Movable Type--which has comments, RSS and Trackback by default--is free for personal use as long as you can do your own hosting. If you want a remotely hosted blog on their recently-launched TypePad.com site, you pay $5 or so a month.
Blogger is now making comments, RSS and such free as long as you do your own hosting of the generated files. If you want a blog with these features hosted on their Blogspot.com site, you pay $5 a month.
It's called responding to competition. With more and more blogging systems offering things like RSS and comments for free to people who posted to their own existing webspace, Blogger had to add those features to its free offering. The revenue is in hosting and ads and maybe in commercial licenses and services. I don't imagine that bring-your-own-hosting Blogger Plus was drawing too many new subscribers in recent months.
You know, joke though this may be, I just sat here for a second and tapped out some Morse on my leg and it seemed faster than both standard number-pad typing and T2, maybe not as fast as a someone with steady hands using a thumb-board, but not bad--and you can do it blind.
Going much faster, I think, would require a decent telegraphy key on a flat surface, which is sort of unweildy for a cellphone, but a key in the form of, say, a ring worn on a finger that you activate by tapping a specific code (CQ?) on, say, your leg or a tabletop wouldn't be half bad. You could put an LED in it and have it flash signals to indicate when it's on, and use standard Morse to indicate who you're messaging and the end of a message or transmission.
Possibly even faster would be "voice recognition" for spoken Morse Code. What you lose in speed over standard text dictation, you'd make up in accuracy (after all, it only needs to recognize two basic sounds: "dit" and "dah") and it could read your words back to you as you dictate. Might not be a bad way to do 100% hands-free text messaging.
Any chance IBM's legal team could string together SCO's actions of the last couple of weeks and make a case that SCO was trying to blackmail IBM? Maybe there's a RICO case here. Ha.
Why these kids today want sound meters
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Nokia 5100 Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Seems to me that the sound meter would be fun for people with booming sound systems in their cars and trucks, both for bragging rights and as a possible defense against getting ticketed for violating noise ordinances.
There are plenty of odes to technology from secular totalitarian states. Dig into poetry from the likes of the USSR, Communist China, North Korea, Nazi Germany and their satellite states for an endless supply of verse about rockets, hydroelectric dams, nuclear submarines, tractors and vaccination campaigns. Mao Zedong himself penned quite a few fetching works about rural electrification and massive irrigation projects in his day.
It's not just for dictatorships, of course. No country that prides itself on its technological superiority over its neighbors can do without at least a few state-sanctioned sonnets about whatever it is the country produces. Major empires of any kind tend to produce plenty of it during their big expansionist periods. Go back to the 19th Century and you'll find plenty of American poems about the building of railroads, telegraph lines and steamships, for instance.
Poems about technology tend not to hold up very well over time. A poem about a gigantic concrete dam isn't quite so resonant 30 years later when a dam twice as big is built a couple hundred miles upriver and the first dam is covered in scaffolding for 10 years at a time for repairs to some of that concrete and one of the turbines. A poem about an emotional moment in your life conjured up by seeing the dam covered in that scaffolding has a better chance of holding up. People tend to be more interesting than technology in the long run, and the good poems with, uh, technology in them tend not to be about technology at all.
As only one person in this whole thread seems to have noted, this isn't about Flash plugins or Cold Fusion MX. It's about cutting off Apple's air supply. Just as Apple has been buying up a few pro video and music tool companies and discontinuing the Windows versions, this would be a means for discontinuing Mac versions of some of the killer apps that are run heavily on Macs. If you can't get Flash and Dreamweaver (and to a lesser extent, Fireworks, Director, Freehand and Fontographer) for the Mac, the Mac suddenly loses at least a third of its pro user base. Lose the web designers, and you also lose the people and companies that use Macs for that and other purposes. Once they have to move web people to PCs, they'll move the Photoshop/Illustrator people to PCs, too. Then the Quark people. Poof. Within two years, the only professional uses for Macs will be video production and some music.
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but when I see the word "homebrew" on what's mostly a computer-hobbyist site, I think homebrew electronics and stuff, you know, like building radios and oscillators and things with blinky lights (cf. old Heathkit catalogs, the 1970s Homebrew Computer Club et al). Instead it's just someone looking for beermaking pen-pals.
Michael's just an idiot
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239 MPG Car
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
The editorial comments are often pretty dumb and uninformed, but in this case we're dealing with Michael, who doesn't know a damn thing about anything. I wonder if he's ever read a newspaper more complex than USA Today. Probably not. All those big words and funny names, and no good stories about anime and hobbits.
I've been using Palms for over 5 years now and haven't been without one except when one's been broken and the new one's on the way. Started with a Palm Personal, and now I'm using the $50 Kyocera 6035 monochrome smartphone.
Can't live without it, or at least I can't work without it. All my phone numbers are in there, password reminders, trouble ticket confirmation numbers, my schedule, my to-dos and scheduled calls for the day, my friends' birthdays, recent customer call notes (I sync with ACT), my shopping list (silly as it sounds), the name of the guy at the auto repair place who gave me an honest estimate a few months back, the name of my barber...
And since I'm a real estate agent nowadays, my financial and loan calculators are there, as is a wireless MLS search applet so I can look something up if I'm driving or walking past it, local movie listings (synced automatically from Yahoo). And also thanks to it being a PDA phone, I can also quickly check, read and send email using both my personal and business accounts. A Palm with a 9.6kbps data connection is an awful SSH client and web browser, but I have those, too, and just used both a few days ago to recreate a mail account I'd misrouted the night before when I set up some spam filters and notifiers.
Putting this latter batch of stuff aside, I find the core functions indispensible. As a phonebook, addressbook, to-do-list and memo pad, it's great. You wouldn't want to write a book or take serious meeting notes with a stylus, but for the quick jottngs you'd otherwise scrawl on napkins, post-its and business cards, a good PDA is hard to beat. And it's smaller than any of those other things. It's been years since I last drove past a supermarket or drugstore and cursed myself for leaving the list at home.
