I may not be albe to see your medical records that says that you have a heart condition but I can log onto a big insuracne company web site like GHP or Aetna, enter in a password, and see that you have been to the ER 5 times in one year for chest pains, and that you have scheduled heart surgey coming up and a host of other things relating to your medical condition.
Sure, with the correct access you can look these things up, but not from outside of the company right now. Your employer (the guys footing the bill) most probably know who are the largest claim utilizers - but most insurance co's specifically eliminate the social security number so that they cannot tell which individual it is.
The other thing is, can you hack SSL yet? I don't know, but I do know that all confidential information that could be sent on the Web is done so within SSL.
I need to amend this... I re-read the original post a little more carefully...
You didn't mention which OS was on the Gateway, but I would assume it is win98. There is no reason that you cannot configure the desktop so that it has only the 3 or 4 icons that your grandfather uses.
The standard X-variation GUIs are just as hard to learn as Win98, and still require the user to know such things as windows, scroll bars, maximization and minimization.
Why bother with Linux for your grandfather? Is it some techie pride that you must install Linux everywhere possible?
I'd suggest just sticking with whatever OS is there and letting granddad rip. He probably won't care as long as it works well, and I can bet that the performance will not suffer regardless of the OS on the machine.
Linux is not the be-all end-all OS, although it works very well for me in my home situation. (dual pentium II-400, SuSe 6.1, C++ programming)
I kinda feel bad about listening to Pink Floyd at work. It isn't that my work suffers; it's rather that if I'm doing anything other than just listening, I feel the music is, in a way, going to waste. If I'm not giving my full attention to (some of) Pink Floyd's music, it seems to just float on by without affecting me at all, my feelings or emotions.
Pink Floyd is most excellent coding music for a hobbyist programmer. I am under no time pressure to code a particular app, and I know these tunes so well, that I can stop concentrating at "There's a kid who had a big hallucination..." and start concentrating on the music for a few seconds, then switch back to coding.
Floyd is awesome. Other good coding music is Tear for Fears, and Eagles Hell Freezes over. But I have about 130 different CDs from the 80s and early 90s and they all get played sometime...
The whole special was a joke, and now that the show has been "cracked" by one of its subjects, all I can say is "Ha Ha!".:-P
As for journalistic integrity, when has MTV, MTV news, or any of the other Real World (TM) stuff had integrity? Everything on that network is made up for teeney-boppers.
>And to all the people whom this makes angry, do >you really think MS is your enemy? Look at all >the people who fought IBM as the evil Big >Brother
I wouldn't trust IBM, Sun or any other commercial company to rescue us computer users. There have been plenty of articles criticizing Microsoft for subsidizing (infiltratiing) universities, grade schools etc. Guess what? IBM used to do the very same thing.
My CS professor just told me that IBM used to sell *mainframes* to schools for $1 back in the mid 70s. Their thinking was that when graduates went into the real world that they would only know one system - IBM.
Sound familiar? Microsoft is doing the same thing today infiltrating the formerly-unixcentric universities with NT servers and Win98 desktops etc. Don't blame them for trying to rule the world - many companies have come and gone after doing the very same thing.
>When you're at work it's even more free than at >home - you don't have to pay for it!
This is the key phrase that I was searching for in all this feedback. I bet there are lots of people who use the t1 connection at work to download a couple of HOW-TOs, Gnu manuals, or even free E-books, then print them off for personal use. I know I have done that occasionally - most recently with the Gnu Make Manual, since I find INFO extremely difficult to use while also trying to program in emacs. And printing 125 pages on my home InkJet would have taken an hour and cost me a $20 Ink cartridge.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I may not be albe to see your medical records that says that you have a heart condition but I can log onto a big insuracne company web site like GHP or Aetna, enter in a password, and see that you have been to the ER 5 times in one year for chest pains, and that you have scheduled heart surgey coming up and a host of other things relating to your medical condition.
Sure, with the correct access you can look these things up, but not from outside of the company right now. Your employer (the guys footing the bill) most probably know who are the largest claim utilizers - but most insurance co's specifically eliminate the social security number so that they cannot tell which individual it is.
The other thing is, can you hack SSL yet? I don't know, but I do know that all confidential information that could be sent on the Web is done so within SSL.
I need to amend this... I re-read the original post a little more carefully...
You didn't mention which OS was on the Gateway, but I would assume it is win98. There is no reason that you cannot configure the desktop so that it has only the 3 or 4 icons that your grandfather uses.
The standard X-variation GUIs are just as hard to learn as Win98, and still require the user to know such things as windows, scroll bars, maximization and minimization.
Stuart
Why bother with Linux for your grandfather? Is it some techie pride that you must install Linux everywhere possible?
I'd suggest just sticking with whatever OS is there and letting granddad rip. He probably won't care as long as it works well, and I can bet that the performance will not suffer regardless of the OS on the machine.
Linux is not the be-all end-all OS, although it works very well for me in my home situation. (dual pentium II-400, SuSe 6.1, C++ programming)
I kinda feel bad about listening to Pink Floyd at work. It isn't that my work suffers; it's rather that if I'm doing anything other than just listening, I feel the music is, in a way, going to waste. If I'm not giving my full attention to (some of) Pink Floyd's music, it seems to just float on by without affecting me at all, my feelings or emotions.
Pink Floyd is most excellent coding music for a hobbyist programmer. I am under no time pressure to code a particular app, and I know these tunes so well, that I can stop concentrating at "There's a kid who had a big hallucination..." and start concentrating on the music for a few seconds, then switch back to coding.
Floyd is awesome. Other good coding music is Tear for Fears, and Eagles Hell Freezes over. But I have about 130 different CDs from the 80s and early 90s and they all get played sometime...
The whole special was a joke, and now that the show has been "cracked" by one of its subjects, all I can say is "Ha Ha!". :-P
As for journalistic integrity, when has MTV, MTV news, or any of the other Real World (TM) stuff had integrity? Everything on that network is made up for teeney-boppers.
>And to all the people whom this makes angry, do >you really think MS is your enemy? Look at all >the people who fought IBM as the evil Big >Brother
I wouldn't trust IBM, Sun or any other commercial company to rescue us computer users. There have been plenty of articles criticizing Microsoft for subsidizing (infiltratiing) universities, grade schools etc. Guess what? IBM used to do the very same thing.
My CS professor just told me that IBM used to sell *mainframes* to schools for $1 back in the mid 70s. Their thinking was that when graduates went into the real world that they would only know one system - IBM.
Sound familiar? Microsoft is doing the same thing today infiltrating the formerly-unixcentric universities with NT servers and Win98 desktops etc. Don't blame them for trying to rule the world - many companies have come and gone after doing the very same thing.
Keep the faith - open source works.
>When you're at work it's even more free than at >home - you don't have to pay for it!
:-)
This is the key phrase that I was searching for in all this feedback. I bet there are lots of people who use the t1 connection at work to download a couple of HOW-TOs, Gnu manuals, or even free E-books, then print them off for personal use. I know I have done that occasionally - most recently with the Gnu Make Manual, since I find INFO extremely difficult to use while also trying to program in emacs. And printing 125 pages on my home InkJet would have
taken an hour and cost me a $20 Ink cartridge.