The e-mail program is almost unusable, since it won't let you send messages to more than five people for fear of spam and now it won't even let you "reply to all."
Umm, what? My Yahoo mailbox has "reply to everyone" that appears when I click the "reply" button. Do tell what you are seeing instead.
MSN has been the subject of some troubling news lately. After eliminating almost 40 positions in the MSN Messenger, MSN Groups, and MSN Photos group, one has to wonder what is going on over there at MOSWEST (article). The termination of the Looksmart deal (article) effectively means that Looksmart is going out of business and that Microsoft's engineers have until the end of June, 2003, to create a new search engine.
The IBM drives used in this article are perhaps the most notoriously loud drives out there. I eradicated them from my systems and have found that all the 7200 RPM Seagates are the quietest. I have also used the Silent Drive enclosure (I have two of them) and they work well on drives at 5400 RPM but only some single-platter 7200 RPM drives due to heat generation. Most modern drives allow you to find out their temperature so if you're worried you can monitor it. The Silent Drive does have metal plates that rest on top of the drive to transfer heat to the outside chassis, much like the drives are designed to dissipate the heat. My dealer sold me the Silent Drive enclosure in generic form so pardon me if I write the brand name incorrectly.
But, seriously, after all this jumping around, I have found that the current crop of Seagates using fluid dynamic motors are the very quietest. I'm just talking about noise, whistles, and vibration (clicks do not bother me). The IBM drives are the very worst--you can't convince me that a vibrating hard drive can be relied upon to store data. WD is a little better. Maxtor is very good as well.
If clicks bother you, there are some interesting developments about acoustic management (which only addresses clicks, not ambient noise and vibration). I inquired with several hard drive manufacturers about acoustic management and one of them replied that this feature is under patent litigation and they will no longer be supporting acoustic management. The representative told me that they have elected instead to quiet all their drives across the line.
Seagate has an excellent rebate for their 120 gigabyte 7200 RPM 8 MB cache model at CompUSA right now, incidentally. It is nearly as fast as the Western Digital 8MB "Special Edition" but by comparison the drive is a silent runner with no vibration. I avoid IBM/Hitachi drives at all costs--again, if the drive itself vibrates, what kind of physical stresses are the internal platters and mechanisms being subject to? I don't want to worry about it so they are out of the picture as far as I am concerned.
This book is sold at Home Depot. I cut my teeth on this work and it's an excellent, and cheap, resource to prepare you for tackling the NEC and whatever NEC companion you choose.
The NEC calls for at least two different circuits to feed each room. This way if a circuit trips at least one circuit will still be live. The idea is that if you have a few lights in the room, at least one of them will still be working when a circuit trips.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're talking about SCO Unixware, not SCO OpenServer. The OpenServer product which the original poster is referring to is the Xenix product. The one that you are referring to is the Unixware product which is the original Unix source that came to SCO from AT&T by way of Novell and Corel.
I'm not sure what the poster meant by "sounds like what Akamai do", but Akamai is far from a "transparent cache proxy". Anyone who has used Akamai for more than 2 minutes would realize this. The only things Akamai might do that could be somehow linked to the patent is that Akamai is a cache that distributes data regionally. It's not transparent and it's not terribly easy to use for the we developer, either.
The names come from the Centaur Technology folks, the people who actually develop the C3 chip (once known as WinChip and Cyrix3) and who are a wholly owned subsidiary of VIA now. The names have nothing to do with a supposed religious bent of VIA's CEO. The names come from Judeo-Christian Old Testament rather than strictly Christian. See www.centtech.com for more information.
Does this still require an Exchange server? I just don't want to have Exchange anymore. I want a new service that provides the shared folders and address books. It is prohibitively expensive to upgrade from Windows NT and the version of Exchange we already use. We want something cheaper that works and so far it is not Exchange server.
Hmm that is interesting. We do actually get pop-ups every now and then that say "The Exchange server is too busy to process your request. Please try again later." This is in an office of only 35 people.
