I wonder about a notebook priced for students that many universities wouldn't permit on their networks - not being XPpro. Now I'm sure many of you will say I'm crazy but I know for example that the UNC will not, with rare exceptions, permit a non XPpro machine in. They sniff you and if they find noncompliance they shut off the port.
Moreover does it have at least wireless drivers built in? Retrofitting Linux drivers into a notebook machine for a PCCard NIC is not a pretty sight even for well known distros that support it. And if I can't at least use wireless at home then a notebook is largely useless to me.
It's really $600 for a 256MB RAM unit.
Last but not least how does this compare with a more mainstream refurbished notebook machine? This unit is a little on the low end side and compares with maybe a 2-3 year old maintstream unit.
All the naysayers here want to bash the article but what they forget is
a) most people unpack, plug in and go b) whatever is preloaded is what will be running c) if it's trialware it will be expired before it's purchased d) do the math, you're talking about 2-3 hrs per machine post purchase setup and tuning e) when it goes bad add another 1-3 hrs per machine per event f) monthly maintenance time is 1-2 hrs per machine with updates and patching
I just bought my 2nd new complete PC since 1990. It's an eMachine and it comes with as complete a complement of automated system management of fix software. It is the 6th PC in my house right now. Almost all the others I put together from parts. I have been using PCs since 1982. I have been on the internet since before there was an internet (1988). I was an MVS, AS/400, Unix and Windows systems admin and systems programmer. I currently support 4 different flavors of Windows on my home LAN.
I know WTF I'm doing.
I am seriously considering that this will be the last Windows PC I ever buy. Intel based probably, Windows? Nuh-uh.
And lemme tell you cats that unless there are lots of people who think like me, 2005 will be first year of declining PC ownership and declinging connections to the Net. It's just not working anymore and the faster we run out of this burning building the better.
All of this 'sue them until they bleed, and put a coin slot on the very air they fucking breathe' mentality I think will drive people to more live performances. Now unless the MPAA thinks it can license me my own ears we're probably going to be ok.
Monkeys attracted to bright shiny objects. Weee fingerprint instead of swiping a card and signing a piece of paper which sucks up a total of less than one minute.
Register your credit card? Did I hear that right? I can safely say that my response to that is go fuck yourself and the grocery cart you rode in on.
Wait lemme guess what the Starbucks crowd in Seattle wants next.....
Pay using Paypal from my Blackberry. Yeah that is the shit. I will be massively more 1337 than you !!!! Weeeeeee !!!
Seriously my phone costs $0. My Palm is quite old but I could replace it for less than $200 bucks. If I want those functions in my phone I have to pay AT LEAST twice that amount. On the other hand there are already crude features like that in my phone but no way to connect them to my PC or any other service I can think of.
I mean how many of you have a cheap candy bar or flip phone that has an obscure data port connector in the bottom that no one can describe to you what it does or sell you a cable of any kind that will connect to it? Let alone show you some software that will at least sync to a Palm desktop or something quick and dirty?
I bet the numbers are huge.
On the other hand I think that people are discovering that PDAs are for the most part unusable devices on their own. Everyone has struggled for years with Graffiti, T9, Fitaly and all the others. Data entry just sucks. And when you're done entering data, then what? Are you really going to trade your stock portfolio i real time with one? Are you really going to bust out that Powerpoint presentation?
Nah, you're going to browse the sports pages, the weather report, CNN and that's about it besides some games.
So PDS sales are decreasing because PDA function really hasn't increased in 5 years. We're still limited in the same ways doing the same halfassed things we were doing 5 years ago.
I'll tell you what I use my PDA for: Avantgo, the address book, a DB of passwords and special calendars I need. Everything else is a waste of time.
But - if phone companies could provide this level of functionality I'd dump my PDA in a second. Even with the smaller screen and reduced battery life.
I'd just add this. Does this mean that everything someone does while talking on a cell phone is retarded? Does that mean if you are cooking while talking on a cell phone you are going to accidently kill yourself or fall face first into the oven? Does it mean that you might accidently choke on food because you're too stupid to eat while holding the phone up to your ear? How about walking? Will I walk retarded too - maybe wander into traffic?
People drive like shit. You probably drive like shit. All you social engineers need to shut the fuck up and find a new hobby besides whining about cell phones.
But Firefox and/or Mozilla is not dramatically faster enough. Seems like the FF development crowd suffers form the same design by committee but with only a slightly smaller committee.
