I just did a major search, and this is what I decided.
My main concerns (in order) were 1. Color Multifunction 2. Good network and compatibility 3. Low cost of supplies 4. Low cost of operation (electricity) 5. Low cost of purchase
I looked at a bunch of different printers, and ended up with the HP 8500 Premier all-in-one. My reasoning was 1. It is a color multifunction printer with all of the capabilities that I needed, including duplexing. 2. It has good support with MSWindows, OSX and Linux, including remote printing and scanning, and even (HOORAY!!!) support for SANE interfaces so XSane works. 3. It uses a separate ink tank and replaceable print heads, and the cost per page is just a few cents per page; much less than for any other inkjet that I found. The premier comes with a second set of cartridges which justifies the extra $50 from newegg. 4. This was the biggie that made the difference. If you look at the stand-by power for either the Brother or HP color all-in-ones they are 25-30 W. This is listed at 5 W for standby, which saves a lot over a 24/7 month. 5. From newegg it was $299, which was a great price, much cheaper than any of the laser all-in-ones and included the extra cartridges and the duplexing unit.
I have been very happy, and so far it has been about 4-5 cents per page for black and white, and 20-30 for color. It has a web page that shows the exact amount of ink used on each page, so you can easily keep track of ink usage. So far in 2.5 months of medium use I have used 50% of the original ink cartridges, and since I got two sets of cartridges this is only 25% of the ink that came with the printer.
I am not an HP salesman, but I am pretty happy with the system, especially the Linux compatibility. You might want to give it a look. It is pretty big, and definitely made for offices, but it is works well for me.
Actually, that is not true. Electric transportation, assuming that we can make electricity with either nuclear, solar or wind power which does not generate CO2 in order to make electricity, is humanity's next step in reducing CO2 emissions. If you look at the current carbon footprint for electricity generation, it has a large component of coal burning, which is the absolute worst for CO2. So, electric cars are often (depending on where you live) inefficient coal burning cars.
The really ironic thing is that if it hadn't been for the law suit, I would not have found Zotero. I have been complaining for years about Endnote, but was unwilling to go LaTeX/BibTeX all of the way, and had been paying for endnote, and using Microsoft Word. With Zotero, I got completely changed over to OpenOffice on all platforms.
I have a 1/4 inch drill bit that can disable any camera in any device in minutes, and I think that any security guard would be able to see that it would never work again.
As a faculty member at a fairly large private university, I have some opinions on that. I find that most of the actual learning occurs when I am talking with my students. This can occur in a large classroom as a conversation between me and a few students, with the other 250 students listening, it can occur with 30 students in a classroom, or it can occur in my office with 2 or 3 students. I have been forced to do on-line learning activities, mostly run through e-mail or bulletin board systems, and I have never had it work. I even tried using facebook as a vehicle, hoping that since students already spend most of their time there, they would be more familiar with it than they were with BZlackboard/Moodle. In the end very little course material was ever discussed on-line. I tried to get discussions, my TAs tried, even a few students tried, but nothing ever happened (except for a lot of part invites, and wierd pictures of cats).
Most of the reason for this lies with the students. They wanted help with math and formulas in their homework, and it is easier to do it on the whiteboard. They needed to converse and that is easier to do in person. In the end, most of the real traffic was invites to meet in the library for study groups, which is a very real use for the technology.
I don't want to be too down on on-line work. If you have a mature learner who knows what he or she wants to learn, then on-line, or books, or technical papers or whatever work well. If you have a bunch of 19-23 year old students who don't know how to learn (an BOY do they not know how to learn) then some sort of personal touch is the most valuable thing you can give them.
The biggest problem is that backup has two different purposes, and people are often confused about these.
1. Disaster recovery: You need backup for you system that covers you for failure of a disk. For this RAID 1 is adequate, though higher levels of protection would be nicer. In our data system, we do a complete live mirror of the file system, with double parity disks.
2. Archiving: This is to cover the loss of data not due to disk failure. The problem described in the article is this kind of failure, and is not covered by the disaster recovery setup. These problems also include people deleting files, people altering files, and wanting original files, curruption of files, whatever problems alter the filesystem. These are not fixed with disaster recovery because they alter the filesystem properly, and permanently.
