How many times is this lame M$ defense going to be used to justify anticompetitive OEM marketing licenses based on an OS monopoly?
I'll say it one more time. Did you build a notebook PC? I didn't think so. We are only now starting to see good notebook PCs that ship with Linux or without an OS.
So, yeah, you can put together off-the-shelf parts and make a desktop PC. But if, like so many of us, a notebook PC is your computing choice, there were no options other than buying a notebook PC, PAYING THE @$#%ING MICROSOFT TAX, and then installing Linux. And you couldn't even sell the Windoze you were forced to buy to someone who wanted it. The CDs were all effectively labeled "Warning, this is a highly customized version of WinBlows that will only work on a PC that already shipped with the same version of the crapiest and most popular OS in the world."
Finally, most PC consumers don't want to build PCs from parts, so even though it's possible to assemble a desktop PC, not being able to buy a Linux PC is still a monopolistic impediment that prevents competing OS vendors from being able to compete on anything close to a level playing field.
So please stop saying, "Just build your own PC like I did."
People know they should backup their data. Many don't. Then they call me when the hard drive dies.
I'd love a service that encrypted my hard drive data and did automatic offsite backups at night via an internet connection. Only I should have the decryption key. It should be secure and very easy to use, with versions of the client software that run on every popular OS. I'd gladly pay for this service. THAT'S what I'd like to see Google do if they want to leverage the goodwill they built based on their search engine business.
Of course, after the horribly invasive idea they floated last week for a Google email service (reading and storing my email, and selling info about me?), Google may not be the company I'd trust with my personal data.
I saw some similar/. concepts to the design that popped into my head. Also some total/. crap.
Build a floating dock. Very common for people living on the river. Make it as wide as you can manage without drawing attention. Eight feet would be good. If you have a lot of river frontage, you could even build two or three docks. The velocity is low, so you need to capture a lot of mass. This is kinetic energy, proportional to the mass and the square of the velocity.
Put a paddlewheel across the downstream width of the dock, maybe five feet in diameter, with two feet submerged. Nothing high tech is required. This doesn't need the optimal vane shape of a high pressure hydroelectric turbine. I'd use a shape that sheds debris to minimize maintenance.
Use a large belt around the outer diameter of the paddlewheel to drive an automotive alternator (very large gear ratio) with an external voltage regulator. This will cost about $20 at a scrap yard. Adjust the voltage regulator to produce 14V at the batteries to null the loss in the long wires, which should be at least 10 AWG. Use a circuit breaker at the batteries and the alternator. A charge controller will prevent overcharging if the regulator fails.
Charge a parallel bank of 12 V deep cycle discharge batteries, as used in golf carts, small boats or RVs. These are available for a decent price locally. Sealed batteries are good. Low maintenance, and no worry about explosive hydrogen offgassing. Keep the batteries warm, but vented to the outside air.
Use a power inverter to create 120 VAC. You can buy one that syncs to the power grid if you you want to sell power back to the utility, but I wouldn't bother. I'd cut the cord completely. You can buy inverters on eBay. Trace makes good inverters.
An alarm should monitor battery voltage and possibly charge rate. If river debris jammed the paddlewheel, you'd want to know sooner rather than later. A true geek would have it email if there was a problem.
I'd build a big cover over the paddlewheel assembly and maybe make it look like a barbeque grill or storage locker. I wouldn't go out of my way to inquire with the authorities. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. "Gee, I didn't know I couldn't generate my own power."
You'll be surprised by how much energy you get from a small & slow moving paddlewheel. Unlike sun or wind, water power is 24/7, so your battery bank can be a lot smaller with a hydro power system. For about $500 initially and battery replacements and alternator brushes every few years, you can be off the grid. Most of us don't have a river and need to use solar.
I haven't had a desktop PC in seven years, and never will again. I exclusively use a notebook PC, mostly for the environmental reasons (tree hugging hippie crap), although portability is a nice feature. Notebook PCs use less power, and don't have big nasty CRTs. They also need less space on my crowded desk.
Yes, you pay more for the same performance in a notebook PC, but the cost difference has narrowed a lot. The reduced electricity consumption does help offset the difference in price to a small degree (maybe $30 per year).
I keep my notebook PC for five years. That's tough for a nerd to do, but I believe in reducing consumption, even in the face of Moore's Law.
