Exactly, my thought too. I have a MS Natural which is around 5-6 years old. And i bought it second hand. Still the best keyboard out of the dozens i have. And the only one that has not quit over so many years. Incidentally, I wash it once a year or so ! (after removing the circuit board, offcourse)
I could never figure out how MS H/W is so much better than that from the pure H/W cos while their S/W keeps having so many unaddressed issues ?
Try a rolling release distro like PCLinuxOS. Have had it since last 3-4 years w/o reinstalling. Always remains updated with apps.
Alternatively, check 'backports' in the package manager for example in Mandriva etc. and you can retain the same system with updated apps. There's is no complicated 'stuff' to do. Just check backports and you'll get updated versions of the app for your older distro.
Actually, this problem is just your imagination. There's no need to keep re-installing new version of the distro every few months. Its just more fun for some people like you.
Me, I have a partition with PCLinux for office use with Lotus, domain login etc. all crap setup and another partition for trying out new distros every few months if i feel like (currently, Mandriva 2009.1 RC2 with KDE 4.2.x - beautiful)
Disclosure: I also use Windows 7 which i think is a very good job from MS after a long time.
Its getting really shameful how stupid our Police & Politicians can be. Instead of working to avoid terror attacks they are spending time on this?
WIFI was only used to CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ATTACKS. That could be done by post/note/phone or just telling the local news channel. This doesn't affect the bombs/guns at ALL.
Main problem seems to be the dumb & out of work IT security advisors hired by the Police/Govt.
Exactly. Whether we get justice or not depends on the "willingness" of police. Which is another name for corruption/harrasement whenever people in power feel like it.
Bet if you break the same rules that Lalu Yadav did you would have an extremely "Willing" police and not still be in your job.
This is the reason why such laws are dangerous since they make almost everything criminal and they can be applied selectively by the police when someone has to be put away.
Do you think Lalu could ever be jailed for browsing erotica ? NO. Could you ? YES just piss off a politician/policeman for any sweet reason and you'll be in jail. And a majority of laptops/mobile phones would have something objectionable under this act
Recently, there was a widely reported case about a Bangalore Techie employed with WIPRO who got put in jail for 6 months for defaming a religious figure on a blog. Never got back his job, was made to live in a bathroom in the jail to make him confess & ended up destroying his kidney due to some infection caught there. His Life was completely destroyed. Later Police claimed they had made a mistake in taking down the IP and caught the wrong guy.
So, don't agree & accept such creeping senseless intrusions into your rights or someday you'll pay a price & there'll be no one left to speak up for you then
Nobody is questioning that we have a good judiciary, it's the senseless laws made by the politicians and the corrupt police we are speaking out against. And the judiciary can't help us against them at all
Really ? Name 10 'biggest politicians' arrested/imprisoned/convicted by the Supreme Court in India ?
Sitting back content that some NGO is going to get this law struck down is not recomended with such draconian laws which seem tailor made only for misuse/harassment and no actual reduction in crime.
This is like the previous move to ban open WIFI access points after some terrorist group bombed a few places and claimed responsibility by an email sent through open wifi access point. Would banning wifi stop the bombs ? NO. What would be the impact: terror groups would use other ways to to claim responsibility of bombings - like drop a letter at a news channel
Great! So now we are SAFE? because real terrorists don't use google earth or the likes, they roll their own Maps?
With the increased Security Theatre in India, here's the current joke in our office:-
Heavily armed terrorists arrive from Karachi; See that our office has smart card access control on every SINGLE door. Call up their masters on the Sat Phone and report that they are unable to do anything as doors are access controlled.
Incidentally, Reliance has asked for anti aircraft guns to protect its refinery (as its quite close to Pakistan border)
As a kid my best time was 1 min !
Used to just take off all the stickers on all faces and put them back in correct order.
Friends were confused though as to why i want to solve it alone in a room and not in front of them.
Have always hated open office for its slow speed (even after disabling java) but I recently tried OpenOffice 3.0 Beta and its extremely fast - no difference from MSO 2003. Plus a lot of new features incl office 2007 document support some new eye candy.
Do try it once before dismissing OOo. You'll be surprised. - http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/
Just something to think about - we now own & trade land and laws exist to protect such ownership, should we do the same with Air ? If yes, what happens to those who don't have any air? If no, why do we own IP then ?
