I always assumed they were the same company... Anyway, in that case, HPs are better but they're still not very good:) I have two here, and they've caused no end of trouble, mainly with the motherboard and sound/network drivers conflicting.
The number of times I've had problems with HP/Packard Bell home computers still ceases to amaze me. Duff CD drives, faulty memory, dodgy proprietary motherboards, the list goes on and on. There is no way you'd catch me or anyone I know going out and buying an HP. Ever.
...BT openworld's 24x7 thing - unlimited use via 0800 number, 15 quid a month all in...
Your mother is a lucky person:). Many people (including myself) have had great problems with the 24x7 thing (SurfTime Anytime) - it's extremely heavily oversubscribed, and (at least when I'd tried it, a few years back now) the dedicated Surftime tie-lines which link the exchanges with the ISPs' dedicated modem racks were almost constantly engaged.
Mind you, I tend to blame everything currently wrong in the world on BT...;) - Their ADSL service is really crap, and that's exacerbated by the poor quality of their local loops, which they don't seem to thrilled on spending much money maintaining or replacing. Thank God I have an NTL cable modem now...
On the same hardware, I've had BeOS, QNX, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, and Linux. Excluding BeOS and QNX, which I haven't done much testing on (although I don't doubt they're quick to boot), WinXP and Linux take about the same time to load, possibly Linux is a tad quicker, because I've got a pretty stripped-down kernel. But WinXP takes a good half the time of it's predecessor.
(note: it's a SMP celeron system, so that may have something to do with it)
Do you realize that it is EASIER for me to play DVDs on my COMPUTER then it is to play them on my dedicated DVD player?
I don't know what sort of television setup you have, but on my sub-£800 television/DVD setup, I just stick the disk in and press the play button. The DVD player requires absolutely zero configuration, and the TV automatically detects the new signal on one of it's inputs, and switches to it. Makes me wonder if the A/V technology is better here in the UK, or at least cheaper...
In case you don't know what inhaled methanol will do to you, expect liver failure, blindness and brain damage.
I think you overreact a bit. If you spill a few millilitres of methanol and inhale the vapour, you're not going to come to harm, as long as you mop it up and ventilate the area. Also, you'd need to inhale a very large amount to get liver failure and brain damage. These symtoms are usually caused by ingestion.
I for one prefer a nice safe, Ni-Cad or Lithium-Hydride battery, but then I'm pretty health conscious.
As a chemist, I very much hope that was sarcasm. Cadmium is a cumulative poison (like lead but worse) which can cause lung and kidney damage.
Lithium Hydride reacts very violently on contact with water to produce Hydrogen and clouds of hot Lithium Hydroxide solution vapour, which are highly irritating to the respiratory system, and generally not very nice.
One has to take these things in perspective, and methanol fuel cells are no more dangerous that any other type of battery.
And maybe some losers are still back in the stone ages with Windows 3.11, did that even HAVE office back then?
That would be Office 4.3, back in the olde days when Microsoft was still in the habit of giving products version numbers. It came on something like 40 3.5" floppies, and took round about 2 hours to install. And God help you if you ever got the disks out of order...
No, he said it was running well in an emulator, but only at about 3FPS at full quality on his iPaq, which he'd subsequently managed to get it running on.
I'd like to see how it goes on my 206Mhz StrongARM HP Jornada...
I totally agree with you, and indeed I love the way it's done, which is where I feel most prospective Linux users are being misled into believeing it's all as smooth and as easy to use as Windows. It's not.
There may be a thin veneer of smoothness, but if you're actually *using* Linux, you need to know the command line and files like the proverbial back of your hand. In that respect Linux is a kick-ass OS.
Actually with Linux it's more likely a case of pressing a key sequence.
God I was asleep then... yeh it's mostly -- or which I love. However, when I came to Linux desktop from Windows, it's not very clear it's that easy.
One very big problem with the Windows design is that it puts things end users generally should not be fiddling with in amongst cosmetic changes. Does the OS X model avoid doing this?
Good point there. Not entirely sure whereabouts in Windows it would go if not in Display Properties - it is in a different tab from the cosmetic stuff.
I must say that the Mandrake installation is probably on a par with the Windows installation. The MacOS installation is probably my favourite, technically speaking. However, and I think many people make this assumption, the mere fact that it's easier to install doesn't mean it's easier to use. The user should not need to touch the CLI AT ALL in a proper GUI interface, although it should be there. MacOS X achieves this with flying colours. Linux distros do not. Windows achieves this most of the time:)
Linux needs a fairly substantial paradigm shift to move away from CLI installations and standardise on a package format which is widely accepted, yet simple to use. A system which negates the need to compile anything, automatically or otherwise, and can handle dependencies well.