I'm ignorant of Evolution's groupware capabilities so this is probably a silly question. Our Exchange users extensively use not only shared address books but also shared folders. There is gigabytes of information stored in the shared folders. Most of it contains email messages but much is also the other Outlook/Exchange objects, like appointments, address book entries(?), and little calendars.
What can these people use that is open source, from client to server? I'd like to hear an answer from someone who actually uses shared folders, shared address books with something like Evolution--none of this conjecture and hypothetical "what if" stories that don't help anyone.
When someone mentions "Adventure Games" I still think of text adventures like the old Infocom games. I played games like Calixto Island on my TRS-80 CoCo that were still text adventure games but had graphics to illustrate the story. I didn't really appreciate the new fully graphical adventure games from outfits like Sierra On-Line where you didn't have to type anymore--I still like the old art of text adventures. That art, called Interactive Fiction, is exploding and every year there is a competition.
I have an online sampler of Interactive Fiction text adventures online. Just go to:
I solved the cancer-causing mouse problem. Ever since I saw this poor guy walking around GE Aerospace with one of those steel bars connecting his elbow to his wrist, I promised myself that I was going to take steps to avoid typing injuries. Since then I've been using a variety of keyboards and trackballs--no more cancer-causing mice for me! With my Logitech Zero-Degree Tilt(TM) Cordless Keyboard Elite on the desk and the Marble Mouse Trackball[sic] in hand, I am safe from the scourge of cancer-causing mice forever!
Maybe if you keep the lights on in your wine cellar!
Kris
Re:efficacy versus efficiency
on
LEDs vs. Lightbulbs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Certain overnight radio shows tout the LED flashlights as being more efficient than incandescent or incandescent halogen. This is patently false. The LED lamps are more durable, but most do not use any more or any less energy than the equivalent incandescent or incandescent halogen at the same wattage (and efficacy).
The trend of changing traffic signals to use LED lamps is a question of reducing maintenance costs since the signals last so much longer than the old incandescents. It has nothing at all to do with saving electricity. It has everything to do with installing lamps so that the fixture does not need as much relamping as before. Of course, safety by reducing burnt lamps is also a big reason:)
On a lighter note, the very newest LED traffic lamps use diffusers so they look more like traditional lamps and not like 100 lamps. Here in Washington DC the green, amber, and red lamps are all being replaced and they are brighter and more attractive than the old lamps were. THey are much better than the green traffic lamps that Fairfax County is experimenting with.
You need not worry about too much competition from the Titan program unless you have heavy-launch capability. The US doesn't even have enough Titans to launch the next-generation spy satellites even if they were finished in time to replace the existing spy satellites. There is a good piece on this in a recent issue of "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" (http://www.bulletin.org/).
I bought that Brother printer from Amazon for about $100 off the regular price--I paid about $150 for it, which is the lowest of the low-end laser printer costs. (The discount might be related to some slighly off-spec lots since other places sell this printer refurb'd for the same price). I'm going to have to purchase a new drum kit already because the printer doesn't seem able to do quality printing on anyone's stock without leaving a very thin film of toner over the paper. Cheap paper will also leave paper dust on the pickup rollers that scorches onto the paper for the first couple of sheets you do in a day. So that $100 I saved will be spent on a $70 drum kit and experiments with different paper brands. Still, this printer is a good deal if you don't mind the hassle, since it's part of a new generation of printers for which the drum and toner are separate consumable items. This is an excellent trend that I hope to see better printer manufacturers, like HP, take up.
Even at home, not just at work, I use several computers. I tried having a "mobile home" various ways, like the pathetic Netscape Roaming Profiles. I ended up settled on just using Yahoo to handle all my mail ("mail plus" product), address book, notepad, and file storage ("briefcase" product). I determined that all I really needed everywhere was the administrative office-keeping stuff (mail) and some files to download (briefcase). All the software development and systems administration stuff that had to be kept locally on a machine turned out to be very few things: a few dot-files (.emacs,.kermrc,.profile) and copy of Emacs 19.34b built to work from $HOME directory. I keep those files in Yahoo Briefcase.
