* To feel important by using more of those MS Office components (Word - check; Excel - check; Outlook - ah ha! check; Powerpoint - hmmmmm *gets cracking on a hum-dinger of a presentation about NOTHING; Access - What the?) They cost a bundle - need to use them!
* Integration with the Windows Network
* Corporate, MS monopolized computing environment dictates its use
* MCSE originally set up the network and all the functionality, carved operating procedures in stone
* Too ignorant to try something original
* Outlook Express is free, so it can't be any good. ---
For the vast majority of small-to-medium-sized businesses, they'd be better served with a good Postfix/Courier-IMAP/SquirrelMail setup, with greylisting and SpamAssassin and anti-virus scanning. All of which is free. And MUCH more stable than any Exchange setup I've ever seen.
So true. I'd be implementing that at my current job if they hadn't just bled anally to upgrade 5.5 to 2000. Instead, I get to extend and entrench that garbage.
In One workday, I loaded a debian box, apt-got each of those packages (and more), configured them, and had the thing working.
With Windows, I have to upgrade the NT4 machine to 2000 & apply all applicable Service Packs (to get to Active Directory) before I can upgrade the MAIL SERVER.
If you are facing this situation, and you have any control over the decision making process, MOVE AWAY FROM WINDOWS AT ALL COSTS (which are actually decreased)
Windows has no place outside of corporations with IT departments that need to support Grandfathered Windowsisms. Shares, public folders, collab, email, all can be handled for $0, with an infinate (and also $0) upgrade path.
Go through life pointing out reasons why NOT, and your whole life will be a great big reason why NOT.
Look at the why for a minute: * You _CAN_ * Some people WANT TO * It's cheap entertainment for people who think a hack like that is entertaining (and it obviously is - even to people who think NOT) * The thing in question doesn't come with linux * They are absurdly inexpensive * It's cooler because it's DIY * Adding anything beyond the basic firmware-enabled functionality is an improvement.
Just say "I'm not impressed," and move along to the Jerk-O-Meter article..
I drove Drivey after an hour long commute in my BMW.
Know what?
I prefer the BMW! #1 reason: Predictable body roll physics. I turn the wheel left, and the car follows. Not so in Drivey, where I turn the car right, and the horizon tips over to the opposite side. Does Drivey think it's a boat?
Drivey has fine acceleration however, and I dig the everlasting twilight/dawn.
It reminds me a lot of the Ford Simulator that existed in the oldenne days (1987). Not as much instrumentation, but who really needs a tach or speedo anyway?
Provided with the wv distribution is an application called wvWare. wvWare is a "power-user" application with lots of command-line options, doo-dads, bells, and whistles. Less interesting, but more convenient, are the helper scripts that use wvWare. These are:
* wvHtml: convert your Word document into HTML4.0
(there are more utilities for LaTeX, etc..
I'm using this to convert all of our internal documentation. It does a pretty good job, even converts the images and acts in a relatively reliable manner with 2003, 2000, & 97 formatted files. There's some oddball output sprinkled in, but nothing a little sed fanciness can't fix.
Do you have the same trouble when you use a trackpad?
Do you stick to using the buttons, or are you a tapper? If the lack of click-action on your neighborhood Synaptics product gives you the willies, then there are roughly 10,000 alternate input devices you can choose, same goes for the MM.
None are gonna offer the same technical dvancement:price ratio, though.
You're going to get instantaneous (or as fast as you can render) feedback in the form of a scroll, or a context menu, not to mention whatever benefit you attribute to the squeeze.
-- Now, am I the only one who can only think of Andy Kaufmann when I hear that tune anymore?
You're welcome to go to any of them you like. There is a significant percentage of the population that wants *nothing to do with corporate coffee*.
Mom & Pop coffee shops need to offer the service to compete. Mom & Pop shops don't have centralized support for their system.
Their consequences are failure. Failure at Free Wi-Fi, and perhaps failure at the thing that put them in business in the first place - a friggin' cuppa Joe.
Coffee is somehow synonomous with Wi-Fi now days. There is a serious need for a Wi-Fi co-op to offer services to non-corporate entities that wish to use it as an incentive for customers.
