I run Fedora 9 on my laptop and upgraded yesterday via "yum" which is not really a download from Mozilla since I get the update from one of the repos, since all a repo needs to do is make the download from the official site and then all the other repos most likely get updated from the master repo which in turn serve out the update to the many client Linux distributions. This is not just Fedora which like Redhat and CentOS use "yum" but other distributions which use app-get and yast as well.
This actually brings up an interesting question. I would assume the 9 million downloads are from Mozilla but how many millions of Linux users have actually updated from their respective repos?
On a different note. When I downloaded Firefox from Mozilla this time I was struck by it speed it's startup (a few seconds) and its update performance over the Firefox 3 beta that comes with Fedora 9. Even updating from 2 to 3 on my company laptop running Win XP I would say I get a 50% or better performance.
Cable is sold as unlimited. The only problem is that the providers oversold, once people started taking advantage of what they were sold the companies started complaining people used what they were sold. Maybe that is true in the USA but in Australia nearly all internet access is sold as capped data usage although once you exceed your limit you get throttled back. This is dependent on your provider so limit penalties could be speed throttling to pay per GB either way there is a penalty.
Check out this site Optus Australia . For those people (like myself) who got in early I get a rate of 7GB (peak) and 14GB (off peak) for AU$50.00 and if I exceed my limit I get throttled back to 128kbs which is fine for torrants and casual internet browsing (forget Youtube). For new users you are going to pay approx AU50.00 more for an extra 9GB but you don't have off peak and peak rates, still for me that is no issue since all good torrent programs have scheduling. Note: AU$1.00 is approx US$0.95.
As for so called "video on demand" it will not likely happen in Australia due to bandwidth caps, however "video on availability" (Foxtel) is viable since it is more easy to control, still for me I find most movies are not worth the price of ownership and since I can rent Bluray as cheap as a DVD I am quite happy to rent if I feel the urge to watch a movie although to be honest I would rather play a game.
Have you looked at Monster Cable . Lots of people buy them unnecessarily. When I purchased a HDTV the sales person tried to hard sell me on a 1.5m HDMI Monster Cable for AU$300. Since I am an electrical engineer and know what signals are being carried I declined (boy was the sales rep pushy - so I told him off) and went and purchased a 2.0M HDM cable for AU19.00 and this one works just as well.
Unfortunately most people don't have any technical knowledge and are entirely at the hands of a sales rep who is only concerned with meeting their sales quota. Personally I would just laugh at the very thought of buying a 1.5M Ethernet cable for $499 when I know I can just as easily buy a 10M cable for less than $10.00. Actually you could just as easily buy a decent wireless router and matching network card for less then $100 and that would save hundreds of dollars over getting a cable guy to install the cable.
At the risk of being modded troll, OO Calc will probably never replace Excel - other than Suns and big iron, corporate america runs on Microsoft Excel (not necessarily a good thing, but still). The problem with OO Calc verses MS Excel is starting to become like the old "vi" verses "emacs" flame-wars. Spreadsheet users need to get some perspective on what a spreadsheet will do and what it should not do.
Some things a spreadsheet should not be used for (please add too if you like):
As a Database.
As an Statistical Analysis tool.
A complex programming tool.
A spreadsheet is a tool that is extremely good at manipulating data (I believe the KISS principle should apply here) and graphically presenting data and IMHO that is where it should end. With regard to presenting data what I find useful is the ability of OO Calc to display and rotate in real time 3D data, that to me is more useful than having to write and debug complex VB scripts which could easily be replaced with a good statical analysis package which has a proven track record (ie. vetted by engineers and scientists with mathematical and programming skills). The problem you get with people (eg. a CPA/Manager/Lawyer... normally with little or no formal programming skills) writing their own scripts is that the people and the firm(s) who use these scripts had better be 100% confident that there are no bugs in them. IMHO keeping auditable track of any mathematical process is much better than putting in data to a "black box" and just getting an answer.
Once we get over the "mine is better than yours" attitude then maybe you find that there is no fundamental difference between OO Calc and MS Excel since they both are very good at graphically presenting data. Of course the big difference is you can see the source for OO Calc which can be and is vetted by professional engineers and scientists compared to trusting Microsoft's closed source solution see example where simple bugs can translate into millions of dollars of lost money.
The problem with fuel price rises they also start the excuse to increase the cost of just about everything due to increased delivery costs. Even if the price of fuel goes down you will usually find that price of goods remains the same or if there is a price drop it will be small in comparison to the fuel price drop.
Switching to a new so called renewable fuel sources is not going to be that easy. Ethanol is not as efficient as petrol and it is debatable if it is cheaper without government subsidies. Biodiesel is most like the best solution if you have a diesel engine, however there is a lot of politics here. Even so the major problem with bio-fuels is allocating land for the growing of it verses land for the growing of food.
As for hydrogen that is still is not really viable at the moment and you have to consider that hydrogen is quite an explosive gas and you need a considerable amount of energy to produce hydrogen. Other forms of power plants are fuel cell and hybrid of which only the hybrid is viable at the moment although this technology is mainly limited to small to medium cars (some trucks do use this but they have a limited range). One quite successful fuel is gas and prices of this fuel is normally less than half that of petrol.
