I considered laser, but for a color laser I'd have spent many times over what I've payed for inkjets. Don't know if you're aware of this, but colour lasers have really plummeted in price these last few years. OK, the refills are expensive but they last thousands of pages rather than hundreds.
Or you could do what I did in Uni - pick up a cheap & cheerful half-decent secondhand B&W laser for any printing that doesn't require colour, and just use the inkjet for when you do. If you've got the space, this is probably the most economical way to handle occasional colour.
"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Fortunately, this is exactly what they get. They lose their liberty - because they've given it up. And they don't gain safety - because terrorists don't care what the law says, and if they're that determined will either find a way around it or find a way to avoid being caught in the first place.
As history has taught us, terrorists tend to be pretty determined people.
The power supplies in computers are switching. They control the voltage to the devices, regardless of what's on the line. Below a certian point, the won't be able to deal with it, but for the most part, the line power isn't going to break components in a machine...
Beyond a certain point, the power supply can (and IME has, several times) take out components quite happily. One cheap power supply + too much/little/noisy power = various random components (in one case, everything) dead.
Each day I would force my dad to use the HTPC I set up for him by unplugging the antenna from VCR. And each day when I get back from work I'd find the antenna cable right back on the VCR
Purely out of curiosity, did he ask for an HTPC? Did he show any interest in what it could offer or how to use it?
If not, then (if you'll forgive this rather troll-ish assumption) perhaps the person who needs to be taught things isn't your dad.
Licensing implications. "Buy our computer, it comes with FREE antivirus software with FREE updates!" sounds pretty commercial to me. From AVG Anti Virus licensing:
AVG Free Edition is available free-of-charge to home users! AVG Free Edition is for private, non-commercial, single home computer use only. Use of AVG Free Edition within any organization or for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited.
Tech support. "This free antivirus software just broke a whole lot of stuff!"
Legal liability. "Free trial, you must pay after 30 days" means after 30 days it's pretty difficult to argue "I lost data because your AV software wasn't working" 32 days later. What if updates were free? Could get pretty messy.
DRM == closed, by necessity, since if you can see the code or understand the protocol, you can break it.
Not true. DRM is just an extension of encryption theory, where a party trusted by the originator (the PC) verifies that someone (the owner) has authority to get at what the originator is sending out. DRM simply provides a means for the PC to be trusted by the originator.
This could be very handy for things like online banking (no more spyware) or in businesses (guaranteed locked-down desktops).
In the 'drm future' there isn't supposed to be any idea of 'open' just dumb devices that are little more than souped up DVD players.
Sure, if you've got a Windows PC. The most likely "doomsday" scenario I forsee is that you'll be able to run any OS you like but so many services will demand that your PC is "trusted" that there will be little point in running something "untrusted".
just run them side by side until you totally switch to open office.
That doesn't solve the problem of people from outside emailing you Word documents - particularly if those people are on a corporate network where they can't install any random bit of software.
I think you need to look further than initial purchase cost.
If you RTFA, there's a very telling sentence:
Early this year, however, the agency reviewed its IT infrastructure as part of an effort to meet performance targets, comply with Scotland's Freedom of Information Act and work more closely with other law enforcement groups
OpenOffice is fine if all you're doing is opening up a letter or a simple form in Word format. But if you want to claim that it's faultless for all documents, I have many thousands of pages in Word.doc format sitting right here to prove you wrong.
An operating system marketed first and foremost as a desktop operating system through channels appropriate to desktop use (eg. in PC World or whatever the US equivalent is).
You don't need 5 or 6 live CDs to support the various wireless chipsets out there.
You need one which supports all/the majority.
Unfortunately, wireless support is going the same way WinModem support did - nowhere fast because the manufacturers refuse to release sufficient specifications to write a driver.
The point of VMWare is that it virtualises the whole system. Provided there's nothing else competing for processor time on the box, any given OS running in VMWare should run at near-native speeds.
Wouldn't it benefit Apple in the long run to get more of its software into the public's hands?
In theory, yes. In practise, show me a company today which has successfully run a business selling operating systems to run on white-box PCs in competition with Microsoft.
I've never purchased a Mac because they simply don't have the software titles I'm interested in and Windows does.
Which is fine. Now you have a system, and if it breaks or you need it extended, you know who to call.
I think the benefit of open source from this perspective is providing an alternative if the person who you want to call has been run over by the proverbial bus. Reduce the risks inherent in owning the system, not the risk of having it installed in the first place.
since at the moment the only people that use open source software are geeks
I keep seeing phrases like this being trotted out in the last few weeks on here. Yet I keep seeing Novell, IBM and RedHat appearing in press releases and news articles about ordinary businesses moving systems to Linux.
