For short term visitors to another country, it is best to rely on the service of ISP where your established credit exist. For your case, GB.
Since compatibility is always the issue, KISS is my approach. I.e., dial up access through your GB ISP using their access point in USA is the best bet. If you are in medium size city, you have good chance of having access point as local number. Save WEB page of accesss number on your computer for convienience!
International ISP, AOL, MSN, IBM,... all have plans for you to access outside of the country you originally made contract. Some times these requires optional fees and restriction, so check their WEB site for latest info. (I used to use MSN, currently AOL)
If you hate those big boys, even medium to smaller size ISP offers these international access points too through business arrangement they make with group of foreign ISPs. Again, check their WEB site.
As for physical phone access, if you are in USA/Canada/Japan, you have standard US phone jack at your Hotel room. Some cheap hotels and Hyatt charges per call fees to local calls, be warned. I use Marriott and its affiliates mostly for this reason.
In the USA/Canada, if you have ATT calling card or MCI calling card with 1-800 numbrer access, you can avoid these per call charges (It's a law). My experiences with these long distance call networks have been noisey and never gave me decent connection speed. So do not count on it for computer. But some pay phone have ridicurous per minutes local call fees in the US, it will be handy thing to use. Find some way to get them before leaving your country.
If you are thinking about sleeping in the car or so, think about getting coupler (one attaches to handset), since public phone in US does not have phone jack equiped. (Well mostly too bad condition to be used for any use.) (In Japan, there are many GRAY public phones with regular and ISDN phone jacks equiped.) Internet cafe is rare existance so do not count on it.
One place to look after for the last resort of computer support is "KINKO's" or similar copy shops. They do not only support XEROX COPY but have functions to support (PRINTER, PHONE with Jack,...) traveling business persons. Valid credit card may be needed. Check yellow page for their locations. Any medium size US cities have these stores.
I just wanted to point out that this jury court system sometimes makes me feel insecure . No offence to the good citizen serving as the jury. I also recognize some positive side to the society by having jury system.
With all understood, I hear too many horror stories of the system. Blame it to US media but those are the messages many foreigners are getting.
Maybe many American business institutions feels the same way too. That is why some business contracts specify that the conflict be arbitrated in a system outside of jury court system. (Sorry I was not law major Grad student, I forgot the name of the system.)
By the way, I once translated a sermons against a big Japanese company for the product liability. One who asked me to translate lamented those big companies usually have better lawyers and are very selective in jury selection. He was highly worried to get bozos to his jury.
I hope that I had a decent exposure to US legal system and did not make previous statement from my total ignorance.
s/hischool/high school/g Never good at spelling --- Engineering geeks (myself)
I have been in US as Student and Investiment visa holder. Sure I can not possibly be a jury. Voila, I was asked to come to court to be a jury. If not respond to the letter, there was threatning phrase.
I am sure it is completely random selection process with my experience but how many of hardworking citizens can be a jury.
But I hear many educated people are dropped during jury selection process. Do I want my life decided by unemployed alcholics? Or somebody hischool drop out working in the corn fields. Sure No.
These legal sytem of unaccountability is hurting this economy. Thanks god, US economy is strong enough to over come this kind of drawbacks.
Turbo Linux (Japanese), through my sad personal experience.
I am not GPL zealot but I think they should be a little bit kind to GPL community since they are benefited from GPL in many ways.
If you down load their "#1 status" Japanese version of TL distribution from their ftp, you will be comfortably surprised how fast their ftp servers are. (Reality: very few even bother to download because cheap high speed connection is still rare thing for most Japanese thanks to its stupid government and monopoly telephone company.) Good start for me. But when installation starts, I was annoyed to find out their distribution has intentionally broken X-system.
