That's because most time-wasting browsing is done from work (high likelihood of Win/IE). Hmm, coffee break time - wonder what's on/.?
At home, your average Slashdot readers is more likely to be working out, cooking a three-course meal for their partner or dressing up for a night on the town...
I'm curious about one little thing - if you have 400 desktop machines behind a single external IP address, all running through a proxy cache, and they all browse to Google over the course of a week... would Google count that as one machine, or 400?
Yeah, he's replacing some character called Han Solo. This Han guy wasn't popular with viewers aged eight or less, and as you can tell from the most recent films, this is the market segment they're really aiming for.
Anyone remember the old SF stories where people were wired into a net (exact details not specified, but usually something wired directly to the brain), with instant info retrieval wherever they happened to be?
The internet is the closest thing we have to that futuristic setup. With a 'net connection, a mouse and a keyboard I can find out literally anything, within seconds. Although I occasionally use the net for entertainment, most of the time I'm soaking up news, opinion, facts, etc. (Ok, so that IS a form of entertainment...)
Strip that away for a couple of days and it's no wonder people feel cut off. Suddenly you have to rely on memory for everything, and it's possible (gasp) that you can't immediately satisfy your curiousity on something by visiting Google.
Anyway, apart from that I run a software web site with my own apps. One of the apps is for sale, all the others are freeware. Orders come in by email and customer queries have to be answered - basically tying me to the PC most days. Yes, I would suffer badly if I had to spend more than half a day offline without a LOT of advance warning.
They made it a jailable offence to enter a movie theatre with a video camera. They're banning camera phones from some public areas (swimming pools, etc) It wouldn't surprise me if they banned RFID scanners from shopping malls. Imagine if every RFID scanner incorporated a unique RFID which another scanner can scan. Then the scanner's scanner can scan your scanner and avert your scanner scam.
Agreed. I used to buy a new game every month or so (more if I found something tempting in the bargain bins) but for the past 3-4 years I've been completely out of the games environment (too busy writing books and software) About the only thing I looked at in that time was BF1942, GTA III and GTA VC.
Three or four weeks ago I got hold of several top-100 games lists (you know the kind of thing), picked out a bunch of 'must-have' games from the recent past, and got the lot off ebay one by one. There's some interesting stuff there, but three weeks later I'm back with the writing & coding again. Too many of the games take too long to start. e.g. You can leap right into Wolfenstein and start blasting, but Splinter Cell or Ghost Recon take an age to pick up again because of the complexity of keyboard commands.
I'm not asking companies to dumb games down, I'm immersed in Morrowind at the moment and that's hardly simplistic. It's just the age-old problem of standardising the controls. E.g. F5 to quicksave, F9 to quickload would be a good start. WASD plus mouse has been standardised for movement, but what about fixing the action key? Inventory? I know it's possible to reconfigure settings, but when I set E for action, whatever was using E is now unbound. So you bind that to something else, and this chain reaction goes on until you end up having to redefine just about everything. Then you discover the game's crap, and you just wasted 1/2 hour setting up sound, video and controls...
I've got about eight of them now, they're fairly rare in Australia so I usually throw in a bid when one comes up on ebay. (One 16kb machine, three rubber keyed ones, a 48+, a 128 +2 and a 128 +3 with disk drive. And some other bits, including 4 ZX81s and a ZX80 without a case;-) I've also got four cartons of tapes, one of which was MIA on WOS. I don't have my ST any more, I sold it for $3k which paid for the PC.
I know, it's all nostalgia but they were happy times.
They had to use 32-bit binaries on Windows, they said there's no 64-bit compiler and they had trouble getting hold of the source code for most of the apps...
My first PC used to tick while checking ram (First POST - geddit? Oh, never mind.)
I graduated from a ZX81 in 1982, to a Sinclair speccy in 1984, to assorted Atari STs until about 1995 when I finally bought a 90mhz Pentium with a whopping 16 megs of ram.
I pulled that PC out of retirement 5 years ago and set it up as a file/print server running Linux. It was only replaced with a new PC about 18 months ago. I really believe in getting value for money out of old hardware...
Really, how does the government know what I read last week?? They can review my purchasing habits, and can request my library history, but they have no way of knowing what I bought with cash at the local thrift store/used dealer.
They can demand your library history, and jail the librarian if (s)he reports the demand. That this is acceptable to you says a lot. Seems to me that you have exposed a dangerous loophole though, so someone better email Ashcroft.
I buy books with cash. Strike one.
there are no cameras at any intersection where I live.
Doesn't really matter, as your cellphone (you carry one, right?) records will show your location for the past x months on demand.
I don't carry a cell phone. Strike two.