The archiving problem can be done with snapshotting, which does provide coverage, and combined with RAID can provide both kinds of backup, but still leaves one weakness. If the entire system is always on line, the failure of the controller can take out multiple disks and disk systems, so something should really be kept off-line. For our system we have 5 sets of disks in ESATA holders that are swapped out in groups for off-line storage.
Finally these don't cover physical problems, such as fires. For this we store one of the sets of disks off-site for certainty.
If data is lost during the day, the snapshotting allows recovery of the data. If it happens during a week, either the snapshot or one of the sets of off-line disks provide backup. The off-site backup has the longest time horizon, but provides the longest time horizon of safety.
I think that in the current computer ecosystem, most people just accept the flaws in microsoft as standard business, but expect perfection in everybody else. So, I have three different version of MSWord that I use, and I have files that each different version renders differently, and that's OK to most people, but if OpenOffice renders it differently, then it is a deep and terrible problem.
My best analogy is to the computer support world. We used to have a crappy IT guy, and the servers were always crashing, and people got used to it. He left, we hired a new guy, and everything runs great. Now when the servers go down once a year, people become unglued, and say he is incompetent. The higher performance breeds higher expectations, which the higher performance then cannot match up to. So, I guess that the solution is to randomly shut down servers so that people don't get too confident.
This is especially strange news in light of an article from zdnet, http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2304, saying that firefox is the top bad example from a list of 12 programs with the worst security record. More interestingly, they don't even mention Internet Explorer as having bad security problems, despite news like this. Does Microsoft just pay journalists to write things like this on the day before they know they have bad news to release in hopes that people won't notice their security problems?
In fact, I think that file formats are the most important front in the control of computers. 10 years ago, it was all about what operating system ran on what hardware, but things are different today. People don't really care what operating system they run, or what hardware they run it on, they only care that they can use the data that they need. That's why microsoft tried so hard to control web browsers or servers (either one would do) because that left them in control. Instead, open standards won out, and it doesn't matter what browser I use, or what operating system I run on, I can still access on-line content. If microsoft can continue to control office document formats, the can control another generation of computer sales to businesses, and thus computer sales to consumers who want to use the same stuff at home as at work. If we had an open office document format (like ODF) that everyone agreed on, then microsoft would have to compete based on the ease of use, feature set, cross-platform compatablility and cost of their software against WordPerfect, OpenOffice, KOffice and whatever else.
So in the end, control of this format is critical. If it fails, it means that all of you data belongs to microsoft, because if you don't have the latest copy of MSOffice, you cannot exchange files any more.
You know, I have this dream of starting an on-line business for funneling voluntary contributions to artists. You log in, and send a PayPal-like payment to an artist whenever you want. Then I can download/borrow/rip-from-the-library anything I want, donate money directly to artists, and not feel bad about ripping off the artists that make the music. Then I don't have to feel guilty, and if I ever get sued, I can pull out the receipt, and say that I am not ripping off the artists because I have them $0.10 per song, which is more than iTunes ever gave them.
I suppose that I need to look at SciPy. My biggest thing that I depend on is the fminsearch function. It is a completely minimization function that can be used in really interesting ways, including doing non-linear minimization using functions that include convolutions. This something that I really haven't found anything else for. What really makes me slow to move is that my university just negotiated a site license, so MATLAB is free, increasing my dependance on the program.
Two reasons. 1. I know how to code in Matlab. I have spent the last 13 years writing matlab code, and it works well. It is especially good at writing vectorized code without having to think about it too much.
2. I have a lot of working, tested code that I don't want to have to re-write. Much of it is special-purpose stuff, and I don't want to have to re-write it and then test it to make sure that it gives the correct answers.
3. Sometimes languages that are good for one thing are not good for another. Most scientific code is still written in FORTRAN for the above reasons, but also because there are few cases where it is worse than C or C++, and several cases where it is better. Ironically, the lack of pointers, something that computer scientists think is terrible, is actually one of its strengths. If you are trying to parallelize a section of code, having a routine mess with array values through pointers renders the code unparallelizable.