Their excuse is True type fonts they use are commercial software and thus excluded from FTP version. Japanese use over 1000 character fonts. Creating new font system is not trivial. So this excuse may sound OK. But Debian already has free true type included so they do not resort to be like this blatant broken distribution just to get by GPL. It looks like they do this just to charge for the software (over $100 per copy), important of which they get free from GPL/BSD community. Another concern I have is that it is practically impossible to copy and share this distribution due to tangled copyright position of each software components. With good money made with expensive distribution without even an installation support in the old days, they could have donated Japanese free true type font.
Whatever the wording in GPL/BSD, spirit is community. Being a member of community, they can not take-take. It has to be give-and-take. If they want to combine commercial software to Linux distribution, I ask them to do it kindly and nicely. I think similar type of consideration must be made by Corel people. If any Linux distributor makes enhancement to core part of distribution, they have to give back to community. If these are not done, GPL community may have to resort to introduce new restrictive rules on distribution.
Last note: my personal experience of old TL 2.0 Pro was miserable. No installation support and priced over $100. True type font and simple word processor was the only significant commercial software bundled. I decided never to purchase CD from them.
It is quite amusing to see many people even in/. community tries to justify use of English system even in Engineering field. But fact of life in US engineering society is that the Metric is gaining significant grounds.
When I visit local (Yes, I live in US now) customers to do presentation on our products, they sometimes like to be explained in Metric. Honestly, there were some strange occasions. I tried to explain things in mil (1/1000th of inch) then customers asked me to convert them into micron and mm.
Yes I have to admit that when I visited Auto industries in D---, those Engineers, though with Ph.D., asked everything in English system. Maybe that's why the can not sell cars abroad well (I drive 100% AMERICAN CAR, please, no flame.) My observation is that no matter how well US cars are made recently, incompatibility hurts its access to the world market.
Let's take a look at semiconductor industries. It was 8 inch wafers but now people are talking 300 mm wafer as next generation. Reference to 12 inch wafer is significant decline. You will be surprised how many industrial equipments in those US fabs are using Metric system (sometimes implicitly).
I also remember in my Grad school days that my fellow ChemE student (US born) telling me that he is much comfortable using Pascal (Pa) than pounds per square inch (psi) for some engineering calculation. I do not blame him. (Try converting from psi to another English unit is the nightmare.
I do understand feeling towards English system for day-to-day units. Basically, you like what you are grown up with. Humans are conservative, or lazy animal. For you 6 foot something tall makes sense. But for me 170 cm is my height. I have to check my drivers license to know my English unit height (based on observation of California DMV official).
Also remember, so many Engineering graduate students in US are foreign educated. Those foreign educated Grad student have very little sympathy for English system. Consequently, they will influence all of the US Engineer in the long run. This is another factor for Metric invasion.
Anyway, admit it. In Engineering field, METRIC MAKES SENSE .
I know if you want to talk to your machine shop, you have to tell them in English system. But most of the engineering work has to be in Metric to be efficient. That's my opinion.
Some history lesson: There was forced conversion to Metric system under American occupation with severe penalty in Japan 50 years ago. Thanks to those Americans! Now all Japanese Engineer does not need to waist their time with traditional units.
To get American to convert completely to Metric, maybe we need Martian invasion , since there will not be Russian invasion. Ha, ha, ha,... Joking.
Downloaded iso-image, burned cd with cdrecord, installed as workstation to new HDD using boot from CDROM.
Yes I got nicely configured newest programs better than I can configure for sure, but it is rough edged. Some icon images used as button below the pull down menu seems to be scrumbled. May be due to my X to be 16 bit color, which I do not know.
I will boot this again a month later and run MandrakeUpdate (BTW, this is not installed in the original installation process even though icon sits on the desk top.). Then it should be better.
To me, Mandrake distribution offers a nice hobby PC workstation with nice desktop to play with.
Toshiba is overloaded by the e-mail response. They are trying to resond to all the e-mail but shorthanded. Thus they had no time to go through English ones but just started Japanese ones. So be patient.
His e-mail response thanked all the people sending corrections on bad English.
