being an iris scan. But doing that to a moving target from dozens of feet away, various eye position, varying pupil size, glasses, etc is probably just as unrealistic/impossible.
Oh, and if the sheep didn't need lecturing, then we would have far less problems. If are aren't a "sheep", then do ignore the posting- wasn't meant for you. But by all means, continue to nit pick on postings.
We should *NEVER* allow the government to collect finger prints of citizens en-mass.
Why? Because once they are in a database, you WILL be a suspect EVERY time a fingerprint is run at every crime scene. It *WILL* be used to track your movements, eventually, whether you believe it or not. And once they are collected, they will *NEVER* be removed from the database, regardless of any change of law.
Fingerprints are left all over the place all the time. They can be searched without the person's knowledge or permission. A retena scan, however, I will provide (reluctantly) to the government for ID purposes because unlike fingerprints or DNA, I am not leaving my eyes all over the place. I will know EXACTLY when and where a retena scan is performed.
Before someone mentions it: Minority Report is pseudo-science *fantasy*. It is not and will not be possible to scan someone's retena from afar, it defies the laws of optics.
As usual, the sheep are quite willing to give up all their rights and privacy in the name of safety. Life isn't safe, and I don't want to live in a "safe" world if it means someone is constantly watching me and telling what I can do and where I can go.
>Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW. >Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
No, it is 16Gb (2GB), not 16GB. That is an order of magnitude larger... making your argument even more correct. Flash memory will probably never (in the foreseeable future) overtake or even come close to what you can do with rotating magnetic media.
Someday there might just be a 20GB flash drive for $200, and at that point in time, there will probably be a 20TB hard drive that is 10 times faster for $200, or a 2TB hard drive that is 10 times smaller and uses 10 times less power than the 20TB for $200.
Still, seeing higher densities of flash is a wonderful thing, especially for portable/pocketable devices. I am AMAZED when I see how inexpensive a 1GB tiny SD card is! It would just blow my mind away 10 years ago... Bring it on!
The solid-state drives you mention are typically based on battery-backed up, volatile, RAM. Sometimes coupled to a hard drive... something akin to a REALLY huge hard drive cache. They are not based on Flash. Flash memory has a limited write cycle, and is *MUCH* slower in reads than fast SCSI RAID storage.
I agree. Draw is *much* more powerful than he gives it credit or than most people realize. His first paragraph:
"OOo Draw is a simple program, not really suited for professional graphics people. But it's good enough for at least 90%"
That is just plain *WRONG* and written by (apparently) someone that has no idea what you can really do with OO Draw. OO Draw can do most everything that you can do in CorelDraw, it is a very powerful vector editing system, not just a way to insert photos and add stupid callout boxes. It has bezier curves, full multi-layer capabilities, splines, snap lines/points/and grids, all the standard primatives, tracing capabilities, pattern and vector fills, connectible objects, 3d controls, etc, etc, etc.
Yep- there is a lot of chatter out there about whether or not it makes sense to swap to Flash. Some people feel that it is worth destroying a flash card once a year to get a more responsive system. I am still "on the fence". Since it is (as far as I can tell) impossible to add more RAM, people are trying to address the issue the only way possible.
It is really too bad Nokia didn't spend the extra $10 or so (speculation) to double the memory so it wouldn't become an issue.
Those who follow or are interested in the 770 are probably tired of reviews, but I wrote a six page review for my user's group. For now, you can get to it here:
http://www.markadavis.org/770review.pdf
As it is now, I have to hack up the settings and config files, lock file permissions, and make it so that users cannot launch their own programs... and that is with Netscape 7. I have yet to tackle how I am going to "upgrade" to Firefox, since it is *so* easy to install plugins and extensions when WE DON'T WANT our users to do that.... If we didn't run everything centrally (thin client) under Linux, it would probably be very difficult to get as far as we have already.
Software designers seem to have forgetten over the years that not everyone is using the applications on a local machine under total user control. System administration options are a *good thing*.
And yes, experts can always get around any limits you throw on them, but that is not representative of 99.9% of the typical business users.