Perhaps "the only people that use open source software voluntarily as the basis of their primary desktop system are geeks". But there's a whole world of servers out there which have never and will never run Windows.
My boss knows nothing about computers and doesn't care to.
Unless your boss is employed in a technical role (and it doesn't sound like it), he shouldn't have to. IT people need to think in business terms because the business sure as heck isn't going to think in IT terms.
Basically, the one question you need to ask yourself before requesting anything is "What does the business benefit from this?". If you can't think of a good answer to that, and your idea costs money, time or other resources, you're probably wasting your energy.
Can someone who knows more about the subject than I comment on the usefulness of distro specific tuning?
I really don't think you'd achieve much. Fundamentally, a Linux system is a bunch of programs running on a Linux kernel. A distribution dictates to a greater or lesser extent how those programs are installed and how the system as a whole is configured and managed, and may include some GUI-based tool to make it easier but is unlikely to have any special black magic to make it run much faster.
IMO, you'd be better off with looking at tuning the kernel and whatever programs you're running, such as Apache, Samba etc.
Nevertheless, Richter said that he and his company had changed their e-mailing practices and pledged not to send spam to anyone who has not asked to be sent commercial e-mail.
Well, in that case, it seems the most sensible course of action is:
To: Scott Richter <scott.richter@optinbig.com> From: jimicus <postmaster@whitepost.org.uk> Subject: Please stop spamming me!
Dear Scott,
Please accept this as an instruction to cease sending any form of unsolicited mail to [any address at the domain.... | the following email address..... ]
This instruction overrides any requests to receive email from you, past, present and future.
Regards,
I'm sure if only 5% of slashdot readers do this there should be a noticeable effect.
Doxygen and JavaDoc are good at the HOW, but cannot do the WHAT or WHY.
Don't blame the tool. Doxygen does a great job of the HOW, but it can't reasonably be expected to handle WHAT or WHY unless there are appropriate comments in the code in the first place. If you're going to use a tool like Doxygen or JavaDoc, at least have the good grace to spend 20 minutes learning the correct syntax so you can write useful comments which wind up in the generated documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Really though, if I needed to print that much, I'd send stuff off to someone with an offset press and have them run the job.
So. What's the market for this thing?
Someone who's getting rid of their offset press because the setup cost and labour for a print run is too much?
I considered laser, but for a color laser I'd have spent many times over what I've payed for inkjets.
Don't know if you're aware of this, but colour lasers have really plummeted in price these last few years. OK, the refills are expensive but they last thousands of pages rather than hundreds.
Or you could do what I did in Uni - pick up a cheap & cheerful half-decent secondhand B&W laser for any printing that doesn't require colour, and just use the inkjet for when you do. If you've got the space, this is probably the most economical way to handle occasional colour.
"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Fortunately, this is exactly what they get. They lose their liberty - because they've given it up. And they don't gain safety - because terrorists don't care what the law says, and if they're that determined will either find a way around it or find a way to avoid being caught in the first place.
As history has taught us, terrorists tend to be pretty determined people.
The power supplies in computers are switching. They control the voltage to the devices, regardless of what's on the line. Below a certian point, the won't be able to deal with it, but for the most part, the line power isn't going to break components in a machine...
Beyond a certain point, the power supply can (and IME has, several times) take out components quite happily. One cheap power supply + too much/little/noisy power = various random components (in one case, everything) dead.
Unusual? Yes. Unheard of? No.
what everyday user needs a half-terabyte of space?
Someone with an enoooouuurmmoooouuuuss appetite for pr0n.
Each day I would force my dad to use the HTPC I set up for him by unplugging the antenna from VCR. And each day when I get back from work I'd find the antenna cable right back on the VCR
Purely out of curiosity, did he ask for an HTPC? Did he show any interest in what it could offer or how to use it?
If not, then (if you'll forgive this rather troll-ish assumption) perhaps the person who needs to be taught things isn't your dad.
Solution:
"Dear Sir,
Seeing as your card and your PIN were used for this transaction, you must have written your PIN down or something. Your problem.
Kind regards,
Your bank."
Now you have to take the bank to court. Should put off anyone claiming less than a few hundred pounds.
Shame. I pay the equivalent of around $8.37/US gallon (about £3.85/imperial gallon) for petrol. And about 80% of that is tax.
AVG Free Edition is available free-of-charge to home users! AVG Free Edition is for private, non-commercial, single home computer use only.
Use of AVG Free Edition within any organization or for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited.
