You seem willing to spend money on computers & 'net connections, instead of giving the money you used for that to starving people.
Perhaps you could help me to actually do something about starving people instead of accusing me without facts.
I actually have an interest in philanthropy and I do give money and sometimes food to starving and homeless people that I am aware of their situation, as well as food and temporary shelter/healthcare to stray animals, and donations to various organisations (but never tax-exempt, but even if I were in the US I wouldn't base my donation decisions on tax reasons). I also have set up a project to offer free computer infrastructure and web/cvs/svn/imap/email/ftp hosting to free software developers.
There are also many people who spend much more than me on computers and other much more unnecessary stuff, and drive SUVs, but I refuse to buy a car or even a motorbike (admittedly not needed in EU as much as in the US).
So, if you want to do something about hunger etc, and not just to whine at people who use computers for their work, you could perhaps point me at the direction of people who you know are in need of assistance and help me verify their situation. But random whining doesn't help, does it?
Look, you *can* say that Python is wrong from a human-computer interface (HCI) or intuitiveness-of-use viewpoint, in the sense that a normal human would expect another answer. However, letting the HCI viewpoint aside, you need to know that computers are complex machines that expect very specific questions. Telling them to subtract two numbers is not enough. Actually, in traditional strong typed programming languages, you are only allowed to subtract integers or floats, and you can't play with numbers in the general sense (in most langs there are built-in shortcuts though). Simply put, a computer cannot understand what a number is, not unless you tell it whether it needs to be treated as a floating point etc... As all numbers are coded in binary, you need to specify the meaning of each bit. And you do this in Python by specifying that the numbers you type are decimals, otherwise your interpreter will make some assumptions which you don't seem to like. So, whether you get the correct result or not depends on how well you ask your question to your computer. Ambiguous questions will result in inaccurate answers. Whether the way your computer expects questions to be asked actually makes sense to you as a human, however, is an issue in the realms of HCI and whether programming languages should be intuitive or they should require you to RTFM even before making a simple calculation. A legitimate issue, I would say, but not enough to make you say that a programming language is in the wrong. It's just not what you consider intuitive (which, by the way, may be and in many cases is perfectly intuitive to computer scientists and engineers).
Where is your volunteerism?? Why should you expect the government, a company, or anyone else to provide you with wifi service when you can roll out your own??
You are not consumers. You can be producers if you want. Just knock your neighbour's door and ask whether they would like to start a new wifi community network project with you. Connect your home wifis together, and if you find a lot of people to join in then you will have created your own network. Then buy a business plan fixed broadband service or a dedicated line (paid either by the community as a whole or by one richer member who can pay for it) and connect it to your wireless and your network will be connected to the Internet as well.
That simple. Yes, I know, the technology (WiFi) is not perfect and you can't transmit with too much power, but if everyone has a roof and the signal is sufficient from roof to roof, then you don't need anything else. The major difficulty is actually a social one (your neighbors may not understand what volunteerism is), but you should try to educate your neighbors and persuade them why they should join in.
Look what people from my city are doing: AWMN and also look at the photos and some other networks in existence worldwide.
The cage is open guys. You have unlicensed bands that you can use without a permit from FCC or other agency. You even can have RONJA if you like the optical way. You also have telephone lines, modems, and BBS software. Why you don't use all this technology to create free networks? Are you really trained to act only as consumers, expecting that for everything you need you should buy it from someone else? If you aren't happy with what is available, build your own!
If you get into a time machine and get back to the dark ages and you put an image of a dragon in the middle of a mediaeval city you can laugh as you watch the crowd getting crazy and paranoid... until they catch and burn you as a witch (and if you don't look like one, they will make you look like a witch, probably by comparing your weight with that of a duck).
Now, fast forward to 2007. Modern enlightened age you think? Think again... If you install some electronic stuff in a modern US city, you can laugh as you watch the crowd getting crazy and paranoid... until they catch you. What happens next depends very much on how white your skin is, whether you have a beard, and whether your name sounds Muslim. An English name combined with white skin and no facial hair will result in you getting your freedom after some interrogation in a police station, but if you have the "wrong" demographic characteristics then you will end up in a nasty camp in Cuba (By the way I find it interesting how they chose to set up Guantanamo on the same island as a communist dictatorship).
