I've been using alltheweb for a couple weeks (yeah, ever since it first showed up on Slashdot). My take on it is that it is fast, as in blazing zippy fast, but mostly useless. It tends to return a lot of pages that are all the same. Dig past the first 10 results or so, and you find that after that it's just one page from the same FAQ, only they list every mirror separately. I haven't found it to be better than any other search engine, and worse than most. Stick with a combination of Google, Altavista, and Yahoo. And Deja.com, for howto questions:-) ---------------------- "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
Indeed-- I am a PC person, and the whole firmware thing was a new one on me. The problem seemed to be it was really easy to install linux from ARC, but really hard from SRM. And it was hard to change from SRM to ARC without an OS already installed. I know there was some way to do it, but man, I tried everything. Read the newsgroups, searched everywhere. I got about a dozen different procedures and tried all of them and no dice.
So the overall upshot seems to be, yes, I am an idiot. But at least I'm an idiot in a totally un-unique way.:-) ---------------------- "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
Ok, in theory, the AS200 is a better machine, but I wrestled with one of those goddamn things for two weeks, on behalf of a coworker, who picked it up cheap on EBay. I couldn't get it to do anything. There's some kind of weird thing where the 200's have 1/2 the ROM as most alphas, so they can only run one version of the firmware (which is usually the SRM console), thus making them a royal bitch to set up if they're OS-less.
Granted, I might just be an idiot. This was my only experience with alphas, so it was a whole new world for me. But I was trying to get Linux to run on it, and that I'm familiar with. I did read a lot of similar experiences on Usenet around that time, though (there was a whole crop of these things cheap on ebay), so I'm inclined to think maybe they are just a bitch to set up.
I did hear later that the guy got Digital Unix to run on it. He had a brother-in-law that worked for DEC, or something. No way could many of us afford a licensed copy of DEC Unix.:-) ---------------------- "This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
Someone above mentioned this, but yeah, it sounds a lot like college radio. My roommate and I had a show for a couple years, and while he wasn't a computer geek, we were both lit-weenies, so it ended up sounding exactly like this, only with obscure literary references (and lots of hyper-obscure music, in the classic college tradition. Like covers of songs you never heard the first time by bands no one's ever heard). But it wasn't bad for a first try. I'm glad you did some post-production work, because damn, getting on the air live and being interesting consistently is HARD.
Keep it up, you'll get better. And I love the Devo-esque theme music. You might want to go one more step and actually just use Devo for your theme, perhaps slightly modified...
Are we not geeks?" We are Slashdot! Are we not geeks? S-L-A-ashdot!
This isn't really much of a wearable computing device. It is in the same way that a laptop is. It's basically too big, too obtrusive, and too power-hungry for wearables.
On the other hand, there have been lots of nifty things going on in wearable-land lately, and it is indeed getting cheaper. You can put together a pentium-class truly wearable system these days for about the cost of a good desktop machine. Check out EMJ ( http://emjembedded.com) and for a truly wearable HMD, look at microooptical ( http://microopticalcorp.com), or at tekgear for the M1 ( http://tekgear.ca). The HMD's are both greyscale QVGA now, but the M2 is expected to be out in a year or so (?) and is projected to be 16M color 800x600, and MicroOptical is also working on a color high-res version of their display.
Make no mistake, wearable computing (IMHO) will be The Next Really Big Thing in computing, sort of akin to the PC in the late 70's-early 80's or the internet in this decade. This won't be for maybe another five years, but those of you who want to be in on the ground floor, start hacking now!:-) ----------------------
I managed to get my hands on a Dell Precision 410 with Redhat 6.0 pre-installed (I won the LinuxCare win-a-dell contest). I have to say, Dell did a nice job configuring it. It's all slicked up with xdm, so if you didn't want to, you'd never even see a command line. Hell, I bet even a kindergartener or an MCSE could administer this thing! Pre-installed Linux is most definitely a Good Thing for the community, I'd say. ----------------------
I'd say that's not exactly a promise that this is going to be a fair or objective comparison. (Yes, I missed the title the first time too-- this is intended to be helpful, not flaming) ----------------------
NOTE: Somewhat off-topic, and definitely rambling...
Thank God! This is the first time I've seen any indication anywhere that anyone but me thinks Wallace is up there with the Really Big Ones. Not that I've gone looking for it, though... perhaps there's an underground Wallace cult somewhere that I'm not aware of.