Linux doesn't come at all close to how polished OS X is, and to a lesser extent Windows. It's a different league altogether.
The point is there is no widely accepted and standardised interface for these sorts of things on Linux. To pick up on a point I saw mentioned by an AC, how would I go about changing the screen resolution on a typical installation?
The typical Windows user would start looking in the desktop properties. On a Mac it's in control panels. On Windows it's in control panel. On Linux it's in/etc/X11/XF86Config. Granted there may be a gui app installed in that particular distribution, but can you guarantee that if you move to a different distro? The consistency is not there.
The open-source ethos seems to dictate that many smaller applications from different authors are better than a big all-consuming application. I like this idea, but it means that every single unix GUI setup has different settings and applications, and this is not a good thing for the end-user.
This is why I don't like the idea of Linux on the desktop. OK, it may seem simple to the user, and this may be all well and good, but in actuality it *isn't simple*. Continuing the old refresh rate theme, what happens if the user's monitor isn't detected properly and the horizontal refresh range is set too high. If you say to a newbie Linux user "Oh, you'll need to reboot into a lower runlevel, login as root, and edit the appropriate section in XF86Config", they're not going to feel particularly confident about this Linux thing. Most Windows users wouldn't know what a horizontal refresh rate is.
The differences between OS X and Linux are huge: The Linux GUIs are programmed (mostly) for hackers by hackers. They're based on the huge estoteric heap of junk known as XFree. Whether it's the appropriate solution is not the point. The point is, it's yet another layer of complexity onto an already complex OS.
The OS X GUI is developed by a company loved by some for it's gorgeous design. It's developed by paid engineers for non-technical users. It's a window manager and desktop environment in one. It's vaguely based on an existing OS. And most importantly, it's designed so the user should never see the command line, unless they want to. Oh, and it's bloody gorgeous:).
I'm rambling now... I wonder if any of the above made sense...
As an aside, Netgear has since replaced the FA310TX with the FA311TX, which uses a National Semiconductor net-card-on-a-chip chipset. That's supported in 2.4, and I've had no problems with it.
When you can instantly access any song ever recorded, why would you still pay to subscribe to a service that only gives 100 streams where someone else is picking the songs?
Of course. The thing is, you may have access to every song ever recorded, but you don't know which ones you like, which you enjoy, and which aren't worth your bandwidth. That's what radio is for. MP3 won't supercede radio, because they're completely different media.
No they're not 100% environmentally friendly, and the fact is Hydrogen *will* be obtained from fossil fuels, but it is much more environmentally friendly to burn all the fossil fuels centrally (i.e. in power stations, which have much more carefully-controlled emmission standards), than it is to ship fuel out to household generators, or whatever, which are inherently less efficient than larger power stations.
Also, when the relevant authorites take it upon themselves to do something about greenhouse gas emmissions , the switch to alternative power is much more cost-effective and easy if it's done centrally.
On a related note, and slashdot has covered this before, GE is working on a home fuel cell which uses the methane from natural gas:
HTTP Request caused a security alert, please contact our web master if you are getting this alert in error.
What is SecureIIS
SecureIIS offers websites running Microsoft Internet Information Server a broad range of protection from common vulnerabilities, both known and unknown. Because SecureIIS does not protect against specific vulnerabilities, but classes of vulnerabilities, it allows for a much more far reaching layer of security.
Hmm... so Slashdotting is a common security vulnerability now...?:) Hmmm...
PCS is yet another marketing acronym, standing for Personal Communication Services (I think). It's primarily used in comparison with the European GSM system, as the two are very different in technology (note that this means it's unlikely that the US 3G system is anything like what our EU one will be/is like).
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
No.
This thing won't let you go at it's physical top speed. It'll have a soft speed limit on it, so there's always enough in reserve to compensate for leaning forward.
Still, I hope he's got the software debugged. I wouldn't want to be on one of those when it crashes....
So is it, or isn't it?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
The slashdot audience seems fairly split in the middle about this one. Half of us seem to think that it'll certainly sell, the other half that it's just a (vastly overpriced) scooter.
Personally, I think it'll sell to many purely for the novelty value. I've always been fascinated by Kamen's previous self-balancing wheelchairs and the like. I'd love to own one... but probably not for $3000.
