I really wish around here in BC they would change the licence/insurance laws. I used to drive a truck (until the head gasket went and leaked all the coolant into the oil pan) and I now drive a tercel. However, I would like to insure both under a single licence. Why? Because there are times when I could use a truck, and I used to use my truck to fill a need about 1 time every week. The rest of the time I could have got by with a much more fuel efficent car.
I don't know where you live, but if you are in Vancouver, you might want to try the Co-operative Auto Network. It's a co-op where you pay a one-time $500 membership fee, and per hour fees (as low as $2/hr) to sign out various vehicles for short periods of time.
It's ideal for folks like you where you have a primary vehicle, but occasionally need a secondary. The co-op fleet has trucks and vans. My wife signed up, and it's better than purchasing (and insuring) a second car. Plus, she gets to satisfy her Mini Cooper fetish (the co-op has three that you can sign out) without having to shell out the bucks.
If you're frustrated with Counter-Strike, you should give True Combat: Elite a whirl. It is based on the Enemy Territory engine, and is freely downloadable (but not open sourced) and can be played in Win32, Mac, or Linux.
On the one hand, it beats the hell out of using machine guns for crowd dispersal.
On the other, because it doesn't (apparently) kill people, armed forces will be *much* more likely to use it to disperse people, instead of trying to do things that keep people from rioting. Technical solution to non-technical problem isn't a solution, it's a treatment.
Any bets on whether this is already in use for interrogation?
There is no doubt that if a microwave weapon were available for military or police deployment, it would not be restricted to crowd control, and they would definitely use it as a method for torture or coercion of individuals regardless of the health risks.
I keep a CD of Kanotix around at all times. It's a Knoppix variant, but I find that Kanotix has a cleaner look and feel. It's also better for a HD install, since it uses only Debian-unstable packages instead of the mix of testing and unstable that Knoppix uses.
Re:Does anyone in the US care about Ultraman?
on
40 Years of Ultraman
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for that hit of nostalgia... I grew up in Windsor too, watching Channels 20 and 50 after school. Ultraman, Lost in Space, Speed Racer, Get Smart...
I find it pretty hard to get worked up about. It doesn't sound like it is one person in a basement deciding what Canadians can and can't look at, but rather an attempt to keep world-wide recognized child exploitation off the net.
The submitters reaction sounds very American. We Canadians don't tend to get so worked up about individual freedoms when the common good is at stake.
I run a filter at the school I work at. I can understand the need to block content for the kids who are our responsibility. Legal issues fall under the government. Why not allow them to block obviously illegal material?
You would be surprised at how censorship schemes like this result in unintended consequences or outright abuses. While censorship decisions won't be made by "one person in the basement", these schemes typically involve bureaucrat decisionmakers who are essentially unaccountable, and likely untrained, for the complexity of these tasks.
One need look no further than the case of Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium, a bookstore in Vancouver that caters to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) community.
Little Sister's has been fighting ongoing harassment from Canada Customs for over a decade now, regarding the importation of LGBT erotica. Canada Customs has the authority to impound and confiscate imported material, whether it is visual or just plain text, that it believes violates the obscenity provisions of the Criminal Code. However, there was evidence that Canada Customs specifically discriminated against Little Sister's (probably because of its status as an LGBT vendor); for example, Canada Customs impounded copies of Madonna's Sex coffee-table book destined for Little Sister's, even though this book was carried by all the mainstream bookstores in Canada.
In 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canada Customs violated the Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms in its conduct towards Little Sister's, but did not remove the authority of Canada Customs to censor material at the border. The consequence is that Canada Customs continue to harass Little Sister's to this day, and Little Sister's has to go to court each and every time it wants to get material released. Needless to say, this is rather expensive for an independent bookshop.
The lesson of all of this is that these censorship schemes typically do not have adequate oversight to prevent or correct civil liberties violations and/or human rights discrimination. You, at least, are accountable to your employer regarding your school library internet filters. However, with this proposed "child porn" internet firewall, what mechanisms will the telcos have to resolve these disputes? How effective and expensive will they be?