Anyway, certain types of geeks are sure to love Wallace. In particular people who like complex plotting, some off-the-wall experimentation, and any writer who can make you see things the way he sees them, even after you've put the book down.
I would have to say, though, that Infinite Jest is not necessarily the best place to start, unless you're accustomed to reading insanely long, absurdly complex, and purposefully difficult books. A rough length/complexity benchmark: Cryptonomicon took me three days to read, IJ took nearly two months. I'd say Girl With Curious Hair (a collection of relatively short stories) would be a better introduction to the world of Wallace, along with possibly The Broom of the System, although I thought that one had some seriously Stephenson-esque ending problems. Come to think of it, IJ kind of did too.
I'm reading his new one now (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and, well, hmm. It's different, that's for sure. Much more experimental that anything else I've read, by him or anyone else for that matter. It's impressive to note that he does manage to carry off most of the stories, which few other writers would be able to, given the level of formal weirdness that's going on. I want him to write Infinite Jest II though. ----------------------
Whoopee. Let's replace one Monopoly with another. To examine our "gods" one by one:
Netscape: Ok, I like their browser better than IE, but it's still huge and buggy. I think JWZ made the most cogent remarks on how life at NS is these days.
Sun: Nice hardware, for some time. Lately however, what have they given us? Java (*shudder*), and the much hyped Vaporware of "Jini". Sun ain't the friendly gang of fellers some in the open source community would like them to be, by a long shot.
AOL: Don't even get me started. They ARE Microsoft, as far as I can tell. They've been offering simplified garbage for idiots from day one, and it remains a mystery how they've even survived, let alone gained the market share they have. I've always thought of AOL's success in the same category as rains of fish and crop circles. It seems to happen, but no one knows why.
The basic questions are: A) How the hell are these three going to create the next consumer platform? and B) Why would we want to substitute M$ crap with America OnNetSunScapeLine's crap? ----------------------
It makes some sense that the last part might be a one time pad, considering the pattern of letters and the embedded "kryptos" that repeats. All you'd have to do is choose the key specifically to produce that pattern when combined with the plaintext.
The real problem here, of course, is that if that's what they did, the message is unbreakable. Any plaintext message is as likely as any other message. Given any plaintext, and the "abcd...kryptos...etc" pattern that I want it to end up as, all I need to do is subtract the plaintext from the final pattern, and I have my one-time pad key.
Now that seems kind of unfair, if it was intended to be a puzzle to solve, so perhaps there's a clue embedded in the plaintext of the first section. Or maybe it's just designed to LOOK like that's the way they did it.:-) ----------------------
...I doubt if the NSA computers you're thinking of are on this list--or even run linear algebra software, for that matter.
Or exist on any lists, anywhere, ever. Their big iron's existence is classified, let alone specs or performance benchmarks. And you can bet your ass that NSA's top five machines would take spots 1 through 5 on this list, if they existed.;-)
Well, ok, maybe not on this list, due to the software differences, as edhall noted. But you know what I mean. ----------------------
Halleleujah. This is the crux of the whole question. Most of us don't ever even think about it, but all the hackers I know don't just do their hacking on a computer.
You can't get a new CDROM for your box at work, because the process requires you to justify all yadda yadda yadda... (you only get that far in such restrictions before getting bored, usually)? What do you do? You find the guy who has the cdrom and you get it directly from the source. This is a process hack, something that computer hackers generally excel at, but can be done by others too.
What about the car hackers? Guys who do insane things to their vehicles which pretty much parallel oil-bath motherboard cooling in terms of whacked-out performance goals.
Hacking is something that can be done whenever and wherever it needs to be, and it doesn't require computers to do. All the computer-centric terms people have come up with will never be able to match the depth of the term as it stands. So USA Today doesn't get it? They never will. Just hack around them:-) ----------------------
Read The Puzzle Palace. There's already a law on the books that says explicitly that no existing or future law of the US may require NSA to reveal anything about its organization, structure, or activities to anyone. Including anyone in the US government. They simply don't have to tell Congress anything, and I know who's gonna win this little tussle.
By the way, if the Aussies actually didn't ask Big Brother for permission before confirming Echelon's existence, I bet the spooks off the BWP are right steamed about it.:-) ----------------------
You get a static IP with the home service too. Really, they just market the higher-bandwidth offerings as "business" and lower as "home." ----------------------
Yeah, they could block ports, but why be so techie about it? My previous ISP (early.com -- DON'T EVER USE THEM!! In fact, if anyone were to take it into their head that an "unplanned service outage" were in order for these freaks, I'd be much obliged:-) noticed that I had a webserver running on my dialup connection.