As for spending lots of time syncing and messing with software, you sound like a Linux hobbyist who installs and recompiles new apps every day. If you use your computer rather than tinker and play with it, what maintenance is there? Maybe once a year I install some new stuff that needs to sync and spend a few minutes checking the clocks and looking at the settings, but that's about it.
I've had some games over the years, but really, apart from something stylus-friendly like Scrabble, PDAs are terrible for games. And why anyone would want a fragile, touchscreen MP3 player for 2-3 times the price of a much more rugged one is beyond me. If you don't need an organizer, don't get a PDA. They're organizers.
Maybe the old 5.1 or 6.x versions of WordPerfect for SCO Unix will work even on modern Linuxes. There's an old HOWTO. Check Google. Some DOS word processors like WordPerfect, XyWrite and the like might work under emulation, but getting a SCO one wotking wouldn't feel like emulation when it comes to things like navigating the filesystems, running multiuser, and using colors to signify formatting over terminal emulation.
I'm not sure "non-geeky users" are going to be keen on any console-mode word processor, no matter how capable it is, though. I guess you know your users best.
Let's see. Yeah, BlueCurve uses a similar antialiased bolded sans-serif font family as BeOS..and MacOS X..and WinXP. And they gave a much cleaner look to the icons-and-labels elements of GNOME, which shares the interface convention with BeOS..and OS X..and WinXP.
Or are you referring to the swoopy blue desktop wallpaper that's similar to BeOS..and OS X and WinXP?
Let us know if RedHat stole any of your bitmaps. That would be bad--and it would be proof that they really do pay attention to the Open BeOS project. I'm sure it's right up there on RedHat's agenda with AmigaDOS.
Simnply using nice antialiased fonts in that family and designing a set of eye-pleasing color icons only shows that RedHat has a better graphic artist working for them than Ximian and TheKompany do. Which should surprise nobody.
Me, I wear glasses, ones with a pretty thick lens on the left at that. The frames get a little in the way of my peripheral vision. But I don't want Lasik. Why? Because of the failure rate--even if it's somehow down to only 1%, and I'm not sure it is.
Forget worrying about not achieving the 20/20 vision you want and that many people get from it. Worry instead about the real risk of corneal damage that will leave your vision worse than it was before, with permanent starbursts and haloes like you're looking through scratched, scuffed glasses all the time.
Will this happen to you? Probably not. In fact, if you have the sort of vision that Lasik corrects, you have a well over 95% chance of getting the great vision without glasses that you want. It's just that if you draw the short straw, you could find your ability to read a screen pretty thoroughly ruined, with or without glasses.
Weigh the benefits against the risks, and if you decide to do it, note that most surgeons have you sign a boilerplate contract that bars you from suing them if your vision is ruined. Who's the real winner?
In Russia and many of the former Soviet Bloc countries, the subways have a clever system that does almost the same thing at a tiny fraction of the cost. They have displays showing how much time has passed since the last train arrived. For less than a dollar's worth of electronics per station, plus a digital numeric display, you get what most passengers really want: a reasonable gauge of how long they'll be waiting. While it's not going to be able to tell you when the next train is delayed, how much expense is that really worth if you're not putting position tracking in place for other reasons already? Obviously photocells and mechanical relays attached to a time counter isn't viable for a trackless system like buses, but a similarly cheap thing could be done with low-power radio trasponders in the vehicles and receivers at the stations.
If a sophisticated tracking system (whether via GPS or via transponders at waypoints) is put into place for other reasons anyway, of course go ahead and mine the data for a sophisticated time-announcement service instead.
By the way, I've never seen a CRT or LCD-panel system in a public transportation system that was in very good condition for long. Even if vandalism isn't a concern, general wear from air pollution, bad weather, cleaning fluids, CRT burn-in, LCD failures, etc. could make the displays expensive to maintain. Will the displays also be used for advertising or important public information that can't be conveyed on printed signboards? If not, I'd look into the cost of a simple electromechanical or digital alphanumeric display showing the times. It's less glamorous and versatile, but might be much cheaper, especially over time.
GAIM was nice to have around on Unix. Too bad the presence of a widely-available Win32 version will force AOL to block it once and for all, in order to maintain their legal position against opening their system up to Microsoft.
Well, there's the 6 or so programs you can buy for Windows in the $25-$50 price range at any CompUSA or major mailorder vendor, like "3D Home Architect" and "Home Builder 3D" and "3D Home Designer", from companies like Broderbund and IMSI. Places liike Circuit City and Best Buy also carry a few of them, as should your local big-box discount chain like Wal-Mart.
Or were you looking for a (free) Linux alternative? There's really nothing at all like that in the free-Unix space yet. There's okay 2D and 3D CAD software out there, but nothing with an interface for easy, amateur floorplan design, rendering geared toward easy, quick views of room interiors and walkthroughs, or the huge texture and object libraries the commercial Windows packages have.
Cliff, do you even read these Ask Slashdot submissions? Have you ever been in a store that sells consumer software? What's next from Ask Slashdot? "Word Processors that Can Use Multiple Fonts?" "Does anyone make color printers?" "Anyone have instructions for rotary telephones?"
As someone else up there said, burn CDs or just get yourself some flash cards and a USB card reader. It's a whole lot easier to install a USB storage driver on the occasional PC than it is to set up an ad-hoc network, at least until Apple's Rendezvous shows up in Windows and Unix.
Too much data to transfer via flash cards? I gather that it isn't because you're willing to use 802.11b, which is no faster than USB. Even so, if you really need the speed, get a Firewire PC Card and a matching portable hard drive. Macs can mount PC-formatted ones just fine. Again, carry around a floppy with the necessary Windows Firewire card drivers just in case, or better yet, jot down the URL for getting it via the Web.