OK, I will declare Microsoft "not a monopoly", in my opinion, the day that I can:
1) Walk in to any major retail chain and purchase an X86 computer 2) Without MS-Windows 3) At a significantly lower price than the same/similar model without MS-Windows
It doesn't really matter what the most "proper" definition of a monopoly is, Microsoft fits it, regardless. How would you feel if you went to buy a car and found that every car on every lot had a Sony casette radio in it? Not only did you have no other choices, you are charged the same or MORE if you try to get a car without a Sony casette radio! Sure, you could rip it out and install something else, but Sony gets your money no matter what... money that you could have used on something else. And the whole radio market suffers because of being stomped on by Sony.
Lack of movie mode is what I think is insane! That, and no macro???? I have the D-828 and *LOVE IT*, it is a wonderful camera. Guess the R1 is *NOT* a suitable upgrade path, since although the 828 has a smaller sensor, it sounds like it is just as wide (angle), has same dual media, can tilt for up/down shots, has more than enough resolution (8MP), and has the missing movie and macro (like 1cm from the lens!!) modes.
Sony does this sometimes and it is very odd- they get a great idea for the next generation product and totally forget about what was successful BEFORE! The R1 will fail to attract people that liked the 727 and the 828 because it lacks features. And it will fail to attract people in the DSLR market because you can't change the lens! It is a lose-lose proposition.
I would like to see a F-929, an 828 with the new sensor with all the exact same fetures, plus add an HDTV 720P 16x9 movie mode (hey- it has the resolution, could have the CPU by now, can have enough storage for some short segments... the 828 can already do 640x480x30FPS).
I assumed he meant for the picture. But that is true, you have to have another set for the audio.
Of course, if I wanted to be picky, I could point out that your comment says "two audio connections" and that is not necessarily correct, either. With HDTV, Digital Dolby 5.1 is the standard... and that is achieved through a single connection. Either a fiber optic cable or a single coax.
Rant time!!!
You know the stupidest thing in the world about HDTV is that all those damn digital and analog connections could have been done with a single, cheap, easy, fiber connection. I have NO IDEA what the purpose was of creating a fiber connection for something as simple as digital audio and yet creating a STUPID DVI/HDMI many-multi-copper-connection for something as complex as HDTV.
It *SHOULD* have been a single fiber, which could easily carry every possible HDTV video and audio signal necessary for any one component to speak to any other one component.
Of course, HDTV SHOULD have been nothing but 1080p, but it is easy to look back and criticize.
When considering what Stallman wrote, it is insane for anyone to think he meant my grandmother when he said there would be more users contributing code and fixing bugs. Yet, this seems to be what Mr. Brown thinks it meant.
OO is an absolutely *huge* and complex project that nobody but the "elite" can really program and I think that is no secret. Crap, I have been using Unix/Linux for 17 years and couldn't even get OO to *compile*. But Stallman's premises *do* work for much of the Open Source world. Even for large projects- look at the Linux kernel, for example. Fixes and enhancements are super-fast and furious.
Just because the OO project might have less community coding than other projects, doesn't make it a FOSS failure. It started life as a commercial project and it is the largest FOSS project in the world. The barrier to entry is very high. He completely discounts the importance of the non-code contributions to OO- artwork, documentation, website, marketing, feedback, bug reports, etc. Much of which is extremely important to the project and the success of OO.
I have submitted several bug reports to OO in the past, and sure enough, they were all fixed in the next release. I have submitted several more bug reports for the new OO 2.0, and I have every confidence they will be fixed in the next release.
Me thinks Mr. Andrew Brown is sour grapes. Are there more *code developers* for OO than for MS-Office? No. Does that surprise me? No. If the OO project had billions of dollars to spend on the project (like MS does), there would be much more. And OO has come a *long way* since the release of the StarOffice 5.X code to the FOSS community... much further than it could have, if the code remained a protected part of Sun. OO is a success in almost every way you look at it, and being FOSS is the main reason.
Um, you most certainly *CAN* use the old RCA cables (2-audio, 1 video) as a substitution for insanely overpriced component cables. And guess what? You *will* have a hi-def picture. I am not sure if it is the best thing to do... and I use DVI/HDMI when possible, but in a pinch...