Gnome's not too bad, and I haven't tried KDE 4 yet. I would stick with Gnome at the moment unless you want KDE 3.5 which is quite good. As for KDE 4 I got the beta version when I installed Fedora 9 which I found to be annoyingly buggy (KDE that is). Granted it did not crash but it did not get the fonts right on the tile bar which is a minor annoyance but other annoyances (mainly menu and configuration control) actually had me and wife switching to Gnome. I will most likely switch back to KDE when 4.1 comes out.
Compriz Fusion is one of those love hate relationships which actually puts MS Visa to shame, however I personally find the eye candy to be annoying after a while although you can turn down or even off some of the effects. It is nice to use it to annoy the MS Vista zealots though. What is interesting is Compriz Fusion does not need huge amounts of memory and you can get by with 512MB compared to the minimum 1G Vista requires. I do know that Vista can run in less than 1G but it does not run well.
I had to beg and plead via a number of emails and finally a phone call to buy AbsoluteFTP from the company because they no longer offered it and had it built into a product that I had no use for. Why do this when a simple web search would have given you "winscp" which can do "ftp" and "sftp" and it is free. It runs on MS Windows with a very nice graphical interface which is very similar to "AbsoluteFTP". My son uses it with "sftp" on his gaming rig (runs MS Win XP) when he connects to my Fedora laptop since I won't allow ftp access.
When you use GPL'ed code to provide a web service, you have to provide the source code that runs that service to all users. If you incorporate GPL'ed code into traditional software, the resulting programme has to be GPL'ed Err No! Please read GPL2 and 3.
If you link your own private code to a GPL'd library or even use a GPL'd compiler you are not legally compelled to make your own private code public. Embedding GPL'd code in your own private software makes you a very bad programmer since the best way to mix GPL'd code and private code is to use libraries. I don't know of any software open source or otherwise that requires you to publish your private source unless you want to.
The main gist of the GPL is to prevent unscrupulous people taking GPL'd code and making it closed. If you like giving your code to others without getting any recognition, then that is your prerogative but if you GPL your code then any changes to your code has to be shared. Of course this does not prevent any company from taking GPL'd code and bringing it in-house.
Actually I won't comment on article yet because he uses a font ( verdana ) that appears to be designed to put the reader to sleep. Actually this it is the type of font that would be great for legal documents. Oh wait!:-)
The PS1 saw a lot of its success because many justified shelling out for it under the premise that it saved them the cost of a DVD player. Good post but a minor correction. The PS1 only played CD's not DVD's. The PS2 on the other hand played DVD's and you are right many people found that when the PS2 came out it was compatible in price to dedicated DVD players and in many cases actually cheaper, also having PS1 backwards compatibility helped as well. So having an item with "value add" is actually a good selling point.
I read many posts stating that DVD players are very cheap and why would I get a BD player? The choice of buying a standalone DVD (upscaling or otherwise) player or a BD player is up to the individual and their economic means however I personally would not buy either one unless there is some "value add" to the purchase.
A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) DVD player/burner/recorder (a HDD DB burner/player/recorder is too expensive for me at the moment) offers greater flexibility and therefore IMHO better value. Likewise a PS3 with it's BD, upscaling DVD, hard disk and it's ability to play games as well as it's internet and media capabilities leave a stand alone DVD player for dead even though it costs more. Still as I have mentioned before the choice is up to the individual.
All Linux distributions have the option of using KDE or Gnome or any other GUI if you wish, it really is up to your preferences and what is installed on your system. Personally I always install both KDE and Gnome since it gives everyone in my family a choice.
I use Fedora 9 which has KDE 4.0.4-2 (latest update) however I was disappointed when I compare it to KDE 3.5 which seemed to scale its fonts on the task bar correctly. Try putting the KDE 4 task bar to your right or left on the screen, KDE 4 now has a widget to do this instead of drag and drop. I would not mind this since it is easy to do but the fonts don't scale accordingly. In fact not only did I find KDE 4.0 annoying my wife was not impressed either until I showed her how to switch to Gnome by selecting Gnome just before you login (you have been able to do this for years). I did some minor customisation for her (hide the task bars) and she is very happy. I also made the switch as well.
Before anyone makes a comment on saying "we have another convert to Gnome" I have also found some annoyances with Gnome as well and from my perspective it is just that the current Gnome IMHO is much better than 4.0 (I found KDE 3.5 much better) but I do realise that KDE 4.0 is what I would call a Beta and definately needs some fixing.
To the KDE developers "Bring back the old 3.5 configuration widget although do enhance it for 4.1 but please don't have lots of little widgets, that is so annoying". Also bring back the drag and drop menu bar and make sure your fonts scale accordingly when changing the position of your task bar.
When KDE 4.1 comes out I will make the switch back from Gnome because I personally like KDE over Gnome but again like I said it is a personal preference. Of course I will switch back if KDE 4.1 is not what I consider better. If they are equal I may have KDE and Gnome days depending on what I want to do.
You are correct the current Linux distributions on the PS3 will not run PS3 games but then again the machine plays PS3 games anyway. Now make a good PS2 emulator for the non backwards compatible PS3 and you may actually be offered a job by Sony or you may have to watch your fingers as the cell door closes:-)
If you install Linux on the PS3 you can display anything that can run under a Linux distribution and that includes emulators on your HDTV (if you have one). Run something like ZSNES (native compile and install) and you can play all Super Nintendo ROMS although you may find that displaying something that was meant for an SDTV on a HDTV may not look that great. This is no different to home-brew on the PSP and even the Wii.