It's not glamorous, and it sure would be nice if 25 years into the personal computing era simple things like spur-of-the-moment peer-to-peer data transfer were easy to do, but it'll get the data moved without too much hassle.
You didn't say what the machines are going to do or what you server situation is. Linux with KDE and a browser-only version of Mozilla (no mail or news) would make for a very good web terminal, complete with Flash support. And if you have a couple of good file servers sitting behind it, you can network-boot them so that machines are interchangeable and don't necessarily need any software installed on them. Then you're just in the business of maintaining file servers, but they don't need to be big ones as they'd have to be if you were deploying, say, X terminals.
But what else do people do at these terminals? Do they get to use Word and Excel? Any custom Windows-based reference tools that aren't available over the web? Educational titles?
StarOffice/OpenOffice is okay, but it can be a little confusing for the kiosk user. It's one thing for a consumer or office worker to spend a couple of hours getting the hang of it if they're replacing MS Office with it. It's quite another to expect people to be productive in it on a casual, walk-in basis. You'll probably also want to customize it to replace the load/save buttons on the OpenOffice toolbars with buttons hooked to macros that load and save in MS Office formats by default. A kiosk user probably isn't going to want to save things in native StarOffice formats.
By all means ignore others' advice to remove floppy drives if you want. If you're comfortable with letting people use floppies to load and save their work under Win2000, you can do it just fine with Linux.
One nice potential savings with Linux is that you can present a customized, locked-down desktop environment like those that Windows system-management tools let you create--without any additional software or fees necessary. Take KDE and modify the guest "start" menus and desktop to include only the things you want to offer: the browser, maybe some desktop shortcuts to popular webmail services and instant-messaging tools, the word processor, a floppy formatter, and a logout button, for instance.
I'm still not convinced there are good reasons to switch over; you certainly don't want to make the systems less useful to the people who use them. I'm assuming you're facing mandatory upgrades from Microsoft and will soon have to choose between paying $300 per machine in Software Assurance with more of the same in two years, or biting the bullet and getting rid of the commercial software.
Depending on your needs, it certainly can work, and can work well. Linux (and Unix in general) is a great way to deploy rock solid centrally-managed, locked-down systems at a low cost. Just make sure you can give people the applications they need and present them in an easy-to-use, zero-training way.
What's "non-clueful" about people who don't want to run a second desktop environment on top of the one they already have? What's wrong with wanting copy-and-paste that works well and being able to sync your addressbook to an offline laptop and a PDA?
I'm assuming your current system's worst problem (if there's even a problem at all) is that this Access-based system isn't integrated with your e-mail clients. It sure is nice to be able to access and select entries from your addressbook straight into the "To:" and "Cc:" fields of the message composition interface. I'll bet that's what will make users happiest. Maybe you should make user productivity and user happiness your primary goal, and not pick a backend technology first. If users are happy with the current system (and they probably aren't), is it a speed issue you could address by migrating the data to a better database and keeping the Access frontend, or is it an interface and data model issue that points to the complete overhaul you have in mind?
That said, LDAP's a good, flexible, extensible way to store multiuser, multi-departmental addressbooks. Go for it. But unless you're a complete jerk, you'll only use it if you can provide the users with interfaces that are at least as convenient (from their standpoint, not yours) as what they have now, and are preferably better. I don't think ugly XWindow applications (and X itself) glopped onto their Windows desktops are the answer.
You can get a good interface between addressbook and e-mail with Outlook. Heck, you can get that with the web interface to Exchange or Notes. What mail system are you using? Generic IMAP? Fine.
Granted, even with the best antivirus protection pushed out to every machine and aggressive scanning on the servers and WSH disabled in Outlook, you still may not be able to sleep nights knowing Outlook's out there. Maybe you can deploy a nice LDAP-maintenance tool or two for people to edit the addressbooks with (a simple web one and a complex, advanced Java one for power users) along with a mail client that can access the same LDAP store read-only.
Ah, you see the apparent contradiction between the comprehensive planning that creates unlivable sprawl and the fact that the planning itself comes from government.
Once you look at the history of postwar new-suburban development as it really happened, the two reconcile pretty well. Yep, the zoning plans that created decentralized, traffic-clogged suburbs came from municipal governments--but the municipal governments literally came from the developers. Putting aside the charming histories of the big cities "founded" by railroad moguls and land speculators, the most extreme examples come in the suburbs built out of nothing in the last forty years: a developer would devise a master plan for a town-sized piece of property in an unincorporated area, they'd have six of their employees move into houses built on the land, and those six people and their families would vote to incorporate a city made up entirely of people tied to the development.
Florida's population is exploding; contrary to the popular image, it's less a state of retirees than it is a state of immigrants (from within the US and from abroad) and of young families.
The traffic problems have gotten awful, and not for lack of highways and 6-lane through roads. The bigger problem is much of Florida's other defining characteristic: fifty years of unregulated sprawl. South Florida has the same problems Los Angeles is finally starting to address. Office space, commerce and residential areas are kept separate, spread out and decentralized, and both coasts are hemmed in by the Everglades. Once the rather limited 20-miles strips of land along the coasts are built on, it just gets denser and denser, and that's what's happening. But unlike New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, Chicago, Moscow, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong or [insert viable city here], the "downtowns" aren't as dominant as they should be, and even in the cities, many neighborhoods are car-oriented.
As in L.A., this makes intercity train service a lot less useful. What good is it if only one in four business travelers can get off a train within a quick local transit or cab ride of their destination? Is a commuter train system going to get a lot of passengers if most people have to drive a half hour in gridlock just to get to a station--and there's no end station near their workplace? (Ask Southeast Florida commuters: the current north-south-only Tri-Rail is enthusiastically embraced by people who live close to one station and work close to another, but shunned by everyone else.)