What I notice from the article is that Kamen appears to be understating his invention to start with. I'd probably guess it goes faster than 12mph, and although that would be impractical on inner-city pavements, I can think of quiet suburban roads where that would be a godsend. Also, if any decent number of people start buying one, I'd guess the price will drop well below $3k.
Oh dear... that went gravely wrong...
Let's try again: New AIBO Demo'd
I find it incredible how the slashdot editorship can't manage to correct such a blatant example of apostrophe misuse. It's Demoed. The apostrophe is used to indicate possesion, or a shortening of the word, not randomy when you feel like it might look better. Does the AIBO belong to the demo? Is there a missing letter in that word? Nope.
Please slashdot, if you want to be viewed as a decent information source, the least you could do would be to at least give articles a cursory check for spelling before slamming them up on the site. Please.
Really, the radiation for these discs (at least the readers) shouldn't really be a problem, although the drives may need to be designed better to prevent the escape of any radiation. The big problem is that current CD-R and RW *writers* use higher-power lasers to heat up the substrate and write or erase. The problem is, that a UV laser won't heat the substrate up nearly as much as an IR one would, but I'm sure they've found a way out of that
Although, I bet only around 25% of people know they have ionising radiation inside their smoke detectors...
Yeh, the point I was trying to make was that the average consumer probably wouldn't be too happy with a source of ionising radiation under their desk. Even a lower-power UV laser, such as might be used for the "read" function in such a disk drive is several thousand times more powerful than the UV we recieve outside, and look how worked up some people get about that:/
The erase-function laser in, say, a CD-RW needs to heat the sensitive layer up to over 300 degrees C to erase the disk, and, as such, has to be a pretty powerful unit. I don't have the expertise to say how much of a risk of cancer there is from a similar-power UV laser, but it can't be insignificant.
Slashdot Mirror
I always assumed they were the same company... Anyway, in that case, HPs are better but they're still not very good :) I have two here, and they've caused no end of trouble, mainly with the motherboard and sound/network drivers conflicting.
HP...home...machines.....
*shudders*
The number of times I've had problems with HP/Packard Bell home computers still ceases to amaze me. Duff CD drives, faulty memory, dodgy proprietary motherboards, the list goes on and on. There is no way you'd catch me or anyone I know going out and buying an HP. Ever.
...BT openworld's 24x7 thing - unlimited use via 0800 number, 15 quid a month all in...
:). Many people (including myself) have had great problems with the 24x7 thing (SurfTime Anytime) - it's extremely heavily oversubscribed, and (at least when I'd tried it, a few years back now) the dedicated Surftime tie-lines which link the exchanges with the ISPs' dedicated modem racks were almost constantly engaged.
Your mother is a lucky person
Mind you, I tend to blame everything currently wrong in the world on BT...;) - Their ADSL service is really crap, and that's exacerbated by the poor quality of their local loops, which they don't seem to thrilled on spending much money maintaining or replacing. Thank God I have an NTL cable modem now...
On the same hardware, I've had BeOS, QNX, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, and Linux. Excluding BeOS and QNX, which I haven't done much testing on (although I don't doubt they're quick to boot), WinXP and Linux take about the same time to load, possibly Linux is a tad quicker, because I've got a pretty stripped-down kernel. But WinXP takes a good half the time of it's predecessor.
(note: it's a SMP celeron system, so that may have something to do with it)
Do you realize that it is EASIER for me to play DVDs on my COMPUTER then it is to play them on my dedicated DVD player?
I don't know what sort of television setup you have, but on my sub-£800 television/DVD setup, I just stick the disk in and press the play button. The DVD player requires absolutely zero configuration, and the TV automatically detects the new signal on one of it's inputs, and switches to it. Makes me wonder if the A/V technology is better here in the UK, or at least cheaper...
In case you don't know what inhaled methanol will do to you, expect liver failure, blindness and brain damage.
I think you overreact a bit. If you spill a few millilitres of methanol and inhale the vapour, you're not going to come to harm, as long as you mop it up and ventilate the area. Also, you'd need to inhale a very large amount to get liver failure and brain damage. These symtoms are usually caused by ingestion.
I for one prefer a nice safe, Ni-Cad or Lithium-Hydride battery, but then I'm pretty health conscious.
As a chemist, I very much hope that was sarcasm. Cadmium is a cumulative poison (like lead but worse) which can cause lung and kidney damage.