Another alternative is to use a hosting provider and access your files remotely from there--same results as using Yahoo but doesn't require a web browser
The Xbox is not that quiet--the fan makes noise and the hard disk whistles. And while it is Pentium III it only has 128k of L2 cache. I left mine turned on inside an entertainment enclosure (windowed doors, opened back) and it was like a mini oven within 10 minutes.
We had a variety of IBM mainframes at SUNY Binghamton (NY) as a result of grants from the local IBM facilities. They were much more powerful than the various VAX machines spread around the departments. After school I went to work for IBM on various projects that ran on some seriously huge RS/6000 machines (not mainframe, obviously) as well as the big iron. VM/CMS and MVS were the systems of choice for business at that time and I'm very sad to see them go away. The colorful text-screen oriented IBM 3270 terminals were absolutely perfect for data-entry and point-of-sale terminals. Much later I found Windows machines at other companies that just ran IBM 3270 emulators to connect to these same mainframes that were running 'way back then.
The move to client-server has been very expensive--I don't have quotable sources but you can search on studies done on the cost to businesses of using client-server methodology vs. terminal-mainframe and in many cases the mainframe was cheaper, more reliable, easier to run, the list went on. I believe SciAm did a piece on this issue back in the mid-90's when client-server was in its hey-day.
And, heh, in case anyone is facing the attrition demon, I would be happy to transition back to the mainframe world and put my VM/CMS, MVS, JCL skills back into use at your firm:)
Slashdot Mirror
The e-mail program is almost unusable, since it won't let you send messages to more than five people for fear of spam and now it won't even let you "reply to all."
Umm, what? My Yahoo mailbox has "reply to everyone" that appears when I click the "reply" button. Do tell what you are seeing instead.
MSN has been the subject of some troubling news lately. After eliminating almost 40 positions in the MSN Messenger, MSN Groups, and MSN Photos group, one has to wonder what is going on over there at MOSWEST (article). The termination of the Looksmart deal (article) effectively means that Looksmart is going out of business and that Microsoft's engineers have until the end of June, 2003, to create a new search engine.
The IBM drives used in this article are perhaps the most notoriously loud drives out there. I eradicated them from my systems and have found that all the 7200 RPM Seagates are the quietest. I have also used the Silent Drive enclosure (I have two of them) and they work well on drives at 5400 RPM but only some single-platter 7200 RPM drives due to heat generation. Most modern drives allow you to find out their temperature so if you're worried you can monitor it. The Silent Drive does have metal plates that rest on top of the drive to transfer heat to the outside chassis, much like the drives are designed to dissipate the heat. My dealer sold me the Silent Drive enclosure in generic form so pardon me if I write the brand name incorrectly.
But, seriously, after all this jumping around, I have found that the current crop of Seagates using fluid dynamic motors are the very quietest. I'm just talking about noise, whistles, and vibration (clicks do not bother me). The IBM drives are the very worst--you can't convince me that a vibrating hard drive can be relied upon to store data. WD is a little better. Maxtor is very good as well.
If clicks bother you, there are some interesting developments about acoustic management (which only addresses clicks, not ambient noise and vibration). I inquired with several hard drive manufacturers about acoustic management and one of them replied that this feature is under patent litigation and they will no longer be supporting acoustic management. The representative told me that they have elected instead to quiet all their drives across the line.
Seagate has an excellent rebate for their 120 gigabyte 7200 RPM 8 MB cache model at CompUSA right now, incidentally. It is nearly as fast as the Western Digital 8MB "Special Edition" but by comparison the drive is a silent runner with no vibration. I avoid IBM/Hitachi drives at all costs--again, if the drive itself vibrates, what kind of physical stresses are the internal platters and mechanisms being subject to? I don't want to worry about it so they are out of the picture as far as I am concerned.