There are a lot of people in the Palm Beach-Miami corridor, but they're relatively spread out and they commute in every possible direction. Intercity rail is an important part of what the state's metro areas need, but it's just not going to make real inroads as an alternative to crowded highways until the "last mile" solutions are also in place. More mixed-use planning and zoning will help by letting people live and work with less need for cars, as it's been helping LA and Atlanta, but that will be a long time in coming. In the meantime, workplaces are so scattered and decentralized that buses take too long to get anyone anywhere useful, and extensive commuter and light rail would have to be practically everywhere, with lots of parallel east-west and north-south lines and express tracks in order to work.
On its own, this high-speed rail network may well only do what its detractors think it will do: ferry families from Florida's coastal cities to Disney World for weekend trips.
No, I can't say that I've wished Apple's Xserve ran Linux. OS X is a more polished OS than Linux is, especially on this hardware. It can run essentially all the same software and then some, it has a better JVM and far, far better administration tools for everything from directory services and Apache to Samba. It's got great monitoring tools and drivers for its hardware, true plug-and-play support for things like Firewire RAID arrays, unified management of SMB, Appleshare and NFS file sharing, and commercial grade on-site support for all of the above.
By going to Linux on it, you get rid of the nice development tools, you sacrifice a lot of the Mac OS 8.x/9.x application compatibility and all of the OS X compatibility. You trade wonderful, richly-featured and consistently designed distributed admin tools for things like webmin. And you give up several avenues for support.
It's not like PPC Linux will let you run the many x86 commercial packages out there. So unless you're a Linux shop already and someone has given you a free Xserve, why put Linux on it? Surely you can find 1U hardware with comparable performance and more mature Linux driver support for a lot less money, no?
So no. No, I haven't ever wanted to run Linux on an Xserve.
How about just connecting a cheap, AC-powered tape recorder to your sound card and if you want to automate it, plug it into a $10 lamp timer?
People used to do this all the time back in the days before streaming audio. It's called "hooking a tape recorder up to a timer".
Granted, these things called "tapes" can't go in your iPod, but they are compatible with those three "portable tape players" sitting in your desk drawer, and they also play on that thing called a "tape deck" that you normally stick the iPod's car adapter into.
Well, your company is a private architectural firm that has Macs and large-format plotters so it would seem to follow that something that costs about the same as two more secondhand two-year-old G4's might be within your price range, even if the CAD software you're using didn't cost Western prices. Believe it or not, most computerized architectural firms--even those in the developing world and poor, remote areas--are for-profit ventures with customers who are building modern structures and thus pay fees--maybe not Western-level fees, but not ten dollars and a dozen jars of pickled vegetables either.
My experience isn't with plotters; it's with color laser printers and mopiers, and I know from that experience that using the wrong PPD or the wrong print driver or even last year's PPD with this year's design software, to talk to an actively-supported commercial RIP unit will result in output that's off--color that's off, alignment that's off, margins that are off, and line art that's not layered properly. Hell, I've seen that enough when systems with mismatched drivers and PPDs are outputting word processing files and spreadsheets to ordinary workgroup black-and-white laser printers. So to me the idea of feeding output from advanced commercial CAD software to a wildly expensive printer with cheap, hacked-together software in between seems like unnecessary pain. Except in your situation where weeks of extra work and even paying a local C programmer to hack Postscript filters actually makes economic sense, since you make it sound like your firm's billables are low even for the local market. And plots that don't look great will be acceptable as long as they're readable.
As someone who's also worked in the developing world for local companies, I understand where you're coming from, and frankly your question would have made a whole lot more sense if you provided this bit of information in the first place. Without that context--that the Macs are probably several years old and the plotter may well be ten years old and your copies of AutoCAD or whatever are either also quite old or maybe not paid for and the DSL line you have costs as much as a draftsperson's salary--you just sound like someone trying to cut corners when you've already spent big money on the other pieces. Take off the hair shirt, dude.
Get a commercial RIP and plotter combination made to work together that has client drivers for the kinds of machines you print from. In the world of graphics printers and RIP units, that almost always means Postscript. Live with it and budget for it and stop trying to find novel and unusual uses for Linux for its own sake in a running business. Use Linux when Linux is the right solution for something.
While you might be able to build your own "solution" with Ghostscript and who knows what else, you're going to be on your own if lines don't intersect the way they're supposed to and labels show up in the wrong font and layers aren't rendered in the right z-order. I'll bet architects, engineers and drafters don't like that and won't be as excited as you are about your $6000 "savings" if they're sending jobs over to Kinko's at ten at night because the RIP on their $8000 plotter is an unsupported piece of garbage sending generic Postscript or converted HPGL to a fussy device that works best with output massaged to address its quirks.
Like I said, pick a solution built around a plotter that meets the users' needs and a supported RIP solution that has a supported driver for that very plotter and client drivers, and PPDs for the OS of the machines that will be outputting to it. If the only things that meet these criteria use Postscript, then welcome to the world of Postscript. While you're at it, if it's a critical device for the running of the business, get a same-day on-site support contract for both pieces.
The only advice I'll give beyond that is to get a RIP device built around an embedded device OS or Unix (Linux, BSD, QNX, Mac OS X, whatever), or at least an NT variant. You can expect reasonable stability and uptime that way. I'd avoid any RIP devices or software built around MacOS 8.x and 9.x. In my experience they freeze up far too often. No RIP should ever freeze, but while once every few weeks is manageable, daily (or worse) freezes and crashes are a bit much. You don't want to become too familiar with your RIP vendor's regional field support engineer.
The choice of OS behind a RIP device should have nothing to do with the OS of the client machines; it's just an appliance connected to your printer. A RIP device is single-purpose, and any expectation of using a RIP to do double duty as something else is a terrible, terrible idea under most normal circumstances.
When should you use free stuff on Linux for this? Go for it if you find a solution with accompanying Mac drivers that has an active user community and mailing lists filled with enthusiastic testimonials from people who use it commercially in a production environment with the very plotter you plan to use and output from Macs running a similar set of applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Movable Type--which has comments, RSS and Trackback by default--is free for personal use as long as you can do your own hosting. If you want a remotely hosted blog on their recently-launched TypePad.com site, you pay $5 or so a month.