I don't think you are defeatist, I just think that you lack imagination. I don't mean that to be too negative, but one of the biggest problems in the "cutting-edge" world of computers is a complete lack of imagination. Microsoft, a company that sees itself as one of the most innovative companies in the world, is working on a 20-year-old business model. That's right, 20 years ago they made their money selling computer operating systems to computer manufacturers, and they had a word processing program, and they are doing the same thing today. Sure they have Zunes and X-boxes and MSN.com but none of them make any money. Sure their OSs look different, and have lots more features, but it is the same business model.
Now, here's a truly innovative business model. (If you steal it, give me credit, and a little money, if you make it). Make a computer whose sole purpose in life is to be a portal to google. I don't care what processor you use, how much memory, it doesn't need a hard drive or an optical drive. I don't even care if it is Linux or whatever. Just get a browser running that does AJAX well, and give me search, shopping, gmail, google maps, google office suite, and some sort of IM. Make it $200 so that I can buy one for my mom and not feel bad if she doesn't use it. Don't make it upgradable, just make it cheap enough that when it gets old enough I can trade it in for a newer model and keep working. Doesn't even have to be google oriented, Yahoo or even MS could do it too. We have just gotten so used to having a thick, upgradable client that needs lots of care and feeding that we have gotten used to it, but computers need to be like telephones or DVD players, or digital cameras or cell phones. Partner an asian manufacturer with the right software company and it could just work.
>>Btw, iCal for surfing the web? I guess you can export your calendar as HTML but...;D
Yeah, I meant iCab. (if that still exists).
Oh, and I agree that people love to try to make non-standard HTML, but that is becoming less common as firefox becomes a more viable contender. I am looking forward to the day when ODF is enough of a standard that people can choose their favorite program based on what they want to do, and assume that it will work. I guess that a better example than my browser one is that nobody cares what program was used to create a web page (well, OK, Linux geeks care whether you used vi or emacs, but nobody else does) as long as they can view it using a standard browser.
I don't know that his is actually so bad. Remember that open source is all about choice. In the proprietary world, there is a huge advantage to being the one standard program, and so companies have used file formats to guarantee their positions. In the open source world, the open office xml file format is an open standard that anybody can use. We can easily have IBM with their office suite, Sun's Star Office, OpenOffice.org and a fork of it, KOffice and everybody can choose whichever version they want, as long as they use the standard file format. It's perfectly analogous to the web. It doesn't matter that some people use IE, others firefox, and others iCal or lynx, because html is standard, and anybody can implement it. In the end it is data that matters, not programs or platforms. This is the great strength of open formats and open source. Let people choose their programs based on their features and use interaction rather than being forced by format externalities.
They have it now. It's called a CD. I can get most CDs from amazon, or some other place like that, for about the same cost as iTMS, and I get to rip it in whatever format I want, DRM free, no questions asked. In fact, I can even get cute, buy the CD from amazon, rip it, and then sell the CD at my local used CD place for $3-4, making the cost of the music even less. Sure it's slower, but it works. To my mind even if Universal doesn't like iTMS DRM, it's a whole lot better to them than the CD option.
Seriously, the best product I have found for this is Clorox Anywhere. It is just basically bottled pool water. It is 90+% effective at killing bacteria, but mail enough that it doesn't damage anything (I have drunk a lot of pool water over the years, and it hasn't hurt me yet)(or maybe it has, I am posing to slashdot). I keep a bottle near my computer, and spray it once a week or so to keep it clean.
I compared both ended up installing MythTV for three basic reasons
1) Cost: WindowsMCE was $200 to start, much more than the free I spent on Ubuntu/MythTV. In fact there was no way to even try MCE without purchasing a copy, so I could only try it out on other systems. I ended up building a trial machine on an old 1GHz P3 ($35 at a surplus sale), and an still running on that. THere is no way that Vista/MCE would run well on that hardware.
2) Frexibility: I currently have a backend/frontend in my kitchen, and a frontend on my main screen, and use my laptop as another frontend when I need it. All pull media, including live TV tuning, from my back end. Nothing similar exists with MCE. I can buy an XBox360 to use as a frontend, but that's not the same.