I hate waiting for a PC to boot. Linux is great because it doesn't need to be rebooted daily. I leave my PC running 24/7 (NOT ecofriendly), but it recycles unused clock cycles doing SETI@home research when I'm not using it, at least until Linux is better about suspending my computer and almost instantly restoring it.
Eco tip -> Turn off your laser printer any time it's not in use. Power saving modes help, but laser printers usually suck more power than large desktop PCs.
I heard they were going to call it Landros. No word yet from Xandros, the excellent Linux desktop distro that does a better job in the Windows refugee market.
Obligatory Monty Python Joke: Maybe they should call it Luxury Yacht, but tell everyone it's pronounced "Lindows".
Every day, I receive 20-30 Netsky worms, courtesy of Windows machines.
Much of my daily spam now comes from compromised Windows boxes being run as spam zombies.
My personal data was stolen from a company I trusted because their server was running IIS and it was infected with Slammer.
I suffer because of Windows insecurity almost constantly, yet no operating system *except* Windows has ever caused me any such grief. Clearly the Forrester "data" is FUD. Plain and simple.
That IS better. Fleeing customers are what really get the attention of a business executive, especially one who has already demonstrated that he's motivated more by the company's bottom line than any abstract concepts of right or wrong.
Ethics by proxy. I like it. As a customer, your feelings about SCO influence EV1's actions.
Executives need to learn that actions have consequences, and doing the right thing is worth more than a nice warm feeling. It can impact the bottom line, sometimes in a dramatic way.
I wrote him an email. I'm sure by that time he already recognized his error. I kept it to one page, and avoided death threats and profanities.
I'd be very surprised if he read it. My goal was merely to get a little tic mark on a secretary's executive summary tally sheet under the heading "Linux Zealot Thinks You Screwed Up". Every control system requires feedback to correct errors.
The X-Prize is $10M to the first non-government team to launch a three person ship to 100 km (the edge of space) and use the same ship to do it again within two weeks, while the X-Prize Cup is a race of sorts, to be run annually after the X-Prize competition is won. New Mexico and Florida are competing to host the X-Prize Cup event, not the X-Prize competition.
The X-Prize is like the Orteig prize that inspired Charles Lindberg to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The X-Prize Cup is like the annual air races (Thompson Cup, Bendix Cup, etc.) that fostered competition and quickly led to commercial aircraft industries.
The X-Prize competition will happen wherever the teams want to launch. BTW - Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, will be winning the X-Prize very soon. They're in Mojave California. Lots of info including pictures here.
And, please, no more references to "orbit". The X-Prize competition is for suborbital flight, which is essentially up and down, similar to the Redstone missions in NASA's early days. There is no requirement for a large horizontal component of velocity as would be needed to achieve orbit.
I found it interesting that New Mexico has a department responsible for space development. Finally, some government is actually looking to the future instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into it.
Color coding parts for assembly orientation doesn't really help when you're making parts one or two at a time. Somebody must still determine what goes where at some point in the process. If the person color coding the part reads the print wrong, you're no better off than if the print was misread during assembly.
Color coding helps in two occasions:
1) The designer is the same person who builds the part and applies the color coding, and would be more likely to get it right than the person doing the assembly.
2) A lot of parts are being made (like the PC connector analogy), where extra effort and care can be spent making sure the color coding is correct, rather than rely on the less technically inclined computer luser to plug stuff in the correct ports.
The best strategy to goof proof an assembly job is to make sure that noninterchangeable parts aren't interchangeable. If NASA assembly technicians had to use a cutting torch and a 20 pound sledge hammer to fit a two pound component, they'd stop and realize something wasn't right. It's no accident that your PC's AC power connection doesn't look anything like the ethernet connection.
I held out for an MP3 player that supported Ogg. I bought the Rio Karma 20. I think Ogg is working its way into the newer players. The turning point will be when the iPod supports Ogg.
Media is too important to use proprietary standards. All the formats should be open. They probably will be. Why use a proprietary standard when an open standard is as good or better?
Unfortunately, we are currently in a position where we have WAY TOO MANY media standards. You can load a ton of CODECs for Xine, and some site is going to use a bastard format or a "new and improved" version that doesn't work. What a hassle.