Lithium Hydride reacts very violently on contact with water to produce Hydrogen and clouds of hot Lithium Hydroxide solution vapour, which are highly irritating to the respiratory system, and generally not very nice.
One has to take these things in perspective, and methanol fuel cells are no more dangerous that any other type of battery.
And maybe some losers are still back in the stone ages with Windows 3.11, did that even HAVE office back then?
That would be Office 4.3, back in the olde days when Microsoft was still in the habit of giving products version numbers. It came on something like 40 3.5" floppies, and took round about 2 hours to install. And God help you if you ever got the disks out of order...
500 euro, BTW, is a pretty large chunk of cash in itself, it's equivalent to about £300 or $450. I'm not entirely sure what the point is, though...
1 Metric Billion (or US Trillion):
- 10^12 - a million million
1 American Billion:
- 10^9 or a thousand million in English.
1 Metric Trillion: - 10^18 - a million billion
God this is confusing...
No, he said it was running well in an emulator, but only at about 3FPS at full quality on his iPaq, which he'd subsequently managed to get it running on.
I'd like to see how it goes on my 206Mhz StrongARM HP Jornada...
I totally agree with you, and indeed I love the way it's done, which is where I feel most prospective Linux users are being misled into believeing it's all as smooth and as easy to use as Windows. It's not.
There may be a thin veneer of smoothness, but if you're actually *using* Linux, you need to know the command line and files like the proverbial back of your hand. In that respect Linux is a kick-ass OS.
Actually with Linux it's more likely a case of pressing a key sequence.
God I was asleep then... yeh it's mostly -- or which I love. However, when I came to Linux desktop from Windows, it's not very clear it's that easy.
One very big problem with the Windows design is that it puts things end users generally should not be fiddling with in amongst cosmetic changes. Does the OS X model avoid doing this?
Good point there. Not entirely sure whereabouts in Windows it would go if not in Display Properties - it is in a different tab from the cosmetic stuff.
I must say that the Mandrake installation is probably on a par with the Windows installation. The MacOS installation is probably my favourite, technically speaking. However, and I think many people make this assumption, the mere fact that it's easier to install doesn't mean it's easier to use. The user should not need to touch the CLI AT ALL in a proper GUI interface, although it should be there. MacOS X achieves this with flying colours. Linux distros do not. Windows achieves this most of the time :)
Linux needs a fairly substantial paradigm shift to move away from CLI installations and standardise on a package format which is widely accepted, yet simple to use. A system which negates the need to compile anything, automatically or otherwise, and can handle dependencies well.
Linux doesn't come at all close to how polished OS X is, and to a lesser extent Windows. It's a different league altogether.
The point is there is no widely accepted and standardised interface for these sorts of things on Linux. To pick up on a point I saw mentioned by an AC, how would I go about changing the screen resolution on a typical installation?
/etc/X11/XF86Config. Granted there may be a gui app installed in that particular distribution, but can you guarantee that if you move to a different distro? The consistency is not there.
:).
The typical Windows user would start looking in the desktop properties. On a Mac it's in control panels. On Windows it's in control panel. On Linux it's in
The open-source ethos seems to dictate that many smaller applications from different authors are better than a big all-consuming application. I like this idea, but it means that every single unix GUI setup has different settings and applications, and this is not a good thing for the end-user.
This is why I don't like the idea of Linux on the desktop. OK, it may seem simple to the user, and this may be all well and good, but in actuality it *isn't simple*. Continuing the old refresh rate theme, what happens if the user's monitor isn't detected properly and the horizontal refresh range is set too high. If you say to a newbie Linux user "Oh, you'll need to reboot into a lower runlevel, login as root, and edit the appropriate section in XF86Config", they're not going to feel particularly confident about this Linux thing. Most Windows users wouldn't know what a horizontal refresh rate is.
The differences between OS X and Linux are huge: The Linux GUIs are programmed (mostly) for hackers by hackers. They're based on the huge estoteric heap of junk known as XFree. Whether it's the appropriate solution is not the point. The point is, it's yet another layer of complexity onto an already complex OS.
The OS X GUI is developed by a company loved by some for it's gorgeous design. It's developed by paid engineers for non-technical users. It's a window manager and desktop environment in one. It's vaguely based on an existing OS. And most importantly, it's designed so the user should never see the command line, unless they want to. Oh, and it's bloody gorgeous
I'm rambling now... I wonder if any of the above made sense...
As an aside, Netgear has since replaced the FA310TX with the FA311TX, which uses a National Semiconductor net-card-on-a-chip chipset. That's supported in 2.4, and I've had no problems with it.