3) Future: This was the biggie. Microsoft has never really declared sides on the copyright thing, or if they have, they are on the wrong side. There is a fight brewing between the copyright holders and consumers. If the copyright holders had their way, PVRs would go away. They want us to watch their programs, with their commercials, at the time they want us to. I predict in the next year, we will see pressure for PVRs and PVR programs to, for instance, disallow playback of programs more than 72 hours after initial recording. Right now movie companies are unhappy because they hapy a lot for commercials for their new blockbuster movies, and they want us to see them on the Wednesday and Thursday before the movies open. Even if we watch the commercials with the programs, if we watch them a week later, the commercials have lost their impace. There will be a fight for more restrictions on PVR activities, and Microsoft is going to have to make a decision on whose side they are on. If they fall on the RIAA's side, then MCE is a very bad decision.
Having just done a thing like this, I have renewed appreciation for the issues involved. When you go to management saying that you can get the same capabilities from a homegrown solution for cheaper, they are already on the defensive. You have to prove that you are right that it will work. If it ever fails, you have nobody to blame but yourselves. When you buy EMC, you can curse them for messing up, and demand that they fix it. If you own box fails, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Now I am not saying that this is a good thing. We can get our systems up and running faster then EMC can fix them. We can get more hardware than we could afford from EMC. And I think that in the IT world there is far too much passing of the buck to vendors (people should care more that their computers are virus infected than that it is all Microsoft's fault, but that's the world that we live in) and not enough holding people responsible for getting services working.
Re:DON'T INSTALL VISTA ON 2002 COMPUTER
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Is Vista a Trap?
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So that's my problem. I am running my kitchen media access computer on a 2001ish 1GHz P3, and it is doing internet filtering, running mythtv, doing file service for my windows box, and being a jukebox and TV. AND it doesn't feel slow (well maybe a bit, but it is very usable). Since when is multi-gigahertz machine slow. I realize that the computer industry is addicted to the idea that we need to throw out all hardware every three years, but we don't have to agree.
The end actually began significantly before then. It began when SCO's lawyers started to require payment for service in addition to their percentage of the final award from the judgment. When your own lawyers don't believe that you are going to win, its over.
My IT people are quite competent. We DeepFreeze every machine that we can, we lock down publicly acessible machines, we spend $1000s on virus scanning, patch servers, deep freeze accounts, we maintain a strong firewall, but users still find ways to mess up their machines. The biggest problem is that users insist that they need IE to look at their particular web site, and they need Outlook to deal with their outside colleagues. Once you have programs that go out and find security breaches running on your user's machines, it is just a matter of time. Our last major breach came because one of our faculty members got his machine infected through IE/ActiveX that was required for some site he wanted to go to, and the people who took it over used it to infect our web server.
In comparison we have 5 Linux servers, 20 Linux clients, 3 Mac servers, and 40 Mac clients, and NONE of them has ever been compromised, even though, we have no extra security past what comes standard with OS X.
That's the difference. We spend $1000s, use strong security, and still have breaches on every type of Windows machine that we run. We do nothing special for Linux and OS X, and nothing happens. My point is that the statistics about security are skewed because they don't count the major vectors for Windows security problems, because they are considered part of the operating system. If we reported IE and ActiveX as security problems (which they are) every month, windows' numbers would always be big.
>> I thought it was a pretty well-established fact at this >>point that Mac OS X is considered to be more secure not >>because it is less vulnerable to attacks, but because it >>is a less desirable target for attacks.
I don't think that this is well-established at all. I see it as an excuse, not a fact.
>>Think of OS X as, say, Sweden.
How about this. Consider OS X as like Great Britain. Handguns are illegal. If you live in Great Britain, your probability of getting shot by a handgun is significantly lower than if you live in the US. This is not because there are fewer people in GB (note it is still possible to bet shot in GB, just much less likely).
Windows chooses not to fix major bugs, such as encouraging users to also have administrative rights and allowing execution of arbitrary remote code with full user access. This is the fundamental problem with Windows. Until this is fixed, it can never be a secure operating system, no matter how many or few people use it.
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I just did a major search, and this is what I decided.