My Mozilla 1.6 seems worse about slowing down than 1.5. It seems to be a bigger problem when I view pdfs. I thought it was just something weird in my installation. Hopefully, the talented Mozilla team is fixing this. Zero is a good number of memory leaks.
And yes, I leave my browser running all the time, just like my OS.
It's still a great browser, and surprisingly just keeps getting better.
I haven't used SuSE, but I switched from Windoze 98 to Xandros Linux 16 months ago and have been very happy with it. It autodetects hardware very well, and is easy to use. Installation is 20 minutes, four clicks. Unlike run-as-root Lindows, this is a real Linux with all the power and security, but still designed to woo Windows users from the dark side. Version 2.0 came out a couple of months ago, and it's more of the same goodness. It features Xandros Networks, which allows online two click access to *A LOT* of open source software. Xandros is based on Debian stable, and uses the KDE user interface.
Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team will win the X-Prize. They are a lot closer than many/. pundits seem to believe. A lot of rocket test programs are scary because there can be no progressive testing. Test some subsystems, then put them together and "light the candle". The Scaled approach is more like an airplane test program, with a gradually expanding envelope. There is still work to be done, but they are very close.
The rocket engine has been tested on the ground at full power for an entire burn. The boost phase on the previous flight was stopped to keep the test program progressing in incremental stages. Binnie could have just as easily kept going well past 100 km, but they're still wringing out the subsystems. The rocket engine works. It's a very clever and simple system that uses nitrous oxide as the oxidizer and rubber as the fuel. The rocket can be throttled by changing the flow rate of the liquid oxidizer. A low cost, safe and throttleable solid rocket booster is quite an achievement (but not invented at Scaled).
To correct a couple of falacies in previous posts.... 100 km is the internationaly recognized limit for being an astronaut. Parabolic suborbital flights do not require heat shielding because they are much slower than orbital flights, not because they have less atmosphere to penetrate on reentry. Both are essentially in the vacuum of space.
I like the Armadillo Aerospace research too, but it isn't going to win the X-Prize. I think they should have called their rocket engine the BFR-9000.
And to the person who said the older Rutan aircraft designs are works of art, I'd have to agree. A picture of my Long-EZ is here.
The X-Prize is going to change the way we look at space. No longer will a $1B shuttle launch be required. We will all have access to space. This is long over due. My appreciation to those who are making it happen. As always, all that is required is big dreams, intelligence and determination.
I bought my HP ze5185 notebook 16 months ago. Just for fun, I asked if it was available without Windows, because I wanted to install Linux. HPDirect told me that not only could I not buy the PC without Windows XP, but if I uninstalled the Windows XP that ships with my PC I would void my hardware warranty. WTF?!?
I bought the laptop PC anyway because there were no decent laptops available with Linux then (but there are now). I never ran XP. I booted the Xandros Linux install CD and have been a very happy camper, even if I am a bit miffed about being forced to pay the Microsoft tax.
I'm optimistic about a major PC manufacturer offering Xandros Linux as an option. It's a great distro for users migrating from Windows. It's easy to use, without giving up any of the Linux security or stability. The deluxe version includes CrossOver, so it runs lots of Windows apps. It's based on Debian stable.
I'm still a bit concerned about HP CEO Carly Fiorina's announcement that HP products will be aggressively enforcing DRM. That seems to me to be a bad move that will only make their products harder to use. Hippy perspective: Like, who wants a piece of consumer electronics to, like, get up in your face and start hassling you? REALLY bad karma, man.
I run a small engineering company. I made some future oriented changes a year and a half ago.
Linux OS. I probably should have switched a year earlier, but it's definitely ready for most business users now. Wars have been fought over which distro to use, but Xandros can definitely help a small company be productive right now.
OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and even HTML authoring (until Nvu becomes available soon). OpenOffice has a good user interface, ease of use and interoperability. Like most open source products, it just keeps getting better.
Mozilla for email and web browsing. I'll switch to Firefox soon. From what I've read, Outlook refugees (poor bastards) would like Ximian Evolution.
Fax via email. I chose MaxEmail, but there are others. Way cheaper, better and less hassle than a fax machine. I strongly prefer email. MaxEmail allows technoweanies to send a fax and we can still handle it as email (choice of PDF or TIFF). They also provide voice mail systems, but we don't use them.