Still, they SHOULD supply a proper cable, even if it is still analog (component). Cox Communications (cable), here, don't even SUPPORT the digital connection for their HD equipment... only analog! (Last time I checked. I have had DirecTV HD TiVo for over a year now).
Most people, myself included, don't expect hardware vendors to produce Linux "drivers". But there is no reason why said vendors can't release useful specifications and information so that FOSS developers can produce their own. It doesn't cost the hardware vendor anything, it takes little to no time, it causes no support liability, and it leads to increased sales and feelings of "good will".
And as a geeky-Linuxy type person, how many non-geeky people ask you for hardware recommendations? I get asked constantly. And I can't recommend something I have not used. So supported hardware that ends up in our hands often, indirectly, leads to lots more sales than just for Linux platforms.
OK, I'll bite to be the first: "But does it work in Linux?":)
It does sound like a great idea, especially if the LED is very bright. Right now, I wrote some scripts to play sounds at intervals when important Email messages come in. But sometimes it can be much more annoying than a nice LED.
Every time you think the mouse is a dead deal, somehow Logitech does come up with something new and useful. And I will admit that I was one of those "what the hell is with this scroll wheel crap" people. And after a few months of using it, you would have to rip it from my cold, dying, RSI hands to get it away from me!
It is quite possible to do a lot of very complex things in spreadsheets without using macros.
> By _my_ estimates, OOo is a good enough replacement for 'everyone who does not use Excel much', > which in the finance industry means the cleaning and catering staff.
I don't doubt that. But I said it was suitable for "95-98% of users out there", not Finance Industry Users, but *ALL* users, combined into one huge body. I didn't say OO does it better, and I wasn't referring to only spreadsheets. But the overwhelming percentage of office documents (99%?) on the planet could be created or recreated/replicated using/with OpenOffice. If you were to just say "spreadsheets", then the percentage would be lower... perhaps 97%?
OpenOffice is suitable for the overwhelming majority of people for an overwhelming majority of applications/types of documents. And, although there are some things that are easier to do in MS-Office than in OpenOffice, and some functionality exists in MS-Office that does not in OO, OpenOffice can ALSO do some things easier and has some functionality that MS-Office does not have (like full/complete vector graphics editing, for one).
Our finance department has no problem at all using OO. They have some very complex spreadsheets, but I don't think any use macros, anyway.
By my estimates, OO 2.0 is probably a suitable MS-Office replacement for about 95-98% of users out there (given a nice random spread/variety of users).
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you need to make the default OS Linux in the bootloader. So then they won't have to figure out the complicated operation of rebooting and selecting "Linux".
Just make sure the install is slick and has all the tools (OO, Firefox, GAIM, etc) that the user expects and in a way they can find it, and you might have some impressive results.
And oh, "Redhat"??? Is that actually commercial stuff from the last few years, or are the Linux installs really that old? Sounds like it is time for an upgrade to Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSe, KUbuntu or something... nothing less exciting than showing off a 2, 3 or 4 year old Linux desktop (eeek).
Apparently not, since http://www.planon.com/drivers.php indicates that it is, indeed supported under MacOS 10:
"Please note that these files are drivers only and do not include any scanning software. They will allow you to use your DocuPen with your mac if your mac has OS 10 and a TWAIN compliant imaging software such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Acrobat Writer among others."
Unfortunately, no mention of Linux, so it is not an interesting product, afterall.
It scares me. You could then be held liable, if someone broke into your system and "stole" some of the watermarked works and then proceeded to "share" them with others. Even worse, someone could frame someone else by simply re-watermarking media to have it point to someone else.
Although it sounds like a very attractive alternative to DRM, there are some serious security issues that would have to be adequately addressed.
>Funny how altruistic and open a company seems at first, until wide-eyed slashdot/linux fans realize that they have just been bamboozled by yet another open-sourced hype.
>Nokia 770 --- is NOT a cell phone. It is yet another PR hype that wide-eyed linux fans believe as true.
Funny how I know exactly what one is, I own one, I love it, they have sold way beyond what Nokia thought would sell, there are lots of FOSS projects for it already, and it is neither hype nor fantasy.
Don't be so bitter- it is a great device... a little underpowered, but otherwise great!
BINGO!