Blogger is now making comments, RSS and such free as long as you do your own hosting of the generated files. If you want a blog with these features hosted on their Blogspot.com site, you pay $5 a month.
It's called responding to competition. With more and more blogging systems offering things like RSS and comments for free to people who posted to their own existing webspace, Blogger had to add those features to its free offering. The revenue is in hosting and ads and maybe in commercial licenses and services. I don't imagine that bring-your-own-hosting Blogger Plus was drawing too many new subscribers in recent months.
You know, joke though this may be, I just sat here for a second and tapped out some Morse on my leg and it seemed faster than both standard number-pad typing and T2, maybe not as fast as a someone with steady hands using a thumb-board, but not bad--and you can do it blind.
Going much faster, I think, would require a decent telegraphy key on a flat surface, which is sort of unweildy for a cellphone, but a key in the form of, say, a ring worn on a finger that you activate by tapping a specific code (CQ?) on, say, your leg or a tabletop wouldn't be half bad. You could put an LED in it and have it flash signals to indicate when it's on, and use standard Morse to indicate who you're messaging and the end of a message or transmission.
Possibly even faster would be "voice recognition" for spoken Morse Code. What you lose in speed over standard text dictation, you'd make up in accuracy (after all, it only needs to recognize two basic sounds: "dit" and "dah") and it could read your words back to you as you dictate. Might not be a bad way to do 100% hands-free text messaging.
Any chance IBM's legal team could string together SCO's actions of the last couple of weeks and make a case that SCO was trying to blackmail IBM? Maybe there's a RICO case here. Ha.
Seems to me that the sound meter would be fun for people with booming sound systems in their cars and trucks, both for bragging rights and as a possible defense against getting ticketed for violating noise ordinances.
There are plenty of odes to technology from secular totalitarian states. Dig into poetry from the likes of the USSR, Communist China, North Korea, Nazi Germany and their satellite states for an endless supply of verse about rockets, hydroelectric dams, nuclear submarines, tractors and vaccination campaigns. Mao Zedong himself penned quite a few fetching works about rural electrification and massive irrigation projects in his day.
It's not just for dictatorships, of course. No country that prides itself on its technological superiority over its neighbors can do without at least a few state-sanctioned sonnets about whatever it is the country produces. Major empires of any kind tend to produce plenty of it during their big expansionist periods. Go back to the 19th Century and you'll find plenty of American poems about the building of railroads, telegraph lines and steamships, for instance.
Poems about technology tend not to hold up very well over time. A poem about a gigantic concrete dam isn't quite so resonant 30 years later when a dam twice as big is built a couple hundred miles upriver and the first dam is covered in scaffolding for 10 years at a time for repairs to some of that concrete and one of the turbines. A poem about an emotional moment in your life conjured up by seeing the dam covered in that scaffolding has a better chance of holding up. People tend to be more interesting than technology in the long run, and the good poems with, uh, technology in them tend not to be about technology at all.
As only one person in this whole thread seems to have noted, this isn't about Flash plugins or Cold Fusion MX. It's about cutting off Apple's air supply. Just as Apple has been buying up a few pro video and music tool companies and discontinuing the Windows versions, this would be a means for discontinuing Mac versions of some of the killer apps that are run heavily on Macs. If you can't get Flash and Dreamweaver (and to a lesser extent, Fireworks, Director, Freehand and Fontographer) for the Mac, the Mac suddenly loses at least a third of its pro user base. Lose the web designers, and you also lose the people and companies that use Macs for that and other purposes. Once they have to move web people to PCs, they'll move the Photoshop/Illustrator people to PCs, too. Then the Quark people. Poof. Within two years, the only professional uses for Macs will be video production and some music.
Game over.
It's December. How many pro baseball scores do you expect to get in December?
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but when I see the word "homebrew" on what's mostly a computer-hobbyist site, I think homebrew electronics and stuff, you know, like building radios and oscillators and things with blinky lights (cf. old Heathkit catalogs, the 1970s Homebrew Computer Club et al). Instead it's just someone looking for beermaking pen-pals.
The editorial comments are often pretty dumb and uninformed, but in this case we're dealing with Michael, who doesn't know a damn thing about anything. I wonder if he's ever read a newspaper more complex than USA Today. Probably not. All those big words and funny names, and no good stories about anime and hobbits.
I've been using Palms for over 5 years now and haven't been without one except when one's been broken and the new one's on the way. Started with a Palm Personal, and now I'm using the $50 Kyocera 6035 monochrome smartphone.
Can't live without it, or at least I can't work without it. All my phone numbers are in there, password reminders, trouble ticket confirmation numbers, my schedule, my to-dos and scheduled calls for the day, my friends' birthdays, recent customer call notes (I sync with ACT), my shopping list (silly as it sounds), the name of the guy at the auto repair place who gave me an honest estimate a few months back, the name of my barber...
And since I'm a real estate agent nowadays, my financial and loan calculators are there, as is a wireless MLS search applet so I can look something up if I'm driving or walking past it, local movie listings (synced automatically from Yahoo). And also thanks to it being a PDA phone, I can also quickly check, read and send email using both my personal and business accounts. A Palm with a 9.6kbps data connection is an awful SSH client and web browser, but I have those, too, and just used both a few days ago to recreate a mail account I'd misrouted the night before when I set up some spam filters and notifiers.
Putting this latter batch of stuff aside, I find the core functions indispensible. As a phonebook, addressbook, to-do-list and memo pad, it's great. You wouldn't want to write a book or take serious meeting notes with a stylus, but for the quick jottngs you'd otherwise scrawl on napkins, post-its and business cards, a good PDA is hard to beat. And it's smaller than any of those other things. It's been years since I last drove past a supermarket or drugstore and cursed myself for leaving the list at home.