Seriously, someone needs to get Bill a hobby now that he doesn't run the company day to day and is only yhe Grand High Ayatollah of Software Architecture. There literally is not one single solitary word that comes from his mouth that I can accept at face value and whenever he mentions such and such aspect of computing that needs and deserves MS's attention I automatically translate that to "Fuck, Burn and Kill".
And I am a Microsoft stockholder and wish them only the best - stockprice-wise. Let's face facts; Micosoft conquers by being average at best and benignly negligent at worst. This is a business not an artform and when they say something about security it can ONLY be interpreted in the context of what is good for Microsoft, not you.
I've been using NS for years and there really isn't anything in Firefox that isn't already in NS. The Profile Manager in NS7.2 works much better, plugins work better and it's generally more solid. The trade off is that it's a little slower than Firefox. I tested out FF on my family and they couldn't really detect any difference in behavior from Netscape7.2.
NS4.72-4.78 were the reference standards for years and were the coding baseine for a great deal of web apps. There was no NS5 and NS6 was shit. Admittedly it was slow buggy crap. NS7.1 was a huge improvment and NS7.2 was a polished version of that. It's got all the biggies that FF has; tabbed browsing, popup blockers, profiles.
Seriously, doctors in the UK need to take chill pill. It seems every day some Royal Academy of Whatchamacalit is pontificating on the dangers of everything.
I imagine that the baseline TCO for Windows with automated patching and a modicum of standardization compared to Linux is pretty good. But in the last year or two none of these TCO calcs account for the almost asymptotic influx of malware, spyware and generally invasive shitty gorp from toolbars to helper apps as well. Cleaning up that mess is a huge problem not just for Brazil but for all of the large companies people here on/. work for. In addition OS desktops e.g. Linux allow the admins to lock down the desktop so that the biggest vectors for infection are shut.
So while the startup and transition costs of a move from Windows to Open Source are appreciable, once you're there it's far lower. Assuming of course they don't do something stupid like hand out root or run dual boot machines or have 100% of the apps running in Wine.
In that the people who work on them tend to work on problems that stimulate their own intellectualy curiosity and not a prioritized list of things that would lead to better general acceptance. For example, one thing that generally pissed me off about Firefox was Profile Manager which required you to enter Profile Manager in order to switch profiles and then start Firefox seperately. Unlike NS7 which just brings up the start profile panel first and you pick whichever one you want. It's needlessly complex to do it the Firefox way. Also the idea that could share mailboxes with NS but if you did they really weren't usable for NS anymore is irritating especially if you're in the middle of migrating and you discover that something simple like clicking on an HTML tag in Thunderbird does nothing because it can't figure out what the default browser is anymore. And so on.
The list is endless. For example in AbiWord - in order to change the default document path you simply change the Open In line in the desktop icon but it is documented nowhere and you expect something obvious like a setting in the application or at least a text ini file. Duh!
And when you try to deploy a simple Open Source desktop machine at home you find that the basic things that most do are the hardest things of all to do and/or become expensive to do well to the point that maybe it's not cost effective anymore. I give you a few examples:
Print servers like an SMC7004AWBR that don't have port redirector software for the "SMC100" for Linus. In fact no drivers for most printers and you rely on "Good Enough" or close enough" Which sometimes works, sometimes not.
Drivers and usable software for digitizer tablets and scanners. Trust me, more people than you think use these devices on their at-home machines.
A cornucopia of different desktop environments that in reality offer few practical differences from one another. Gnome, KDE, etc. are all good but not really noticeably different or helpful for moving home/office users from Windows to Linux.
Though I really like the idea of Knoppix and similar Linux on a CD to just run the hell out of it and test it out first. I've been asking for something like this for Windows for years - to be used as a bootable stripped down Windows recovery CD that doesn't install anything.
The idea that any build level higher than 0.69 beta is good enough. It's not. We really need a bunch of different build streams for the 250 odd distros in use right now. Over at distrowatch you can point to all of them but a basic taxonomy is missing: I suggest the following: Desktop, server, server appliance/firewall, embedded, Boot CD, cluster, gamers, special hardware (eg S/390, PPC). And for desktop and server clearly delineate 1.0 from 1.0+ sometimes people just want something that works.
If it costs nearly as much as Windows most people will use Windows. Mandrake are you listening?????