The same can happen if you get into an airport with an electronic nametag on your chest.
Or, perhaps if you walk to enter a train with your iPod wires visible from your pocket.
Welcome to a society where everything that deviates from what is considered normal is equated with terrorism. Very soon every kind of behaviour, from what you see on your computer screen (Treacherous Computing will help with this) to what clothes you wear will be controlled by formal bureaucracies by force of violence if you don't comply. Not really because your behaviour will constitute a real threat, but only because your behaviour is inconsistent with that of a slave.
When (or if) this terrorism fear paranoia passes, future historians will discuss our post-911 age with great interest and will consider it as a prime example of how civilisations can sabotage themselves and self-destruct forgetting hundreds of years of societal and civil evolution.
That's good but who is going to upload it? Most people are stuck with ADSL or cable that has good download speeds but crappy upload rates. Companies seem to think that in the Web 2.0 it is ok to sell access with 256kbps upstream. Ridiculous. TCP/IP is designed to work within synchronous (same down/upload) connections, so selling asynchronous connections makes absolutely no sense.
No very high end desktop drives are SCSI 15k rpm drives, I know as I had a couple a while back
Yeah you are correct, I also have had 4 SCSI HDDs before the advent of the Raptor SATA, but I would think that a SCSI machine starts to enter the realm of workstations rather than desktops.
Those of you who have been in a community wifi network or a free software project probably know the liberating force of a free community. It is my belief that when the gov licenses spectrum, it should also license bits of it for gratis (no charge) to a free networking community. By selling only to highest bidders, the gov essentially denies amateurs their right to create useful communication projects for their communities.
It's slow, but it gets faster if you upgrade the HDD to 7200RPM and you replace the crappy XP with GNU/Linux. For me I don't need much performance, as most of the work I do on it is Email/Web/VPN/SSH. I don't compile software on it, but I SSH to another machine and I do lots of my software development from there, so I really don't care about the CPU speed, and as I don't play games (only chess and FreeCiv occassionally) I don't need a fast graphics card. The only thing I need from an ultramobile is a fast HDD (Flybook ships with 4200RPM but it's a standard 2.5" HDD so I upgraded it by myself to 7200). The price? I got my first Flybook for 2000 EUR (colour red) and when the local price fell my second one for 1000 EUR (a blue one) for backup purposes. Newer models cost up to 4000 EUR.
The most distinguishing features of Flybook are actually its ergonomics, its connectivity (it has a GSM module and newer models have HSDPA), and the ability to work with it even while walking. Yes, thanks to the smart placement of its pointing device and mouse buttons, you can actually be productive while you walk, and I do it many times. The disadvantages of Flybook are its lack of a good distribution network (it's very hard to find), and its high price.
Does it worth its money? It depends on you and on how you use it. If you use it for business purposes it's okay, but I would be reluctant to recommend it solely for entertainment unless you enjoy spending grands. If you are in business and you buy a machine, what you have to think is "will this machine help me make more money/value than I am asked to pay for it?". You also have to think of value in broader terms, eg time saved or lower weight is a kind of value which under the correct circumstances can be translated to money. For example, with a 15.4" laptop you cannot work with it while walking (I have tried it), and its weight will prevent you from getting many batteries with you. With a small subnotebook, you can use the weight gainings to carry more batteries and its small size to use it everywhere and not only while being seated. This directly translates to increased productivity. And if you are in the software/consilting/Internet business this will mean that you will have more time available to fix more bugs, satisfy more clients, and channel your creativity and entrepreneurship in more ways. For me, Flybook has definitely been an asset, considering the many times I have used it to quickly fix software issues, bring up dead servers, or solve business or client's emergencies, and all that without having to carry 15.4" behemoths.
By the way, if you need laptops that combine performance with mobility I would recommend those in the 10-13" range. Many laptops in these screen sizes come with Core 2 Duo and decent graphics. If you want more mobility (which is what I want), there are UMPCs like Sony's (4.5") and ultramobiles like Flybook (8.9"). For full productivity you may like to consider 14" models.
Linux as a complete desktop OS is still relatively new and even now not entirely complete. Advocacy aside, why would anyone willingly choose a solution that means deprivation? Why would anyone suggest it?