That should give you an idea of the trouble behind it.
Imagine for a minute you're a hardware developer (maybe you are, but play along) with a great idea for a Convergence Device.
You know that a PDA that can play games with a game-friendly and generally useful input mechanism and a big screen would ultimately redefine the PDA.
You have to build this system, and expand on the Palm platform. Lots of hardware testing, R&D, and software development to get games like THPS to run on a Palm.
*THEN*, you have to keep the price reasonable for all this advanced hardware that took a long time to get ready.
By that time, what was hot has started to become tepid.
Tepid doesn't sell. Especially not at a premium.
Small company trying to do something innovative without the inertia and market-mass that benefits efforts by larger companies.
Because you've got to deal with the people who want to put that fake meat into their mouth and not notice that it's faux flesh.
Most people who drop meat from their diet get so used to eating everything else that they stop checking everything that goes in their mouth scanning for cooked starch or meat.
It's sad, but your body becomes so accustomed to eating soggy, fatty, starchy, meaty foods that even when you know you should be eating broccoli & tomatoes, you just can't make yourself put down the sausage pizza & breadstix.
Break free of that, and you break free of the need for meat, and simultaneously clear up receptors for things like cilantro, lime juice, apples, and fresh things.
Until the rest of humanity gets to that point, the purveyors of fake meats have to save the carnies from themselves.
"By our count, if you weed out the multiple translations, different editions and compilations ("The Iliad" is there four times), as well as the "portable" volumes for well-represented authors, you wind up with 1,031 books"
The paperpack factor would keep these out of just about any library except for that of a Public Elementary School. And then, a better deal could be had on better quality books.
Would you pay as much for a Kia for a giant pile of paperbacks?
If they did something amazing like offer some sort of quality, leather binding, special edition, hell - even a cardboard cover, then I can see dropping nearly $8000 for books at one time.
Otherwise, I'd take my chances and perhaps miss out on 4 or 5 of those books by Anonymous and Shakespeare to bid on a few closed public library book lots. Might even get free bookshelves.
Even at $2 per book (high estimate) you'd come out ahead, unless you're one of those people who has to have all *brand new* stuff.
If the point is to have Emily Bronte on hand for all eternity, what's the sense of having her in a crappy airport paperback?
With so much of the data being generated being mostly "worthless" - flash ads, me-too blogs, today's online edition of any newspaper, and so on, survival of the most "valuable" information will be akin to the discoveries in the pyramids and burial chambers of the world.
What 1845 newspaper are you referencing on a daily basis? How about that depression-era film projector in the media room? I don't know about you, but I don't play any Chubby Checker 45's anymore.
Who is going to look at - let alone attribute any sociological value to all this stuff we generate everyday? There's a giant digital "pump" spewing gigs and gigs of this junk every day.
The important things rise to the top and through achieving a place within popular culture, they achieve permanence.
Here's a theory - the lack of everlasting digital preservation will bring Western Earthlings' oral tradition out of atrophy. We may not have all the gems, but then, the longing for something can be potentially more energizing than the actual "thing" itself.
Listen to a romantic yarn about a freight train hopping adventure.
Ask your Grandfather about how much he loved your Grandmother when they first met (or vice versa).
Hours and hours of home movies are a drag - no matter what millennium.
When future civilizations unearth your casket, look in your inside coat pocket, and examine the little stack of Mini BluRay discs, what will matter is the whole timeline of it all, not just an isolated event. That good cell-cam pic of the chick with amazing gams - a blink of an eye. Your Mexico vacation where you discovered your latent cinematic genius - boiled down to "human away from home village".
Do what you can, spread it out, put the eggs in more than one basket, and take it with you when you go.
Whatever publication you put out with Pages will put you WAAYYYY closer to something your Printer will smile over rather than curse, like with Publisher. >shudder
I had the same reaction to Pages after using PageMaker & Publisher in a production environment. Publisher is NO GOOD AT ALL.
However, OpenOffice, Pages, Word & PageMaker/Quark/Publisher/InDesign/Frame cannot be fairly compared as equals.
Pages does Word + Publisher *BETTER* Numbers will probably do Excel + Access *APPLEY*
Remember: FileMaker, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL).