Admit that Linux certified hardware is probably a failed effort. If I try to run a distro on my cheap greybox it may run, it may not. Seemingly if I spend a couple of hundred hours I can probably tweak every obscure problem until it does - - maybe. And 'works' is a pretty vague point anyway. I have a bunch CDRWs in Windows that all 'work' far below their rated speed.
Wine can suck and suck hard. All we want is to run the functions we run in Windows not necessarily the apps themselves which are bloated and too expensive anyhow, eliminating the benefits of running Linux to begin with. It's an unavoidable gambit and one that should be taken as last option. But if there is to be better emulation or sub-OS option it has to be low cost and not require any native MS code to run.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Firefox is a good example of fixing a problem that probably doesn't exist but is an interesting challenge nonetheless. FF/TB is really NS7.2 stripped down and a little faster. It was a tremendous development effort on the part of some very dedicated people to literall
Re:I'll sell you my IBM PC300PL for $100
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 1
Ah I see, create a magical supercomputer to run MS Word in the Third World. That's the most rational approach.
Lemme tell you - I run Open Office on an ANTIQUE computer just fine.
Go get a surplus laptop machine. Junk the display, remove the entire case, separate the machine from the keyboard. Remove the battery. Take what's left and drop it in a cheap plastic box with cutouts for the power supply, the CDROM, PCCards and whatever ports you have. Hopefully you'll have a USB port. Plug in your power supply, monitor, USB keyboard.
It's great news that India is developing the next stage of their space program beyond simple payload to orbit missions. Soon Iran, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea will cut the legs out of that sector of the business so NASA, the ESA, Japan, India and Russia will have to find new venues for their space programs. Scientific missions to the moon as proof of concept programs for new technology are a great first step.
And all information coming from MS is therefore marketing-speak. MS has never and will never convey a single nugget of information that is not crafted to be in MS own best interest. Period.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder about a notebook priced for students that many universities wouldn't permit on their networks - not being XPpro. Now I'm sure many of you will say I'm crazy but I know for example that the UNC will not, with rare exceptions, permit a non XPpro machine in. They sniff you and if they find noncompliance they shut off the port.
Moreover does it have at least wireless drivers built in? Retrofitting Linux drivers into a notebook machine for a PCCard NIC is not a pretty sight even for well known distros that support it. And if I can't at least use wireless at home then a notebook is largely useless to me.
It's really $600 for a 256MB RAM unit.
Last but not least how does this compare with a more mainstream refurbished notebook machine? This unit is a little on the low end side and compares with maybe a 2-3 year old maintstream unit.
All the naysayers here want to bash the article but what they forget is
a) most people unpack, plug in and go
b) whatever is preloaded is what will be running
c) if it's trialware it will be expired before it's purchased
d) do the math, you're talking about 2-3 hrs per machine post purchase setup and tuning
e) when it goes bad add another 1-3 hrs per machine per event
f) monthly maintenance time is 1-2 hrs per machine with updates and patching
I just bought my 2nd new complete PC since 1990. It's an eMachine and it comes with as complete a complement of automated system management of fix software. It is the 6th PC in my house right now. Almost all the others I put together from parts. I have been using PCs since 1982. I have been on the internet since before there was an internet (1988). I was an MVS, AS/400, Unix and Windows systems admin and systems programmer. I currently support 4 different flavors of Windows on my home LAN.
I know WTF I'm doing.
I am seriously considering that this will be the last Windows PC I ever buy. Intel based probably, Windows? Nuh-uh.
And lemme tell you cats that unless there are lots of people who think like me, 2005 will be first year of declining PC ownership and declinging connections to the Net. It's just not working anymore and the faster we run out of this burning building the better.
Which OS would evil Spock use?
MOS/2 - Moustache OS/2, of course.
All of this 'sue them until they bleed, and put a coin slot on the very air they fucking breathe' mentality I think will drive people to more live performances. Now unless the MPAA thinks it can license me my own ears we're probably going to be ok.
Monkeys attracted to bright shiny objects. Weee fingerprint instead of swiping a card and signing a piece of paper which sucks up a total of less than one minute.
Register your credit card? Did I hear that right? I can safely say that my response to that is go fuck yourself and the grocery cart you rode in on.
Wait lemme guess what the Starbucks crowd in Seattle wants next.....
Pay using Paypal from my Blackberry. Yeah that is the shit. I will be massively more 1337 than you !!!! Weeeeeee !!!