It is not in Motorola's best interest to allow open development and they know it- because that is what their buyers (the phone service companies) tell them. They probably love the low cost and flexibility of Linux but really are not all that interested in seeing much development outside of what THEY want.
Funny how altruistic and "open" a company seems at first, until they realize they might lose control of their "baby".
Now contrast this with the Nokia 770 and you can see that Nokia has a different beast alltogether. How will this affect future Nokia phone development? Hard to say. But if you ask me, they are using the 770 as a big testbed for a total Linux switch-over. Can they then fend off the phone service companies? Again, hard to say...
>Your use of the word "sheep" is not only practically devoid of content, it's also chock full of self-important arrogance. "Oh, the sheep are so stupid! If only everyone was as smart as me!"
I never called people stupid nor implied I had all the answers. But there is a large segment of the population that does exactly what they are told without questioning anything. I see it all the time. I don't have all the answers, but I do hope to at least incite people to think about the ramifications of their choices. Sure, I could have done it better, but it is a slashdot post, not an article or book!
>If you are actually a remotely intelligent person, the least insightful thing you could be doing (yes, even less so than bothering to address some netizen about the failings of their public writing)
Oh, savior of the mediocrity, seems to me that you are more interested in picking on spelling and word choice than addressing content. Maybe if you stuck to the topic and less to personal attacks and I worked more on better word choice, then we wouldn't be wasting time on this exchange.
Actually, you are probably right about it being an iris scan. But doing that to a moving target from dozens of feet away, various eye position, varying pupil size, glasses, etc is probably just as unrealistic/impossible.
Oh, and if the sheep didn't need lecturing, then we would have far less problems. If are aren't a "sheep", then do ignore the posting- wasn't meant for you. But by all means, continue to nit pick on postings.
We should *NEVER* allow the government to collect finger prints of citizens en-mass.
Why? Because once they are in a database, you WILL be a suspect EVERY time a fingerprint is run at every crime scene. It *WILL* be used to track your movements, eventually, whether you believe it or not. And once they are collected, they will *NEVER* be removed from the database, regardless of any change of law.
Fingerprints are left all over the place all the time. They can be searched without the person's knowledge or permission. A retena scan, however, I will provide (reluctantly) to the government for ID purposes because unlike fingerprints or DNA, I am not leaving my eyes all over the place. I will know EXACTLY when and where a retena scan is performed.
Before someone mentions it: Minority Report is pseudo-science *fantasy*. It is not and will not be possible to scan someone's retena from afar, it defies the laws of optics.
As usual, the sheep are quite willing to give up all their rights and privacy in the name of safety. Life isn't safe, and I don't want to live in a "safe" world if it means someone is constantly watching me and telling what I can do and where I can go.
No, it seems you need to do better research. There are no other wireless USB hubs on the market.
>Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
>Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
No, it is 16Gb (2GB), not 16GB. That is an order of magnitude larger... making your argument even more correct. Flash memory will probably never (in the foreseeable future) overtake or even come close to what you can do with rotating magnetic media.
Someday there might just be a 20GB flash drive for $200, and at that point in time, there will probably be a 20TB hard drive that is 10 times faster for $200, or a 2TB hard drive that is 10 times smaller and uses 10 times less power than the 20TB for $200.
Still, seeing higher densities of flash is a wonderful thing, especially for portable/pocketable devices. I am AMAZED when I see how inexpensive a 1GB tiny SD card is! It would just blow my mind away 10 years ago... Bring it on!
The solid-state drives you mention are typically based on battery-backed up, volatile, RAM. Sometimes coupled to a hard drive... something akin to a REALLY huge hard drive cache. They are not based on Flash. Flash memory has a limited write cycle, and is *MUCH* slower in reads than fast SCSI RAID storage.
I agree. Draw is *much* more powerful than he gives it credit or than most people realize. His first paragraph:
"OOo Draw is a simple program, not really suited for professional graphics people. But it's good enough for at least 90%"
That is just plain *WRONG* and written by (apparently) someone that has no idea what you can really do with OO Draw. OO Draw can do most everything that you can do in CorelDraw, it is a very powerful vector editing system, not just a way to insert photos and add stupid callout boxes. It has bezier curves, full multi-layer capabilities, splines, snap lines/points/and grids, all the standard primatives, tracing capabilities, pattern and vector fills, connectible objects, 3d controls, etc, etc, etc.