Given the conduct of the major telcos in the marketplace (see the other post on this page about how Telus blocked the union internet sites of the Telecommunications Workers Union during the strike last year), I personally don't have much confidence in them.
I use a console utility called EXIFdater, licensed under the GPL. The author thoughtfully provides both C source code (compilable with gcc) and a Win32 executable binary.
Exifdater reads date EXIF data from a jpg file, and renames the file according to the pattern that you specify in the command parameters. It can incorporate the original filename in the new filename. You can then organize your photos according to date, simply using your filesystem. This way you are not locked into any database format.
Here is a script that I wrote to run exifdater with my favourite parameters:
#!/bin/sh
# this script is/usr/local/bin/exifrename
# usage exifrename FILE
# for multiple files: for i in $(ls);do exifrename $i; done
exifdater -p @y-@n-@d. $1
# @y=year, @n=month, @d=day
# the '-' and '.' characters are literal strings
So if I use the above script on a file originally named IMG_005.jpg, it renames it 2006-11-21.IMG_005.jpg
The exifdater page also has a link to a public domain utility called jhead. I haven't used it yet, but it appears to have more features than exifdater, including editing the JPEG header comments.
This type of fraud (a rogue purchases property from an innocent vendor, flips it to an innocent buyer, then absconds with the money, leaving the property with unclear title) has been around at least as long as there has been the law of contract. The legal doctrine is one of "Mistake". Here is a more recent case from the U.K. about Mistake in contract, invovling a similarly fraudulent transaction, but with a car instead of a house: Hudson v. Shogun [2001] EWCA Civ 1001.
A choice quote from that British case: "It may seem remarkable that the law governing the consequences of a fraud as common as this is still in doubt, but it is." This would apply to all of the jurisdictions deriving their law from British common law, including Australia, Canada and the U.S.
Here is an American viewpoint (the Law Site on MSN) on the issue of Mistake
Storyline is what disturbs. Let's get back to telling real stories.
Amen to that. Most of the posts so far , and a couple of previous slashdot stories on this topic, seem to equate "disturbing" with "gore", and offer as examples of "disturbing" games stuff like Doom, Silent Hill, System Shock 2 etc. While these games are certainly on par with horror-genre type films (I loved System Shock 2, btw), they don't capture the same context of disturbing as the example of the game Manhunt in TFA (ie. having the gamer assume the dual roles of murderer and detective).
A friend and I were having this same conversation last night, about films. A lot of people consider the Saw franchise scary, but for me, one of the most disturbing and suspenseful cinematic scenes recently was the scene in 2005's Crash where the little girl runs out to her father and apparently gets shot. I haven't seen City of God or Hotel Rwanda, which are films cited in the TFA, for the very reason that I think they would not be enjoyable viewing experiences.
The main question posed in the TFA is: If a videogame is no longer fun, we tend to stop playing. How can you make a videogame not "fun" and still compel players to go on? The hurdle that the gaming industry needs to overcome is the profit motive; games that aren't fun to play are unlikely to be purchased. The film industry, on the other hand, has had decades of avant-garde and independent films to condition audiences for challenging fare.
The parent poster here cited text adventure games as examples of the truly disturbing and challenging, and I heartily agree with that. I played Photopia, and that game left me pondering.
Games will have caught up to films when the field will have its equivalents of film directors Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Atom Egoyan. There is one guy in gaming, John Tynes, who is close. A couple of his pen-and-paper RPGs are downright nightmarish: Puppetland, and especially Powerkill. The games used to be available on Tyne's website, but don't seem to be there anymore, so here is a review.
All you need to do is insert the Knoppix LiveCD during a Windows session, let autoplay do its thing, then you are given an option of running Knoppix right from Windows. I never tried networking with it, so I don't know how it well it does that.
You raised a good point with Dick Butkus; reminded me of Dick Assman, made famous on the Letterman show.
The latter shows that with enough hype, even a name with seriously negative connotations can become an advantage. Look at Assman, an ordinary guy working at a Saskatchewan gas station; the guys at the Letterman show turned his ridiculous, "what were his parents thinking" name into a marketing asset (no pun intended), and made a celebrity out of him.