I use Debian GNU/Linux as my primary platform and I happily work with it on desktops and laptops. Why would anyone suggest Windows in their sane mind is beyond my imagination.
My primary OS is Debian GNU/Linux and it is an antivirus by itself. XP still exists as a dual-boot option but rarely gets booted at all. Why so many companies insist on MS, I really don't know, but I guess they just don't know how to hack a GNU/Linux OS to their own needs.
Low-end desktops use 7200. High-end desktops use 10000RPM (Raptor SATA ATM). All my disks are 10000RPM for years since Raptor first came out. BTW there are 10000RPM 2.5" disks as well but too hard to find.
2. The internal guts are too hard to work with. Anything more than a RAM upgrade is a nightmare of tiny screws and shielding tape.
Hard drives are easy to replace. I have changed the HDD on all of my laptops to upgrade to 7200RPM. On some models you have to remove the keyboard, but it's not that hard.
When out of my home office, I do my business mainly on a Flybook which has a 8.9" screen, and it's exactly the right size for me. Really. My only wish is that it had a higher resolution, like 1280x720, because its 1024x600 is too low for some kinds of work. For me, anything larger than 12" is too heavy and too big to be used in-car or while walking etc. Flybook is nice in the sense that it is designed to be used while standing, as it has its pointing device exactly at the correct place to allow you to use it while walking or standing in a queue, and it has built-in GPRS, UMTS or HSDPA Internet. And Debian (with some hacking) runs ok on it.
I actually upgrade all my laptops to 7200RPM HDDs as soon as I buy them. Even subnotebooks (the heavenly feeling when changing from 4200 to 7200 is hard to put in words). I have no problem with the CPU, as long as the HDD is fast and there is ample memory. Yes, they do heat up the laptop and eat up the battery rather quickly, but what can you do when you need it, short of upgrading to an SSD? Perhaps the next step (before the SSD, I mean) is to put one of these 10000RPM 2.5" HDDs on a laptop, but I still haven't tried it, even though my desktop HDDs are 10000RPM (and yes, the difference between 10k and 7200 is noticeable).
I see no logic in configuring your laptops to suspend when you close the lid. The reasonable thing to do is to simply blank the screen. I actually save lots of battery life by closing the lid when I don't need the screen, and my connections (SSH, HSDPA 3.5G) are still alive. Actually most of the power is eaten by the screen, so if you blank it there is little incentive to do a full suspend.
I actually do a lot of my work on a ship using an HSDPA/3.5G connection and various laptops. One of my laptops is an IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad machine. On one occasion it fell down on the metallic upper deck's floor. A PCMCIA (3G) card on it was completely destroyed, but there was absolutely no damage on the laptop itself. Not even a small scratch. No damage to my 7200RPM HDD (Seagate, custom upgrade by me) at all, which is incredible considering that it was working when it fell down. The durability of my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad really surprised me. My biggest problem was actually my lost SSH connection (which I revived soon as I luckily had another 3G terminal with me, and from that day I always use the nohup command whenever I am about to execute anything time-consuming on a server).
On another occassion, the same IBM ThinkPad machine was exposed to large amounts of seawater by accident (shit happens). The water actually entered into the laptop through the cooling holes. Again, the laptop had absolutely no problem working.
In general, having used 4 different ThinkPad models over years, I can say that their durability is great. A very old IBM with a 100MHz processor still works as if it were new, and its screen hinges have not shown any signs of aging. An old Dell Latitude I have, however, suffers from a too relaxed screen which dances on every little move (never bothered to fix it as I don't use it much).
It also worths noting that my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads have never had problems with radio interference, although other laptops I have go crazy (random keystrokes/mouse clicks/speaker noise etc) whenever I place a 3G terminal too close (2-4 cm) on them.
9. Can't upgrade HDD (USB external HDD would be an options)
What models are you using? Most laptops have upgradeable HDDs, although sometimes you lose the warranty (no big deal if you know your machine is ok).
The only HDDs that are problematic to upgrade are these hard-to-find 1.8inch. The normal 2.5" HDDs are easy to replace. On some models you have to remove the keyboard, but it's not that hard.
I have actually replaced the HDD on all of my laptops with 7200RPM models.
Slashdot Mirror
Having Intel and AMD with different SSE4 sets is a headache. Couldn't they just agree to a standard?