Getting back on topic. Putting a piracy prevention chip in a PC motherboard may mean that people will just not buy that motherboard, however if this chip is put in all motherboards I can imagine the litigation that it may cause since a game would have to talk to the chip therefore bypassing the OS or even with the help of the OS. This type of thing may also be an excellent mallware target which may make the Sony/BMG root kit fiasco a walk in the park.
Compared to a hard drive the Solid State Disk has no moving part however they don't have the reliability of modern quality hard drives but if you look back to the 1970's and 1980's disk drives were fairly small in capacity but large and relatively power hungry they were also expensive and not that reliable. The problem with hard drives even today is that they have moving parts which will eventually fail. Hence the Mean Time Between Failure rating which are sort of a rubbery figure that gives a guideline on how reliable the device is.
The MTBF of this solid state drive is supposed to be 1,000,000 hours which is actually not a bad figure since that translates to approx 114 years. Even taking say 5% (my rubbery figure) that still translates to approx 5 years which if you look at many laptop disks that is reasonably reliable.
I doubt that SSD's will replace cheap high capacity hard disks any time soon but their main use at the moment would be in laptops and any device that is requires low power consumption and possibly a greater resistance to vibration.
Like anything over time prices will come down with reliability and capacity going up. To determine how far a product will drop in price you actually need to know the overall production costs of the product which not only includes fabrication but packaging, delivery and marketing. An interesting example is flash disks which have dropped significantly in price but increased in capacity with the lower capacity line actually dropped instead of continuing to drop the price per lower capacity drive.
My laptop (10 months old) has a Nvida graphics card and when I get a new Fedora kernel I always switch my repo to "livna" and the installation of the new kernel and Nvidia drivers are correctly installed. All I do is run "yum update --enablerepo=livna" and when finished I just reboot and everything works. If you don't do this then the best thing to do is to remove the Nvidia drivers (kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia), install the new kernel, reboot then enable the "livna" repo and install the drivers with "yum install --enablerepo=livna kmod-nvidia". You need two reboots for this though. No matter which way you go you must use the "livna" repo to get the Nvidia graphics drivers.
If you are having problems with "yum install {package}" or "yum remove {package}" I would suggest looking very carefully at your repos. I only ever have the default repos enabled and always select a repo with "yum --enablerepo={my_repo} install {package}". Also I would be careful with what repos you use anyway since some can really cause problems.
Personally I have found the "Livna" repo to be the best one to match the default repos. If I cannot install a particular package by default I enable "Livna" then the next repo but as I have said some repos can cause you problems. If that is the case then you may have to use "rpm -e --nodeps {package_that_has_issues}" and this is were the fun starts. You can always try and install later if you really need the package.
As for i386 and x86_64 packages I always suggest trying to use the package that matches the architecture which means for 64bit architecture (most current PC's now) you should try to get rid of i386 packages if you have both the 32bit and 64bit ones. Use "yum erase {package}.i386" to get rid of the i386 package. You may be able to do what I have suggested in the GUI but when you have dependency issues the command line is the best and safest way to go. If you are using RHEL 5.1 (latest is 5.2) then you most likely have a subscription which will give you telephone and email support. If you are paying for this then I would definately suggest using it.
So now I always install Windows first so it's all happy and in place and then let Linux have its way. Windows doesn't even have a clue. It's really best this way. Fully agree with that.
I have a dual boot on my work laptop running XP (we are not allowed MS Vista) and PCLinuxOS which works well except it is getting harder to use Linux because many applications I need to use are Microsoft centric so basically my dual boot is really a single boot into XP (Sigh!).
My home laptop came with Vista Ultimate which actually works fine except it had nothing except the OS and a lot of crap-ware (8GB all up), which leaves me to download Open Source or pirate. I backed up MS Vista (good for when I sell my laptop) and installed Fedora 7 (no dual boot) and a few months later I installed Fedora 8 and very soon I will install Fedora 9. Personally I won't have any problems doing the backup of my data, a fresh install of Fedora 9, recovery of my data and some minor customisation. All up for me approx 4 hours of very easy work most of the time waiting, so I will end up putting in about three and a half hours worth of gaming.
From the article I would question the expertise of the writer since anyone with any sense will repartition (you can use the default if you want - I don't but that's me) and format the part of the disk you want to install the Linux distro on (I use the whole disk but again that's me).
Would I recommend Fedora to a novice? Probably not but all members of my family use the machine I have Fedora on and no one has any issues. I even give everyone the choice of KDE or Gnome which can be selectable on login. I am the only one who uses the command line but for some things I do a GUI works great, it all depends on what I want to do. A properly installed Linux (Fedora, Ubunto, OpenSuse,...) can work really well but one thing Fedora has that will turn off the novice is the number of package updates you get every week and every third week you get a new kernel. To me this is one of the fun parts of Fedora and it does not take much of my time. Of course if you want you don't have to update any packages, but is that any more different to not updating a Microsoft OS.
Personally I have found Fedora and many Linux distributions very easy to install however you should have some knowledge of how to setup/boot (100MB) and / (rest of the partition/disk) since that is basically all you need for a working Linux Distribution and Fedora is no different, so when in doubt just accept the defaults but please format the partitions.