Kris
I, for one, am going to pile the DLT backups and the mail server into the Navigator and drive to Cape Hatteras for some surf and turf!
What kind of backwater, podunk company doesn't have a rotating on-call list. It isn't 1992 anymore.
Uh, I thought we Merkins called it "utility" but maybe that's how data center techs refer to it.
This book is sold at Home Depot. I cut my teeth on this work and it's an excellent, and cheap, resource to prepare you for tackling the NEC and whatever NEC companion you choose.
The NEC calls for at least two different circuits to feed each room. This way if a circuit trips at least one circuit will still be live. The idea is that if you have a few lights in the room, at least one of them will still be working when a circuit trips.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're talking about SCO Unixware, not SCO OpenServer. The OpenServer product which the original poster is referring to is the Xenix product. The one that you are referring to is the Unixware product which is the original Unix source that came to SCO from AT&T by way of Novell and Corel.
Kris
I'm not sure what the poster meant by "sounds like what Akamai do", but Akamai is far from a "transparent cache proxy". Anyone who has used Akamai for more than 2 minutes would realize this. The only things Akamai might do that could be somehow linked to the patent is that Akamai is a cache that distributes data regionally. It's not transparent and it's not terribly easy to use for the we developer, either.
Kris
The names come from the Centaur Technology folks, the people who actually develop the C3 chip (once known as WinChip and Cyrix3) and who are a wholly owned subsidiary of VIA now. The names have nothing to do with a supposed religious bent of VIA's CEO. The names come from Judeo-Christian Old Testament rather than strictly Christian. See www.centtech.com for more information.
Kris
Buh? The i686 kernels on all the Unixes work just fine on my Ezra, Ezra-T, Samuel2 and Samuel systems.
Kris
Does this still require an Exchange server? I just don't want to have Exchange anymore. I want a new service that provides the shared folders and address books. It is prohibitively expensive to upgrade from Windows NT and the version of Exchange we already use. We want something cheaper that works and so far it is not Exchange server.
Kris
Hmm that is interesting. We do actually get pop-ups every now and then that say "The Exchange server is too busy to process your request. Please try again later." This is in an office of only 35 people.
Kris
I'm ignorant of Evolution's groupware capabilities so this is probably a silly question. Our Exchange users extensively use not only shared address books but also shared folders. There is gigabytes of information stored in the shared folders. Most of it contains email messages but much is also the other Outlook/Exchange objects, like appointments, address book entries(?), and little calendars.
What can these people use that is open source, from client to server? I'd like to hear an answer from someone who actually uses shared folders, shared address books with something like Evolution--none of this conjecture and hypothetical "what if" stories that don't help anyone.
When someone mentions "Adventure Games" I still think of text adventures like the old Infocom games. I played games like Calixto Island on my TRS-80 CoCo that were still text adventure games but had graphics to illustrate the story. I didn't really appreciate the new fully graphical adventure games from outfits like Sierra On-Line where you didn't have to type anymore--I still like the old art of text adventures. That art, called Interactive Fiction, is exploding and every year there is a competition.
I have an online sampler of Interactive Fiction text adventures online. Just go to:
Kriston.net/Games
Kris
I solved the cancer-causing mouse problem. Ever since I saw this poor guy walking around GE Aerospace with one of those steel bars connecting his elbow to his wrist, I promised myself that I was going to take steps to avoid typing injuries. Since then I've been using a variety of keyboards and trackballs--no more cancer-causing mice for me! With my Logitech Zero-Degree Tilt(TM) Cordless Keyboard Elite on the desk and the Marble Mouse Trackball[sic] in hand, I am safe from the scourge of cancer-causing mice forever!
Kris
Maybe if you keep the lights on in your wine cellar!
Kris
Certain overnight radio shows tout the LED flashlights as being more efficient than incandescent or incandescent halogen. This is patently false. The LED lamps are more durable, but most do not use any more or any less energy than the equivalent incandescent or incandescent halogen at the same wattage (and efficacy).