I had apache running because I'm a web developer, and often work at home. It continued to run when I dialed in to the ISP, so they decided this constituted "running a server" and canceled my service, AND kept the money I paid them for three more months of service.
I called and bitched, but they just completely stonewalled me. "Duh. There's nothing I can do. Duh." Apparently, no one there has any control of their own network, if you believe their "support" people.
So they don't need to block ports, they can just pull the plug on you. ----------------------
Like the above poster, I got ADSL from Bell Atlantic (in DC), and it's wonderful. The process takes about 2 weeks, since they have to ship the modem (which arrived on time and with a $50 rebate), and also send two technicians to your house (one guy does the outside wiring, and I'm not sure what the second guy did, but it worked after he left:-). You have to sign up with BA as your ISP for 12 months, which is 10 bucks a month, and the DSL (640k down/90k up) is $50 a month.
I was a little wary of getting the service, as I had read the horror stories about that guy with the Mac, and all I have are Linux boxen. When the first person I talked to at BA got to the dreaded question "what operating system", I said Linux. He said "Hmmm... we don't seem to have that listed." I asked him if unix was listed, and he said no. Then I asked if it was anything more complicated than configuring the NIC, and he said no, that was what their technicians did. I assured him I could do that myself, and that was that.
The only other time it was mentioned was when the second guy came to activate the service. He looked at my machine (a homebuilt dual PPRo, all black, no identifying brands or features:-), then looked at the monitor, which was showing a Gnome/E desktop with the Apple Platinum theme. "What is that?" he said, a bit puzzled. I told him Linux, and he went, "Ah, so you've got it all configured then?" It was a riot.
[sidebar: Does anyone else find that as soon as you mention Linux around computer people, you instantly get to cut all the Win-Idiot bull? Like computer stores, for example... I went to CompUSA (of all places! don't shop there by the way!) for a modem a while ago, and I asked for a 56k modem that was jumper-configurable. The sales guy hemmed and hawed for a minute, so I said "I run Linux, so I don't want any of that win-modem garbage." His face just lit up. He showed me one that his linux-using friend got, and it's worked perfectly. Well, until I got DSL. It doesn't do much now.]
Also, they never asked for my MAC address. Perhaps because BA owns the whole route, they have their own ways of determining it or something. Dunno, but it was never mentioned.
So the summary is, Bell Atlantic ADSL==good. I don't think I could get by without it anymore. ----------------------
I'm guessing it's more like they want someone who can convince the DOJ that Linux is an emerging technology and a threat to their monop^H^H^H^H^Hhard-fought and constantly threatened competetive advantage, while at the same time convincing the PHB's that Linux is crap and they'd be insane to run enterprise applications on it.
Or, to put it another way, they need someone who can talk out of both sides of their ass.:-)
"Waiter! This food sucks! And the portions are too small!" ----------------------
Just saw this one. It's one of those "Where do you want to go..." commercials about a bread store franchise chain. Looked like just another M$ love-fest, but then...
They start talking about how popular this bread store is, but why? It's just another franchise right? Well (GET THIS) "it's different because it's open. Those who know marketing share with those who know more about bread machines. If one store needs advertising tips, maybe they trade with another who's figured out a more efficient stocking system..." (a paraphrase, but that was the gist). They were talking about Open Source enterprise!!! Microsoft! I wanted to vomit. You know when someone does something so unbelievably arrogant that it makes you physically ill? This was it.
So after neatly summarizing all the benefits of an open system (whether it's bread or software), they continue to be the world's greatest paragon of obfuscation, monopoly, and proprietary secrets. Can they really be that stupid? Time will tell... ----------------------
Personally, I don't use word processors much either, but I had to find one for my g/f to do resumes/job applications on. So having tried all the word processors for Linux, we've settled on StarOffice.
I have to say that of everything I tried, WP8 was the worst. Some flaws:
The fonts are unreadable. Totally.
No driver for my Canon BJC 4000. Not an exotic uncommon printer, I'd say. Not to mention the fact that I wouldn't even need a damn driver if it would print using the print system I ALREADY HAVE!
Word import sucks. It mangles anything more complex than simple paragraphs, and the fonts all go to hell.
The interface was clearly designed by aliens. It's even more counterintuitive than Word for christ's sake. I'm not looking for a word processor that challenges my perceptions about reality, thanks.