It still sounds good to me, and I was looking into the possibilities a year or more ago. The lifestyle switch would be welcome to me, and I bet to the rest of a cross-section of adventure/traveller/techies. I don't think that netting that particular vein of IT pros will yield that many fish with more than 10 years of actual 'work' under their belts, especially ones that (a) have no family to uproot, (b) have any desire to take on the challenge of moving to a foreign country where your wage would be less than a third of what you made, in USD, nevermind the adjustment for cost of living. Including wrapping up financial burdens in the USA, which would never get paid up when your salary is so diminished.http://www.payscale.com/salary-survey/v id-3068/fid-11570
I am moving to a part of my city that has a significant Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi population *just for the escape* to a saner sort of life: groceries, attitudes, etc.
A "ghetto" like that is not an easy thing to find, from my experiece.
I'd jump at the chance to work in India - even if it meant being employed by a company in India, paying me the indiginous wage. It would be nice for some American companies to sponsor some of us adventure/traveller/nerds at reduced salaries. I, for one, am available.
Slashdot Mirror
Try it with "Pope" or "Kerry" and see what you get.
There's pudding under that crust!
* To feel important by using more of those MS Office components (Word - check; Excel - check; Outlook - ah ha! check; Powerpoint - hmmmmm *gets cracking on a hum-dinger of a presentation about NOTHING; Access - What the?) They cost a bundle - need to use them!
* Integration with the Windows Network
* Corporate, MS monopolized computing environment dictates its use
* MCSE originally set up the network and all the functionality, carved operating procedures in stone
* Too ignorant to try something original
* Outlook Express is free, so it can't be any good.
---
So true. I'd be implementing that at my current job if they hadn't just bled anally to upgrade 5.5 to 2000. Instead, I get to extend and entrench that garbage.
In One workday, I loaded a debian box, apt-got each of those packages (and more), configured them, and had the thing working.
With Windows, I have to upgrade the NT4 machine to 2000 & apply all applicable Service Packs (to get to Active Directory) before I can upgrade the MAIL SERVER.
If you are facing this situation, and you have any control over the decision making process, MOVE AWAY FROM WINDOWS AT ALL COSTS (which are actually decreased)
Windows has no place outside of corporations with IT departments that need to support Grandfathered Windowsisms. Shares, public folders, collab, email, all can be handled for $0, with an infinate (and also $0) upgrade path.
Go through life pointing out reasons why NOT, and your whole life will be a great big reason why NOT.
Look at the why for a minute:
* You _CAN_
* Some people WANT TO
* It's cheap entertainment for people who think a hack like that is entertaining (and it obviously is - even to people who think NOT)
* The thing in question doesn't come with linux
* They are absurdly inexpensive
* It's cooler because it's DIY
* Adding anything beyond the basic firmware-enabled functionality is an improvement.
Just say "I'm not impressed," and move along to the Jerk-O-Meter article..
You might be right, and I'm just experiencing a physically impossible amount of suspension travel.
That's what makes it feel like a boat.
I drove Drivey after an hour long commute in my BMW.
Know what?
I prefer the BMW! #1 reason: Predictable body roll physics. I turn the wheel left, and the car follows. Not so in Drivey, where I turn the car right, and the horizon tips over to the opposite side. Does Drivey think it's a boat?
Drivey has fine acceleration however, and I dig the everlasting twilight/dawn.
It reminds me a lot of the Ford Simulator that existed in the oldenne days (1987). Not as much instrumentation, but who really needs a tach or speedo anyway?
From the sourceforge page:
I'm using this to convert all of our internal documentation. It does a pretty good job, even converts the images and acts in a relatively reliable manner with 2003, 2000, & 97 formatted files. There's some oddball output sprinkled in, but nothing a little sed fanciness can't fix.
If you look at the Intel D915GUX, you'll see the unpopulated pads near the SATA headers:
g -sep2k4/d915gux-board.jpg
http://www.ixbt.com/mainboard/images/roundup-i915
If you look at photos of the same region of an Apple X86 Developer MLB, you'll see a chip.
I'd like to see the kernel output from an attempt to boot on one of those..