My main concerns (in order) were
1. Color Multifunction
2. Good network and compatibility
3. Low cost of supplies
4. Low cost of operation (electricity)
5. Low cost of purchase
I looked at a bunch of different printers, and ended up with the HP 8500 Premier all-in-one. My reasoning was
1. It is a color multifunction printer with all of the capabilities that I needed, including duplexing.
2. It has good support with MSWindows, OSX and Linux, including remote printing and scanning, and even (HOORAY!!!) support for SANE interfaces so XSane works.
3. It uses a separate ink tank and replaceable print heads, and the cost per page is just a few cents per page; much less than for any other inkjet that I found. The premier comes with a second set of cartridges which justifies the extra $50 from newegg.
4. This was the biggie that made the difference. If you look at the stand-by power for either the Brother or HP color all-in-ones they are 25-30 W. This is listed at 5 W for standby, which saves a lot over a 24/7 month.
5. From newegg it was $299, which was a great price, much cheaper than any of the laser all-in-ones and included the extra cartridges and the duplexing unit.
I have been very happy, and so far it has been about 4-5 cents per page for black and white, and 20-30 for color. It has a web page that shows the exact amount of ink used on each page, so you can easily keep track of ink usage. So far in 2.5 months of medium use I have used 50% of the original ink cartridges, and since I got two sets of cartridges this is only 25% of the ink that came with the printer.
I am not an HP salesman, but I am pretty happy with the system, especially the Linux compatibility. You might want to give it a look. It is pretty big, and definitely made for offices, but it is works well for me.
Actually, that is not true. Electric transportation, assuming that we can make electricity with either nuclear, solar or wind power which does not generate CO2 in order to make electricity, is humanity's next step in reducing CO2 emissions. If you look at the current carbon footprint for electricity generation, it has a large component of coal burning, which is the absolute worst for CO2. So, electric cars are often (depending on where you live) inefficient coal burning cars.
Or as good as poo.
Even college level QM is pretty static. I teach the same material out of pretty muich the same textbook as when I took the course 20 years ago.
The really ironic thing is that if it hadn't been for the law suit, I would not have found Zotero. I have been complaining for years about Endnote, but was unwilling to go LaTeX/BibTeX all of the way, and had been paying for endnote, and using Microsoft Word. With Zotero, I got completely changed over to OpenOffice on all platforms.
So, Thanks for the law suit.
I have a 1/4 inch drill bit that can disable any camera in any device in minutes, and I think that any security guard would be able to see that it would never work again.
As a faculty member at a fairly large private university, I have some opinions on that. I find that most of the actual learning occurs when I am talking with my students. This can occur in a large classroom as a conversation between me and a few students, with the other 250 students listening, it can occur with 30 students in a classroom, or it can occur in my office with 2 or 3 students. I have been forced to do on-line learning activities, mostly run through e-mail or bulletin board systems, and I have never had it work. I even tried using facebook as a vehicle, hoping that since students already spend most of their time there, they would be more familiar with it than they were with BZlackboard/Moodle. In the end very little course material was ever discussed on-line. I tried to get discussions, my TAs tried, even a few students tried, but nothing ever happened (except for a lot of part invites, and wierd pictures of cats).
Most of the reason for this lies with the students. They wanted help with math and formulas in their homework, and it is easier to do it on the whiteboard. They needed to converse and that is easier to do in person. In the end, most of the real traffic was invites to meet in the library for study groups, which is a very real use for the technology.
I don't want to be too down on on-line work. If you have a mature learner who knows what he or she wants to learn, then on-line, or books, or technical papers or whatever work well. If you have a bunch of 19-23 year old students who don't know how to learn (an BOY do they not know how to learn) then some sort of personal touch is the most valuable thing you can give them.
The biggest problem is that backup has two different purposes, and people are often confused about these.
1. Disaster recovery: You need backup for you system that covers you for failure of a disk. For this RAID 1 is adequate, though higher levels of protection would be nicer. In our data system, we do a complete live mirror of the file system, with double parity disks.