Yep- there is a lot of chatter out there about whether or not it makes sense to swap to Flash. Some people feel that it is worth destroying a flash card once a year to get a more responsive system. I am still "on the fence". Since it is (as far as I can tell) impossible to add more RAM, people are trying to address the issue the only way possible.
It is really too bad Nokia didn't spend the extra $10 or so (speculation) to double the memory so it wouldn't become an issue.
Those who follow or are interested in the 770 are probably tired of reviews, but I wrote a six page review for my user's group. For now, you can get to it here:
http://www.markadavis.org/770review.pdf
I couldn't agree with you more.
As it is now, I have to hack up the settings and config files, lock file permissions, and make it so that users cannot launch their own programs... and that is with Netscape 7. I have yet to tackle how I am going to "upgrade" to Firefox, since it is *so* easy to install plugins and extensions when WE DON'T WANT our users to do that.... If we didn't run everything centrally (thin client) under Linux, it would probably be very difficult to get as far as we have already.
Software designers seem to have forgetten over the years that not everyone is using the applications on a local machine under total user control. System administration options are a *good thing*.
And yes, experts can always get around any limits you throw on them, but that is not representative of 99.9% of the typical business users.
OK, I will declare Microsoft "not a monopoly", in my opinion, the day that I can:
1) Walk in to any major retail chain and purchase an X86 computer
2) Without MS-Windows
3) At a significantly lower price than the same/similar model without MS-Windows
It doesn't really matter what the most "proper" definition of a monopoly is, Microsoft fits it, regardless. How would you feel if you went to buy a car and found that every car on every lot had a Sony casette radio in it? Not only did you have no other choices, you are charged the same or MORE if you try to get a car without a Sony casette radio! Sure, you could rip it out and install something else, but Sony gets your money no matter what... money that you could have used on something else. And the whole radio market suffers because of being stomped on by Sony.
Lack of movie mode is what I think is insane! That, and no macro???? I have the D-828 and *LOVE IT*, it is a wonderful camera. Guess the R1 is *NOT* a suitable upgrade path, since although the 828 has a smaller sensor, it sounds like it is just as wide (angle), has same dual media, can tilt for up/down shots, has more than enough resolution (8MP), and has the missing movie and macro (like 1cm from the lens!!) modes.
Sony does this sometimes and it is very odd- they get a great idea for the next generation product and totally forget about what was successful BEFORE! The R1 will fail to attract people that liked the 727 and the 828 because it lacks features. And it will fail to attract people in the DSLR market because you can't change the lens! It is a lose-lose proposition.
I would like to see a F-929, an 828 with the new sensor with all the exact same fetures, plus add an HDTV 720P 16x9 movie mode (hey- it has the resolution, could have the CPU by now, can have enough storage for some short segments... the 828 can already do 640x480x30FPS).
I assumed he meant for the picture. But that is true, you have to have another set for the audio.
Of course, if I wanted to be picky, I could point out that your comment says "two audio connections" and that is not necessarily correct, either. With HDTV, Digital Dolby 5.1 is the standard... and that is achieved through a single connection. Either a fiber optic cable or a single coax.
Rant time!!!
You know the stupidest thing in the world about HDTV is that all those damn digital and analog connections could have been done with a single, cheap, easy, fiber connection. I have NO IDEA what the purpose was of creating a fiber connection for something as simple as digital audio and yet creating a STUPID DVI/HDMI many-multi-copper-connection for something as complex as HDTV.
It *SHOULD* have been a single fiber, which could easily carry every possible HDTV video and audio signal necessary for any one component to speak to any other one component.
Of course, HDTV SHOULD have been nothing but 1080p, but it is easy to look back and criticize.
When considering what Stallman wrote, it is insane for anyone to think he meant my grandmother when he said there would be more users contributing code and fixing bugs. Yet, this seems to be what Mr. Brown thinks it meant.