Cell Phones. This sounds a bit cheesy at first glance, but the world is moving to wireless, almost forcing employees to have a cell phone anyway. Unless you're running a call center, cell phones meet all the phone needs of a typical small business. Voice mail is included. The concept of a receptionist, or worse an automated attendant system, is outdated. Putting customers on hold and transferring them three times is not a "feature" anyone should want in a phone system. VoIP and hacking together open source voice mail systems are neat technologies, but they're overkill for typical small business. If you need a small phone system, Siemens makes the GigaSet line that is well engineered with voicemail and wireless. When I last looked, they were about $350 + $80 per handset, maximum of 8 users. New models include routers and other cool stuff.
QuickBooks. Definitely NOT open source, but hopefully someone will create an open source program that can read QB data, or at least a native Linux version of QB. For now, QB Pro 2000 runs under CrossOver, but it's ugly. QB can actually be used for a lot more than accounting. If you like, it'll manage a customer/contact database, track time for hourly employees, provide rudimentary project management, etc.
In the perfect world, there would be one system that did everything. It'd be well integrated, easy to use and open source. That world will never exist, but we can come close. The goal should still be as few systems as possible, less complexity, lowest cost, and maximum ease of use. It should scale well when new employees are added. A small geek company like mine could easily go broke trying to create the perfect system. There are times when close enough will have to do, so you can get to the paying work and the never ending stream of government forms and accounting.
"Buy a computer with no OS or build your own" is a typical desktop user perspective. It is possible to assemble a good desktop PC and install your own OS. But what about guys like me who want a good (ie name brand) notebook. Try and buy one without Windows. They are only now starting to become available, and still not any brand someone would recognize. Microsoft's monopolistic OEM licensing agreements prevent any OEM receiving favorable Windows pricing from selling ANY PC without Windows preinstalled. It is impossible for any PC manufacturer to compete in the ruthlessly competitive hardware market if they pay retail for the Windows OS.
So I'm forced to pay Microsoft for an OEM version of Windows XP I do not want and will never use. Yeah, that's fair. It's called the Microsoft Tax.
I sent the following email to Robert Marsh, (headsurfer@ev1.net), the CEO of EV1 Servers.
Mr. Marsh:
In an apparent effort to reach out to the open source community, you were quoted at http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/ev1030504.cfm as saying, "...our intent was simply to take us out of the loop, not to make us public enemy number one."
By now you've probably realized that your company was used as a propaganda tool by SCO, and has therefore lost credibility in the open source community because of the belief that you caved in to extortion. SCO's intellectual property claims have no merit. EV1 Servers would never have needed to take any action at all. By the time IBM's legal team is finished with SCO, there will be nothing left to pursue Novel, AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler, EV1 Servers, or anyone else.
It's probably apparent now that what seemed like a cheap insurance policy (paying SCO for protection you didn't need) was actually a case of your company paying to generate a massive amount of unfavorable press. The results would have probably been slightly more positive if you had spent the money on television commercials showing EV1 personnel killing puppies. Ouch. This is probably not a company ending decision, but it's definitely a move in the wrong direction. Paying for an expedient end to a potential problem isn't always the right thing to do. Sometimes it's important to do what's right.
Imagine the positive image you could have generated for EV1 Servers without spending any money at all. EV1 Servers could have contacted Groklaw or any of the other online news sources clamoring for SCO information, showed them the scary letter that SCO sent, and explained to them that you told SCO in no uncertain terms that their claims were baseless, and you would rather spend money defending Linux in court than give them a penny. You missed the chance to be a hero. Maybe next time.
I bought a new HP ze5185 notebook PC in December 2002. I never booted Windows XP. I put in the Xandros 1.0 CD and installation was easier than any Windows install I've done.
I was immediately impressed with the availability of open source software. A year later, I installed Xandros 2.0. It's even better. I haven't missed Windows at all (no surprise, I hated ever Windows version I ever used). I do wish there was a Linux version of QuickBooks accounting software. The Win version runs in Crossover, but it's a bit ugly. All other applications I need for my small engineering business are native Linux aps.