As for spending lots of time syncing and messing with software, you sound like a Linux hobbyist who installs and recompiles new apps every day. If you use your computer rather than tinker and play with it, what maintenance is there? Maybe once a year I install some new stuff that needs to sync and spend a few minutes checking the clocks and looking at the settings, but that's about it.
I've had some games over the years, but really, apart from something stylus-friendly like Scrabble, PDAs are terrible for games. And why anyone would want a fragile, touchscreen MP3 player for 2-3 times the price of a much more rugged one is beyond me. If you don't need an organizer, don't get a PDA. They're organizers.
Maybe the old 5.1 or 6.x versions of WordPerfect for SCO Unix will work even on modern Linuxes. There's an old HOWTO. Check Google. Some DOS word processors like WordPerfect, XyWrite and the like might work under emulation, but getting a SCO one wotking wouldn't feel like emulation when it comes to things like navigating the filesystems, running multiuser, and using colors to signify formatting over terminal emulation.
I'm not sure "non-geeky users" are going to be keen on any console-mode word processor, no matter how capable it is, though. I guess you know your users best.
Let's see. Yeah, BlueCurve uses a similar antialiased bolded sans-serif font family as BeOS ..and MacOS X ..and WinXP. And they gave a much cleaner look to the icons-and-labels elements of GNOME, which shares the interface convention with BeOS ..and OS X ..and WinXP.
..and OS X and WinXP?
Or are you referring to the swoopy blue desktop wallpaper that's similar to BeOS
Let us know if RedHat stole any of your bitmaps. That would be bad--and it would be proof that they really do pay attention to the Open BeOS project. I'm sure it's right up there on RedHat's agenda with AmigaDOS.
Simnply using nice antialiased fonts in that family and designing a set of eye-pleasing color icons only shows that RedHat has a better graphic artist working for them than Ximian and TheKompany do. Which should surprise nobody.
Me, I wear glasses, ones with a pretty thick lens on the left at that. The frames get a little in the way of my peripheral vision. But I don't want Lasik. Why? Because of the failure rate--even if it's somehow down to only 1%, and I'm not sure it is.
Forget worrying about not achieving the 20/20 vision you want and that many people get from it. Worry instead about the real risk of corneal damage that will leave your vision worse than it was before, with permanent starbursts and haloes like you're looking through scratched, scuffed glasses all the time.
Will this happen to you? Probably not. In fact, if you have the sort of vision that Lasik corrects, you have a well over 95% chance of getting the great vision without glasses that you want. It's just that if you draw the short straw, you could find your ability to read a screen pretty thoroughly ruined, with or without glasses.
Weigh the benefits against the risks, and if you decide to do it, note that most surgeons have you sign a boilerplate contract that bars you from suing them if your vision is ruined. Who's the real winner?
In Russia and many of the former Soviet Bloc countries, the subways have a clever system that does almost the same thing at a tiny fraction of the cost. They have displays showing how much time has passed since the last train arrived. For less than a dollar's worth of electronics per station, plus a digital numeric display, you get what most passengers really want: a reasonable gauge of how long they'll be waiting. While it's not going to be able to tell you when the next train is delayed, how much expense is that really worth if you're not putting position tracking in place for other reasons already? Obviously photocells and mechanical relays attached to a time counter isn't viable for a trackless system like buses, but a similarly cheap thing could be done with low-power radio trasponders in the vehicles and receivers at the stations.
If a sophisticated tracking system (whether via GPS or via transponders at waypoints) is put into place for other reasons anyway, of course go ahead and mine the data for a sophisticated time-announcement service instead.
By the way, I've never seen a CRT or LCD-panel system in a public transportation system that was in very good condition for long. Even if vandalism isn't a concern, general wear from air pollution, bad weather, cleaning fluids, CRT burn-in, LCD failures, etc. could make the displays expensive to maintain. Will the displays also be used for advertising or important public information that can't be conveyed on printed signboards? If not, I'd look into the cost of a simple electromechanical or digital alphanumeric display showing the times. It's less glamorous and versatile, but might be much cheaper, especially over time.
GAIM was nice to have around on Unix. Too bad the presence of a widely-available Win32 version will force AOL to block it once and for all, in order to maintain their legal position against opening their system up to Microsoft.
Well, there's the 6 or so programs you can buy for Windows in the $25-$50 price range at any CompUSA or major mailorder vendor, like "3D Home Architect" and "Home Builder 3D" and "3D Home Designer", from companies like Broderbund and IMSI. Places liike Circuit City and Best Buy also carry a few of them, as should your local big-box discount chain like Wal-Mart.
Or were you looking for a (free) Linux alternative? There's really nothing at all like that in the free-Unix space yet. There's okay 2D and 3D CAD software out there, but nothing with an interface for easy, amateur floorplan design, rendering geared toward easy, quick views of room interiors and walkthroughs, or the huge texture and object libraries the commercial Windows packages have.
Cliff, do you even read these Ask Slashdot submissions? Have you ever been in a store that sells consumer software? What's next from Ask Slashdot? "Word Processors that Can Use Multiple Fonts?" "Does anyone make color printers?" "Anyone have instructions for rotary telephones?"
As someone else up there said, burn CDs or just get yourself some flash cards and a USB card reader. It's a whole lot easier to install a USB storage driver on the occasional PC than it is to set up an ad-hoc network, at least until Apple's Rendezvous shows up in Windows and Unix.
Too much data to transfer via flash cards? I gather that it isn't because you're willing to use 802.11b, which is no faster than USB. Even so, if you really need the speed, get a Firewire PC Card and a matching portable hard drive. Macs can mount PC-formatted ones just fine. Again, carry around a floppy with the necessary Windows Firewire card drivers just in case, or better yet, jot down the URL for getting it via the Web.