I play these games on my Palm with Frotz, a Z-code interpreter. Frotz exists for a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows CE, GameBoy Advanced, Windows, KDE etc. Many of the interactive fiction games are in Z-code format.
Here's an eWeek article from January 14, 2004: Eolas Discussing Browser Patent with Linux Community. In the article, Dr. Michael Doyle, the principal behind Eolas, expresses his support for the "open-source community".
While I'm link-whoring, here's some more stuff if you want insight on the guy: Doyle's homepage, another eWeek interview "Browser Victory Shouldn't Alter HTML", and an article from I, Cringely that was one of the first media pieces on the whole issue. More can be found on Google and Wikipedia, of course.
Regardless of Doyle's intentions, I'm against the whole software and business-method patenting regimes. It's been said many times before, but patenting software or business-methods is as ludicrous as patenting story ideas in literature.
You should note that I've been very careful not to claim that Canada doesn't have its share of racists, sexists, or other hate mongers. Native People face a lot of racism in various parts of Canada (which I find a shame -- I've known a number of Native Canadians in my years, and have found them to be decent and honourable people). There are vocal segments of society who are openly against homosexuals. And yes, there are those who have an undercurrent of religious intolerance. The very people this article is about are self-proclaimed skinheads, living in the area of our nations capital.
I'm coming late to this discussion; if I had the mod points, I would have modded the parent post up. It's important that Yaz qualified his otherwise excellent posts to this topic; Canada is not entirely free of the type of racism that has afflicted the U.S.
People were in fact denied the right to vote in Canada based on their gender or the colour of their skin.
Women didn't get the vote until the 20th Century. Only male Chinese immigrants were allowed to work in Canada, and were not allowed to vote or bring their families over, a situation that lasted until after World War II (even when some of these Chinese-Canadians were fighting in the Canadian armed forces). First Nations (ie aboriginal) people suffered a long history of racism up to the present day, and were not allowed to vote until the '60's (as I recall); further, the apartheid South African regime based their system on some of Canada's policies.
And that's not including incidents involving WwII internment of Canadian citizens of Japanese descent, WWI internment of Ukrainian Canadians, the turning away of the Komagata Maru freighter carrying Sikh refugees...
What I meant was that Outlook 2000 cannot access the Exchange calendar through OWA; it doesn't have that functionality. Outlook 2003 does. Thanks for your information that Exchange with OWA enabled gives you the full feature set; that explains a lot.
It's interesting that you've had the experience of Exchange/OWA breaking once a month. Here, Exchange regularly but intermittently chokes, but this happens to everyone at the same time whether they're using Outlook or OWA, so I don't regard this as an Evolution bug. It's probably a server configuration issue, but as the servers are managed nationally, I have no idea what is involved.
Let me be a contrary data point. My employer installed Exchange Server with Outlook Web Access (OWA). However (and I don't know anything about Exchange licensing) they didn't purchase the module to allow native shared calendaring in Outlook. Consequently, everyone uses Exchange as a glorified mail server only.
I arrived around six months ago. I needed shared calendaring so that my secretary can set dates. Okay, through OWA, we can share my calendar if we both log in to my account through OWA, using Firefox.
But, how to sync with my Palm? My employer provided me with Outlook 2000, which does not have OWA access; only Outlook 2003 does. And they wouldn't upgrade my Outlook.
Fortunately, we have a liberal IT policy, so I installed Ubuntu. Evolution connects to the Exchange server fine, and through OWA, I can sync my calendar and palm, something that Outlook 2000 can't do. So, to get more functionality out of Exchange, I had to use Evolution instead of Outlook!
As far as everything else goes, Abiword/Gnumeric/Openoffice/Firefox all have been drop-in replacements for the usual Microsoft suspects.
I just checked out your links. You may be interested to know that the artwork for Polaris is heavily inspired from an early 20th century Danish illustrator named Kay Nielsen. If you google his name, you can find more biographical information and artwork by him.
Apparently, there are no books with his artwork in print. My wife and I were extremely fortunate to come across an antique edition of "East of Sun, West of Moon: Old Tales from the North" a few years ago; paid $125 Cdn for it. His artwork is amazing, and I can see why the developers of Polaris would use him as an inspiration.