2. Archiving: This is to cover the loss of data not due to disk failure. The problem described in the article is this kind of failure, and is not covered by the disaster recovery setup. These problems also include people deleting files, people altering files, and wanting original files, curruption of files, whatever problems alter the filesystem. These are not fixed with disaster recovery because they alter the filesystem properly, and permanently.
The archiving problem can be done with snapshotting, which does provide coverage, and combined with RAID can provide both kinds of backup, but still leaves one weakness. If the entire system is always on line, the failure of the controller can take out multiple disks and disk systems, so something should really be kept off-line. For our system we have 5 sets of disks in ESATA holders that are swapped out in groups for off-line storage.
Finally these don't cover physical problems, such as fires. For this we store one of the sets of disks off-site for certainty.
If data is lost during the day, the snapshotting allows recovery of the data. If it happens during a week, either the snapshot or one of the sets of off-line disks provide backup. The off-site backup has the longest time horizon, but provides the longest time horizon of safety.
I think that in the current computer ecosystem, most people just accept the flaws in microsoft as standard business, but expect perfection in everybody else. So, I have three different version of MSWord that I use, and I have files that each different version renders differently, and that's OK to most people, but if OpenOffice renders it differently, then it is a deep and terrible problem. My best analogy is to the computer support world. We used to have a crappy IT guy, and the servers were always crashing, and people got used to it. He left, we hired a new guy, and everything runs great. Now when the servers go down once a year, people become unglued, and say he is incompetent. The higher performance breeds higher expectations, which the higher performance then cannot match up to. So, I guess that the solution is to randomly shut down servers so that people don't get too confident.
This is especially strange news in light of an article from zdnet, http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2304, saying that firefox is the top bad example from a list of 12 programs with the worst security record. More interestingly, they don't even mention Internet Explorer as having bad security problems, despite news like this. Does Microsoft just pay journalists to write things like this on the day before they know they have bad news to release in hopes that people won't notice their security problems?
In fact, I think that file formats are the most important front in the control of computers. 10 years ago, it was all about what operating system ran on what hardware, but things are different today. People don't really care what operating system they run, or what hardware they run it on, they only care that they can use the data that they need. That's why microsoft tried so hard to control web browsers or servers (either one would do) because that left them in control. Instead, open standards won out, and it doesn't matter what browser I use, or what operating system I run on, I can still access on-line content. If microsoft can continue to control office document formats, the can control another generation of computer sales to businesses, and thus computer sales to consumers who want to use the same stuff at home as at work. If we had an open office document format (like ODF) that everyone agreed on, then microsoft would have to compete based on the ease of use, feature set, cross-platform compatablility and cost of their software against WordPerfect, OpenOffice, KOffice and whatever else. So in the end, control of this format is critical. If it fails, it means that all of you data belongs to microsoft, because if you don't have the latest copy of MSOffice, you cannot exchange files any more.
You know, I have this dream of starting an on-line business for funneling voluntary contributions to artists. You log in, and send a PayPal-like payment to an artist whenever you want. Then I can download/borrow/rip-from-the-library anything I want, donate money directly to artists, and not feel bad about ripping off the artists that make the music. Then I don't have to feel guilty, and if I ever get sued, I can pull out the receipt, and say that I am not ripping off the artists because I have them $0.10 per song, which is more than iTunes ever gave them.
I suppose that I need to look at SciPy. My biggest thing that I depend on is the fminsearch function. It is a completely minimization function that can be used in really interesting ways, including doing non-linear minimization using functions that include convolutions. This something that I really haven't found anything else for. What really makes me slow to move is that my university just negotiated a site license, so MATLAB is free, increasing my dependance on the program.
Two reasons.
1. I know how to code in Matlab. I have spent the last 13 years writing matlab code, and it works well. It is especially good at writing vectorized code without having to think about it too much.
2. I have a lot of working, tested code that I don't want to have to re-write. Much of it is special-purpose stuff, and I don't want to have to re-write it and then test it to make sure that it gives the correct answers.
3. Sometimes languages that are good for one thing are not good for another. Most scientific code is still written in FORTRAN for the above reasons, but also because there are few cases where it is worse than C or C++, and several cases where it is better. Ironically, the lack of pointers, something that computer scientists think is terrible, is actually one of its strengths. If you are trying to parallelize a section of code, having a routine mess with array values through pointers renders the code unparallelizable.