Also he said he peeked into/. but could not figure out how to leave message here.
At this moment they give very primitive information only. No installation information. Not much of help but a good start.
I bet they did not even tried it. For example, if you want to make multiple partition and try to install their back up CD to HDD, it will zap your partition with no option. I found no information on alternative installtion floppy.
It took me a while to figure it out. I have one of the ultra-slim PC Dynabook SS3300CT (Japanese Windoze98) running Mandrake 6.0. If you reboot (with init 3) just as installed, it will freeze your console keyboard. Topic 97 PCMCIA driver seems to have some problem with keyboard / mouse system. You have to run gpm before pcmcia in Sys-V init. Go check my page for details of installation.
http://home.pacbell.net/aoki
FYI: I have not seen these ultra thin PC in Fry's (American store) but T-zone (Japanese store for Japanese business here) can get them for you in Silicon valley by calling them locally.
It's not funny. It's sad and extremely bad English. It's not just a small grammatical mistakes. I would not say these guys did not get full corporate support but defiantly these guys never asked their US subsidiary person for proofreading. If this bad English is due to automatic translation, I should say this is a good translation. I remember using one and chucking it 1 hour later. That stupid translation software cost over $1000, phewwwww. Anyway, be kind, gentleman. It's a good start. And praise their intention or use their intention on our behalf. Positive thinking ! If you really hate this bad English, instead of poking fun here, send them an e-mail telling the true story. --- Dammed it, I did. --- Sigh in Japanese ---
Slashdot Mirror
For short term visitors to another country, it is best to rely on the service of ISP where your established credit exist. For your case, GB.
...) traveling business persons. Valid credit card may be needed. Check yellow page for their locations. Any medium size US cities have these stores.
Since compatibility is always the issue, KISS is my approach. I.e., dial up access through your GB ISP using their access point in USA is the best bet. If you are in medium size city, you have good chance of having access point as local number. Save WEB page of accesss number on your computer for convienience!
International ISP, AOL, MSN, IBM,... all have plans for you to access outside of the country you originally made contract. Some times these requires optional fees and restriction, so check their WEB site for latest info. (I used to use MSN, currently AOL)
If you hate those big boys, even medium to smaller size ISP offers these international access points too through business arrangement they make with group of foreign ISPs. Again, check their WEB site.
As for physical phone access, if you are in USA/Canada/Japan, you have standard US phone jack at your Hotel room. Some cheap hotels and Hyatt charges per call fees to local calls, be warned. I use Marriott and its affiliates mostly for this reason.
In the USA/Canada, if you have ATT calling card or MCI calling card with 1-800 numbrer access, you can avoid these per call charges (It's a law). My experiences with these long distance call networks have been noisey and never gave me decent connection speed. So do not count on it for computer. But some pay phone have ridicurous per minutes local call fees in the US, it will be handy thing to use. Find some way to get them before leaving your country.
If you are thinking about sleeping in the car or so, think about getting coupler (one attaches to handset), since public phone in US does not have phone jack equiped. (Well mostly too bad condition to be used for any use.) (In Japan, there are many GRAY public phones with regular and ISDN phone jacks equiped.) Internet cafe is rare existance so do not count on it.
One place to look after for the last resort of computer support is "KINKO's" or similar copy shops. They do not only support XEROX COPY but have functions to support (PRINTER, PHONE with Jack,
Good luck traveling.
This MS person seems to be UTK Alumini. (Google serch result.) See following:
s .html
http://www.cs.utk.edu/news/Newsletter/alumninew
But he is not in Redmond but in N.C few hours from RedHat.
I just wanted to point out that this jury court system sometimes makes me feel insecure . No offence to the good citizen serving as the jury. I also recognize some positive side to the society by having jury system.
With all understood, I hear too many horror stories of the system. Blame it to US media but those are the messages many foreigners are getting.