Openoffice is already in Lotus Notes 8 and if you double click any ms office attachment it opens it in an embedded window/tab inside of LN8. Been availble in all LN8 betas since 6 months; so its not anything new except the branding 'sym phony' etc.
Does make Lotus Notes 8 into a single solution for all messaging, office and browsing purposes.
That scenario actually worked good enough to fool a couple of IT tech support guys from an ISP (Iqara - owned by British Gas) who kept trying to look for add/remove programs and double clicking on a JVM they had downloaded for half an hour - to our intense amusement.
Said systems were running XPDE (xpde.org - no longer actively developed i think) on a customized minimal fedora install with opera, mplayer, OOo etc. which were basically ZONBU (zonbu.com) like small PCs being tried out by said ISP 5 years ago.
There are at least 2 other opensource autoclick programs for linux/windows since last 5 years. Don't remember the names right now. rsiguard has a trial for 30 days. very good if you have RSI.
I get your point. There are many active linux/oss communities in India and some of them do contribute useful stuff - for eg. linux scripts for connecting to arcane ISPs or CDMA phone internet connections etc.
However, i have seen some really excellent products in some mid size companies which they never release outside since they are trying to sell the solution/product/service to some large company. I am not referring to PCQLinux type of re-rolled distros with some new apps and new logos but to some really really interesting projects I have seen here. There was a company trying to sell a flash based read only distro running a modified XPde type of desktop with just firefox/openoffice/gaim/adobe and other daily use apps with plugins for all types of media/jvm/flashplayer/real etc. Very quick and nice to use everything (menu/apps/configs) in the same place as a winxp box. It was on a 256mb flash which was loaded to 512 ram and would open most apps within 2 seconds (incl oo with quickstart etc). These were INR 8000 boxes which would save documents and settings to a small partition on the flash and sync with the ISP (British Gas's IQARA and some other ones). Finally the deal didn't work out, but instead of releasing the software as oss they had to just abandon it because they needed to concentrate on the next thing which could bring in some revenues. similarly, we've seen a lot of remote data collection and control systems built on small linux clients communicating with cdma wireless cards with the server undergoing trials at some petrol/gas/cng/lpg pumps with a host of innovative features including logging the time whenever the MoBo got exposed to light (meaning someone is tampering with it) remote shutdown of compressors/pumps at dealers exceeding credit limits.
Even the Jet entertainment systems is extremely polished but you won't find it sourceforge or freshmeat. Only in the developers PCs/laptops or the rare times it actually gets sold to a customer - at the customers machines.
To be honest, even I would do the same - while i take a lot of efforts to fix some things for myself and some of them are actually quite useful and bugfree, the only people using them is those who come over and copy it from me. anything beyond that seems too much effort and gets procrastinated indefinitely.
Even if you look at the Pune Linux Users Group, there are very little opensource 'work' which is distributed there - mainly just CDs of major distros.
Offcourse we are improving like you pointed out, and maybe with more and more tech colleges having oss projects would build up some threshold momentum pretty soon.
just my 2p.
More examples:
Indian Railways reservation system runs unix/vms and it's online sales are the highest ecommerce sales in the entire AsiaPac.
Jet Air runs it's in flight video on demand system on a customized linux which is good enough to eat. Over 200 terminals with touch screens, streaming over 100 video options from a single server (cluster). Always reboots during takeoff for some reason though. That's when you can see identical console messages flying by on every screen.
All High Courts (over 30 i think) and the supreme court are on RH (judges laptops dual boot to windows for 'watching movies' & voip.... )
Somehow, the cost factors and convenience of fiddling with the system is very attractive to Indians. Don't like to take too much pains to contribute back though.
There used to be some excellent local distros too which died off since there was no quick (as in 1-2 years) revenue models
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I could never figure out how MS H/W is so much better than that from the pure H/W cos while their S/W keeps having so many unaddressed issues ?
To get old/classic menus back use this: http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer (On first run after install goto view>customize ribbon>Schemas>Classic UI)
Now, exactly whom are your trying to fool ?