Seriously my phone costs $0. My Palm is quite old but I could replace it for less than $200 bucks. If I want those functions in my phone I have to pay AT LEAST twice that amount. On the other hand there are already crude features like that in my phone but no way to connect them to my PC or any other service I can think of.
I mean how many of you have a cheap candy bar or flip phone that has an obscure data port connector in the bottom that no one can describe to you what it does or sell you a cable of any kind that will connect to it? Let alone show you some software that will at least sync to a Palm desktop or something quick and dirty?
I bet the numbers are huge.
On the other hand I think that people are discovering that PDAs are for the most part unusable devices on their own. Everyone has struggled for years with Graffiti, T9, Fitaly and all the others. Data entry just sucks. And when you're done entering data, then what? Are you really going to trade your stock portfolio i real time with one? Are you really going to bust out that Powerpoint presentation?
Nah, you're going to browse the sports pages, the weather report, CNN and that's about it besides some games.
So PDS sales are decreasing because PDA function really hasn't increased in 5 years. We're still limited in the same ways doing the same halfassed things we were doing 5 years ago.
I'll tell you what I use my PDA for: Avantgo, the address book, a DB of passwords and special calendars I need. Everything else is a waste of time.
But - if phone companies could provide this level of functionality I'd dump my PDA in a second. Even with the smaller screen and reduced battery life.
Or a rockhammer to the Pieta is what this sounds like.
I'd just add this. Does this mean that everything someone does while talking on a cell phone is retarded? Does that mean if you are cooking while talking on a cell phone you are going to accidently kill yourself or fall face first into the oven? Does it mean that you might accidently choke on food because you're too stupid to eat while holding the phone up to your ear? How about walking? Will I walk retarded too - maybe wander into traffic?
People drive like shit. You probably drive like shit. All you social engineers need to shut the fuck up and find a new hobby besides whining about cell phones.
As opposed to what?
But Firefox and/or Mozilla is not dramatically faster enough. Seems like the FF development crowd suffers form the same design by committee but with only a slightly smaller committee.
Seriously, someone needs to get Bill a hobby now that he doesn't run the company day to day and is only yhe Grand High Ayatollah of Software Architecture. There literally is not one single solitary word that comes from his mouth that I can accept at face value and whenever he mentions such and such aspect of computing that needs and deserves MS's attention I automatically translate that to "Fuck, Burn and Kill".
And I am a Microsoft stockholder and wish them only the best - stockprice-wise. Let's face facts; Micosoft conquers by being average at best and benignly negligent at worst. This is a business not an artform and when they say something about security it can ONLY be interpreted in the context of what is good for Microsoft, not you.
I've been using NS for years and there really isn't anything in Firefox that isn't already in NS. The Profile Manager in NS7.2 works much better, plugins work better and it's generally more solid. The trade off is that it's a little slower than Firefox. I tested out FF on my family and they couldn't really detect any difference in behavior from Netscape7.2.
NS4.72-4.78 were the reference standards for years and were the coding baseine for a great deal of web apps. There was no NS5 and NS6 was shit. Admittedly it was slow buggy crap. NS7.1 was a huge improvment and NS7.2 was a polished version of that. It's got all the biggies that FF has; tabbed browsing, popup blockers, profiles.
If you know what I mean.
Seriously, doctors in the UK need to take chill pill. It seems every day some Royal Academy of Whatchamacalit is pontificating on the dangers of everything.
I imagine that the baseline TCO for Windows with automated patching and a modicum of standardization compared to Linux is pretty good. But in the last year or two none of these TCO calcs account for the almost asymptotic influx of malware, spyware and generally invasive shitty gorp from toolbars to helper apps as well. Cleaning up that mess is a huge problem not just for Brazil but for all of the large companies people here on /. work for. In addition OS desktops e.g. Linux allow the admins to lock down the desktop so that the biggest vectors for infection are shut.
So while the startup and transition costs of a move from Windows to Open Source are appreciable, once you're there it's far lower. Assuming of course they don't do something stupid like hand out root or run dual boot machines or have 100% of the apps running in Wine.