Maybe many American business institutions feels the same way too. That is why some business contracts specify that the conflict be arbitrated in a system outside of jury court system. (Sorry I was not law major Grad student, I forgot the name of the system.)
By the way, I once translated a sermons against a big Japanese company for the product liability. One who asked me to translate lamented those big companies usually have better lawyers and are very selective in jury selection. He was highly worried to get bozos to his jury.
I hope that I had a decent exposure to US legal system and did not make previous statement from my total ignorance.
s/hischool/high school/g Never good at spelling --- Engineering geeks (myself)
I have been in US as Student and Investiment visa holder. Sure I can not possibly be a jury. Voila, I was asked to come to court to be a jury. If not respond to the letter, there was threatning phrase.
I am sure it is completely random selection process with my experience but how many of hardworking citizens can be a jury.
But I hear many educated people are dropped during jury selection process. Do I want my life decided by unemployed alcholics? Or somebody hischool drop out working in the corn fields. Sure No.
These legal sytem of unaccountability is hurting this economy. Thanks god, US economy is strong enough to over come this kind of drawbacks.
Turbo Linux (Japanese), through my sad personal experience.
I am not GPL zealot but I think they should be a little bit kind to GPL community since they are benefited from GPL in many ways.
If you down load their "#1 status" Japanese version of TL distribution from their ftp, you will be comfortably surprised how fast their ftp servers are. (Reality: very few even bother to download because cheap high speed connection is still rare thing for most Japanese thanks to its stupid government and monopoly telephone company.) Good start for me. But when installation starts, I was annoyed to find out their distribution has intentionally broken X-system.
Their excuse is True type fonts they use are commercial software and thus excluded from FTP version. Japanese use over 1000 character fonts. Creating new font system is not trivial. So this excuse may sound OK. But Debian already has free true type included so they do not resort to be like this blatant broken distribution just to get by GPL. It looks like they do this just to charge for the software (over $100 per copy), important of which they get free from GPL/BSD community. Another concern I have is that it is practically impossible to copy and share this distribution due to tangled copyright position of each software components. With good money made with expensive distribution without even an installation support in the old days, they could have donated Japanese free true type font.
Whatever the wording in GPL/BSD, spirit is community. Being a member of community, they can not take-take. It has to be give-and-take. If they want to combine commercial software to Linux distribution, I ask them to do it kindly and nicely. I think similar type of consideration must be made by Corel people. If any Linux distributor makes enhancement to core part of distribution, they have to give back to community. If these are not done, GPL community may have to resort to introduce new restrictive rules on distribution.
Last note: my personal experience of old TL 2.0 Pro was miserable. No installation support and priced over $100. True type font and simple word processor was the only significant commercial software bundled. I decided never to purchase CD from them.
In Engineering field, METRIC MAKES SENSE .
/. community tries to justify use of English system even in Engineering field. But fact of life in US engineering society is that the Metric is gaining significant grounds.
I was raised in metric world.
It is quite amusing to see many people even in
When I visit local (Yes, I live in US now) customers to do presentation on our products, they sometimes like to be explained in Metric. Honestly, there were some strange occasions. I tried to explain things in mil (1/1000th of inch) then customers asked me to convert them into micron and mm.
Yes I have to admit that when I visited Auto industries in D---, those Engineers, though with Ph.D., asked everything in English system. Maybe that's why the can not sell cars abroad well (I drive 100% AMERICAN CAR, please, no flame.) My observation is that no matter how well US cars are made recently, incompatibility hurts its access to the world market.
Let's take a look at semiconductor industries. It was 8 inch wafers but now people are talking 300 mm wafer as next generation. Reference to 12 inch wafer is significant decline. You will be surprised how many industrial equipments in those US fabs are using Metric system (sometimes implicitly).
I also remember in my Grad school days that my fellow ChemE student (US born) telling me that he is much comfortable using Pascal (Pa) than pounds per square inch (psi) for some engineering calculation. I do not blame him. (Try converting from psi to another English unit is the nightmare.