It's not glamorous, and it sure would be nice if 25 years into the personal computing era simple things like spur-of-the-moment peer-to-peer data transfer were easy to do, but it'll get the data moved without too much hassle.
You didn't say what the machines are going to do or what you server situation is. Linux with KDE and a browser-only version of Mozilla (no mail or news) would make for a very good web terminal, complete with Flash support. And if you have a couple of good file servers sitting behind it, you can network-boot them so that machines are interchangeable and don't necessarily need any software installed on them. Then you're just in the business of maintaining file servers, but they don't need to be big ones as they'd have to be if you were deploying, say, X terminals.
But what else do people do at these terminals? Do they get to use Word and Excel? Any custom Windows-based reference tools that aren't available over the web? Educational titles?
StarOffice/OpenOffice is okay, but it can be a little confusing for the kiosk user. It's one thing for a consumer or office worker to spend a couple of hours getting the hang of it if they're replacing MS Office with it. It's quite another to expect people to be productive in it on a casual, walk-in basis. You'll probably also want to customize it to replace the load/save buttons on the OpenOffice toolbars with buttons hooked to macros that load and save in MS Office formats by default. A kiosk user probably isn't going to want to save things in native StarOffice formats.
By all means ignore others' advice to remove floppy drives if you want. If you're comfortable with letting people use floppies to load and save their work under Win2000, you can do it just fine with Linux.
One nice potential savings with Linux is that you can present a customized, locked-down desktop environment like those that Windows system-management tools let you create--without any additional software or fees necessary. Take KDE and modify the guest "start" menus and desktop to include only the things you want to offer: the browser, maybe some desktop shortcuts to popular webmail services and instant-messaging tools, the word processor, a floppy formatter, and a logout button, for instance.
I'm still not convinced there are good reasons to switch over; you certainly don't want to make the systems less useful to the people who use them. I'm assuming you're facing mandatory upgrades from Microsoft and will soon have to choose between paying $300 per machine in Software Assurance with more of the same in two years, or biting the bullet and getting rid of the commercial software.
Depending on your needs, it certainly can work, and can work well. Linux (and Unix in general) is a great way to deploy rock solid centrally-managed, locked-down systems at a low cost. Just make sure you can give people the applications they need and present them in an easy-to-use, zero-training way.
What's "non-clueful" about people who don't want to run a second desktop environment on top of the one they already have? What's wrong with wanting copy-and-paste that works well and being able to sync your addressbook to an offline laptop and a PDA?
I'm assuming your current system's worst problem (if there's even a problem at all) is that this Access-based system isn't integrated with your e-mail clients. It sure is nice to be able to access and select entries from your addressbook straight into the "To:" and "Cc:" fields of the message composition interface. I'll bet that's what will make users happiest. Maybe you should make user productivity and user happiness your primary goal, and not pick a backend technology first. If users are happy with the current system (and they probably aren't), is it a speed issue you could address by migrating the data to a better database and keeping the Access frontend, or is it an interface and data model issue that points to the complete overhaul you have in mind?
That said, LDAP's a good, flexible, extensible way to store multiuser, multi-departmental addressbooks. Go for it. But unless you're a complete jerk, you'll only use it if you can provide the users with interfaces that are at least as convenient (from their standpoint, not yours) as what they have now, and are preferably better. I don't think ugly XWindow applications (and X itself) glopped onto their Windows desktops are the answer.
You can get a good interface between addressbook and e-mail with Outlook. Heck, you can get that with the web interface to Exchange or Notes. What mail system are you using? Generic IMAP? Fine.
Granted, even with the best antivirus protection pushed out to every machine and aggressive scanning on the servers and WSH disabled in Outlook, you still may not be able to sleep nights knowing Outlook's out there. Maybe you can deploy a nice LDAP-maintenance tool or two for people to edit the addressbooks with (a simple web one and a complex, advanced Java one for power users) along with a mail client that can access the same LDAP store read-only.
Ah, you see the apparent contradiction between the comprehensive planning that creates unlivable sprawl and the fact that the planning itself comes from government.
Once you look at the history of postwar new-suburban development as it really happened, the two reconcile pretty well. Yep, the zoning plans that created decentralized, traffic-clogged suburbs came from municipal governments--but the municipal governments literally came from the developers. Putting aside the charming histories of the big cities "founded" by railroad moguls and land speculators, the most extreme examples come in the suburbs built out of nothing in the last forty years: a developer would devise a master plan for a town-sized piece of property in an unincorporated area, they'd have six of their employees move into houses built on the land, and those six people and their families would vote to incorporate a city made up entirely of people tied to the development.
Six employees, literally. No exaggeration.
Florida's population is exploding; contrary to the popular image, it's less a state of retirees than it is a state of immigrants (from within the US and from abroad) and of young families.
The traffic problems have gotten awful, and not for lack of highways and 6-lane through roads. The bigger problem is much of Florida's other defining characteristic: fifty years of unregulated sprawl. South Florida has the same problems Los Angeles is finally starting to address. Office space, commerce and residential areas are kept separate, spread out and decentralized, and both coasts are hemmed in by the Everglades. Once the rather limited 20-miles strips of land along the coasts are built on, it just gets denser and denser, and that's what's happening. But unlike New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, Chicago, Moscow, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong or [insert viable city here], the "downtowns" aren't as dominant as they should be, and even in the cities, many neighborhoods are car-oriented.
As in L.A., this makes intercity train service a lot less useful. What good is it if only one in four business travelers can get off a train within a quick local transit or cab ride of their destination? Is a commuter train system going to get a lot of passengers if most people have to drive a half hour in gridlock just to get to a station--and there's no end station near their workplace? (Ask Southeast Florida commuters: the current north-south-only Tri-Rail is enthusiastically embraced by people who live close to one station and work close to another, but shunned by everyone else.)
