I've got the one with the 15.3" screen (1280x1024). It's not the highest resolution you can get on a laptop, but I've not seen any other with a larger physical screen. This machine (I'm typing on it now!) is my primary work machine; I use it all day every day at work, and at home in the evenings (ie: I'm packing it up and moving it twice a day). I've had it a year and a half, and I'm extremely happy with it. I've found it to be quite rugged, except for the thingy you push get get PCMCIA cards out. I've certainly had no hinge problems.
A friend had the 7000 (15" screen, 1024x768), and had no problems with the screen/hinge either. His keyboard stopped working properly at one point, but it got sent back and fixed under warranty, and has been fine since then.
Bear one thing in mind: Dell does not make these laptops. Have a look at HP's, and you'll notice they're pretty much identical. They're not made by HP either, but by some company in the far east somewhere.
I can imagine that a lot of college and high school kids over there would jump at the chance to do an install fest for the government.
Germans like to do things by the book. They are very beaurocratic - especially when any form of governmental business is involved. I would guess they'll buy a stack of consulting from a specialist.
Germans also tend to buy German where possible. (This is especially true of the car industry.) I'd be surprised if they decide to take Linux and not use SuSE.
Would the be the same ACLU that told a school in the US to remove a "God bless America" message because it was "cruel and devisive" ??
I certainly support their efforts in many areas, but by pulling something like that they're just being hypocritical, which will cause many to dismiss other (legitimate) things they say.
Hey, HP, how about dumping some of the mangement drones that pulled this one off.
That's got to be the most sensible thing I've heard all day. HP's got very fat round the middle. People who aren't good at being engineers get promoted out of the way. If there's one group of people at HP who need to be kicked, it's the middle managers.
For a long time, after they bought Apollo, they had two flavors of HPUX, one for the 700-series (workstations) and one for the 800 series (servers).
Apollo's DomainOS thingy may have been around for a while, but was never (AFAIK) available on the 700 - they are PA-RISC. Both DomainOS and HP-UX were available for the s300 and s400 machines (which were 680x0 based). There was no binary compatibility between HP-UX on s400 and HP-UX on s700.
I used to have a 425e at work. It was a much better machine than any i386 of the time, but they were expensive. I think HP priced themselves out of the market.
In addition HP had a "business" legacy OS (name escapes me, ME? ME/MX someting like that.
It's called MPE/iX, and it's not going away anytime soon. It now features a POSIX interface, so you can run a POSIX shell (/bin/sh) and compile up programs like Apache! MPE is tuned very much for throughput - Oracle runs something like 20% faster on MPE than on HP-UX on the same hardware. HP would like to kill MPE, but they have some very major customers who want to keep it. It is extremely stable.
I think Carly Fiorentina have committed a major blunder
Lots of people agree with you on that one! She left Lucent in a bad state, and now she's killing HP.
The BEST thing about HP was their engineering. I bought a new Omnibook 6000 in June and love it.
I don't doubt the quality of HP's engineering. I used to work there. Don't kid yourself about their laptops though. You can buy exactly the same ones (albeit in black) from Dell. They're made by some other company.
Actually, the official strategy from HP, at least before all of this merger business, is the "Three OS Strategy" Windows, HP-UX, Linux.
Everybody always forgets the fourth. MPE/iX. It's not pushed as much as HP-UX, but it's very definately still there. It runs on the same PA-RISC boxes that HP-UX does, but is throughput tuned. Various large companies use it for their worldwide booking systems. HP don't like to tell people, but Oracle runs significantly faster on MPE than on HP-UX on the same hardware. I heard once that it can be as much as 30% faster in some cases.
Who benefits from it? I do! I like having everything with the same widget look & feel. I like it that when I change my settings, all my apps change too. It's integrated. Much better than the collection of different bits we had before (Athena, Motif, Swing, Bob's random widget set,...).
That's the reason you see KDE versions of many things - to take advantage the coordinated desktop. A Tk script doesn't use my currently selected look & feel. You also get the ability to read/write files through the IOslaves (eg: transparently over FTP/SMB etc) plus other features.