I'd really like a low cost virtualization option so that I could run Linux without rebooting.
You should try Cooperative Linux. From their website, they describe it as:
"Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software."
When I first played with Linux a decade or so ago, I couldn't get my Matrox video card to work with X Windows using a Slackware distro. So, I gave it up.
Ironically, it was my Matrox G450 card that caused me to switch completely to Linux from Windows. One day, in July 2002, after humming along for 3 years, my computer refused to boot into Windows; it would just get to a black screen with a cryptic message about "registry error... reboot". It safe-booted, but would crash every time I changed the video resolution higher than 640x480. After a weekend of reinstalling Windows and various drivers, pulling out PCI cards and putting them back in, I isolated the problem to the video card.
The strange thing was, the Matrox G450 worked flawlessly from a Knoppix LiveCD, so I knew it wasn't a hardware problem. My wife, exasperated with the time I was spending on this problem, told me that if the video card works with Knoppix, then just install Knoppix on the computer. Yes, my wife wanted to switch 100% to Linux!
So that's what we did. My wife adjusted with little re-training (mainly on the concept of the/home directory). She doesn't know how to administer or troubleshoot Linux, but she doesn't know how to do these things with Windows, either. She found no discernible difference between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice / Gnumeric, except that OpenOffice recovered her Word97 document from work when it became inexplicably corrupted. And she's become quite addicted to Frozen Bubble.
I eventually discovered that the original problem with the Matrox G450 card was with the VIA chipset my motherboard uses, and probably some combination of Windows drivers; this is regardless of whether I tried Windows 98 or Windows 2000. Since Kanotix (which is on that computer now) and the open source Matrox drivers have no problems with it, I have not felt the need to dick around with Windows anymore.
In fact, up until last year, we were all Linux on my home network, but recently our employers have given us company laptops with WindowsXP on them, so we're not 100% Microsoft-free anymore. However, I partitioned my laptop hard-drive and installed Ubuntu on it to dual-boot (my employer has a pretty liberal IT policy).
Slashdot Mirror
If you like Privateer or Elite, there is an open source space shooter called Vega Strike. There's even a mod for Star Trek:Next Generation vessels.
I don't know where you live, but if you are in Vancouver, you might want to try the Co-operative Auto Network. It's a co-op where you pay a one-time $500 membership fee, and per hour fees (as low as $2/hr) to sign out various vehicles for short periods of time.
It's ideal for folks like you where you have a primary vehicle, but occasionally need a secondary. The co-op fleet has trucks and vans. My wife signed up, and it's better than purchasing (and insuring) a second car. Plus, she gets to satisfy her Mini Cooper fetish (the co-op has three that you can sign out) without having to shell out the bucks.
If you're frustrated with Counter-Strike, you should give True Combat: Elite a whirl. It is based on the Enemy Territory engine, and is freely downloadable (but not open sourced) and can be played in Win32, Mac, or Linux.
Amen to that. Just look at the way that police are mis-using tasers as the first response against suspects who are already subdued, rather than using less dangerous methods of policing.
There is no doubt that if a microwave weapon were available for military or police deployment, it would not be restricted to crowd control, and they would definitely use it as a method for torture or coercion of individuals regardless of the health risks.
I keep a CD of Kanotix around at all times. It's a Knoppix variant, but I find that Kanotix has a cleaner look and feel. It's also better for a HD install, since it uses only Debian-unstable packages instead of the mix of testing and unstable that Knoppix uses.
However, I'm going to my parents' home for the Xmas holidays, so I'll be using their WinXP machine. I happened to have a USB flash drive lying around, so I packed it with portable FOSS Win32 packages from , including FireFox, Thunderbird, GIMP, OpenOffice etc. These packages install everything, including dlls, into an application folder and are executed directly from the USB drive. The added benefit is that you can copy these packages from machine to machine simply by copying the application folders; there is no need to run an installer every time or alter the Registry.