For a while, she was actually using VMWare to boot Win95 and use Word, because there just wasn't a useful word processor out there for Linux. Now I set her up with StarOffice, which, while I agree wholeheartedly with those who want it not to be it's own damn OS, is a pretty good word processor. It's bloated, but I'm running a dual PPro with 128M RAM, so that's not too much of a problem. Otherwise, it imports well, and has what she needs. But why, oh why, is there no way to just run the word processing part of it?
I wonder how many of the people who complain about StarOffice being too bloated prefer to run emacs? Heh. ----------------------
I've had to tangle with http file upload problems at work, for an extranet product, and I can attest that, while http file download works fine (it is, after all, just the first step in viewing any web page), file upload is way more flaky. Problems:
When clients have slow connections, frequently the connection times out somewhere along the line before they can send the whole file (especially with large files)
So far (AFAIK) there is no way to upload multiple files at the same time. The form element that handles file upload only takes one file at a time.
It's just not as fast, and it's a bandwidth hog. These are subjective observations, not benchmarks, but I had to upload a damn lot of files in testing, and it seems to take longer than ftp. The file is sent in chunks, and I think that headers and handling for each of these chunks adds overhead to the upload.
While we're at it, if anyone knows of a good way to integrate ftp file transfer with a web site, please share! ----------------------
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using alltheweb for a couple weeks (yeah, ever since it first showed up on Slashdot). My take on it is that it is fast, as in blazing zippy fast, but mostly useless. It tends to return a lot of pages that are all the same. Dig past the first 10 results or so, and you find that after that it's just one page from the same FAQ, only they list every mirror separately. I haven't found it to be better than any other search engine, and worse than most. Stick with a combination of Google, Altavista, and Yahoo. And Deja.com, for howto questions :-)
----------------------
"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
So the overall upshot seems to be, yes, I am an idiot. But at least I'm an idiot in a totally un-unique way. :-)
----------------------
"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
Granted, I might just be an idiot. This was my only experience with alphas, so it was a whole new world for me. But I was trying to get Linux to run on it, and that I'm familiar with. I did read a lot of similar experiences on Usenet around that time, though (there was a whole crop of these things cheap on ebay), so I'm inclined to think maybe they are just a bitch to set up.
I did hear later that the guy got Digital Unix to run on it. He had a brother-in-law that worked for DEC, or something. No way could many of us afford a licensed copy of DEC Unix. :-)
----------------------
"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!
Don't dismiss Metropolis's relevance too quickly. Yeah, the technology's sort of silly, but the Big Picture hold up rather well.
And dammit, now you've got the Metropolis theme music stuck in my head. Dah-da... da-da-da da-da... grrrr
----------------------
More like the short-sighted leading the stupid.
----------------------
640K should be enough memory for anyone
(ibid.)
----------------------
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,
is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners...
I wish I was a moderater right now. I'd +1 this just for the sig.
----------------------
Keep it up, you'll get better. And I love the Devo-esque theme music. You might want to go one more step and actually just use Devo for your theme, perhaps slightly modified...
Are we not geeks?"
We are Slashdot!
Are we not geeks?
S-L-A-ashdot!
----------------------
On the other hand, there have been lots of nifty things going on in wearable-land lately, and it is indeed getting cheaper. You can put together a pentium-class truly wearable system these days for about the cost of a good desktop machine. Check out EMJ ( http://emjembedded.com) and for a truly wearable HMD, look at microooptical ( http://microopticalcorp.com), or at tekgear for the M1 ( http://tekgear.ca). The HMD's are both greyscale QVGA now, but the M2 is expected to be out in a year or so (?) and is projected to be 16M color 800x600, and MicroOptical is also working on a color high-res version of their display.
Make no mistake, wearable computing (IMHO) will be The Next Really Big Thing in computing, sort of akin to the PC in the late 70's-early 80's or the internet in this decade. This won't be for maybe another five years, but those of you who want to be in on the ground floor, start hacking now! :-)
----------------------
I managed to get my hands on a Dell Precision 410 with Redhat 6.0 pre-installed (I won the LinuxCare win-a-dell contest). I have to say, Dell did a nice job configuring it. It's all slicked up with xdm, so if you didn't want to, you'd never even see a command line. Hell, I bet even a kindergartener or an MCSE could administer this thing! Pre-installed Linux is most definitely a Good Thing for the community, I'd say.
----------------------
A GPL Advocate's Perspective
I'd say that's not exactly a promise that this is going to be a fair or objective comparison.