If a simple window manager and a desktop menu works for you, use it. I like KDE.
Is it really that SCSI parts are twice as expensive to manufacture?
I know that IBM manufactures the same hardware for IDE and SCSI. With the exception of a small part of the external circuitry (ie: connector etc) and the EEPROM contents, they are the same.
Companies charge a larger markup on SCSI devices because they can. They're "not consumer" devices - they're more for specialists etc..
Chicken and egg! I know the retail volume is lower, but if someone came out with a SCSI drive at an "IDE" price, I think it would change.
It's not just the size! There's no question which is faster, and I know SCSI has less overhead/more bandwidth etc, but for most of us it's not worth it. I wonder why we don't see larger lower-speed SCSI drives. (Those two are the largest ones any shop around here has to offer.)
... it appears that the prosecutor is deliberatly casting the case in terms that will allow the defense to challenge and break the DMCA.
I was wondering about this. Maybe the people at the FBI realise that the DMCA is going to be nothing but a big barrel of headaches, and have decided to push it far enough that it breaks - far enough that it's more than obvious that it's very wrong.
The "for financial gain" bit had be thinking too. Since when has selling something for financial gain been wrong?
There's also the whole question of legitimate juresdiction. If they can arrest someone for breaking a US law outside of the US, the opposite must also apply - any other country could arrest a US citizen for something they might have done legally in the US.
Quote from Dire Straits (hopefully not illegal!):
And when you point your finger,
'cause your plan fell through,
You get twenty more fingers, pointing back at you.
If the law is allowed to stand, it will backfire for sure. I think the FBI probably sees that.
-- Steve
Re:Elcomsoft should be paying for his legal fees
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
If he did it solely and entirely to make a financial gain, then sure I can see this case having a point. But without that, it's entirely pointless.
I don't get it. The primary purpose of any business is to make money. What's the point of selling a product if not for financial gain?
I work for private financial gain. This is a base element of capitalism. Is there something wrong with wanting to make money?
Anyway, if that's one of the points against him, it's extremely hypocritical. The DMCA only exists so that others can make money.
It's not just the speed - if you fly, you can basically go in a straight line. Ground vehicles have to stick to where the roads/rails are, and that's generally not as direct.
An example: Stuttgart is around 600km from London. If I drive it using the "Autobahns" (fastest route) via Aachen, Brussels and Calais I'll travel about 1000km.
The ICE trains cruise at 240km/h (150mph), but not on windy or hilly stretches. If one can average 200km/h over 1000km that's 5 hours. If a Zep can do 150km/h (94mph?) over 600km, that's 4 hours. Also, a train is much more likely to have to stop en route; flights tend to be direct.
All of this is of course completely ignoring the English channel, which could cause significant delay.
For me as a passenger, the deciding factor would be price. I could see the Zeps being of significant interest as freight transporters, especially as they would be able to land much closer to depots.
-- Steve
PS. There's a new route through Luxembourg which I haven't tried yet, but going that way saves about 100km.
The HP laptops are made by the same people who make the Dell ones. The new models even have some of the same numbers! The colour is slightly different, but that's about it. The insides are identical.
-- Steve
Re:Is better TV definition needed ?
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 1
...many less than the masses who have sub-30' TVs
I don't know anyone at all who has a 30 foot TV. Most people seem to have 2' - 3' TVs (24" - 36").
Ideally, I'd want all my webservers, etc. to be just as impregnable at port 80 as on port 8000, so why bother hiding it?
Didn't you read the article? He explained why using another port is a good idea. You still have to secure it like you would port 80, but someone scanning default ports only would miss your server altogether. Someone scanning over lots of ports would find it, but scanning lots of ports makes much more "noise" which you can then pick up.
As a MiniDisc user, I like to copy my CDs to MD digitally via an optical cable (my car radio has MD and not CD). This means I have no DA-AD conversion and it automatically puts in the track breaks on the MD. It also sets the "copy bit".