Thanks for that hit of nostalgia... I grew up in Windsor too, watching Channels 20 and 50 after school. Ultraman, Lost in Space, Speed Racer, Get Smart...
You would be surprised at how censorship schemes like this result in unintended consequences or outright abuses. While censorship decisions won't be made by "one person in the basement", these schemes typically involve bureaucrat decisionmakers who are essentially unaccountable, and likely untrained, for the complexity of these tasks.
One need look no further than the case of Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium, a bookstore in Vancouver that caters to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) community.
Little Sister's has been fighting ongoing harassment from Canada Customs for over a decade now, regarding the importation of LGBT erotica. Canada Customs has the authority to impound and confiscate imported material, whether it is visual or just plain text, that it believes violates the obscenity provisions of the Criminal Code. However, there was evidence that Canada Customs specifically discriminated against Little Sister's (probably because of its status as an LGBT vendor); for example, Canada Customs impounded copies of Madonna's Sex coffee-table book destined for Little Sister's, even though this book was carried by all the mainstream bookstores in Canada.
In 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canada Customs violated the Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms in its conduct towards Little Sister's, but did not remove the authority of Canada Customs to censor material at the border. The consequence is that Canada Customs continue to harass Little Sister's to this day, and Little Sister's has to go to court each and every time it wants to get material released. Needless to say, this is rather expensive for an independent bookshop.
The lesson of all of this is that these censorship schemes typically do not have adequate oversight to prevent or correct civil liberties violations and/or human rights discrimination. You, at least, are accountable to your employer regarding your school library internet filters. However, with this proposed "child porn" internet firewall, what mechanisms will the telcos have to resolve these disputes? How effective and expensive will they be?
Given the conduct of the major telcos in the marketplace (see the other post on this page about how Telus blocked the union internet sites of the Telecommunications Workers Union during the strike last year), I personally don't have much confidence in them.
Exifdater reads date EXIF data from a jpg file, and renames the file according to the pattern that you specify in the command parameters. It can incorporate the original filename in the new filename. You can then organize your photos according to date, simply using your filesystem. This way you are not locked into any database format.
Here is a script that I wrote to run exifdater with my favourite parameters:
So if I use the above script on a file originally named IMG_005.jpg, it renames it 2006-11-21.IMG_005.jpg
The exifdater page also has a link to a public domain utility called jhead. I haven't used it yet, but it appears to have more features than exifdater, including editing the JPEG header comments.
This type of fraud (a rogue purchases property from an innocent vendor, flips it to an innocent buyer, then absconds with the money, leaving the property with unclear title) has been around at least as long as there has been the law of contract. The legal doctrine is one of "Mistake". Here is a more recent case from the U.K. about Mistake in contract, invovling a similarly fraudulent transaction, but with a car instead of a house: Hudson v. Shogun [2001] EWCA Civ 1001.
A choice quote from that British case: "It may seem remarkable that the law governing the consequences of a fraud as common as this is still in doubt, but it is." This would apply to all of the jurisdictions deriving their law from British common law, including Australia, Canada and the U.S.
Here is an American viewpoint (the Law Site on MSN) on the issue of Mistake
Storyline is what disturbs. Let's get back to telling real stories.
Amen to that. Most of the posts so far , and a couple of previous slashdot stories on this topic, seem to equate "disturbing" with "gore", and offer as examples of "disturbing" games stuff like Doom, Silent Hill, System Shock 2 etc. While these games are certainly on par with horror-genre type films (I loved System Shock 2, btw), they don't capture the same context of disturbing as the example of the game Manhunt in TFA (ie. having the gamer assume the dual roles of murderer and detective).
A friend and I were having this same conversation last night, about films. A lot of people consider the Saw franchise scary, but for me, one of the most disturbing and suspenseful cinematic scenes recently was the scene in 2005's Crash where the little girl runs out to her father and apparently gets shot. I haven't seen City of God or Hotel Rwanda, which are films cited in the TFA, for the very reason that I think they would not be enjoyable viewing experiences.