Perhaps you could help me to actually do something about starving people instead of accusing me without facts.
I actually have an interest in philanthropy and I do give money and sometimes food to starving and homeless people that I am aware of their situation, as well as food and temporary shelter/healthcare to stray animals, and donations to various organisations (but never tax-exempt, but even if I were in the US I wouldn't base my donation decisions on tax reasons). I also have set up a project to offer free computer infrastructure and web/cvs/svn/imap/email/ftp hosting to free software developers.
There are also many people who spend much more than me on computers and other much more unnecessary stuff, and drive SUVs, but I refuse to buy a car or even a motorbike (admittedly not needed in EU as much as in the US).
So, if you want to do something about hunger etc, and not just to whine at people who use computers for their work, you could perhaps point me at the direction of people who you know are in need of assistance and help me verify their situation. But random whining doesn't help, does it?
They actually do worse things, like torturing Tibetan nuns, and you worry whether you can access your favourite search engine in China?
I would say that proprietary math software is less of a problem when the result is exportable to open formats, not that there is no problem at all.
Look, you *can* say that Python is wrong from a human-computer interface (HCI) or intuitiveness-of-use viewpoint, in the sense that a normal human would expect another answer. However, letting the HCI viewpoint aside, you need to know that computers are complex machines that expect very specific questions. Telling them to subtract two numbers is not enough. Actually, in traditional strong typed programming languages, you are only allowed to subtract integers or floats, and you can't play with numbers in the general sense (in most langs there are built-in shortcuts though). Simply put, a computer cannot understand what a number is, not unless you tell it whether it needs to be treated as a floating point etc... As all numbers are coded in binary, you need to specify the meaning of each bit. And you do this in Python by specifying that the numbers you type are decimals, otherwise your interpreter will make some assumptions which you don't seem to like. So, whether you get the correct result or not depends on how well you ask your question to your computer. Ambiguous questions will result in inaccurate answers. Whether the way your computer expects questions to be asked actually makes sense to you as a human, however, is an issue in the realms of HCI and whether programming languages should be intuitive or they should require you to RTFM even before making a simple calculation. A legitimate issue, I would say, but not enough to make you say that a programming language is in the wrong. It's just not what you consider intuitive (which, by the way, may be and in many cases is perfectly intuitive to computer scientists and engineers).
The Internet (at least the one before the Eternal September) is such a wonderful place that being not addicted to it is incomprehensive.
Where is your volunteerism?? Why should you expect the government, a company, or anyone else to provide you with wifi service when you can roll out your own??
You are not consumers. You can be producers if you want. Just knock your neighbour's door and ask whether they would like to start a new wifi community network project with you. Connect your home wifis together, and if you find a lot of people to join in then you will have created your own network. Then buy a business plan fixed broadband service or a dedicated line (paid either by the community as a whole or by one richer member who can pay for it) and connect it to your wireless and your network will be connected to the Internet as well.
That simple. Yes, I know, the technology (WiFi) is not perfect and you can't transmit with too much power, but if everyone has a roof and the signal is sufficient from roof to roof, then you don't need anything else. The major difficulty is actually a social one (your neighbors may not understand what volunteerism is), but you should try to educate your neighbors and persuade them why they should join in.
Look what people from my city are doing: AWMN and also look at the photos and some other networks in existence worldwide.
The cage is open guys. You have unlicensed bands that you can use without a permit from FCC or other agency. You even can have RONJA if you like the optical way. You also have telephone lines, modems, and BBS software. Why you don't use all this technology to create free networks? Are you really trained to act only as consumers, expecting that for everything you need you should buy it from someone else? If you aren't happy with what is available, build your own!
If you get into a time machine and get back to the dark ages and you put an image of a dragon in the middle of a mediaeval city you can laugh as you watch the crowd getting crazy and paranoid... until they catch and burn you as a witch (and if you don't look like one, they will make you look like a witch, probably by comparing your weight with that of a duck).
Now, fast forward to 2007. Modern enlightened age you think? Think again... If you install some electronic stuff in a modern US city, you can laugh as you watch the crowd getting crazy and paranoid... until they catch you. What happens next depends very much on how white your skin is, whether you have a beard, and whether your name sounds Muslim. An English name combined with white skin and no facial hair will result in you getting your freedom after some interrogation in a police station, but if you have the "wrong" demographic characteristics then you will end up in a nasty camp in Cuba (By the way I find it interesting how they chose to set up Guantanamo on the same island as a communist dictatorship).