Here are some of the "most of us" http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/8241-rc-hangs-every-4-seconds-about-2-3-seconds.html http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/8058-build-7100-vs-7077-x-64-anyone-7077-better-me.html http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/8955-7077-much-faster-than-official-rc-7100-a.html I am going to revert to my 7077 drive image tomorrow as RC is quite a low slower than 7077 that I had. YMMV
Try a rolling release distro like PCLinuxOS. Have had it since last 3-4 years w/o reinstalling. Always remains updated with apps. Alternatively, check 'backports' in the package manager for example in Mandriva etc. and you can retain the same system with updated apps. There's is no complicated 'stuff' to do. Just check backports and you'll get updated versions of the app for your older distro. Actually, this problem is just your imagination. There's no need to keep re-installing new version of the distro every few months. Its just more fun for some people like you. Me, I have a partition with PCLinux for office use with Lotus, domain login etc. all crap setup and another partition for trying out new distros every few months if i feel like (currently, Mandriva 2009.1 RC2 with KDE 4.2.x - beautiful) Disclosure: I also use Windows 7 which i think is a very good job from MS after a long time.
Its getting really shameful how stupid our Police & Politicians can be. Instead of working to avoid terror attacks they are spending time on this? WIFI was only used to CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ATTACKS. That could be done by post/note/phone or just telling the local news channel. This doesn't affect the bombs/guns at ALL. Main problem seems to be the dumb & out of work IT security advisors hired by the Police/Govt.
Exactly. Whether we get justice or not depends on the "willingness" of police. Which is another name for corruption/harrasement whenever people in power feel like it. Bet if you break the same rules that Lalu Yadav did you would have an extremely "Willing" police and not still be in your job.
This is the reason why such laws are dangerous since they make almost everything criminal and they can be applied selectively by the police when someone has to be put away.
Do you think Lalu could ever be jailed for browsing erotica ? NO. Could you ? YES just piss off a politician/policeman for any sweet reason and you'll be in jail. And a majority of laptops/mobile phones would have something objectionable under this act
Recently, there was a widely reported case about a Bangalore Techie employed with WIPRO who got put in jail for 6 months for defaming a religious figure on a blog. Never got back his job, was made to live in a bathroom in the jail to make him confess & ended up destroying his kidney due to some infection caught there. His Life was completely destroyed. Later Police claimed they had made a mistake in taking down the IP and caught the wrong guy.
So, don't agree & accept such creeping senseless intrusions into your rights or someday you'll pay a price & there'll be no one left to speak up for you then
Nobody is questioning that we have a good judiciary, it's the senseless laws made by the politicians and the corrupt police we are speaking out against. And the judiciary can't help us against them at all
Lalu Yadav is still a Minister in the Central Govt heading the Railways as of date. How is that a valid example ?
Really ? Name 10 'biggest politicians' arrested/imprisoned/convicted by the Supreme Court in India ? Sitting back content that some NGO is going to get this law struck down is not recomended with such draconian laws which seem tailor made only for misuse/harassment and no actual reduction in crime.
This is like the previous move to ban open WIFI access points after some terrorist group bombed a few places and claimed responsibility by an email sent through open wifi access point. Would banning wifi stop the bombs ? NO. What would be the impact: terror groups would use other ways to to claim responsibility of bombings - like drop a letter at a news channel
Great! So now we are SAFE? because real terrorists don't use google earth or the likes, they roll their own Maps?
With the increased Security Theatre in India, here's the current joke in our office:- Heavily armed terrorists arrive from Karachi; See that our office has smart card access control on every SINGLE door. Call up their masters on the Sat Phone and report that they are unable to do anything as doors are access controlled.
Incidentally, Reliance has asked for anti aircraft guns to protect its refinery (as its quite close to Pakistan border)
Yes you can. here: http://www.celiocorp.com/
Where can i get 'pay per use' / SAAS ?
At around Rs. 400 Crore / USD 80 Million, it must be the cheapest unmanned moon mission and.... 1st post
Brilliant, crashes instantly. how did you find it so quickly ?
I second that ! Made me realize we can never ever make an AI which can think such things up - so No singularity ever.
As a kid my best time was 1 min ! Used to just take off all the stickers on all faces and put them back in correct order. Friends were confused though as to why i want to solve it alone in a room and not in front of them.
Umm, MS office 2003 is around 400 MB.