When you can instantly access any song ever recorded, why would you still pay to subscribe to a service that only gives 100 streams where someone else is picking the songs?
Of course. The thing is, you may have access to every song ever recorded, but you don't know which ones you like, which you enjoy, and which aren't worth your bandwidth. That's what radio is for. MP3 won't supercede radio, because they're completely different media.
No they're not 100% environmentally friendly, and the fact is Hydrogen *will* be obtained from fossil fuels, but it is much more environmentally friendly to burn all the fossil fuels centrally (i.e. in power stations, which have much more carefully-controlled emmission standards), than it is to ship fuel out to household generators, or whatever, which are inherently less efficient than larger power stations.
e n_ us/microgen/index.jsp/
Also, when the relevant authorites take it upon themselves to do something about greenhouse gas emmissions , the switch to alternative power is much more cost-effective and easy if it's done centrally.
On a related note, and slashdot has covered this before, GE is working on a home fuel cell which uses the methane from natural gas:
http://www.gepower.com/dhtml/distributed_power/
It's potentially much more interesting and cleaner (not to mention cheaper) than the coleman cell.
and I get this:
:) Hmmm...
SecureIIS application firewall security alert
HTTP Request caused a security alert, please contact our web master if you are getting this alert in error.
What is SecureIIS
SecureIIS offers websites running Microsoft Internet Information Server a broad range of protection from common vulnerabilities, both known and unknown. Because SecureIIS does not protect against specific vulnerabilities, but classes of vulnerabilities, it allows for a much more far reaching layer of security.
Hmm... so Slashdotting is a common security vulnerability now...?
PCS is yet another marketing acronym, standing for Personal Communication Services (I think). It's primarily used in comparison with the European GSM system, as the two are very different in technology (note that this means it's unlikely that the US 3G system is anything like what our EU one will be/is like).
No.
This thing won't let you go at it's physical top speed. It'll have a soft speed limit on it, so there's always enough in reserve to compensate for leaning forward.
Still, I hope he's got the software debugged. I wouldn't want to be on one of those when it crashes....
The slashdot audience seems fairly split in the middle about this one. Half of us seem to think that it'll certainly sell, the other half that it's just a (vastly overpriced) scooter.
Personally, I think it'll sell to many purely for the novelty value. I've always been fascinated by Kamen's previous self-balancing wheelchairs and the like. I'd love to own one... but probably not for $3000.
What I notice from the article is that Kamen appears to be understating his invention to start with. I'd probably guess it goes faster than 12mph, and although that would be impractical on inner-city pavements, I can think of quiet suburban roads where that would be a godsend. Also, if any decent number of people start buying one, I'd guess the price will drop well below $3k.
Oh dear... that went gravely wrong...
Let's try again:
New AIBO Demo'd
I find it incredible how the slashdot editorship can't manage to correct such a blatant example of apostrophe misuse. It's Demoed. The apostrophe is used to indicate possesion, or a shortening of the word, not randomy when you feel like it might look better. Does the AIBO belong to the demo? Is there a missing letter in that word? Nope.
Please slashdot, if you want to be viewed as a decent information source, the least you could do would be to at least give articles a cursory check for spelling before slamming them up on the site. Please.
Must...fight...urge....
Must...resist...flameing....
Noooooo!
New AIBO Demo'd
I find it incredible how the slashdot editorship
Damn... you saw right through my cunning plan...
Really, the radiation for these discs (at least the readers) shouldn't really be a problem, although the drives may need to be designed better to prevent the escape of any radiation. The big problem is that current CD-R and RW *writers* use higher-power lasers to heat up the substrate and write or erase. The problem is, that a UV laser won't heat the substrate up nearly as much as an IR one would, but I'm sure they've found a way out of that
Although, I bet only around 25% of people know they have ionising radiation inside their smoke detectors...
Yeh, the point I was trying to make was that the average consumer probably wouldn't be too happy with a source of ionising radiation under their desk. Even a lower-power UV laser, such as might be used for the "read" function in such a disk drive is several thousand times more powerful than the UV we recieve outside, and look how worked up some people get about that :/
The erase-function laser in, say, a CD-RW needs to heat the sensitive layer up to over 300 degrees C to erase the disk, and, as such, has to be a pretty powerful unit. I don't have the expertise to say how much of a risk of cancer there is from a similar-power UV laser, but it can't be insignificant.
--Russ