The main question posed in the TFA is: If a videogame is no longer fun, we tend to stop playing. How can you make a videogame not "fun" and still compel players to go on? The hurdle that the gaming industry needs to overcome is the profit motive; games that aren't fun to play are unlikely to be purchased. The film industry, on the other hand, has had decades of avant-garde and independent films to condition audiences for challenging fare.
The parent poster here cited text adventure games as examples of the truly disturbing and challenging, and I heartily agree with that. I played Photopia, and that game left me pondering.
Games will have caught up to films when the field will have its equivalents of film directors Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Atom Egoyan. There is one guy in gaming, John Tynes, who is close. A couple of his pen-and-paper RPGs are downright nightmarish: Puppetland, and especially Powerkill. The games used to be available on Tyne's website, but don't seem to be there anymore, so here is a review.
Actually, Knoppix can be run under Windows using qemu: see the Slashdot article WinOS+QEMU+Knoppix 3.8 = WinKnoppix!
All you need to do is insert the Knoppix LiveCD during a Windows session, let autoplay do its thing, then you are given an option of running Knoppix right from Windows. I never tried networking with it, so I don't know how it well it does that.
The latter shows that with enough hype, even a name with seriously negative connotations can become an advantage. Look at Assman, an ordinary guy working at a Saskatchewan gas station; the guys at the Letterman show turned his ridiculous, "what were his parents thinking" name into a marketing asset (no pun intended), and made a celebrity out of him.
I play these games on my Palm with Frotz, a Z-code interpreter. Frotz exists for a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows CE, GameBoy Advanced, Windows, KDE etc. Many of the interactive fiction games are in Z-code format.
While I'm link-whoring, here's some more stuff if you want insight on the guy: Doyle's homepage, another eWeek interview "Browser Victory Shouldn't Alter HTML", and an article from I, Cringely that was one of the first media pieces on the whole issue. More can be found on Google and Wikipedia, of course.
Regardless of Doyle's intentions, I'm against the whole software and business-method patenting regimes. It's been said many times before, but patenting software or business-methods is as ludicrous as patenting story ideas in literature.
You should note that I've been very careful not to claim that Canada doesn't have its share of racists, sexists, or other hate mongers. Native People face a lot of racism in various parts of Canada (which I find a shame -- I've known a number of Native Canadians in my years, and have found them to be decent and honourable people). There are vocal segments of society who are openly against homosexuals. And yes, there are those who have an undercurrent of religious intolerance. The very people this article is about are self-proclaimed skinheads, living in the area of our nations capital.
I'm coming late to this discussion; if I had the mod points, I would have modded the parent post up. It's important that Yaz qualified his otherwise excellent posts to this topic; Canada is not entirely free of the type of racism that has afflicted the U.S.
People were in fact denied the right to vote in Canada based on their gender or the colour of their skin.
Women didn't get the vote until the 20th Century. Only male Chinese immigrants were allowed to work in Canada, and were not allowed to vote or bring their families over, a situation that lasted until after World War II (even when some of these Chinese-Canadians were fighting in the Canadian armed forces). First Nations (ie aboriginal) people suffered a long history of racism up to the present day, and were not allowed to vote until the '60's (as I recall); further, the apartheid South African regime based their system on some of Canada's policies.
And that's not including incidents involving WwII internment of Canadian citizens of Japanese descent, WWI internment of Ukrainian Canadians, the turning away of the Komagata Maru freighter carrying Sikh refugees...
Somebody mod parent up. Tom Cech won the Nobel Prize for that work on self-replicating strands of RNA.
Don't forget another great Canadian TV comedy ensemble: Second City TV.
And Delerium, don't forget Delerium and Kirsty Thirsk's vocals.
Just adding this reply for posterity's sake. I came across a succinct, one-page summary of Linux on the Jem Report: The Linux Learning Guide
Also, the major distros have their own manuals, handbooks, wikis, FAQs etc. that cover the basics.
What I meant was that Outlook 2000 cannot access the Exchange calendar through OWA; it doesn't have that functionality. Outlook 2003 does. Thanks for your information that Exchange with OWA enabled gives you the full feature set; that explains a lot.