:)
The trend of changing traffic signals to use LED lamps is a question of reducing maintenance costs since the signals last so much longer than the old incandescents. It has nothing at all to do with saving electricity. It has everything to do with installing lamps so that the fixture does not need as much relamping as before. Of course, safety by reducing burnt lamps is also a big reason
On a lighter note, the very newest LED traffic lamps use diffusers so they look more like traditional lamps and not like 100 lamps. Here in Washington DC the green, amber, and red lamps are all being replaced and they are brighter and more attractive than the old lamps were. THey are much better than the green traffic lamps that Fairfax County is experimenting with.
Kris
Naturally it's actually http://www.thebulletin.org/.
Kris
You need not worry about too much competition from the Titan program unless you have heavy-launch capability. The US doesn't even have enough Titans to launch the next-generation spy satellites even if they were finished in time to replace the existing spy satellites. There is a good piece on this in a recent issue of "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" (http://www.bulletin.org/).
Kris
I bought that Brother printer from Amazon for about $100 off the regular price--I paid about $150 for it, which is the lowest of the low-end laser printer costs. (The discount might be related to some slighly off-spec lots since other places sell this printer refurb'd for the same price). I'm going to have to purchase a new drum kit already because the printer doesn't seem able to do quality printing on anyone's stock without leaving a very thin film of toner over the paper. Cheap paper will also leave paper dust on the pickup rollers that scorches onto the paper for the first couple of sheets you do in a day. So that $100 I saved will be spent on a $70 drum kit and experiments with different paper brands. Still, this printer is a good deal if you don't mind the hassle, since it's part of a new generation of printers for which the drum and toner are separate consumable items. This is an excellent trend that I hope to see better printer manufacturers, like HP, take up.
Kris
Even at home, not just at work, I use several computers. I tried having a "mobile home" various ways, like the pathetic Netscape Roaming Profiles. I ended up settled on just using Yahoo to handle all my mail ("mail plus" product), address book, notepad, and file storage ("briefcase" product). I determined that all I really needed everywhere was the administrative office-keeping stuff (mail) and some files to download (briefcase). All the software development and systems administration stuff that had to be kept locally on a machine turned out to be very few things: a few dot-files (.emacs, .kermrc, .profile) and copy of Emacs 19.34b built to work from $HOME directory. I keep those files in Yahoo Briefcase.
Another alternative is to use a hosting provider and access your files remotely from there--same results as using Yahoo but doesn't require a web browser
Kris
The Xbox is not that quiet--the fan makes noise and the hard disk whistles. And while it is Pentium III it only has 128k of L2 cache. I left mine turned on inside an entertainment enclosure (windowed doors, opened back) and it was like a mini oven within 10 minutes.
Kris
We had a variety of IBM mainframes at SUNY Binghamton (NY) as a result of grants from the local IBM facilities. They were much more powerful than the various VAX machines spread around the departments. After school I went to work for IBM on various projects that ran on some seriously huge RS/6000 machines (not mainframe, obviously) as well as the big iron. VM/CMS and MVS were the systems of choice for business at that time and I'm very sad to see them go away. The colorful text-screen oriented IBM 3270 terminals were absolutely perfect for data-entry and point-of-sale terminals. Much later I found Windows machines at other companies that just ran IBM 3270 emulators to connect to these same mainframes that were running 'way back then.
:)
The move to client-server has been very expensive--I don't have quotable sources but you can search on studies done on the cost to businesses of using client-server methodology vs. terminal-mainframe and in many cases the mainframe was cheaper, more reliable, easier to run, the list went on. I believe SciAm did a piece on this issue back in the mid-90's when client-server was in its hey-day.
And, heh, in case anyone is facing the attrition demon, I would be happy to transition back to the mainframe world and put my VM/CMS, MVS, JCL skills back into use at your firm
Kris