Xandros demonstrates that Linux is ready for the average desktop user now. The few remaining hassles of Linux seem less important to me than the Outlook worms and crashes most Windows users suffer. And the issues with Linux are disappearing rapidly. It has the potential to be almost as low hassle as a Mac in a year or two, while running on low cost generic PC hardware. I don't see what Microsoft can do to stop Linux. Even with the FUD campaign, SCO, etc., Linux marches on relentlessly. It's the nature of open source software to continuously improve.
I have a few issues with Xandros.
I wasted last weekend watching the five DVD set of Stargate season six. Xine worked reliably, but only after I shut down most other applications. Xine's user interface is slow on my PC. But playback is smooth and of good quality.
I used a couple of different CD burning applications in Xandros 1.0. They worked well, but there wasn't one application that was good for audio and data CDs. I was glad when Xandros 2.0 integrated CD burning into the excellent Xandros File Manager. Unfortunately, my first attempts to copy audio CDs resulted in one good CD and five coasters. Maybe I need to learn how to use the CD burning features. Or maybe I need to install K3B until Xandros refines their CD burner.
Unlike the article, I have no trouble playing Quicktime videos. Mozilla handles them automatically too. Even crappy Realplayer seems tamed in the Linux world where it is prevented from taking over my PC, although it's probably still spyware.
Putting aside glitches in multimedia that most operating systems experience to some extent, I'd have to say that Xandros is an excellent platform for businesses, where the main uses will be word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, and internet browsing. Xandros has always done all of these things very well, and will only get better as OpenOffice matures and Firefox makes it's way into Xandros.
The biggest item left on the To-Do list is repealing the Microsoft tax. I resent the fact that I can't buy a name brand notebook PC without being forced to give $80 to Microsoft for an OS I do not want and will not use. Just think how bad it would be if the US Department of Justice had LOST their antitrust lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times is this lame M$ defense going to be used to justify anticompetitive OEM marketing licenses based on an OS monopoly?
I'll say it one more time. Did you build a notebook PC? I didn't think so. We are only now starting to see good notebook PCs that ship with Linux or without an OS.
So, yeah, you can put together off-the-shelf parts and make a desktop PC. But if, like so many of us, a notebook PC is your computing choice, there were no options other than buying a notebook PC, PAYING THE @$#%ING MICROSOFT TAX, and then installing Linux. And you couldn't even sell the Windoze you were forced to buy to someone who wanted it. The CDs were all effectively labeled "Warning, this is a highly customized version of WinBlows that will only work on a PC that already shipped with the same version of the crapiest and most popular OS in the world."
Finally, most PC consumers don't want to build PCs from parts, so even though it's possible to assemble a desktop PC, not being able to buy a Linux PC is still a monopolistic impediment that prevents competing OS vendors from being able to compete on anything close to a level playing field.
So please stop saying, "Just build your own PC like I did."
The B2 costs about $2.2 billion.
I'd love a service that encrypted my hard drive data and did automatic offsite backups at night via an internet connection. Only I should have the decryption key. It should be secure and very easy to use, with versions of the client software that run on every popular OS. I'd gladly pay for this service. THAT'S what I'd like to see Google do if they want to leverage the goodwill they built based on their search engine business.
Of course, after the horribly invasive idea they floated last week for a Google email service (reading and storing my email, and selling info about me?), Google may not be the company I'd trust with my personal data.
Build a floating dock. Very common for people living on the river. Make it as wide as you can manage without drawing attention. Eight feet would be good. If you have a lot of river frontage, you could even build two or three docks. The velocity is low, so you need to capture a lot of mass. This is kinetic energy, proportional to the mass and the square of the velocity.
Put a paddlewheel across the downstream width of the dock, maybe five feet in diameter, with two feet submerged. Nothing high tech is required. This doesn't need the optimal vane shape of a high pressure hydroelectric turbine. I'd use a shape that sheds debris to minimize maintenance.
Use a large belt around the outer diameter of the paddlewheel to drive an automotive alternator (very large gear ratio) with an external voltage regulator. This will cost about $20 at a scrap yard. Adjust the voltage regulator to produce 14V at the batteries to null the loss in the long wires, which should be at least 10 AWG. Use a circuit breaker at the batteries and the alternator. A charge controller will prevent overcharging if the regulator fails.
Charge a parallel bank of 12 V deep cycle discharge batteries, as used in golf carts, small boats or RVs. These are available for a decent price locally. Sealed batteries are good. Low maintenance, and no worry about explosive hydrogen offgassing. Keep the batteries warm, but vented to the outside air.