It's interesting that you've had the experience of Exchange/OWA breaking once a month. Here, Exchange regularly but intermittently chokes, but this happens to everyone at the same time whether they're using Outlook or OWA, so I don't regard this as an Evolution bug. It's probably a server configuration issue, but as the servers are managed nationally, I have no idea what is involved.
Let me be a contrary data point. My employer installed Exchange Server with Outlook Web Access (OWA). However (and I don't know anything about Exchange licensing) they didn't purchase the module to allow native shared calendaring in Outlook. Consequently, everyone uses Exchange as a glorified mail server only.
I arrived around six months ago. I needed shared calendaring so that my secretary can set dates. Okay, through OWA, we can share my calendar if we both log in to my account through OWA, using Firefox.
But, how to sync with my Palm? My employer provided me with Outlook 2000, which does not have OWA access; only Outlook 2003 does. And they wouldn't upgrade my Outlook.
Fortunately, we have a liberal IT policy, so I installed Ubuntu. Evolution connects to the Exchange server fine, and through OWA, I can sync my calendar and palm, something that Outlook 2000 can't do. So, to get more functionality out of Exchange, I had to use Evolution instead of Outlook!
As far as everything else goes, Abiword/Gnumeric/Openoffice/Firefox all have been drop-in replacements for the usual Microsoft suspects.
I just checked out your links. You may be interested to know that the artwork for Polaris is heavily inspired from an early 20th century Danish illustrator named Kay Nielsen. If you google his name, you can find more biographical information and artwork by him.
Apparently, there are no books with his artwork in print. My wife and I were extremely fortunate to come across an antique edition of "East of Sun, West of Moon: Old Tales from the North" a few years ago; paid $125 Cdn for it. His artwork is amazing, and I can see why the developers of Polaris would use him as an inspiration.
I'd really like a low cost virtualization option so that I could run Linux without rebooting.
You should try Cooperative Linux. From their website, they describe it as:
"Cooperative Linux is the first working free and open source method for optimally running Linux on Microsoft Windows natively. More generally, Cooperative Linux (short-named coLinux) is a port of the Linux kernel that allows it to run cooperatively alongside another operating system on a single machine. For instance, it allows one to freely run Linux on Windows 2000/XP, without using a commercial PC virtualization software such as VMware, in a way which is much more optimal than using any general purpose PC virtualization software."
When I first played with Linux a decade or so ago, I couldn't get my Matrox video card to work with X Windows using a Slackware distro. So, I gave it up.
/home directory). She doesn't know how to administer or troubleshoot Linux, but she doesn't know how to do these things with Windows, either. She found no discernible difference between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice / Gnumeric, except that OpenOffice recovered her Word97 document from work when it became inexplicably corrupted. And she's become quite addicted to Frozen Bubble.
Ironically, it was my Matrox G450 card that caused me to switch completely to Linux from Windows. One day, in July 2002, after humming along for 3 years, my computer refused to boot into Windows; it would just get to a black screen with a cryptic message about "registry error... reboot". It safe-booted, but would crash every time I changed the video resolution higher than 640x480. After a weekend of reinstalling Windows and various drivers, pulling out PCI cards and putting them back in, I isolated the problem to the video card.
The strange thing was, the Matrox G450 worked flawlessly from a Knoppix LiveCD, so I knew it wasn't a hardware problem. My wife, exasperated with the time I was spending on this problem, told me that if the video card works with Knoppix, then just install Knoppix on the computer. Yes, my wife wanted to switch 100% to Linux!
So that's what we did. My wife adjusted with little re-training (mainly on the concept of the
I eventually discovered that the original problem with the Matrox G450 card was with the VIA chipset my motherboard uses, and probably some combination of Windows drivers; this is regardless of whether I tried Windows 98 or Windows 2000. Since Kanotix (which is on that computer now) and the open source Matrox drivers have no problems with it, I have not felt the need to dick around with Windows anymore.
In fact, up until last year, we were all Linux on my home network, but recently our employers have given us company laptops with WindowsXP on them, so we're not 100% Microsoft-free anymore. However, I partitioned my laptop hard-drive and installed Ubuntu on it to dual-boot (my employer has a pretty liberal IT policy).