Wouldn't backing your data up be cheaper? Your stating the logical thing to do but unfortunately most people have no idea how to backup their data and many that do could not be bothered living in denial as to the reliability of cheap disks. People like this only complain when the disk fails especially when it costs $1500 for a partial recovery which could have brought an acceptable backup solution in the first place and still have change to buy a nice stereo system for your PC and possibly a 20"+ LCD monitor (my son did this for well under $1000).
Actually the cheapest solution for the home requires backup disks that are equal or greater in size to the data they backup (my current solution). This is a viable solution but you are definately subject to physical disasters such as fire and theft, still that is the chance you sometimes take for convience. Tapes are actually better but they start to get expensive however they are easy to put off-site (gets around the fire and theft issue). The same is true with DVD or Bluray disks but when you are trying to backup terra-bytes this can also get expensive and inconvenient.
What is even worse are companies who have little if any backup strategies and there are quite a few of them. Some companies pay considerable amounts of money to do backups but many don't do any disaster recovery planing so when a disaster happens (and it will) the losses to the company due to downtime can be quite high, sometimes millions of dollars in lost revenue due to a recovery outage.
Personally a backup solution which also includes disaster recovery should reflect what you perceive your data is worth.
IN Australia I can get 8GB SD/USB flash memory for approx AU$32.00 and 16GB SD/USB flash memory costs about AU$72.00 so a 20GB Solid state disk which I would assume to have much better reliability and performance than flash memory should be more expensive again, so from a personal perspective I would much rather pay the AU$50.00 for the larger solid state memory.
Even if you put on a Linux distribution with just about everything that is available from any repository you would not use up more than 10GB including the OS and this includes all Office software and development software (ie. gcc, g++, f77 etc..) which would leave you with 10GB free for your required data. You could even attach terabytes of USB disk if you really need it although at that stage I think I would be seriously considering what I wanted the machine for.
The problem with the EEEPC 900 is the price since it's approaching the price of a low end laptop. It should be interesting if the they sell. Still if you are willing to look around you may get a better deal although I think the magic number from the Australian purchase point of view is less then AU$500.00. The 7" EEEPC sold well (Linux version) world wide and I think this shook Microsoft to the point that they spent millions on getting XP to run on it.
From my personal perspective I have no interest in this type of PC preferring full sized laptops but I do know my son's girlfriend has the Linux one and she is very pleased with it. As I have said before the magic threshold of approx AU$500.00 may make or break the choice of buying one.
And in case you missed it, for 90+% of users, hacking the code or recompiling the kernel != "just works." In any event, just because such hacking is _possible_ doesn't mean it's going to happen. I have been using Linux for years and while I can "hack" I have never had to recompile a kernel although I did configure one a few years ago. I actually use Fedora 8 (waiting on 9) and if I want I can download and install a new kernel every three weeks. This is not what the average user would want to do. In most cases I don't need to do this and can easily prevent a new kernel being downloaded. (just put "exclude=kernel*" in/etc/yum.conf) and you can either do updates with "yum update" on the command line or if you find this too taxing try the GUI updater. Of course if you use a different Linux distro you can run "app-get" (Debian updater) or it's equivalent GUI updater. All updates can be automated if this is wanted which would be fine for most people.
If people don't want to update their Linux machine they don't have to however a GUI updater and installer sure makes it easy and this is much better than what Microsoft provides since they only update their own products while Linux distros allow you to install and maintain thousands of packages.
Fedora is not the type of Linux distro I would recommend for the average user, however from version 8 (64bit) I have found that everything "just works" on my laptop and this includes wireless. In fact I am typing this on Firefox running under Fedora 8 (I don't dual boot) and I have never had to "hack" it's kernel yet.
Well now we all know that Australians pay more for quality... I don't mind paying for quality but I also want functionality as well, however I do like to shop around and the internet makes it very quick easy to do this. Basically when I decide on a particular product I want I do a price comparison as to what I would pay in Australia (includes GST) and what the product costs overseas plus delivery which is very important on deciding if I buy overseas or just get it in Australia. A world wide warranty is also important when purchasing from overseas as well. If the cost in Australia is only a few dollars more than the same product overseas I would buy the product in Australia since it may be possible to do a deal with the seller. In other words I do my homework.
Another thing that I have to consider is the voltage rating of a device (if it uses mains power) since Australia has 240V AC and the US has 110v AC. Of course a universal power supply is fine but it would be very annoying if I got a product that only took 110V AC,
From a personal perspective I have found that most consumer goods in Australia are not that much more expensive than the same product overseas but as I have said before it pays to do some research first.
I suppose I better get back on topic but I normally put Linux (Fedora to be precise) on any PC I own because I find that Linux offers the most usability for anything I want to do and IMHO it is fun. I unfortunately have to pay the Microsoft tax but since I get a new laptop from my work at a very good discount I save the MS Windows OS (now Vista Ultimate) and when I sell the laptop (usually every 12 months) I make a small profit but I do give the buyer the option of a fully working Fedora or any Linux of their choice or even Windows Vista. No prizes on guessing the OS most buyers want and what they have to pirate (what's this "pay for") to get the software they think they require:-)
At a Sydney launch event for the much-anticipated Eee PC 900 model, local product manager Albert Liang revealed that the XP model would sell for $599 in Australia, while the Linux model would be $649. To cover the licence cost associated with Windows XP Home and Microsoft Works ? which replace a custom version of the Xandros Linux distribution and OpenOffice ? the XP model has just 12GB of storage, while the Linux version has 20GB. Ok the the above prices are for the Eee PC 900 model which is not out yet but you are looking at a price from a Department Store which is not known for being cheap.