>> I don't want to be a defeatist, but...
I don't think you are defeatist, I just think that you lack imagination. I don't mean that to be too negative, but one of the biggest problems in the "cutting-edge" world of computers is a complete lack of imagination. Microsoft, a company that sees itself as one of the most innovative companies in the world, is working on a 20-year-old business model. That's right, 20 years ago they made their money selling computer operating systems to computer manufacturers, and they had a word processing program, and they are doing the same thing today. Sure they have Zunes and X-boxes and MSN.com but none of them make any money. Sure their OSs look different, and have lots more features, but it is the same business model.
Now, here's a truly innovative business model. (If you steal it, give me credit, and a little money, if you make it). Make a computer whose sole purpose in life is to be a portal to google. I don't care what processor you use, how much memory, it doesn't need a hard drive or an optical drive. I don't even care if it is Linux or whatever. Just get a browser running that does AJAX well, and give me search, shopping, gmail, google maps, google office suite, and some sort of IM. Make it $200 so that I can buy one for my mom and not feel bad if she doesn't use it. Don't make it upgradable, just make it cheap enough that when it gets old enough I can trade it in for a newer model and keep working. Doesn't even have to be google oriented, Yahoo or even MS could do it too. We have just gotten so used to having a thick, upgradable client that needs lots of care and feeding that we have gotten used to it, but computers need to be like telephones or DVD players, or digital cameras or cell phones. Partner an asian manufacturer with the right software company and it could just work.
>>Btw, iCal for surfing the web? I guess you can export your calendar as HTML but ... ;D
Yeah, I meant iCab. (if that still exists).
Oh, and I agree that people love to try to make non-standard HTML, but that is becoming less common as firefox becomes a more viable contender. I am looking forward to the day when ODF is enough of a standard that people can choose their favorite program based on what they want to do, and assume that it will work. I guess that a better example than my browser one is that nobody cares what program was used to create a web page (well, OK, Linux geeks care whether you used vi or emacs, but nobody else does) as long as they can view it using a standard browser.
I don't know that his is actually so bad. Remember that open source is all about choice. In the proprietary world, there is a huge advantage to being the one standard program, and so companies have used file formats to guarantee their positions. In the open source world, the open office xml file format is an open standard that anybody can use. We can easily have IBM with their office suite, Sun's Star Office, OpenOffice.org and a fork of it, KOffice and everybody can choose whichever version they want, as long as they use the standard file format. It's perfectly analogous to the web. It doesn't matter that some people use IE, others firefox, and others iCal or lynx, because html is standard, and anybody can implement it. In the end it is data that matters, not programs or platforms. This is the great strength of open formats and open source. Let people choose their programs based on their features and use interaction rather than being forced by format externalities.
They have it now. It's called a CD. I can get most CDs from amazon, or some other place like that, for about the same cost as iTMS, and I get to rip it in whatever format I want, DRM free, no questions asked. In fact, I can even get cute, buy the CD from amazon, rip it, and then sell the CD at my local used CD place for $3-4, making the cost of the music even less. Sure it's slower, but it works. To my mind even if Universal doesn't like iTMS DRM, it's a whole lot better to them than the CD option.
Seriously, the best product I have found for this is Clorox Anywhere. It is just basically bottled pool water. It is 90+% effective at killing bacteria, but mail enough that it doesn't damage anything (I have drunk a lot of pool water over the years, and it hasn't hurt me yet)(or maybe it has, I am posing to slashdot). I keep a bottle near my computer, and spray it once a week or so to keep it clean.
I compared both ended up installing MythTV for three basic reasons
1) Cost: WindowsMCE was $200 to start, much more than the free I spent on Ubuntu/MythTV. In fact there was no way to even try MCE without purchasing a copy, so I could only try it out on other systems. I ended up building a trial machine on an old 1GHz P3 ($35 at a surplus sale), and an still running on that. THere is no way that Vista/MCE would run well on that hardware.