There are a lot of people in the Palm Beach-Miami corridor, but they're relatively spread out and they commute in every possible direction. Intercity rail is an important part of what the state's metro areas need, but it's just not going to make real inroads as an alternative to crowded highways until the "last mile" solutions are also in place. More mixed-use planning and zoning will help by letting people live and work with less need for cars, as it's been helping LA and Atlanta, but that will be a long time in coming. In the meantime, workplaces are so scattered and decentralized that buses take too long to get anyone anywhere useful, and extensive commuter and light rail would have to be practically everywhere, with lots of parallel east-west and north-south lines and express tracks in order to work.
On its own, this high-speed rail network may well only do what its detractors think it will do: ferry families from Florida's coastal cities to Disney World for weekend trips.
No, I can't say that I've wished Apple's Xserve ran Linux. OS X is a more polished OS than Linux is, especially on this hardware. It can run essentially all the same software and then some, it has a better JVM and far, far better administration tools for everything from directory services and Apache to Samba. It's got great monitoring tools and drivers for its hardware, true plug-and-play support for things like Firewire RAID arrays, unified management of SMB, Appleshare and NFS file sharing, and commercial grade on-site support for all of the above.
By going to Linux on it, you get rid of the nice development tools, you sacrifice a lot of the Mac OS 8.x/9.x application compatibility and all of the OS X compatibility. You trade wonderful, richly-featured and consistently designed distributed admin tools for things like webmin. And you give up several avenues for support.
It's not like PPC Linux will let you run the many x86 commercial packages out there. So unless you're a Linux shop already and someone has given you a free Xserve, why put Linux on it? Surely you can find 1U hardware with comparable performance and more mature Linux driver support for a lot less money, no?
So no. No, I haven't ever wanted to run Linux on an Xserve.
How about just connecting a cheap, AC-powered tape recorder to your sound card and if you want to automate it, plug it into a $10 lamp timer?
People used to do this all the time back in the days before streaming audio. It's called "hooking a tape recorder up to a timer".
Granted, these things called "tapes" can't go in your iPod, but they are compatible with those three "portable tape players" sitting in your desk drawer, and they also play on that thing called a "tape deck" that you normally stick the iPod's car adapter into.
Well, your company is a private architectural firm that has Macs and large-format plotters so it would seem to follow that something that costs about the same as two more secondhand two-year-old G4's might be within your price range, even if the CAD software you're using didn't cost Western prices. Believe it or not, most computerized architectural firms--even those in the developing world and poor, remote areas--are for-profit ventures with customers who are building modern structures and thus pay fees--maybe not Western-level fees, but not ten dollars and a dozen jars of pickled vegetables either.
My experience isn't with plotters; it's with color laser printers and mopiers, and I know from that experience that using the wrong PPD or the wrong print driver or even last year's PPD with this year's design software, to talk to an actively-supported commercial RIP unit will result in output that's off--color that's off, alignment that's off, margins that are off, and line art that's not layered properly. Hell, I've seen that enough when systems with mismatched drivers and PPDs are outputting word processing files and spreadsheets to ordinary workgroup black-and-white laser printers. So to me the idea of feeding output from advanced commercial CAD software to a wildly expensive printer with cheap, hacked-together software in between seems like unnecessary pain. Except in your situation where weeks of extra work and even paying a local C programmer to hack Postscript filters actually makes economic sense, since you make it sound like your firm's billables are low even for the local market. And plots that don't look great will be acceptable as long as they're readable.
As someone who's also worked in the developing world for local companies, I understand where you're coming from, and frankly your question would have made a whole lot more sense if you provided this bit of information in the first place. Without that context--that the Macs are probably several years old and the plotter may well be ten years old and your copies of AutoCAD or whatever are either also quite old or maybe not paid for and the DSL line you have costs as much as a draftsperson's salary--you just sound like someone trying to cut corners when you've already spent big money on the other pieces. Take off the hair shirt, dude.
Get a commercial RIP and plotter combination made to work together that has client drivers for the kinds of machines you print from. In the world of graphics printers and RIP units, that almost always means Postscript. Live with it and budget for it and stop trying to find novel and unusual uses for Linux for its own sake in a running business. Use Linux when Linux is the right solution for something.
While you might be able to build your own "solution" with Ghostscript and who knows what else, you're going to be on your own if lines don't intersect the way they're supposed to and labels show up in the wrong font and layers aren't rendered in the right z-order. I'll bet architects, engineers and drafters don't like that and won't be as excited as you are about your $6000 "savings" if they're sending jobs over to Kinko's at ten at night because the RIP on their $8000 plotter is an unsupported piece of garbage sending generic Postscript or converted HPGL to a fussy device that works best with output massaged to address its quirks.
Like I said, pick a solution built around a plotter that meets the users' needs and a supported RIP solution that has a supported driver for that very plotter and client drivers, and PPDs for the OS of the machines that will be outputting to it. If the only things that meet these criteria use Postscript, then welcome to the world of Postscript. While you're at it, if it's a critical device for the running of the business, get a same-day on-site support contract for both pieces.
The only advice I'll give beyond that is to get a RIP device built around an embedded device OS or Unix (Linux, BSD, QNX, Mac OS X, whatever), or at least an NT variant. You can expect reasonable stability and uptime that way. I'd avoid any RIP devices or software built around MacOS 8.x and 9.x. In my experience they freeze up far too often. No RIP should ever freeze, but while once every few weeks is manageable, daily (or worse) freezes and crashes are a bit much. You don't want to become too familiar with your RIP vendor's regional field support engineer.
The choice of OS behind a RIP device should have nothing to do with the OS of the client machines; it's just an appliance connected to your printer. A RIP device is single-purpose, and any expectation of using a RIP to do double duty as something else is a terrible, terrible idea under most normal circumstances.
When should you use free stuff on Linux for this? Go for it if you find a solution with accompanying Mac drivers that has an active user community and mailing lists filled with enthusiastic testimonials from people who use it commercially in a production environment with the very plotter you plan to use and output from Macs running a similar set of applications.