From the following web site MSY (only a few Km from where I live):
Asus EeePC 7" Linux + Open office ?Mum?s Day Specials? AU$395
Asus EeePC 7" XP HOME + 4GB SD + Free USB Mouse AU$535
From the same place you can get a 4GB SD card for AU21.00 and a USB mouse for AU5.00 and if you do the math then XP Home is worth AU$106 (AU$1 == US$0.94).
Given the above much cheaper prices (ok it is the 7" model) if I was in the market for this type of PC I would not get it at a department store and most people (example: students) who really want something like this would do a web search first (or at least they should) before buying anyway.
Mondo is excellent for disaster recovery of the Linux Operating System with the advantage of producing a recovery iso without shutting down the system. While you do need to compile the source it is fairly easy to do this and the compiled binaries can easily be installed on all other Linux OS's of the same type.
I have found that Clonezilla is an excellent tool for creating recovery or deployment images however it is not really a true disaster recovery tool since you have to create an image by shutting down the system. Still if you are happy to do this it is quite fast (I get approx 35MB/sec on my laptop drive to my backup disk or server). I have used this tool to actually image and recover Linux, MS Windows and Solaris disks and it is surprising easy to do this. Since you are backing up an image the file-system and disk management layout is not important and all data can be faithfully recovered. I suppose you could call this a "poor man's RDP solution" and having used both I prefer Clonezilla any day since IMHO it is more flexible.
While tools like Clonezilla and Mondo are good bare metal recovery tools it is always important that a good backup strategy is used for spot recovery (eg. dump or even cpio (ugg!)), however to backup a database it is best to use the correct database backup tools preferably those that don't shut the database down. Of course the larger the amount of data you need to backup the greater the need of a good disaster recovery strategy and this is a major problem that really needs addressing from the corporate business to the home user.
I have one of the Australian 60GB PS3 and it is software backwards compatible however it does still use the PS2 graphics engine and over 85% of PS2 games work flawlessly on it. Of course this does not help when your favourate PS2 game does not play or even worse freezes randomly.
Personally I mainly play PS2 games on my PS3 (most recent release PS2 games play fine) since the PS3 does an excellent job smoothing and upscaling on a HDTV. In addition I can get three to four PS2 games to one PS3 game so I do save money. At the moment there are only four PS3 games I want to play but I have so many good PS2 games to choose from that I can wait for the price of particular PS3 games that I want to drop.
All PS3's play just about all PS1 games and it does a very good job smoothing and upscaling to a 720p or 1080p HDTV than a PS2 could ever do.
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I run Fedora 9 on my laptop and upgraded yesterday via "yum" which is not really a download from Mozilla since I get the update from one of the repos, since all a repo needs to do is make the download from the official site and then all the other repos most likely get updated from the master repo which in turn serve out the update to the many client Linux distributions. This is not just Fedora which like Redhat and CentOS use "yum" but other distributions which use app-get and yast as well.
This actually brings up an interesting question. I would assume the 9 million downloads are from Mozilla but how many millions of Linux users have actually updated from their respective repos?
On a different note. When I downloaded Firefox from Mozilla this time I was struck by it speed it's startup (a few seconds) and its update performance over the Firefox 3 beta that comes with Fedora 9. Even updating from 2 to 3 on my company laptop running Win XP I would say I get a 50% or better performance.
Check out this site Optus Australia . For those people (like myself) who got in early I get a rate of 7GB (peak) and 14GB (off peak) for AU$50.00 and if I exceed my limit I get throttled back to 128kbs which is fine for torrants and casual internet browsing (forget Youtube). For new users you are going to pay approx AU50.00 more for an extra 9GB but you don't have off peak and peak rates, still for me that is no issue since all good torrent programs have scheduling. Note: AU$1.00 is approx US$0.95.
As for so called "video on demand" it will not likely happen in Australia due to bandwidth caps, however "video on availability" (Foxtel) is viable since it is more easy to control, still for me I find most movies are not worth the price of ownership and since I can rent Bluray as cheap as a DVD I am quite happy to rent if I feel the urge to watch a movie although to be honest I would rather play a game.
Unfortunately most people don't have any technical knowledge and are entirely at the hands of a sales rep who is only concerned with meeting their sales quota. Personally I would just laugh at the very thought of buying a 1.5M Ethernet cable for $499 when I know I can just as easily buy a 10M cable for less than $10.00. Actually you could just as easily buy a decent wireless router and matching network card for less then $100 and that would save hundreds of dollars over getting a cable guy to install the cable.
Some things a spreadsheet should not be used for (please add too if you like):
- As a Database.
- As an Statistical Analysis tool.
- A complex programming tool.