Over the last few years I've noticed that a large number of consumer CD players (for home systems - not portables) have optical out. My soundcard has optical in - more and more soundcards have this feature, including some of the newer SoundBlasters. AFAIK the optical connection is part of the SP/DIF standard. Optical cables aren't particularly expensive either.
If the new copy-protection is supposed to hinder CDs from being played in CD-ROM devices, it's not a big problem to use an external player with a digital interface. If the CD won't play in a standalone consumer CD player, it will definately go back to the shop.
As an aside, sound cards tend to ignore the copy bit on data coming in over the digital interfaces.
I think conventional wisdom has kept quiet the extent of european-american contact in early history - And there's the roman remains recently found in the gulf, suggesting at least a little early european-american contact.
I don't know that conventional wisdom kept things quiet, but the Phoenecians certainly did. This was a middle-eastern race, who had probably the most advanced navigational capapbilities of their time. I seem to recall that there is evidence which suggests that they were not only going to the Americas, but that they were getting as far away as New Zealand.
Apparently they were very secretive and would rather scuttle a ship than let someone following find out where they were going. It doesn't surprise me that none of their knowledge got passed on to us.
I've had a Dell Inspiron 7500 with the 15.4" screen for nearly a year now. It works well for games too. Certainly, 2D style games in the native resolution (in this case 1280x1024) are crystal clear.
3D is a bit lacking though. The ATI 8Mb chipset (Rage mobility) isn't bad, but my much slower tower with a P-II 350 and original TNT is miles better in both frame rate and image quality.
Not to say it's not usable though - you'll probably have to use 640x480 to get a decent frame rate, and you'll need at least DirectX 7.
Also, the contrast of 3D images is not so good. It might be the TFT screen, as that affects such things anyhow, but I think the chipset doesn't do an amazing job (I tried it with a monitor too).
Other things to note about the laptop: the VGA out can be used as a second screen (Win98/Win2K) as well as just a replica of the primary display. That's nice. The laptop also works very well with Linux (sound and all).
should we drive on the left side of the streets too?
I think Germany was driving on the left until 1912 or thereabouts - just before WW1. Most places used to drive on the left; Napoleon made driving on the right law and the change filtered through. In some cases it took longer than others (certain north European countries I think).
Back to the metric system: the UK changed officially from Imperial to metric over 20 years ago, but the road signs still show miles instead of km. Everyone learns metric in school though - to the extent that most don't know the exact relationship between the old units.
The easiest way for America to change over is to change what is taught in schools first, then start placing both types of units on consumer products. When that generation has grown up, there will be no need for the old units and they can be dropped.
It's worrying to hear that advanced scientific projects (ie: NASA Mars probe) are not using metric already though.
I'd buy one tomorrow (are you listening HP?), doublely so if they could make it have some sort of battery adapter to take standard sized cells.
I'm not sure that'd be sooo helpful. I have a 320LX - a predecessor to the Jornada. It uses 2 AA batteries; I have 1500mAh cells, and I get up to a couple of weeks usage per charge, and I use the thing all the time. The Jornada is significantly more power-hungry though. Mine has a passive LCD screen (optionally backlit). The Jornada has an active matrix screen. This alone makes a big difference. Also, the Jornada has a significantly faster processor and more memory, which also makes a difference. You'll probably find that the Jornada's cell (lithium-ion?) is more of necessity.
I can't believe they missed it out! It didn't even appear in the runners-up list. I think it was the first real 3D game ever, plus it created a new genre, and then there were also innovative things it did like jumping the raster beam and flipping modes (in the original on the BBC) which it may have been first at too.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got the one with the 15.3" screen (1280x1024). It's not the highest resolution you can get on a laptop, but I've not seen any other with a larger physical screen. This machine (I'm typing on it now!) is my primary work machine; I use it all day every day at work, and at home in the evenings (ie: I'm packing it up and moving it twice a day). I've had it a year and a half, and I'm extremely happy with it. I've found it to be quite rugged, except for the thingy you push get get PCMCIA cards out. I've certainly had no hinge problems.