They're $109 at Fry's, d00ds. You can take it back when you're done.
Yes - and standards compliant.
The AM-ness of it is not Beta, the hardware is.
The button only existed because you need something to actuate.
Your finger is what does the business.
The illusion of needing a whole "button" to do a task is now outmoded. You can thank the iPod for getting us here.
"It's all about where you put your finger."
Do you have the same trouble when you use a trackpad?
Do you stick to using the buttons, or are you a tapper? If the lack of click-action on your neighborhood Synaptics product gives you the willies, then there are roughly 10,000 alternate input devices you can choose, same goes for the MM.
None are gonna offer the same technical dvancement:price ratio, though.
You're going to get instantaneous (or as fast as you can render) feedback in the form of a scroll, or a context menu, not to mention whatever benefit you attribute to the squeeze.
--
Now, am I the only one who can only think of Andy Kaufmann when I hear that tune anymore?
Those are chain stores.
You're welcome to go to any of them you like. There is a significant percentage of the population that wants *nothing to do with corporate coffee*.
Mom & Pop coffee shops need to offer the service to compete. Mom & Pop shops don't have centralized support for their system.
Their consequences are failure. Failure at Free Wi-Fi, and perhaps failure at the thing that put them in business in the first place - a friggin' cuppa Joe.
Coffee is somehow synonomous with Wi-Fi now days. There is a serious need for a Wi-Fi co-op to offer services to non-corporate entities that wish to use it as an incentive for customers.
What Would Jerry Do?
How are we supposed to use this today?
Yeah, you girls in the typing pool (do they still have those?) run around real quick and take up a collection to get the SysAdmin a new iPod.
BOFH references aside, if I tried to pull that, there would be nothing but animosity toward me.
I don't want to settle for a case of frickin' SODEY POP. Give us some notice next year!!!
With a little foresight, and the right HR person, I could have had the day off or something!!!
Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
That should give you an idea of the trouble behind it.
Imagine for a minute you're a hardware developer (maybe you are, but play along) with a great idea for a Convergence Device.
You know that a PDA that can play games with a game-friendly and generally useful input mechanism and a big screen would ultimately redefine the PDA.
You have to build this system, and expand on the Palm platform. Lots of hardware testing, R&D, and software development to get games like THPS to run on a Palm.
*THEN*, you have to keep the price reasonable for all this advanced hardware that took a long time to get ready.
By that time, what was hot has started to become tepid.
Tepid doesn't sell. Especially not at a premium.
Small company trying to do something innovative without the inertia and market-mass that benefits efforts by larger companies.
This isn't exactly a "Desktop Machine" by the standard definition. It's sort of a "Sweet Spot" between a laptop and a desktop.
Ladies & Gentlemen, what we have here is the Performa for the 00's.
I am reminded of the "Powdermilk Biscuits" tagline which goes "Made by Norweigan Bachelor farmers, so you know they're Pure...mostly."
There's a connection there - it's just not terribly tangible.
---
(Brought to you by the Ketchup Advisory Board)
Ketch-up
Because you've got to deal with the people who want to put that fake meat into their mouth and not notice that it's faux flesh.
Most people who drop meat from their diet get so used to eating everything else that they stop checking everything that goes in their mouth scanning for cooked starch or meat.
It's sad, but your body becomes so accustomed to eating soggy, fatty, starchy, meaty foods that even when you know you should be eating broccoli & tomatoes, you just can't make yourself put down the sausage pizza & breadstix.
Break free of that, and you break free of the need for meat, and simultaneously clear up receptors for things like cilantro, lime juice, apples, and fresh things.
Until the rest of humanity gets to that point, the purveyors of fake meats have to save the carnies from themselves.
I can't find any evidence of this being a Sun branded computer.
The info page shows a Tadpole and a Naturetech notebook.
So these still seem to be SPARC notebooks.
Tadpole makes a Dual CPU SPARC notebook, BTW
"By our count, if you weed out the multiple translations, different editions and compilations ("The Iliad" is there four times), as well as the "portable" volumes for well-represented authors, you wind up with 1,031 books"
W T F
1,031 books after dups and "goofy editions".