Use a power inverter to create 120 VAC. You can buy one that syncs to the power grid if you you want to sell power back to the utility, but I wouldn't bother. I'd cut the cord completely. You can buy inverters on eBay. Trace makes good inverters.
An alarm should monitor battery voltage and possibly charge rate. If river debris jammed the paddlewheel, you'd want to know sooner rather than later. A true geek would have it email if there was a problem.
I'd build a big cover over the paddlewheel assembly and maybe make it look like a barbeque grill or storage locker. I wouldn't go out of my way to inquire with the authorities. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. "Gee, I didn't know I couldn't generate my own power."
You'll be surprised by how much energy you get from a small & slow moving paddlewheel. Unlike sun or wind, water power is 24/7, so your battery bank can be a lot smaller with a hydro power system. For about $500 initially and battery replacements and alternator brushes every few years, you can be off the grid. Most of us don't have a river and need to use solar.
If you're on a cable modem, you probably don't have a static IP address, which is a requirement to seed a BitTorrent.
Yes, you pay more for the same performance in a notebook PC, but the cost difference has narrowed a lot. The reduced electricity consumption does help offset the difference in price to a small degree (maybe $30 per year).
I keep my notebook PC for five years. That's tough for a nerd to do, but I believe in reducing consumption, even in the face of Moore's Law.
I hate waiting for a PC to boot. Linux is great because it doesn't need to be rebooted daily. I leave my PC running 24/7 (NOT ecofriendly), but it recycles unused clock cycles doing SETI@home research when I'm not using it, at least until Linux is better about suspending my computer and almost instantly restoring it.
Eco tip -> Turn off your laser printer any time it's not in use. Power saving modes help, but laser printers usually suck more power than large desktop PCs.
Obligatory Monty Python Joke: Maybe they should call it Luxury Yacht, but tell everyone it's pronounced "Lindows".
Much of my daily spam now comes from compromised Windows boxes being run as spam zombies.
My personal data was stolen from a company I trusted because their server was running IIS and it was infected with Slammer.
I suffer because of Windows insecurity almost constantly, yet no operating system *except* Windows has ever caused me any such grief. Clearly the Forrester "data" is FUD. Plain and simple.
Then:
apt-get install weasel
apt-get install moneygrubbing
apt-get install ambulancechaser
Ethics by proxy. I like it. As a customer, your feelings about SCO influence EV1's actions.
Executives need to learn that actions have consequences, and doing the right thing is worth more than a nice warm feeling. It can impact the bottom line, sometimes in a dramatic way.
I'd be very surprised if he read it. My goal was merely to get a little tic mark on a secretary's executive summary tally sheet under the heading "Linux Zealot Thinks You Screwed Up". Every control system requires feedback to correct errors.
I wonder how many /. readers sent him an email.
The X-Prize is like the Orteig prize that inspired Charles Lindberg to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The X-Prize Cup is like the annual air races (Thompson Cup, Bendix Cup, etc.) that fostered competition and quickly led to commercial aircraft industries.
The X-Prize competition will happen wherever the teams want to launch. BTW - Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, will be winning the X-Prize very soon. They're in Mojave California. Lots of info including pictures here.
And, please, no more references to "orbit". The X-Prize competition is for suborbital flight, which is essentially up and down, similar to the Redstone missions in NASA's early days. There is no requirement for a large horizontal component of velocity as would be needed to achieve orbit.
I found it interesting that New Mexico has a department responsible for space development. Finally, some government is actually looking to the future instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into it.
I still think we need one open source industry standard media format.
Color coding helps in two occasions:
1) The designer is the same person who builds the part and applies the color coding, and would be more likely to get it right than the person doing the assembly.
2) A lot of parts are being made (like the PC connector analogy), where extra effort and care can be spent making sure the color coding is correct, rather than rely on the less technically inclined computer luser to plug stuff in the correct ports.
The best strategy to goof proof an assembly job is to make sure that noninterchangeable parts aren't interchangeable. If NASA assembly technicians had to use a cutting torch and a 20 pound sledge hammer to fit a two pound component, they'd stop and realize something wasn't right. It's no accident that your PC's AC power connection doesn't look anything like the ethernet connection.