A spreadsheet is a tool that is extremely good at manipulating data (I believe the KISS principle should apply here) and graphically presenting data and IMHO that is where it should end. With regard to presenting data what I find useful is the ability of OO Calc to display and rotate in real time 3D data, that to me is more useful than having to write and debug complex VB scripts which could easily be replaced with a good statical analysis package which has a proven track record (ie. vetted by engineers and scientists with mathematical and programming skills). The problem you get with people (eg. a CPA/Manager/Lawyer... normally with little or no formal programming skills) writing their own scripts is that the people and the firm(s) who use these scripts had better be 100% confident that there are no bugs in them. IMHO keeping auditable track of any mathematical process is much better than putting in data to a "black box" and just getting an answer.Once we get over the "mine is better than yours" attitude then maybe you find that there is no fundamental difference between OO Calc and MS Excel since they both are very good at graphically presenting data. Of course the big difference is you can see the source for OO Calc which can be and is vetted by professional engineers and scientists compared to trusting Microsoft's closed source solution see example where simple bugs can translate into millions of dollars of lost money.
The problem with fuel price rises they also start the excuse to increase the cost of just about everything due to increased delivery costs. Even if the price of fuel goes down you will usually find that price of goods remains the same or if there is a price drop it will be small in comparison to the fuel price drop.
Switching to a new so called renewable fuel sources is not going to be that easy. Ethanol is not as efficient as petrol and it is debatable if it is cheaper without government subsidies. Biodiesel is most like the best solution if you have a diesel engine, however there is a lot of politics here. Even so the major problem with bio-fuels is allocating land for the growing of it verses land for the growing of food.
As for hydrogen that is still is not really viable at the moment and you have to consider that hydrogen is quite an explosive gas and you need a considerable amount of energy to produce hydrogen. Other forms of power plants are fuel cell and hybrid of which only the hybrid is viable at the moment although this technology is mainly limited to small to medium cars (some trucks do use this but they have a limited range). One quite successful fuel is gas and prices of this fuel is normally less than half that of petrol.
Compriz Fusion is one of those love hate relationships which actually puts MS Visa to shame, however I personally find the eye candy to be annoying after a while although you can turn down or even off some of the effects. It is nice to use it to annoy the MS Vista zealots though. What is interesting is Compriz Fusion does not need huge amounts of memory and you can get by with 512MB compared to the minimum 1G Vista requires. I do know that Vista can run in less than 1G but it does not run well.
If you link your own private code to a GPL'd library or even use a GPL'd compiler you are not legally compelled to make your own private code public. Embedding GPL'd code in your own private software makes you a very bad programmer since the best way to mix GPL'd code and private code is to use libraries. I don't know of any software open source or otherwise that requires you to publish your private source unless you want to.
The main gist of the GPL is to prevent unscrupulous people taking GPL'd code and making it closed. If you like giving your code to others without getting any recognition, then that is your prerogative but if you GPL your code then any changes to your code has to be shared. Of course this does not prevent any company from taking GPL'd code and bringing it in-house.
Actually I won't comment on article yet because he uses a font ( verdana ) that appears to be designed to put the reader to sleep. Actually this it is the type of font that would be great for legal documents. Oh wait! :-)
I read many posts stating that DVD players are very cheap and why would I get a BD player? The choice of buying a standalone DVD (upscaling or otherwise) player or a BD player is up to the individual and their economic means however I personally would not buy either one unless there is some "value add" to the purchase.
A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) DVD player/burner/recorder (a HDD DB burner/player/recorder is too expensive for me at the moment) offers greater flexibility and therefore IMHO better value. Likewise a PS3 with it's BD, upscaling DVD, hard disk and it's ability to play games as well as it's internet and media capabilities leave a stand alone DVD player for dead even though it costs more. Still as I have mentioned before the choice is up to the individual.
All Linux distributions have the option of using KDE or Gnome or any other GUI if you wish, it really is up to your preferences and what is installed on your system. Personally I always install both KDE and Gnome since it gives everyone in my family a choice.
I use Fedora 9 which has KDE 4.0.4-2 (latest update) however I was disappointed when I compare it to KDE 3.5 which seemed to scale its fonts on the task bar correctly. Try putting the KDE 4 task bar to your right or left on the screen, KDE 4 now has a widget to do this instead of drag and drop. I would not mind this since it is easy to do but the fonts don't scale accordingly. In fact not only did I find KDE 4.0 annoying my wife was not impressed either until I showed her how to switch to Gnome by selecting Gnome just before you login (you have been able to do this for years). I did some minor customisation for her (hide the task bars) and she is very happy. I also made the switch as well.
Before anyone makes a comment on saying "we have another convert to Gnome" I have also found some annoyances with Gnome as well and from my perspective it is just that the current Gnome IMHO is much better than 4.0 (I found KDE 3.5 much better) but I do realise that KDE 4.0 is what I would call a Beta and definately needs some fixing.
To the KDE developers "Bring back the old 3.5 configuration widget although do enhance it for 4.1 but please don't have lots of little widgets, that is so annoying". Also bring back the drag and drop menu bar and make sure your fonts scale accordingly when changing the position of your task bar.
When KDE 4.1 comes out I will make the switch back from Gnome because I personally like KDE over Gnome but again like I said it is a personal preference. Of course I will switch back if KDE 4.1 is not what I consider better. If they are equal I may have KDE and Gnome days depending on what I want to do.
You are correct the current Linux distributions on the PS3 will not run PS3 games but then again the machine plays PS3 games anyway. Now make a good PS2 emulator for the non backwards compatible PS3 and you may actually be offered a job by Sony or you may have to watch your fingers as the cell door closes :-)
If you install Linux on the PS3 you can display anything that can run under a Linux distribution and that includes emulators on your HDTV (if you have one). Run something like ZSNES (native compile and install) and you can play all Super Nintendo ROMS although you may find that displaying something that was meant for an SDTV on a HDTV may not look that great. This is no different to home-brew on the PSP and even the Wii.