I do understand feeling towards English system for day-to-day units. Basically, you like what you are grown up with. Humans are conservative, or lazy animal. For you 6 foot something tall makes sense. But for me 170 cm is my height. I have to check my drivers license to know my English unit height (based on observation of California DMV official).
Also remember, so many Engineering graduate students in US are foreign educated. Those foreign educated Grad student have very little sympathy for English system. Consequently, they will influence all of the US Engineer in the long run. This is another factor for Metric invasion.
Anyway, admit it. In Engineering field, METRIC MAKES SENSE .
I know if you want to talk to your machine shop, you have to tell them in English system. But most of the engineering work has to be in Metric to be efficient. That's my opinion.
Some history lesson:
There was forced conversion to Metric system under American occupation with severe penalty in
Japan 50 years ago. Thanks to those Americans! Now all Japanese Engineer does not need to waist
their time with traditional units.
To get American to convert completely to Metric, maybe we need Martian invasion , since
there will not be Russian invasion. Ha, ha, ha,... Joking.
Downloaded iso-image, burned cd with cdrecord, installed as workstation to new HDD using boot from CDROM.
Yes I got nicely configured newest programs better than I can configure for sure, but it is rough edged. Some icon images used as button below the pull down menu seems to be scrumbled. May be due to my X to be 16 bit color, which I do not know.
I will boot this again a month later and run MandrakeUpdate (BTW, this is not installed in the original installation process even though icon sits on the desk top.). Then it should be better.
To me, Mandrake distribution offers a nice hobby PC workstation with nice desktop to play with .
Good job Mandrake!!!
You should fix this lynx problem by creating subdirectory ~/tmp under the home directries of all accounts:
/home/usernames/tmp, /etc/skel/temp
/root/tmp,
Check http://home.knUUt.de/tom.be/faq.html for more info.
Good luck.
I recieved e-mail from Toshiba in Japanese.
/. but could not figure out how to leave message here.
Toshiba is overloaded by the e-mail response. They are trying to resond to all the e-mail but shorthanded. Thus they had no time to go through English ones but just started Japanese ones. So be patient.
His e-mail response thanked all the people sending corrections on bad English.
Also he said he peeked into
Looks like good start.
I think this is one of Keiretsu subsidiary -- KOGAISHA.
TOSHIBA word phrase in this company's Japanese name uses the same 2 Kanjis. (Or should I spell this in singular form Kanji???)
At this moment they give very primitive information only. No installation information. Not much of help but a good start.
I bet they did not even tried it. For example, if you want to make multiple partition and try to install their back up CD to HDD, it will zap your partition with no option. I found no information on alternative installtion floppy.
It took me a while to figure it out. I have one of the ultra-slim PC Dynabook SS3300CT (Japanese Windoze98) running Mandrake 6.0. If you reboot (with init 3) just as installed, it will freeze your console keyboard. Topic 97 PCMCIA driver seems to have some problem with keyboard / mouse system. You have to run gpm before pcmcia in Sys-V init. Go check my page for details of installation.
http://home.pacbell.net/aoki
FYI: I have not seen these ultra thin PC in Fry's (American store) but T-zone (Japanese store for Japanese business here) can get them for you in Silicon valley by calling them locally.
It's not funny. It's sad and extremely bad English. It's not just a small grammatical mistakes. I would not say these guys did not get full corporate support but defiantly these guys never asked their US subsidiary person for proofreading. If this bad English is due to automatic translation, I should say this is a good translation. I remember using one and chucking it 1 hour later. That stupid translation software cost over $1000, phewwwww.
Anyway, be kind, gentleman. It's a good start. And praise their intention or use their intention on our behalf. Positive thinking !
If you really hate this bad English, instead of poking fun here, send them an e-mail telling the true story. --- Dammed it, I did.
--- Sigh in Japanese ---