DRM == closed, by necessity, since if you can see the code or understand the protocol, you can break it.
Not true. DRM is just an extension of encryption theory, where a party trusted by the originator (the PC) verifies that someone (the owner) has authority to get at what the originator is sending out. DRM simply provides a means for the PC to be trusted by the originator.
This could be very handy for things like online banking (no more spyware) or in businesses (guaranteed locked-down desktops).
That's why Linux will never be DRM compliant
Really?
In the 'drm future' there isn't supposed to be any idea of 'open' just dumb devices that are little more than souped up DVD players.
Sure, if you've got a Windows PC. The most likely "doomsday" scenario I forsee is that you'll be able to run any OS you like but so many services will demand that your PC is "trusted" that there will be little point in running something "untrusted".
just run them side by side until you totally switch to open office.
That doesn't solve the problem of people from outside emailing you Word documents - particularly if those people are on a corporate network where they can't install any random bit of software.
I think you need to look further than initial purchase cost.
.doc format sitting right here to prove you wrong.
If you RTFA, there's a very telling sentence:
Early this year, however, the agency reviewed its IT infrastructure as part of an effort to meet performance targets, comply with Scotland's Freedom of Information Act and work more closely with other law enforcement groups
OpenOffice is fine if all you're doing is opening up a letter or a simple form in Word format. But if you want to claim that it's faultless for all documents, I have many thousands of pages in Word
Sorry, maybe I should have made that clearer.
An operating system marketed first and foremost as a desktop operating system through channels appropriate to desktop use (eg. in PC World or whatever the US equivalent is).
You don't need 5 or 6 live CDs to support the various wireless chipsets out there.
You need one which supports all/the majority.
Unfortunately, wireless support is going the same way WinModem support did - nowhere fast because the manufacturers refuse to release sufficient specifications to write a driver.
The point of VMWare is that it virtualises the whole system. Provided there's nothing else competing for processor time on the box, any given OS running in VMWare should run at near-native speeds.
Wouldn't it benefit Apple in the long run to get more of its software into the public's hands?
In theory, yes. In practise, show me a company today which has successfully run a business selling operating systems to run on white-box PCs in competition with Microsoft.
I've never purchased a Mac because they simply don't have the software titles I'm interested in and Windows does.
And with an x86-based Mac, you can do both.
Which is fine. Now you have a system, and if it breaks or you need it extended, you know who to call.
I think the benefit of open source from this perspective is providing an alternative if the person who you want to call has been run over by the proverbial bus. Reduce the risks inherent in owning the system, not the risk of having it installed in the first place.
since at the moment the only people that use open source software are geeks
I keep seeing phrases like this being trotted out in the last few weeks on here. Yet I keep seeing Novell, IBM and RedHat appearing in press releases and news articles about ordinary businesses moving systems to Linux.
Perhaps "the only people that use open source software voluntarily as the basis of their primary desktop system are geeks". But there's a whole world of servers out there which have never and will never run Windows.
Many have succeeded quite well without electricity or running water either.
How many are still doing quite well without electricity or running water today?
My boss knows nothing about computers and doesn't care to.
Unless your boss is employed in a technical role (and it doesn't sound like it), he shouldn't have to. IT people need to think in business terms because the business sure as heck isn't going to think in IT terms.
Basically, the one question you need to ask yourself before requesting anything is "What does the business benefit from this?". If you can't think of a good answer to that, and your idea costs money, time or other resources, you're probably wasting your energy.
Can someone who knows more about the subject than I comment on the usefulness of distro specific tuning?
I really don't think you'd achieve much. Fundamentally, a Linux system is a bunch of programs running on a Linux kernel. A distribution dictates to a greater or lesser extent how those programs are installed and how the system as a whole is configured and managed, and may include some GUI-based tool to make it easier but is unlikely to have any special black magic to make it run much faster.
IMO, you'd be better off with looking at tuning the kernel and whatever programs you're running, such as Apache, Samba etc.
Well, in that case, it seems the most sensible course of action is:I'm sure if only 5% of slashdot readers do this there should be a noticeable effect.
Sitting in a bank account somewhere in Nigeria. Send me your bank account details and I'll have it wired across.
Doxygen and JavaDoc are good at the HOW, but cannot do the WHAT or WHY.
Don't blame the tool. Doxygen does a great job of the HOW, but it can't reasonably be expected to handle WHAT or WHY unless there are appropriate comments in the code in the first place. If you're going to use a tool like Doxygen or JavaDoc, at least have the good grace to spend 20 minutes learning the correct syntax so you can write useful comments which wind up in the generated documentation.