And the only time you would want/need a permit to protest is if you intend to block traffic, and the permit provides the "protesters" police protection
Sure, and the safe area thoughtfully provided by the police tends to be out of sight of both the event they are protesting and the media attending it.
Hell, you can have a protest in the shopping centre carpark here and nobody would care a jot. Strike three.
So, I haven't lost all my personal freedoms yet. Hang on, there's someone knocking on the--
"The battle is by no means certain, and I believe that it's not unconcievable that open source will be (for all practical matters) legislated out of america (and probably western europe and australia as well). Which, as an american (who does NOT have thousands to funnel towards anyones campaign coffers) troubles me deeply."
Do you realise how many govt departments in Australia are using Open Source? What are they going to do, legislate against themselves?
I'd rather see the IT people in each country developing skills in open source, building and installing their own solutions, rather than teaching a bunch of drones neater handwriting so they can make out cheques to Microsoft.
It's a bit like the auto industry - many countries build their own to (a) keep the jobs local and (b) cut down on the river of cash flowing out of the country.
The internet has encouraged thousands upon thousands of previously isolated writers to gather into critique groups (critters, Online Workshop, etc) - maybe they're all so busy creating they don't have time to sample? That's what happened to me...
"The Microsoft co-founder and one of the world's richest men is in Sydney today for a press appearance so tightly scripted and controlled it could have been orchestrated by US President George W. Bush's media office."
"At least the assembled do not have to submit their retinas or fingerprints for scanning - possibly because Microsoft can't come to grips with good security."
"Those running the market-leading open source Apache web server, who use desktop operating systems such as Mac OS X or GNU/Linux, or Windows web browsers other than Explorer (such as Opera or Mozilla) were inoculated from the virus."
My mother has been running Gentoo for over 12 months. No hassles, it's been great for her and brilliant for me.
My workplace has been running Gentoo on the server for approx 18 months. No hassles. The terminals are now running Gentoo. Again, no hassles.
The school has been running a Gentoo LSTP server for 16 months with no hassles (beginning to see a pattern...) They have 6 terminals, all running smoothly. Alongside them, there are 12-16 running Windows. Will the Windows PCs be small piles of molten slag next week? Who knows...
KDE kiosk mode - played with it, tore my hair out, installed icewm instead. Icewm has a lovely, simple menu file and a straightforward config file. You can symlink the.icewm folder somewhere else (eg./home/icewm-shared) and then make the contents rw only on your own username. You edit the menus, they use the menus.
The above is something I set up on shared terminals at a primary school, it stops the kids messing with the desktop, deleting items, etc.
Set up a ~3gb partition just for user files (or use Fat32 for your windows partition). Define this as the location for My Documents in Windows, and in Linux you can set it as the save point for OpenOffice, etc (e.g. soft link into your home folder)
Then, if you use Thunderbird for email on Windows and Linux, you can point them both to the same message store so it doesn't matter which OS you're using. Ditto the Mozilla Calendar app in Mozilla/Firefox. Ditto Openoffice files. With those three items covered, choosing whether to boot Windows or Linux comes down to whether you want to play games... or do some work.
At work, we have 4 desktop machines running Windows 98, and a file/print/web server running Linux. The Windows machines were purchased years ago, they're cyrix 686 machines running at 200mhz, with 32-64mb of ram. All up, we spent about $5000 or $6000 on hardware way back when, exluding the server - which was a P90 with 16 megs of ram.
The people I work with don't like computers. The existing machines are 'good enough' for the job, and that's that. So, under what circumstances do I buy and install Windows XP on these machines? Or indeed, upgrade them in any way?
I bought a new PC (wow) as a server - an Athlon 2500+ with 512 megs of ram and a 20gb hard drive. The goal was to have all the old clunkers running as LTSP terminals so that they would operate a lot faster - and about a week after I'd got things set up, one of the machines had a hard drive failure. One by one, I've swapped the rest of the machines onto Linux via LTSP, and despite some fun and games it's been smooth sailing since.
Long answer: 1 web/file server which also runs a 20-user LTSP setup, and 2 web/file/print/email servers with 5 users each. None of them are really heavily used so it's hard to say what kind of difference it made going to 2.6, but I've not had any problems.
"Works with all email programs" they say. Bullshit. My email program filters HTML out and displays all inbound mail as plain text. I'd love to see them get around that with this trickery.
By the way, I've seen this stuff before. Before I wrote my email app I started getting regular, everyday emails with little images of postage stamps in them. (About 12-14 months ago) They were also there to confirm receipt of delivery, and since Outlook Express had no way to switch off remote image loading, I switched off Outlook Express.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because most time-wasting browsing is done from work (high likelihood of Win/IE). Hmm, coffee break time - wonder what's on /.?