The same can happen if you get into an airport with an electronic nametag on your chest.
Or, perhaps if you walk to enter a train with your iPod wires visible from your pocket.
Welcome to a society where everything that deviates from what is considered normal is equated with terrorism. Very soon every kind of behaviour, from what you see on your computer screen (Treacherous Computing will help with this) to what clothes you wear will be controlled by formal bureaucracies by force of violence if you don't comply. Not really because your behaviour will constitute a real threat, but only because your behaviour is inconsistent with that of a slave.
When (or if) this terrorism fear paranoia passes, future historians will discuss our post-911 age with great interest and will consider it as a prime example of how civilisations can sabotage themselves and self-destruct forgetting hundreds of years of societal and civil evolution.
That's good but who is going to upload it? Most people are stuck with ADSL or cable that has good download speeds but crappy upload rates. Companies seem to think that in the Web 2.0 it is ok to sell access with 256kbps upstream. Ridiculous. TCP/IP is designed to work within synchronous (same down/upload) connections, so selling asynchronous connections makes absolutely no sense.
Yeah you are correct, I also have had 4 SCSI HDDs before the advent of the Raptor SATA, but I would think that a SCSI machine starts to enter the realm of workstations rather than desktops.
Those of you who have been in a community wifi network or a free software project probably know the liberating force of a free community. It is my belief that when the gov licenses spectrum, it should also license bits of it for gratis (no charge) to a free networking community. By selling only to highest bidders, the gov essentially denies amateurs their right to create useful communication projects for their communities.
It's slow, but it gets faster if you upgrade the HDD to 7200RPM and you replace the crappy XP with GNU/Linux. For me I don't need much performance, as most of the work I do on it is Email/Web/VPN/SSH. I don't compile software on it, but I SSH to another machine and I do lots of my software development from there, so I really don't care about the CPU speed, and as I don't play games (only chess and FreeCiv occassionally) I don't need a fast graphics card. The only thing I need from an ultramobile is a fast HDD (Flybook ships with 4200RPM but it's a standard 2.5" HDD so I upgraded it by myself to 7200). The price? I got my first Flybook for 2000 EUR (colour red) and when the local price fell my second one for 1000 EUR (a blue one) for backup purposes. Newer models cost up to 4000 EUR.
The most distinguishing features of Flybook are actually its ergonomics, its connectivity (it has a GSM module and newer models have HSDPA), and the ability to work with it even while walking. Yes, thanks to the smart placement of its pointing device and mouse buttons, you can actually be productive while you walk, and I do it many times. The disadvantages of Flybook are its lack of a good distribution network (it's very hard to find), and its high price.
Does it worth its money? It depends on you and on how you use it. If you use it for business purposes it's okay, but I would be reluctant to recommend it solely for entertainment unless you enjoy spending grands. If you are in business and you buy a machine, what you have to think is "will this machine help me make more money/value than I am asked to pay for it?". You also have to think of value in broader terms, eg time saved or lower weight is a kind of value which under the correct circumstances can be translated to money. For example, with a 15.4" laptop you cannot work with it while walking (I have tried it), and its weight will prevent you from getting many batteries with you. With a small subnotebook, you can use the weight gainings to carry more batteries and its small size to use it everywhere and not only while being seated. This directly translates to increased productivity. And if you are in the software/consilting/Internet business this will mean that you will have more time available to fix more bugs, satisfy more clients, and channel your creativity and entrepreneurship in more ways. For me, Flybook has definitely been an asset, considering the many times I have used it to quickly fix software issues, bring up dead servers, or solve business or client's emergencies, and all that without having to carry 15.4" behemoths.
By the way, if you need laptops that combine performance with mobility I would recommend those in the 10-13" range. Many laptops in these screen sizes come with Core 2 Duo and decent graphics. If you want more mobility (which is what I want), there are UMPCs like Sony's (4.5") and ultramobiles like Flybook (8.9"). For full productivity you may like to consider 14" models.
I use Debian GNU/Linux as my primary platform and I happily work with it on desktops and laptops. Why would anyone suggest Windows in their sane mind is beyond my imagination.