Getting back on topic. Putting a piracy prevention chip in a PC motherboard may mean that people will just not buy that motherboard, however if this chip is put in all motherboards I can imagine the litigation that it may cause since a game would have to talk to the chip therefore bypassing the OS or even with the help of the OS. This type of thing may also be an excellent mallware target which may make the Sony/BMG root kit fiasco a walk in the park.
Compared to a hard drive the Solid State Disk has no moving part however they don't have the reliability of modern quality hard drives but if you look back to the 1970's and 1980's disk drives were fairly small in capacity but large and relatively power hungry they were also expensive and not that reliable. The problem with hard drives even today is that they have moving parts which will eventually fail. Hence the Mean Time Between Failure rating which are sort of a rubbery figure that gives a guideline on how reliable the device is.
The MTBF of this solid state drive is supposed to be 1,000,000 hours which is actually not a bad figure since that translates to approx 114 years. Even taking say 5% (my rubbery figure) that still translates to approx 5 years which if you look at many laptop disks that is reasonably reliable.
I doubt that SSD's will replace cheap high capacity hard disks any time soon but their main use at the moment would be in laptops and any device that is requires low power consumption and possibly a greater resistance to vibration.
Like anything over time prices will come down with reliability and capacity going up. To determine how far a product will drop in price you actually need to know the overall production costs of the product which not only includes fabrication but packaging, delivery and marketing. An interesting example is flash disks which have dropped significantly in price but increased in capacity with the lower capacity line actually dropped instead of continuing to drop the price per lower capacity drive.
My laptop (10 months old) has a Nvida graphics card and when I get a new Fedora kernel I always switch my repo to "livna" and the installation of the new kernel and Nvidia drivers are correctly installed. All I do is run "yum update --enablerepo=livna" and when finished I just reboot and everything works. If you don't do this then the best thing to do is to remove the Nvidia drivers (kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia), install the new kernel, reboot then enable the "livna" repo and install the drivers with "yum install --enablerepo=livna kmod-nvidia". You need two reboots for this though. No matter which way you go you must use the "livna" repo to get the Nvidia graphics drivers.
If you are having problems with "yum install {package}" or "yum remove {package}" I would suggest looking very carefully at your repos. I only ever have the default repos enabled and always select a repo with "yum --enablerepo={my_repo} install {package}". Also I would be careful with what repos you use anyway since some can really cause problems.
Personally I have found the "Livna" repo to be the best one to match the default repos. If I cannot install a particular package by default I enable "Livna" then the next repo but as I have said some repos can cause you problems. If that is the case then you may have to use "rpm -e --nodeps {package_that_has_issues}" and this is were the fun starts. You can always try and install later if you really need the package.
As for i386 and x86_64 packages I always suggest trying to use the package that matches the architecture which means for 64bit architecture (most current PC's now) you should try to get rid of i386 packages if you have both the 32bit and 64bit ones. Use "yum erase {package}.i386" to get rid of the i386 package. You may be able to do what I have suggested in the GUI but when you have dependency issues the command line is the best and safest way to go. If you are using RHEL 5.1 (latest is 5.2) then you most likely have a subscription which will give you telephone and email support. If you are paying for this then I would definately suggest using it.
I have a dual boot on my work laptop running XP (we are not allowed MS Vista) and PCLinuxOS which works well except it is getting harder to use Linux because many applications I need to use are Microsoft centric so basically my dual boot is really a single boot into XP (Sigh!).
My home laptop came with Vista Ultimate which actually works fine except it had nothing except the OS and a lot of crap-ware (8GB all up), which leaves me to download Open Source or pirate. I backed up MS Vista (good for when I sell my laptop) and installed Fedora 7 (no dual boot) and a few months later I installed Fedora 8 and very soon I will install Fedora 9. Personally I won't have any problems doing the backup of my data, a fresh install of Fedora 9, recovery of my data and some minor customisation. All up for me approx 4 hours of very easy work most of the time waiting, so I will end up putting in about three and a half hours worth of gaming.
From the article I would question the expertise of the writer since anyone with any sense will repartition (you can use the default if you want - I don't but that's me) and format the part of the disk you want to install the Linux distro on (I use the whole disk but again that's me).
Would I recommend Fedora to a novice? Probably not but all members of my family use the machine I have Fedora on and no one has any issues. I even give everyone the choice of KDE or Gnome which can be selectable on login. I am the only one who uses the command line but for some things I do a GUI works great, it all depends on what I want to do. A properly installed Linux (Fedora, Ubunto, OpenSuse,
Personally I have found Fedora and many Linux distributions very easy to install however you should have some knowledge of how to setup
Actually the cheapest solution for the home requires backup disks that are equal or greater in size to the data they backup (my current solution). This is a viable solution but you are definately subject to physical disasters such as fire and theft, still that is the chance you sometimes take for convience. Tapes are actually better but they start to get expensive however they are easy to put off-site (gets around the fire and theft issue). The same is true with DVD or Bluray disks but when you are trying to backup terra-bytes this can also get expensive and inconvenient.
What is even worse are companies who have little if any backup strategies and there are quite a few of them. Some companies pay considerable amounts of money to do backups but many don't do any disaster recovery planing so when a disaster happens (and it will) the losses to the company due to downtime can be quite high, sometimes millions of dollars in lost revenue due to a recovery outage.