Have always hated open office for its slow speed (even after disabling java) but I recently tried OpenOffice 3.0 Beta and its extremely fast - no difference from MSO 2003. Plus a lot of new features incl office 2007 document support some new eye candy. Do try it once before dismissing OOo. You'll be surprised. - http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/
Just something to think about - we now own & trade land and laws exist to protect such ownership, should we do the same with Air ? If yes, what happens to those who don't have any air? If no, why do we own IP then ?
Openoffice is already in Lotus Notes 8 and if you double click any ms office attachment it opens it in an embedded window/tab inside of LN8. Been availble in all LN8 betas since 6 months; so its not anything new except the branding 'sym phony' etc. Does make Lotus Notes 8 into a single solution for all messaging, office and browsing purposes.
That scenario actually worked good enough to fool a couple of IT tech support guys from an ISP (Iqara - owned by British Gas) who kept trying to look for add/remove programs and double clicking on a JVM they had downloaded for half an hour - to our intense amusement.
Said systems were running XPDE (xpde.org - no longer actively developed i think) on a customized minimal fedora install with opera, mplayer, OOo etc. which were basically ZONBU (zonbu.com) like small PCs being tried out by said ISP 5 years ago.
There are at least 2 other opensource autoclick programs for linux/windows since last 5 years. Don't remember the names right now. rsiguard has a trial for 30 days. very good if you have RSI.
Byzantine has been doing this for the last few years. Not bad to use. Surprisingly, even though it uses mozilla as a desktop it has much less memory usage than almost all other distros. And opening a browser is always instant on since it's already in memory. http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/old-index.html http://byzgl.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_P age
I get your point. There are many active linux/oss communities in India and some of them do contribute useful stuff - for eg. linux scripts for connecting to arcane ISPs or CDMA phone internet connections etc. However, i have seen some really excellent products in some mid size companies which they never release outside since they are trying to sell the solution/product/service to some large company. I am not referring to PCQLinux type of re-rolled distros with some new apps and new logos but to some really really interesting projects I have seen here. There was a company trying to sell a flash based read only distro running a modified XPde type of desktop with just firefox/openoffice/gaim/adobe and other daily use apps with plugins for all types of media/jvm/flashplayer/real etc. Very quick and nice to use everything (menu/apps/configs) in the same place as a winxp box. It was on a 256mb flash which was loaded to 512 ram and would open most apps within 2 seconds (incl oo with quickstart etc). These were INR 8000 boxes which would save documents and settings to a small partition on the flash and sync with the ISP (British Gas's IQARA and some other ones). Finally the deal didn't work out, but instead of releasing the software as oss they had to just abandon it because they needed to concentrate on the next thing which could bring in some revenues. similarly, we've seen a lot of remote data collection and control systems built on small linux clients communicating with cdma wireless cards with the server undergoing trials at some petrol/gas/cng/lpg pumps with a host of innovative features including logging the time whenever the MoBo got exposed to light (meaning someone is tampering with it) remote shutdown of compressors/pumps at dealers exceeding credit limits. Even the Jet entertainment systems is extremely polished but you won't find it sourceforge or freshmeat. Only in the developers PCs/laptops or the rare times it actually gets sold to a customer - at the customers machines. To be honest, even I would do the same - while i take a lot of efforts to fix some things for myself and some of them are actually quite useful and bugfree, the only people using them is those who come over and copy it from me. anything beyond that seems too much effort and gets procrastinated indefinitely. Even if you look at the Pune Linux Users Group, there are very little opensource 'work' which is distributed there - mainly just CDs of major distros. Offcourse we are improving like you pointed out, and maybe with more and more tech colleges having oss projects would build up some threshold momentum pretty soon. just my 2p.
More examples: Indian Railways reservation system runs unix/vms and it's online sales are the highest ecommerce sales in the entire AsiaPac. Jet Air runs it's in flight video on demand system on a customized linux which is good enough to eat. Over 200 terminals with touch screens, streaming over 100 video options from a single server (cluster). Always reboots during takeoff for some reason though. That's when you can see identical console messages flying by on every screen. All High Courts (over 30 i think) and the supreme court are on RH (judges laptops dual boot to windows for 'watching movies' & voip .... )
Somehow, the cost factors and convenience of fiddling with the system is very attractive to Indians. Don't like to take too much pains to contribute back though.
There used to be some excellent local distros too which died off since there was no quick (as in 1-2 years) revenue models