They don't. I do all my presentations with OpenOffice.org Impress and it works great. Even the wireless presentation gadgets work with it just fine.
My primary OS is Debian GNU/Linux and it is an antivirus by itself. XP still exists as a dual-boot option but rarely gets booted at all. Why so many companies insist on MS, I really don't know, but I guess they just don't know how to hack a GNU/Linux OS to their own needs.
That's why refrigerators exist.
What about Flybook VM? It is good for aeroplane users and for those who want to move the screen away or closer.
Low-end desktops use 7200. High-end desktops use 10000RPM (Raptor SATA ATM). All my disks are 10000RPM for years since Raptor first came out. BTW there are 10000RPM 2.5" disks as well but too hard to find.
Hard drives are easy to replace. I have changed the HDD on all of my laptops to upgrade to 7200RPM. On some models you have to remove the keyboard, but it's not that hard.
When out of my home office, I do my business mainly on a Flybook which has a 8.9" screen, and it's exactly the right size for me. Really. My only wish is that it had a higher resolution, like 1280x720, because its 1024x600 is too low for some kinds of work. For me, anything larger than 12" is too heavy and too big to be used in-car or while walking etc. Flybook is nice in the sense that it is designed to be used while standing, as it has its pointing device exactly at the correct place to allow you to use it while walking or standing in a queue, and it has built-in GPRS, UMTS or HSDPA Internet. And Debian (with some hacking) runs ok on it.
AFAIk only Flybook VM has separated the screen but it did so for aeroplane users, not for replaceability.
I actually upgrade all my laptops to 7200RPM HDDs as soon as I buy them. Even subnotebooks (the heavenly feeling when changing from 4200 to 7200 is hard to put in words). I have no problem with the CPU, as long as the HDD is fast and there is ample memory. Yes, they do heat up the laptop and eat up the battery rather quickly, but what can you do when you need it, short of upgrading to an SSD? Perhaps the next step (before the SSD, I mean) is to put one of these 10000RPM 2.5" HDDs on a laptop, but I still haven't tried it, even though my desktop HDDs are 10000RPM (and yes, the difference between 10k and 7200 is noticeable).
I see no logic in configuring your laptops to suspend when you close the lid. The reasonable thing to do is to simply blank the screen. I actually save lots of battery life by closing the lid when I don't need the screen, and my connections (SSH, HSDPA 3.5G) are still alive. Actually most of the power is eaten by the screen, so if you blank it there is little incentive to do a full suspend.
I actually do a lot of my work on a ship using an HSDPA/3.5G connection and various laptops. One of my laptops is an IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad machine. On one occasion it fell down on the metallic upper deck's floor. A PCMCIA (3G) card on it was completely destroyed, but there was absolutely no damage on the laptop itself. Not even a small scratch. No damage to my 7200RPM HDD (Seagate, custom upgrade by me) at all, which is incredible considering that it was working when it fell down. The durability of my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad really surprised me. My biggest problem was actually my lost SSH connection (which I revived soon as I luckily had another 3G terminal with me, and from that day I always use the nohup command whenever I am about to execute anything time-consuming on a server).
On another occassion, the same IBM ThinkPad machine was exposed to large amounts of seawater by accident (shit happens). The water actually entered into the laptop through the cooling holes. Again, the laptop had absolutely no problem working.
In general, having used 4 different ThinkPad models over years, I can say that their durability is great. A very old IBM with a 100MHz processor still works as if it were new, and its screen hinges have not shown any signs of aging. An old Dell Latitude I have, however, suffers from a too relaxed screen which dances on every little move (never bothered to fix it as I don't use it much).
It also worths noting that my IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads have never had problems with radio interference, although other laptops I have go crazy (random keystrokes/mouse clicks/speaker noise etc) whenever I place a 3G terminal too close (2-4 cm) on them.
What models are you using? Most laptops have upgradeable HDDs, although sometimes you lose the warranty (no big deal if you know your machine is ok).
The only HDDs that are problematic to upgrade are these hard-to-find 1.8inch. The normal 2.5" HDDs are easy to replace. On some models you have to remove the keyboard, but it's not that hard.
I have actually replaced the HDD on all of my laptops with 7200RPM models.