2) Frexibility: I currently have a backend/frontend in my kitchen, and a frontend on my main screen, and use my laptop as another frontend when I need it. All pull media, including live TV tuning, from my back end. Nothing similar exists with MCE. I can buy an XBox360 to use as a frontend, but that's not the same.
3) Future: This was the biggie. Microsoft has never really declared sides on the copyright thing, or if they have, they are on the wrong side. There is a fight brewing between the copyright holders and consumers. If the copyright holders had their way, PVRs would go away. They want us to watch their programs, with their commercials, at the time they want us to. I predict in the next year, we will see pressure for PVRs and PVR programs to, for instance, disallow playback of programs more than 72 hours after initial recording. Right now movie companies are unhappy because they hapy a lot for commercials for their new blockbuster movies, and they want us to see them on the Wednesday and Thursday before the movies open. Even if we watch the commercials with the programs, if we watch them a week later, the commercials have lost their impace. There will be a fight for more restrictions on PVR activities, and Microsoft is going to have to make a decision on whose side they are on. If they fall on the RIAA's side, then MCE is a very bad decision.
Having just done a thing like this, I have renewed appreciation for the issues involved. When you go to management saying that you can get the same capabilities from a homegrown solution for cheaper, they are already on the defensive. You have to prove that you are right that it will work. If it ever fails, you have nobody to blame but yourselves. When you buy EMC, you can curse them for messing up, and demand that they fix it. If you own box fails, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Now I am not saying that this is a good thing. We can get our systems up and running faster then EMC can fix them. We can get more hardware than we could afford from EMC. And I think that in the IT world there is far too much passing of the buck to vendors (people should care more that their computers are virus infected than that it is all Microsoft's fault, but that's the world that we live in) and not enough holding people responsible for getting services working.
So that's my problem. I am running my kitchen media access computer on a 2001ish 1GHz P3, and it is doing internet filtering, running mythtv, doing file service for my windows box, and being a jukebox and TV. AND it doesn't feel slow (well maybe a bit, but it is very usable). Since when is multi-gigahertz machine slow. I realize that the computer industry is addicted to the idea that we need to throw out all hardware every three years, but we don't have to agree.
The end actually began significantly before then. It began when SCO's lawyers started to require payment for service in addition to their percentage of the final award from the judgment. When your own lawyers don't believe that you are going to win, its over.
My IT people are quite competent. We DeepFreeze every machine that we can, we lock down publicly acessible machines, we spend $1000s on virus scanning, patch servers, deep freeze accounts, we maintain a strong firewall, but users still find ways to mess up their machines. The biggest problem is that users insist that they need IE to look at their particular web site, and they need Outlook to deal with their outside colleagues. Once you have programs that go out and find security breaches running on your user's machines, it is just a matter of time. Our last major breach came because one of our faculty members got his machine infected through IE/ActiveX that was required for some site he wanted to go to, and the people who took it over used it to infect our web server.
In comparison we have 5 Linux servers, 20 Linux clients, 3 Mac servers, and 40 Mac clients, and NONE of them has ever been compromised, even though, we have no extra security past what comes standard with OS X.
That's the difference. We spend $1000s, use strong security, and still have breaches on every type of Windows machine that we run. We do nothing special for Linux and OS X, and nothing happens. My point is that the statistics about security are skewed because they don't count the major vectors for Windows security problems, because they are considered part of the operating system. If we reported IE and ActiveX as security problems (which they are) every month, windows' numbers would always be big.
>> I thought it was a pretty well-established fact at this
>>point that Mac OS X is considered to be more secure not
>>because it is less vulnerable to attacks, but because it
>>is a less desirable target for attacks.
I don't think that this is well-established at all. I see it as an excuse, not a fact.
>>Think of OS X as, say, Sweden.
How about this. Consider OS X as like Great Britain. Handguns are illegal. If you live in Great Britain, your probability of getting shot by a handgun is significantly lower than if you live in the US. This is not because there are fewer people in GB (note it is still possible to bet shot in GB, just much less likely).
Windows chooses not to fix major bugs, such as encouraging users to also have administrative rights and allowing execution of arbitrary remote code with full user access. This is the fundamental problem with Windows. Until this is fixed, it can never be a secure operating system, no matter how many or few people use it.