Media is too important to use proprietary standards. All the formats should be open. They probably will be. Why use a proprietary standard when an open standard is as good or better?
Unfortunately, we are currently in a position where we have WAY TOO MANY media standards. You can load a ton of CODECs for Xine, and some site is going to use a bastard format or a "new and improved" version that doesn't work. What a hassle.
My Mozilla uses nppdf.so. I haven't changed it from the default installation.
Thanks for the tip.
And yes, I leave my browser running all the time, just like my OS.
It's still a great browser, and surprisingly just keeps getting better.
Economics is like that. Always yin and yang. What's bad news for EMI is good news for Memorex.
[end of shameless plug]
The rocket engine has been tested on the ground at full power for an entire burn. The boost phase on the previous flight was stopped to keep the test program progressing in incremental stages. Binnie could have just as easily kept going well past 100 km, but they're still wringing out the subsystems. The rocket engine works. It's a very clever and simple system that uses nitrous oxide as the oxidizer and rubber as the fuel. The rocket can be throttled by changing the flow rate of the liquid oxidizer. A low cost, safe and throttleable solid rocket booster is quite an achievement (but not invented at Scaled).
To correct a couple of falacies in previous posts.... 100 km is the internationaly recognized limit for being an astronaut. Parabolic suborbital flights do not require heat shielding because they are much slower than orbital flights, not because they have less atmosphere to penetrate on reentry. Both are essentially in the vacuum of space.
I like the Armadillo Aerospace research too, but it isn't going to win the X-Prize. I think they should have called their rocket engine the BFR-9000.
And to the person who said the older Rutan aircraft designs are works of art, I'd have to agree. A picture of my Long-EZ is here.
The X-Prize is going to change the way we look at space. No longer will a $1B shuttle launch be required. We will all have access to space. This is long over due. My appreciation to those who are making it happen. As always, all that is required is big dreams, intelligence and determination.
I bought the laptop PC anyway because there were no decent laptops available with Linux then (but there are now). I never ran XP. I booted the Xandros Linux install CD and have been a very happy camper, even if I am a bit miffed about being forced to pay the Microsoft tax.
I'm optimistic about a major PC manufacturer offering Xandros Linux as an option. It's a great distro for users migrating from Windows. It's easy to use, without giving up any of the Linux security or stability. The deluxe version includes CrossOver, so it runs lots of Windows apps. It's based on Debian stable.
I'm still a bit concerned about HP CEO Carly Fiorina's announcement that HP products will be aggressively enforcing DRM. That seems to me to be a bad move that will only make their products harder to use. Hippy perspective: Like, who wants a piece of consumer electronics to, like, get up in your face and start hassling you? REALLY bad karma, man.
Linux OS. I probably should have switched a year earlier, but it's definitely ready for most business users now. Wars have been fought over which distro to use, but Xandros can definitely help a small company be productive right now.
OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and even HTML authoring (until Nvu becomes available soon). OpenOffice has a good user interface, ease of use and interoperability. Like most open source products, it just keeps getting better.
Mozilla for email and web browsing. I'll switch to Firefox soon. From what I've read, Outlook refugees (poor bastards) would like Ximian Evolution.
Fax via email. I chose MaxEmail, but there are others. Way cheaper, better and less hassle than a fax machine. I strongly prefer email. MaxEmail allows technoweanies to send a fax and we can still handle it as email (choice of PDF or TIFF). They also provide voice mail systems, but we don't use them.
Cell Phones. This sounds a bit cheesy at first glance, but the world is moving to wireless, almost forcing employees to have a cell phone anyway. Unless you're running a call center, cell phones meet all the phone needs of a typical small business. Voice mail is included. The concept of a receptionist, or worse an automated attendant system, is outdated. Putting customers on hold and transferring them three times is not a "feature" anyone should want in a phone system. VoIP and hacking together open source voice mail systems are neat technologies, but they're overkill for typical small business. If you need a small phone system, Siemens makes the GigaSet line that is well engineered with voicemail and wireless. When I last looked, they were about $350 + $80 per handset, maximum of 8 users. New models include routers and other cool stuff.
QuickBooks. Definitely NOT open source, but hopefully someone will create an open source program that can read QB data, or at least a native Linux version of QB. For now, QB Pro 2000 runs under CrossOver, but it's ugly. QB can actually be used for a lot more than accounting. If you like, it'll manage a customer/contact database, track time for hourly employees, provide rudimentary project management, etc.