Personally a backup solution which also includes disaster recovery should reflect what you perceive your data is worth.
IN Australia I can get 8GB SD/USB flash memory for approx AU$32.00 and 16GB SD/USB flash memory costs about AU$72.00 so a 20GB Solid state disk which I would assume to have much better reliability and performance than flash memory should be more expensive again, so from a personal perspective I would much rather pay the AU$50.00 for the larger solid state memory.
Even if you put on a Linux distribution with just about everything that is available from any repository you would not use up more than 10GB including the OS and this includes all Office software and development software (ie. gcc, g++, f77 etc..) which would leave you with 10GB free for your required data. You could even attach terabytes of USB disk if you really need it although at that stage I think I would be seriously considering what I wanted the machine for.
The problem with the EEEPC 900 is the price since it's approaching the price of a low end laptop. It should be interesting if the they sell. Still if you are willing to look around you may get a better deal although I think the magic number from the Australian purchase point of view is less then AU$500.00. The 7" EEEPC sold well (Linux version) world wide and I think this shook Microsoft to the point that they spent millions on getting XP to run on it.
From my personal perspective I have no interest in this type of PC preferring full sized laptops but I do know my son's girlfriend has the Linux one and she is very pleased with it. As I have said before the magic threshold of approx AU$500.00 may make or break the choice of buying one.
If people don't want to update their Linux machine they don't have to however a GUI updater and installer sure makes it easy and this is much better than what Microsoft provides since they only update their own products while Linux distros allow you to install and maintain thousands of packages.
Fedora is not the type of Linux distro I would recommend for the average user, however from version 8 (64bit) I have found that everything "just works" on my laptop and this includes wireless. In fact I am typing this on Firefox running under Fedora 8 (I don't dual boot) and I have never had to "hack" it's kernel yet.
Another thing that I have to consider is the voltage rating of a device (if it uses mains power) since Australia has 240V AC and the US has 110v AC. Of course a universal power supply is fine but it would be very annoying if I got a product that only took 110V AC,
From a personal perspective I have found that most consumer goods in Australia are not that much more expensive than the same product overseas but as I have said before it pays to do some research first.
I suppose I better get back on topic but I normally put Linux (Fedora to be precise) on any PC I own because I find that Linux offers the most usability for anything I want to do and IMHO it is fun. I unfortunately have to pay the Microsoft tax but since I get a new laptop from my work at a very good discount I save the MS Windows OS (now Vista Ultimate) and when I sell the laptop (usually every 12 months) I make a small profit but I do give the buyer the option of a fully working Fedora or any Linux of their choice or even Windows Vista. No prizes on guessing the OS most buyers want and what they have to pirate (what's this "pay for") to get the software they think they require:-)
From the following web site MSY (only a few Km from where I live):
Asus EeePC 7" Linux + Open office ?Mum?s Day Specials? AU$395
Asus EeePC 7" XP HOME + 4GB SD + Free USB Mouse AU$535
From the same place you can get a 4GB SD card for AU21.00 and a USB mouse for AU5.00 and if you do the math then XP Home is worth AU$106 (AU$1 == US$0.94).
Given the above much cheaper prices (ok it is the 7" model) if I was in the market for this type of PC I would not get it at a department store and most people (example: students) who really want something like this would do a web search first (or at least they should) before buying anyway.
Mondo is excellent for disaster recovery of the Linux Operating System with the advantage of producing a recovery iso without shutting down the system. While you do need to compile the source it is fairly easy to do this and the compiled binaries can easily be installed on all other Linux OS's of the same type.
I have found that Clonezilla is an excellent tool for creating recovery or deployment images however it is not really a true disaster recovery tool since you have to create an image by shutting down the system. Still if you are happy to do this it is quite fast (I get approx 35MB/sec on my laptop drive to my backup disk or server). I have used this tool to actually image and recover Linux, MS Windows and Solaris disks and it is surprising easy to do this. Since you are backing up an image the file-system and disk management layout is not important and all data can be faithfully recovered. I suppose you could call this a "poor man's RDP solution" and having used both I prefer Clonezilla any day since IMHO it is more flexible.
While tools like Clonezilla and Mondo are good bare metal recovery tools it is always important that a good backup strategy is used for spot recovery (eg. dump or even cpio (ugg!)), however to backup a database it is best to use the correct database backup tools preferably those that don't shut the database down. Of course the larger the amount of data you need to backup the greater the need of a good disaster recovery strategy and this is a major problem that really needs addressing from the corporate business to the home user.
I have one of the Australian 60GB PS3 and it is software backwards compatible however it does still use the PS2 graphics engine and over 85% of PS2 games work flawlessly on it. Of course this does not help when your favourate PS2 game does not play or even worse freezes randomly.
Personally I mainly play PS2 games on my PS3 (most recent release PS2 games play fine) since the PS3 does an excellent job smoothing and upscaling on a HDTV. In addition I can get three to four PS2 games to one PS3 game so I do save money. At the moment there are only four PS3 games I want to play but I have so many good PS2 games to choose from that I can wait for the price of particular PS3 games that I want to drop.
All PS3's play just about all PS1 games and it does a very good job smoothing and upscaling to a 720p or 1080p HDTV than a PS2 could ever do.