(Yes, I missed the title the first time too-- this is intended to be helpful, not flaming)
----------------------
Thank God! This is the first time I've seen any indication anywhere that anyone but me thinks Wallace is up there with the Really Big Ones. Not that I've gone looking for it, though... perhaps there's an underground Wallace cult somewhere that I'm not aware of.
Anyway, certain types of geeks are sure to love Wallace. In particular people who like complex plotting, some off-the-wall experimentation, and any writer who can make you see things the way he sees them, even after you've put the book down.
I would have to say, though, that Infinite Jest is not necessarily the best place to start, unless you're accustomed to reading insanely long, absurdly complex, and purposefully difficult books. A rough length/complexity benchmark: Cryptonomicon took me three days to read, IJ took nearly two months. I'd say Girl With Curious Hair (a collection of relatively short stories) would be a better introduction to the world of Wallace, along with possibly The Broom of the System, although I thought that one had some seriously Stephenson-esque ending problems. Come to think of it, IJ kind of did too.
I'm reading his new one now (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and, well, hmm. It's different, that's for sure. Much more experimental that anything else I've read, by him or anyone else for that matter. It's impressive to note that he does manage to carry off most of the stories, which few other writers would be able to, given the level of formal weirdness that's going on. I want him to write Infinite Jest II though.
----------------------
- Netscape: Ok, I like their browser better than IE, but it's still huge and buggy. I think JWZ made the most cogent remarks on how life at NS is these days.
- Sun: Nice hardware, for some time. Lately however, what have they given us? Java (*shudder*), and the much hyped Vaporware of "Jini". Sun ain't the friendly gang of fellers some in the open source community would like them to be, by a long shot.
- AOL: Don't even get me started. They ARE Microsoft, as far as I can tell. They've been offering simplified garbage for idiots from day one, and it remains a mystery how they've even survived, let alone gained the market share they have. I've always thought of AOL's success in the same category as rains of fish and crop circles. It seems to happen, but no one knows why.
The basic questions are:A) How the hell are these three going to create the next consumer platform? and
B) Why would we want to substitute M$ crap with America OnNetSunScapeLine's crap?
----------------------
The real problem here, of course, is that if that's what they did, the message is unbreakable. Any plaintext message is as likely as any other message. Given any plaintext, and the "abcd...kryptos...etc" pattern that I want it to end up as, all I need to do is subtract the plaintext from the final pattern, and I have my one-time pad key.
Now that seems kind of unfair, if it was intended to be a puzzle to solve, so perhaps there's a clue embedded in the plaintext of the first section. Or maybe it's just designed to LOOK like that's the way they did it. :-)
----------------------
Or exist on any lists, anywhere, ever. Their big iron's existence is classified, let alone specs or performance benchmarks. And you can bet your ass that NSA's top five machines would take spots 1 through 5 on this list, if they existed. ;-)
Well, ok, maybe not on this list, due to the software differences, as edhall noted. But you know what I mean.
----------------------
You can't get a new CDROM for your box at work, because the process requires you to justify all yadda yadda yadda... (you only get that far in such restrictions before getting bored, usually)? What do you do? You find the guy who has the cdrom and you get it directly from the source. This is a process hack, something that computer hackers generally excel at, but can be done by others too.
What about the car hackers? Guys who do insane things to their vehicles which pretty much parallel oil-bath motherboard cooling in terms of whacked-out performance goals.
Hacking is something that can be done whenever and wherever it needs to be, and it doesn't require computers to do. All the computer-centric terms people have come up with will never be able to match the depth of the term as it stands. So USA Today doesn't get it? They never will. Just hack around them :-)
----------------------
Read The Puzzle Palace. There's already a law on the books that says explicitly that no existing or future law of the US may require NSA to reveal anything about its organization, structure, or activities to anyone. Including anyone in the US government. They simply don't have to tell Congress anything, and I know who's gonna win this little tussle.
By the way, if the Aussies actually didn't ask Big Brother for permission before confirming Echelon's existence, I bet the spooks off the BWP are right steamed about it. :-)
----------------------
You get a static IP with the home service too. Really, they just market the higher-bandwidth offerings as "business" and lower as "home."
----------------------
Yeah, they could block ports, but why be so techie about it? My previous ISP (early.com -- DON'T EVER USE THEM!! In fact, if anyone were to take it into their head that an "unplanned service outage" were in order for these freaks, I'd be much obliged :-) noticed that I had a webserver running on my dialup connection.