In that the people who work on them tend to work on problems that stimulate their own intellectualy curiosity and not a prioritized list of things that would lead to better general acceptance. For example, one thing that generally pissed me off about Firefox was Profile Manager which required you to enter Profile Manager in order to switch profiles and then start Firefox seperately. Unlike NS7 which just brings up the start profile panel first and you pick whichever one you want. It's needlessly complex to do it the Firefox way. Also the idea that could share mailboxes with NS but if you did they really weren't usable for NS anymore is irritating especially if you're in the middle of migrating and you discover that something simple like clicking on an HTML tag in Thunderbird does nothing because it can't figure out what the default browser is anymore. And so on.
The list is endless. For example in AbiWord - in order to change the default document path you simply change the Open In line in the desktop icon but it is documented nowhere and you expect something obvious like a setting in the application or at least a text ini file. Duh!
And when you try to deploy a simple Open Source desktop machine at home you find that the basic things that most do are the hardest things of all to do and/or become expensive to do well to the point that maybe it's not cost effective anymore. I give you a few examples:
Print servers like an SMC7004AWBR that don't have port redirector software for the "SMC100" for Linus. In fact no drivers for most printers and you rely on "Good Enough" or close enough" Which sometimes works, sometimes not.
Drivers and usable software for digitizer tablets and scanners. Trust me, more people than you think use these devices on their at-home machines.
A cornucopia of different desktop environments that in reality offer few practical differences from one another. Gnome, KDE, etc. are all good but not really noticeably different or helpful for moving home/office users from Windows to Linux.
Though I really like the idea of Knoppix and similar Linux on a CD to just run the hell out of it and test it out first. I've been asking for something like this for Windows for years - to be used as a bootable stripped down Windows recovery CD that doesn't install anything.
The idea that any build level higher than 0.69 beta is good enough. It's not. We really need a bunch of different build streams for the 250 odd distros in use right now. Over at distrowatch you can point to all of them but a basic taxonomy is missing: I suggest the following: Desktop, server, server appliance/firewall, embedded, Boot CD, cluster, gamers, special hardware (eg S/390, PPC). And for desktop and server clearly delineate 1.0 from 1.0+ sometimes people just want something that works.
If it costs nearly as much as Windows most people will use Windows. Mandrake are you listening?????
Admit that Linux certified hardware is probably a failed effort. If I try to run a distro on my cheap greybox it may run, it may not. Seemingly if I spend a couple of hundred hours I can probably tweak every obscure problem until it does - - maybe. And 'works' is a pretty vague point anyway. I have a bunch CDRWs in Windows that all 'work' far below their rated speed.
Wine can suck and suck hard. All we want is to run the functions we run in Windows not necessarily the apps themselves which are bloated and too expensive anyhow, eliminating the benefits of running Linux to begin with. It's an unavoidable gambit and one that should be taken as last option. But if there is to be better emulation or sub-OS option it has to be low cost and not require any native MS code to run.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Firefox is a good example of fixing a problem that probably doesn't exist but is an interesting challenge nonetheless. FF/TB is really NS7.2 stripped down and a little faster. It was a tremendous development effort on the part of some very dedicated people to literall
Ah I see, create a magical supercomputer to run MS Word in the Third World. That's the most rational approach.
Lemme tell you - I run Open Office on an ANTIQUE computer just fine.
Stuffing a PC into a miniMac case is......
Let me know - P2/400, 288MB RAM, 40GB Drive, CDRW. It's worth about $100 bucks.
BUT BECAUSE OUR SOFTWARE FROM SEATTLE SUCKS DICK
You need a fucking Mongocomputer to run it.
Go get a surplus laptop machine. Junk the display, remove the entire case, separate the machine from the keyboard. Remove the battery. Take what's left and drop it in a cheap plastic box with cutouts for the power supply, the CDROM, PCCards and whatever ports you have. Hopefully you'll have a USB port. Plug in your power supply, monitor, USB keyboard.
Voila a 'desktop' PC no bigger 12x3x0.75 inches
It's great news that India is developing the next stage of their space program beyond simple payload to orbit missions. Soon Iran, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea will cut the legs out of that sector of the business so NASA, the ESA, Japan, India and Russia will have to find new venues for their space programs. Scientific missions to the moon as proof of concept programs for new technology are a great first step.
And all information coming from MS is therefore marketing-speak. MS has never and will never convey a single nugget of information that is not crafted to be in MS own best interest. Period.
Don't be amazed when your kids turn your uppermiddle class psychochristian soccermom Libertarian pot smoking ass over to the DEA.
I will fucking cheer when that happens.
Quarters like this are roughly the difference between an average college and a really good college for my kids.
Was that nearly all of us would survive.