OO is an absolutely *huge* and complex project that nobody but the "elite" can really program and I think that is no secret. Crap, I have been using Unix/Linux for 17 years and couldn't even get OO to *compile*. But Stallman's premises *do* work for much of the Open Source world. Even for large projects- look at the Linux kernel, for example. Fixes and enhancements are super-fast and furious.
Just because the OO project might have less community coding than other projects, doesn't make it a FOSS failure. It started life as a commercial project and it is the largest FOSS project in the world. The barrier to entry is very high. He completely discounts the importance of the non-code contributions to OO- artwork, documentation, website, marketing, feedback, bug reports, etc. Much of which is extremely important to the project and the success of OO.
I have submitted several bug reports to OO in the past, and sure enough, they were all fixed in the next release. I have submitted several more bug reports for the new OO 2.0, and I have every confidence they will be fixed in the next release.
Me thinks Mr. Andrew Brown is sour grapes. Are there more *code developers* for OO than for MS-Office? No. Does that surprise me? No. If the OO project had billions of dollars to spend on the project (like MS does), there would be much more. And OO has come a *long way* since the release of the StarOffice 5.X code to the FOSS community... much further than it could have, if the code remained a protected part of Sun. OO is a success in almost every way you look at it, and being FOSS is the main reason.
Um, you most certainly *CAN* use the old RCA cables (2-audio, 1 video) as a substitution for insanely overpriced component cables. And guess what? You *will* have a hi-def picture. I am not sure if it is the best thing to do... and I use DVI/HDMI when possible, but in a pinch...
Still, they SHOULD supply a proper cable, even if it is still analog (component). Cox Communications (cable), here, don't even SUPPORT the digital connection for their HD equipment... only analog! (Last time I checked. I have had DirecTV HD TiVo for over a year now).
>I've found two programs that will solve your problem: this and this [openoffice].
As far as I am aware, OpenOffice will not open an "msi" file nor an "exe" file....
Agreed.
Most people, myself included, don't expect hardware vendors to produce Linux "drivers". But there is no reason why said vendors can't release useful specifications and information so that FOSS developers can produce their own. It doesn't cost the hardware vendor anything, it takes little to no time, it causes no support liability, and it leads to increased sales and feelings of "good will".
And as a geeky-Linuxy type person, how many non-geeky people ask you for hardware recommendations? I get asked constantly. And I can't recommend something I have not used. So supported hardware that ends up in our hands often, indirectly, leads to lots more sales than just for Linux platforms.
OK, I'll bite to be the first: "But does it work in Linux?" :)
It does sound like a great idea, especially if the LED is very bright. Right now, I wrote some scripts to play sounds at intervals when important Email messages come in. But sometimes it can be much more annoying than a nice LED.
Every time you think the mouse is a dead deal, somehow Logitech does come up with something new and useful. And I will admit that I was one of those "what the hell is with this scroll wheel crap" people. And after a few months of using it, you would have to rip it from my cold, dying, RSI hands to get it away from me!
> That's utterly adorable. I'm sorry but it is :)
It is quite possible to do a lot of very complex things in spreadsheets without using macros.
> By _my_ estimates, OOo is a good enough replacement for 'everyone who does not use Excel much',
> which in the finance industry means the cleaning and catering staff.
I don't doubt that. But I said it was suitable for "95-98% of users out there", not Finance Industry Users, but *ALL* users, combined into one huge body. I didn't say OO does it better, and I wasn't referring to only spreadsheets. But the overwhelming percentage of office documents (99%?) on the planet could be created or recreated/replicated using/with OpenOffice. If you were to just say "spreadsheets", then the percentage would be lower... perhaps 97%?
OpenOffice is suitable for the overwhelming majority of people for an overwhelming majority of applications/types of documents. And, although there are some things that are easier to do in MS-Office than in OpenOffice, and some functionality exists in MS-Office that does not in OO, OpenOffice can ALSO do some things easier and has some functionality that MS-Office does not have (like full/complete vector graphics editing, for one).
Our finance department has no problem at all using OO. They have some very complex spreadsheets, but I don't think any use macros, anyway.
By my estimates, OO 2.0 is probably a suitable MS-Office replacement for about 95-98% of users out there (given a nice random spread/variety of users).