I had apache running because I'm a web developer, and often work at home. It continued to run when I dialed in to the ISP, so they decided this constituted "running a server" and canceled my service, AND kept the money I paid them for three more months of service.
I called and bitched, but they just completely stonewalled me. "Duh. There's nothing I can do. Duh." Apparently, no one there has any control of their own network, if you believe their "support" people.
So they don't need to block ports, they can just pull the plug on you.
----------------------
I was a little wary of getting the service, as I had read the horror stories about that guy with the Mac, and all I have are Linux boxen. When the first person I talked to at BA got to the dreaded question "what operating system", I said Linux. He said "Hmmm... we don't seem to have that listed." I asked him if unix was listed, and he said no. Then I asked if it was anything more complicated than configuring the NIC, and he said no, that was what their technicians did. I assured him I could do that myself, and that was that.
The only other time it was mentioned was when the second guy came to activate the service. He looked at my machine (a homebuilt dual PPRo, all black, no identifying brands or features :-), then looked at the monitor, which was showing a Gnome/E desktop with the Apple Platinum theme. "What is that?" he said, a bit puzzled. I told him Linux, and he went, "Ah, so you've got it all configured then?" It was a riot.
[sidebar: Does anyone else find that as soon as you mention Linux around computer people, you instantly get to cut all the Win-Idiot bull? Like computer stores, for example... I went to CompUSA (of all places! don't shop there by the way!) for a modem a while ago, and I asked for a 56k modem that was jumper-configurable. The sales guy hemmed and hawed for a minute, so I said "I run Linux, so I don't want any of that win-modem garbage." His face just lit up. He showed me one that his linux-using friend got, and it's worked perfectly. Well, until I got DSL. It doesn't do much now.]
Also, they never asked for my MAC address. Perhaps because BA owns the whole route, they have their own ways of determining it or something. Dunno, but it was never mentioned.
So the summary is, Bell Atlantic ADSL==good. I don't think I could get by without it anymore.
----------------------
Or, to put it another way, they need someone who can talk out of both sides of their ass. :-)
"Waiter! This food sucks! And the portions are too small!"
----------------------
Also, it doesn't seem to display the ads at the top of the page, which I think is a nice feature. ;-) Keep up the good work!
----------------------
They start talking about how popular this bread store is, but why? It's just another franchise right? Well (GET THIS) "it's different because it's open. Those who know marketing share with those who know more about bread machines. If one store needs advertising tips, maybe they trade with another who's figured out a more efficient stocking system..." (a paraphrase, but that was the gist). They were talking about Open Source enterprise!!! Microsoft! I wanted to vomit. You know when someone does something so unbelievably arrogant that it makes you physically ill? This was it.
So after neatly summarizing all the benefits of an open system (whether it's bread or software), they continue to be the world's greatest paragon of obfuscation, monopoly, and proprietary secrets. Can they really be that stupid? Time will tell...
----------------------
I have to say that of everything I tried, WP8 was the worst. Some flaws:
- The fonts are unreadable. Totally.
- No driver for my Canon BJC 4000. Not an exotic uncommon printer, I'd say. Not to mention the fact that I wouldn't even need a damn driver if it would print using the print system I ALREADY HAVE!
- Word import sucks. It mangles anything more complex than simple paragraphs, and the fonts all go to hell.
- The interface was clearly designed by aliens. It's even more counterintuitive than Word for christ's sake. I'm not looking for a word processor that challenges my perceptions about reality, thanks.
For a while, she was actually using VMWare to boot Win95 and use Word, because there just wasn't a useful word processor out there for Linux. Now I set her up with StarOffice, which, while I agree wholeheartedly with those who want it not to be it's own damn OS, is a pretty good word processor. It's bloated, but I'm running a dual PPro with 128M RAM, so that's not too much of a problem. Otherwise, it imports well, and has what she needs. But why, oh why, is there no way to just run the word processing part of it?I wonder how many of the people who complain about StarOffice being too bloated prefer to run emacs? Heh.
----------------------
- When clients have slow connections, frequently the connection times out somewhere along the line before they can send the whole file (especially with large files)
- So far (AFAIK) there is no way to upload multiple files at the same time. The form element that handles file upload only takes one file at a time.
- It's just not as fast, and it's a bandwidth hog. These are subjective observations, not benchmarks, but I had to upload a damn lot of files in testing, and it seems to take longer than ftp. The file is sent in chunks, and I think that headers and handling for each of these chunks adds overhead to the upload.
While we're at it, if anyone knows of a good way to integrate ftp file transfer with a web site, please share!----------------------