At home, your average Slashdot readers is more likely to be working out, cooking a three-course meal for their partner or dressing up for a night on the town...
Actually, that's a silly argument.
Pity about the targeted ads down the right hand side, though...
I'm curious about one little thing - if you have 400 desktop machines behind a single external IP address, all running through a proxy cache, and they all browse to Google over the course of a week... would Google count that as one machine, or 400?
Yeah, he's replacing some character called Han Solo. This Han guy wasn't popular with viewers aged eight or less, and as you can tell from the most recent films, this is the market segment they're really aiming for.
Anyone remember the old SF stories where people were wired into a net (exact details not specified, but usually something wired directly to the brain), with instant info retrieval wherever they happened to be?
The internet is the closest thing we have to that futuristic setup. With a 'net connection, a mouse and a keyboard I can find out literally anything, within seconds. Although I occasionally use the net for entertainment, most of the time I'm soaking up news, opinion, facts, etc. (Ok, so that IS a form of entertainment...)
Strip that away for a couple of days and it's no wonder people feel cut off. Suddenly you have to rely on memory for everything, and it's possible (gasp) that you can't immediately satisfy your curiousity on something by visiting Google.
Anyway, apart from that I run a software web site with my own apps. One of the apps is for sale, all the others are freeware. Orders come in by email and customer queries have to be answered - basically tying me to the PC most days. Yes, I would suffer badly if I had to spend more than half a day offline without a LOT of advance warning.
They made it a jailable offence to enter a movie theatre with a video camera. They're banning camera phones from some public areas (swimming pools, etc) It wouldn't surprise me if they banned RFID scanners from shopping malls. Imagine if every RFID scanner incorporated a unique RFID which another scanner can scan. Then the scanner's scanner can scan your scanner and avert your scanner scam.
Damn, I suspected I was a geek but now I know for sure.
Agreed. I used to buy a new game every month or so (more if I found something tempting in the bargain bins) but for the past 3-4 years I've been completely out of the games environment (too busy writing books and software) About the only thing I looked at in that time was BF1942, GTA III and GTA VC.
Three or four weeks ago I got hold of several top-100 games lists (you know the kind of thing), picked out a bunch of 'must-have' games from the recent past, and got the lot off ebay one by one. There's some interesting stuff there, but three weeks later I'm back with the writing & coding again. Too many of the games take too long to start. e.g. You can leap right into Wolfenstein and start blasting, but Splinter Cell or Ghost Recon take an age to pick up again because of the complexity of keyboard commands.
I'm not asking companies to dumb games down, I'm immersed in Morrowind at the moment and that's hardly simplistic. It's just the age-old problem of standardising the controls. E.g. F5 to quicksave, F9 to quickload would be a good start. WASD plus mouse has been standardised for movement, but what about fixing the action key? Inventory? I know it's possible to reconfigure settings, but when I set E for action, whatever was using E is now unbound. So you bind that to something else, and this chain reaction goes on until you end up having to redefine just about everything. Then you discover the game's crap, and you just wasted 1/2 hour setting up sound, video and controls...
Yeah, except I think if you read the article you'll find the Phillips guy works for Oracle...
So, what're you doing with the speccy? :)
;-) I've also got four cartons of tapes, one of which was MIA on WOS. I don't have my ST any more, I sold it for $3k which paid for the PC.
I've got about eight of them now, they're fairly rare in Australia so I usually throw in a bid when one comes up on ebay. (One 16kb machine, three rubber keyed ones, a 48+, a 128 +2 and a 128 +3 with disk drive. And some other bits, including 4 ZX81s and a ZX80 without a case
I know, it's all nostalgia but they were happy times.
They had to use 32-bit binaries on Windows, they said there's no 64-bit compiler and they had trouble getting hold of the source code for most of the apps...
My first PC used to tick while checking ram (First POST - geddit? Oh, never mind.)
I graduated from a ZX81 in 1982, to a Sinclair speccy in 1984, to assorted Atari STs until about 1995 when I finally bought a 90mhz Pentium with a whopping 16 megs of ram.
I pulled that PC out of retirement 5 years ago and set it up as a file/print server running Linux. It was only replaced with a new PC about 18 months ago. I really believe in getting value for money out of old hardware...
I don't carry a cell phone. Strike two.
Hell, you can have a protest in the shopping centre carpark here and nobody would care a jot. Strike three.
So, I haven't lost all my personal freedoms yet. Hang on, there's someone knocking on the--
Sure it's updated on a regular basis. Once a decade is regular.
What is doesn't say is that it will be updated frequently...
"The battle is by no means certain, and I believe that it's not unconcievable that open source will be (for all practical matters) legislated out of america (and probably western europe and australia as well). Which, as an american (who does NOT have thousands to funnel towards anyones campaign coffers) troubles me deeply."
