Hmm... Energetic particles hitting Earth, originating from a single location in the sky... Someone is obviously trying to throw a rock through our window.
Given the coming energy crisis and other factors, it seems not altogether inconceivable that the car of the future will be no car at all! Now that would be a revolution.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on who's better off after an energy crisis that's appearing increasingly inevitable. The city-dweller or the suburbanite?
I understand that the average city-dweller uses far less of an environmental footprint and consumes far less energy than the suburbanite. But the city-dweller relies more on imports, which require energy to deliver.
Meanwhile, the suburbanite has more land and is closer to farms, but is almost entirely dependent on automobiles for almost every facet of life and has a relatively huge environmental footprint.
My money's on the city-dweller, but somehow I fear we're all screwed...
On a related topic, I'm in the market for a new laptop, but I can't find a laptop sans XP that's cheaper than the Dell laptops with XP. Does anyone have any recommendations?
BTW, I too found it difficult to configure a Dell desktop system sans XP without the price going up. I ended up buying one with XP and formatting it as soon as I got it. Seems like I should be able to sell my XP license to someone else who needs it, but I don't believe that's possible given their license. Frustrating.
Looks cool, but there's [still] no Linux version so it's quite useless to me.
To make matters worse, the choice of technologies for the plugin SDK guarantees it will be difficult to write cross-platform plugins for any future non-Windows versions. You can hardly expect any plugin developers to rebuild each of their plugins for every platform, especially when they use Win32-specific APIs. This is a huge weakness in this product. I expected better from Google.
I'm a big fan of xscreensaver and am disappointed to hear its future is "highly ambiguous".
For those who are interested, last year I started the SaverBeans screensaver pack, a set of screensavers implemented in Java. A small native layer is available for each platform (seeking a volunteer for MacOS) that bridges to the underlying OS. So you can write the screensaver once and run it on any supported platform.
There are currently 18 LGPL-licensed screen savers with 16 more about to be released shortly (this month). The SDK supports everything from simple screensavers to OpenGL. It's also a great platform for distributed computing.
I can't hope to amass a collection as grand as xscreensaver, but contributions are always welcome.
Every one of your contractors will burn up 10 minutes every day due to bugs/quirks and they never learn to get around them
MSOffice never burns up time by being buggy or quirky
$500 gets you enough licenses of MSOffice for all your users
All your MSOffice upgrades are free
Not to mention the high costs of security issues with MSOffice macro viruses, etc. and the software you need to purchase to protect yourself from them.
My experience with OpenOffice has been quite good. It was a little buggy in its initial incarnations, but has come a long way and is very stable now!
If OpenOffice doesn't have quite enough polish for you, check out StarOffice as well.
Of course especially in an office environment you could always replace your noisy computers with thin clients like SunRays.
It's amazing what a difference a quiet office makes.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Energetic particles hitting Earth, originating from a single location in the sky... Someone is obviously trying to throw a rock through our window.
Given the coming energy crisis and other factors, it seems not altogether inconceivable that the car of the future will be no car at all! Now that would be a revolution.
Mechanical Turk
I don't know why, but for some reason my mind read "World of Star Control" instead of "World of Starcraft".
Has anyone figured out if it's possible to do a log scale plot? How about comparing two tickers on the same chart?
I understand that the average city-dweller uses far less of an environmental footprint and consumes far less energy than the suburbanite. But the city-dweller relies more on imports, which require energy to deliver.
Meanwhile, the suburbanite has more land and is closer to farms, but is almost entirely dependent on automobiles for almost every facet of life and has a relatively huge environmental footprint.
My money's on the city-dweller, but somehow I fear we're all screwed...
BTW, I too found it difficult to configure a Dell desktop system sans XP without the price going up. I ended up buying one with XP and formatting it as soon as I got it. Seems like I should be able to sell my XP license to someone else who needs it, but I don't believe that's possible given their license. Frustrating.
To make matters worse, the choice of technologies for the plugin SDK guarantees it will be difficult to write cross-platform plugins for any future non-Windows versions. You can hardly expect any plugin developers to rebuild each of their plugins for every platform, especially when they use Win32-specific APIs. This is a huge weakness in this product. I expected better from Google.
For those who are interested, last year I started the SaverBeans screensaver pack, a set of screensavers implemented in Java. A small native layer is available for each platform (seeking a volunteer for MacOS) that bridges to the underlying OS. So you can write the screensaver once and run it on any supported platform.
There are currently 18 LGPL-licensed screen savers with 16 more about to be released shortly (this month). The SDK supports everything from simple screensavers to OpenGL. It's also a great platform for distributed computing.
I can't hope to amass a collection as grand as xscreensaver, but contributions are always welcome.
Actually, Sun Java System Application Server 8 PE is free as in beer, and it is high-quality with good documentation:
It is a fully compliant J2EE 1.4 application server that is free for development, production deployment, and redistribution.
Disclaimer: I work for Sun.
Don't forget about the free Java Desktop T-Shirt giveaway for the first 20 screensavers submitted before JavaOne!
- Every one of your contractors will burn up 10 minutes every day due to bugs/quirks and they never learn to get around them
- MSOffice never burns up time by being buggy or quirky
- $500 gets you enough licenses of MSOffice for all your users
- All your MSOffice upgrades are free
Not to mention the high costs of security issues with MSOffice macro viruses, etc. and the software you need to purchase to protect yourself from them. My experience with OpenOffice has been quite good. It was a little buggy in its initial incarnations, but has come a long way and is very stable now! If OpenOffice doesn't have quite enough polish for you, check out StarOffice as well.Of course especially in an office environment you could always replace your noisy computers with thin clients like SunRays. It's amazing what a difference a quiet office makes.