The paperpack factor would keep these out of just about any library except for that of a Public Elementary School. And then, a better deal could be had on better quality books.
Would you pay as much for a Kia for a giant pile of paperbacks?
If they did something amazing like offer some sort of quality, leather binding, special edition, hell - even a cardboard cover, then I can see dropping nearly $8000 for books at one time.
Otherwise, I'd take my chances and perhaps miss out on 4 or 5 of those books by Anonymous and Shakespeare to bid on a few closed public library book lots. Might even get free bookshelves.
Even at $2 per book (high estimate) you'd come out ahead, unless you're one of those people who has to have all *brand new* stuff.
If the point is to have Emily Bronte on hand for all eternity, what's the sense of having her in a crappy airport paperback?
With so much of the data being generated being mostly "worthless" - flash ads, me-too blogs, today's online edition of any newspaper, and so on, survival of the most "valuable" information will be akin to the discoveries in the pyramids and burial chambers of the world.
What 1845 newspaper are you referencing on a daily basis? How about that depression-era film projector in the media room? I don't know about you, but I don't play any Chubby Checker 45's anymore.
Who is going to look at - let alone attribute any sociological value to all this stuff we generate everyday? There's a giant digital "pump" spewing gigs and gigs of this junk every day.
The important things rise to the top and through achieving a place within popular culture, they achieve permanence.
Here's a theory - the lack of everlasting digital preservation will bring Western Earthlings' oral tradition out of atrophy. We may not have all the gems, but then, the longing for something can be potentially more energizing than the actual "thing" itself.
Listen to a romantic yarn about a freight train hopping adventure.
Ask your Grandfather about how much he loved your Grandmother when they first met (or vice versa).
Hours and hours of home movies are a drag - no matter what millennium.
When future civilizations unearth your casket, look in your inside coat pocket, and examine the little stack of Mini BluRay discs, what will matter is the whole timeline of it all, not just an isolated event. That good cell-cam pic of the chick with amazing gams - a blink of an eye. Your Mexico vacation where you discovered your latent cinematic genius - boiled down to "human away from home village".
Do what you can, spread it out, put the eggs in more than one basket, and take it with you when you go.
Whatever publication you put out with Pages will put you WAAYYYY closer to something your Printer will smile over rather than curse, like with Publisher.
>shudder
I had the same reaction to Pages after using PageMaker & Publisher in a production environment. Publisher is NO GOOD AT ALL.
However, OpenOffice, Pages, Word & PageMaker/Quark/Publisher/InDesign/Frame cannot be fairly compared as equals.
Pages does Word + Publisher *BETTER*
Numbers will probably do Excel + Access *APPLEY*
Remember:
FileMaker, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL).
Look at the iPod Shuffle. It's very limited. Chic, but limited.
Same goes for the Mac Mini. Chic, but hobbled by HD I/O, etc.
Why would they not apply the same philosophy to some new Intel hardware?
Care to site these sources you quote?
Awful authoritative if you ask me, with all the absolutes in there.
You're right.
v id-3068/fid-11570
It still sounds good to me, and I was looking into the possibilities a year or more ago. The lifestyle switch would be welcome to me, and I bet to the rest of a cross-section of adventure/traveller/techies. I don't think that netting that particular vein of IT pros will yield that many fish with more than 10 years of actual 'work' under their belts, especially ones that (a) have no family to uproot, (b) have any desire to take on the challenge of moving to a foreign country where your wage would be less than a third of what you made, in USD, nevermind the adjustment for cost of living. Including wrapping up financial burdens in the USA, which would never get paid up when your salary is so diminished.http://www.payscale.com/salary-survey/
I am moving to a part of my city that has a significant Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi population *just for the escape* to a saner sort of life: groceries, attitudes, etc.
A "ghetto" like that is not an easy thing to find, from my experiece.
I'd jump at the chance to work in India - even if it meant being employed by a company in India, paying me the indiginous wage. It would be nice for some American companies to sponsor some of us adventure/traveller/nerds at reduced salaries. I, for one, am available.
The software will continue to work.
What kind of longevity do you hope to get out of a vanity mirror anyway?
Nope.
And..