Do you realise how many govt departments in Australia are using Open Source? What are they going to do, legislate against themselves?
I'd rather see the IT people in each country developing skills in open source, building and installing their own solutions, rather than teaching a bunch of drones neater handwriting so they can make out cheques to Microsoft.
It's a bit like the auto industry - many countries build their own to (a) keep the jobs local and (b) cut down on the river of cash flowing out of the country.
The internet has encouraged thousands upon thousands of previously isolated writers to gather into critique groups (critters, Online Workshop, etc) - maybe they're all so busy creating they don't have time to sample? That's what happened to me...
Gates fussy over security in Sydney
Couple of choice quotes:
"The Microsoft co-founder and one of the world's richest men is in Sydney today for a press appearance so tightly scripted and controlled it could have been orchestrated by US President George W. Bush's media office."
"At least the assembled do not have to submit their retinas or fingerprints for scanning - possibly because Microsoft can't come to grips with good security."
"Those running the market-leading open source Apache web server, who use desktop operating systems such as Mac OS X or GNU/Linux, or Windows web browsers other than Explorer (such as Opera or Mozilla) were inoculated from the virus."
There's quite a bit more, all fun reading.
So, not only do they want to charge us for air, but also snow, rain, hail, sleet...
I also have a site distributing Windows software, with 300-400 uniques per day.
Year to date:
Internet Explorer 49309 82.6 %
Mozilla 5715 9.6 %
Opera 2371 4 %
Netscape 2077 3.5 %
Konqueror 55 0.1 %
2nd half last year for comparison:
Internet Explorer 47071 87.6 %
Mozilla 2711 5 %
Netscape 1957 3.6 %
Opera 1728 3.2 %
Slip sliding awaaayy...
My mother has been running Gentoo for over 12 months. No hassles, it's been great for her and brilliant for me.
My workplace has been running Gentoo on the server for approx 18 months. No hassles. The terminals are now running Gentoo. Again, no hassles.
The school has been running a Gentoo LSTP server for 16 months with no hassles (beginning to see a pattern...) They have 6 terminals, all running smoothly. Alongside them, there are 12-16 running Windows. Will the Windows PCs be small piles of molten slag next week? Who knows...
KDE kiosk mode - played with it, tore my hair out, installed icewm instead. Icewm has a lovely, simple menu file and a straightforward config file. You can symlink the .icewm folder somewhere else (eg. /home/icewm-shared) and then make the contents rw only on your own username. You edit the menus, they use the menus.
The above is something I set up on shared terminals at a primary school, it stops the kids messing with the desktop, deleting items, etc.
Cheers Simon
Set up a ~3gb partition just for user files (or use Fat32 for your windows partition). Define this as the location for My Documents in Windows, and in Linux you can set it as the save point for OpenOffice, etc (e.g. soft link into your home folder)
... or do some work.
Then, if you use Thunderbird for email on Windows and Linux, you can point them both to the same message store so it doesn't matter which OS you're using. Ditto the Mozilla Calendar app in Mozilla/Firefox. Ditto Openoffice files. With those three items covered, choosing whether to boot Windows or Linux comes down to whether you want to play games
Ok, here's my situation:
At work, we have 4 desktop machines running Windows 98, and a file/print/web server running Linux. The Windows machines were purchased years ago, they're cyrix 686 machines running at 200mhz, with 32-64mb of ram. All up, we spent about $5000 or $6000 on hardware way back when, exluding the server - which was a P90 with 16 megs of ram.
The people I work with don't like computers. The existing machines are 'good enough' for the job, and that's that. So, under what circumstances do I buy and install Windows XP on these machines? Or indeed, upgrade them in any way?
I bought a new PC (wow) as a server - an Athlon 2500+ with 512 megs of ram and a 20gb hard drive. The goal was to have all the old clunkers running as LTSP terminals so that they would operate a lot faster - and about a week after I'd got things set up, one of the machines had a hard drive failure. One by one, I've swapped the rest of the machines onto Linux via LTSP, and despite some fun and games it's been smooth sailing since.
Yes.
Long answer: 1 web/file server which also runs a 20-user LTSP setup, and 2 web/file/print/email servers with 5 users each. None of them are really heavily used so it's hard to say what kind of difference it made going to 2.6, but I've not had any problems.
"Works with all email programs" they say. Bullshit. My email program filters HTML out and displays all inbound mail as plain text. I'd love to see them get around that with this trickery.
By the way, I've seen this stuff before. Before I wrote my email app I started getting regular, everyday emails with little images of postage stamps in them. (About 12-14 months ago) They were also there to confirm receipt of delivery, and since Outlook Express had no way to switch off remote image loading, I switched off Outlook Express.