In the perfect world, there would be one system that did everything. It'd be well integrated, easy to use and open source. That world will never exist, but we can come close. The goal should still be as few systems as possible, less complexity, lowest cost, and maximum ease of use. It should scale well when new employees are added. A small geek company like mine could easily go broke trying to create the perfect system. There are times when close enough will have to do, so you can get to the paying work and the never ending stream of government forms and accounting.
So I'm forced to pay Microsoft for an OEM version of Windows XP I do not want and will never use. Yeah, that's fair. It's called the Microsoft Tax.
Mr. Marsh:
In an apparent effort to reach out to the open source community, you were quoted at http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/ev1030504.cfm as saying, "...our intent was simply to take us out of the loop, not to make us public enemy number one."
By now you've probably realized that your company was used as a propaganda tool by SCO, and has therefore lost credibility in the open source community because of the belief that you caved in to extortion. SCO's intellectual property claims have no merit. EV1 Servers would never have needed to take any action at all. By the time IBM's legal team is finished with SCO, there will be nothing left to pursue Novel, AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler, EV1 Servers, or anyone else.
It's probably apparent now that what seemed like a cheap insurance policy (paying SCO for protection you didn't need) was actually a case of your company paying to generate a massive amount of unfavorable press. The results would have probably been slightly more positive if you had spent the money on television commercials showing EV1 personnel killing puppies. Ouch. This is probably not a company ending decision, but it's definitely a move in the wrong direction. Paying for an expedient end to a potential problem isn't always the right thing to do. Sometimes it's important to do what's right.
Imagine the positive image you could have generated for EV1 Servers without spending any money at all. EV1 Servers could have contacted Groklaw or any of the other online news sources clamoring for SCO information, showed them the scary letter that SCO sent, and explained to them that you told SCO in no uncertain terms that their claims were baseless, and you would rather spend money defending Linux in court than give them a penny. You missed the chance to be a hero. Maybe next time.
Bruce Layne
Lexington Kentucky
I was immediately impressed with the availability of open source software. A year later, I installed Xandros 2.0. It's even better. I haven't missed Windows at all (no surprise, I hated ever Windows version I ever used). I do wish there was a Linux version of QuickBooks accounting software. The Win version runs in Crossover, but it's a bit ugly. All other applications I need for my small engineering business are native Linux aps.
Xandros demonstrates that Linux is ready for the average desktop user now. The few remaining hassles of Linux seem less important to me than the Outlook worms and crashes most Windows users suffer. And the issues with Linux are disappearing rapidly. It has the potential to be almost as low hassle as a Mac in a year or two, while running on low cost generic PC hardware. I don't see what Microsoft can do to stop Linux. Even with the FUD campaign, SCO, etc., Linux marches on relentlessly. It's the nature of open source software to continuously improve.
I have a few issues with Xandros.
I wasted last weekend watching the five DVD set of Stargate season six. Xine worked reliably, but only after I shut down most other applications. Xine's user interface is slow on my PC. But playback is smooth and of good quality.
I used a couple of different CD burning applications in Xandros 1.0. They worked well, but there wasn't one application that was good for audio and data CDs. I was glad when Xandros 2.0 integrated CD burning into the excellent Xandros File Manager. Unfortunately, my first attempts to copy audio CDs resulted in one good CD and five coasters. Maybe I need to learn how to use the CD burning features. Or maybe I need to install K3B until Xandros refines their CD burner.
Unlike the article, I have no trouble playing Quicktime videos. Mozilla handles them automatically too. Even crappy Realplayer seems tamed in the Linux world where it is prevented from taking over my PC, although it's probably still spyware.
Putting aside glitches in multimedia that most operating systems experience to some extent, I'd have to say that Xandros is an excellent platform for businesses, where the main uses will be word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, and internet browsing. Xandros has always done all of these things very well, and will only get better as OpenOffice matures and Firefox makes it's way into Xandros.
The biggest item left on the To-Do list is repealing the Microsoft tax. I resent the fact that I can't buy a name brand notebook PC without being forced to give $80 to Microsoft for an OS I do not want and will not use. Just think how bad it would be if the US Department of Justice had LOST their antitrust lawsuit.