A friend had the 7000 (15" screen, 1024x768), and had no problems with the screen/hinge either. His keyboard stopped working properly at one point, but it got sent back and fixed under warranty, and has been fine since then.
Bear one thing in mind: Dell does not make these laptops. Have a look at HP's, and you'll notice they're pretty much identical. They're not made by HP either, but by some company in the far east somewhere.
-- Steve
I can imagine that a lot of college and high school kids over there would jump at the chance to do an install fest for the government.
Germans like to do things by the book. They are very beaurocratic - especially when any form of governmental business is involved. I would guess they'll buy a stack of consulting from a specialist.
Germans also tend to buy German where possible. (This is especially true of the car industry.) I'd be surprised if they decide to take Linux and not use SuSE.
-- Steve
Would the be the same ACLU that told a school in the US to remove a "God bless America" message because it was "cruel and devisive" ??
I certainly support their efforts in many areas, but by pulling something like that they're just being hypocritical, which will cause many to dismiss other (legitimate) things they say.
-- Steve
Their basic problem, that their stuff costs 2-3x what comparable stuff costs from others, has yet to be solved. It will be sad if HP goes that route.
What do you mean "if"??
Have you looked at how much some of HP's kit costs? HP == high price
-- Steve
Hey, HP, how about dumping some of the mangement drones that pulled this one off.
That's got to be the most sensible thing I've heard all day. HP's got very fat round the middle. People who aren't good at being engineers get promoted out of the way. If there's one group of people at HP who need to be kicked, it's the middle managers.
-- Steve
For a long time, after they bought Apollo, they had two flavors of HPUX, one for the 700-series (workstations) and one for the 800 series (servers).
Apollo's DomainOS thingy may have been around for a while, but was never (AFAIK) available on the 700 - they are PA-RISC. Both DomainOS and HP-UX were available for the s300 and s400 machines (which were 680x0 based). There was no binary compatibility between HP-UX on s400 and HP-UX on s700.
I used to have a 425e at work. It was a much better machine than any i386 of the time, but they were expensive. I think HP priced themselves out of the market.
In addition HP had a "business" legacy OS (name escapes me, ME? ME/MX someting like that.
It's called MPE/iX, and it's not going away anytime soon. It now features a POSIX interface, so you can run a POSIX shell (/bin/sh) and compile up programs like Apache! MPE is tuned very much for throughput - Oracle runs something like 20% faster on MPE than on HP-UX on the same hardware. HP would like to kill MPE, but they have some very major customers who want to keep it. It is extremely stable.
I think Carly Fiorentina have committed a major blunder
Lots of people agree with you on that one! She left Lucent in a bad state, and now she's killing HP.
-- Steve
The BEST thing about HP was their engineering. I bought a new Omnibook 6000 in June and love it.
I don't doubt the quality of HP's engineering. I used to work there. Don't kid yourself about their laptops though. You can buy exactly the same ones (albeit in black) from Dell. They're made by some other company.
-- Steve
Actually, the official strategy from HP, at least before all of this merger business, is the "Three OS Strategy" Windows, HP-UX, Linux.
Everybody always forgets the fourth. MPE/iX. It's not pushed as much as HP-UX, but it's very definately still there. It runs on the same PA-RISC boxes that HP-UX does, but is throughput tuned. Various large companies use it for their worldwide booking systems. HP don't like to tell people, but Oracle runs significantly faster on MPE than on HP-UX on the same hardware. I heard once that it can be as much as 30% faster in some cases.
/. should still get an HP icon though...
-- Steve
Who benefits from it? I do! I like having everything with the same widget look & feel. I like it that when I change my settings, all my apps change too. It's integrated. Much better than the collection of different bits we had before (Athena, Motif, Swing, Bob's random widget set, ...).
That's the reason you see KDE versions of many things - to take advantage the coordinated desktop. A Tk script doesn't use my currently selected look & feel. You also get the ability to read/write files through the IOslaves (eg: transparently over FTP/SMB etc) plus other features.
If a simple window manager and a desktop menu works for you, use it. I like KDE.
-- Steve
Is it really that SCSI parts are twice as expensive to manufacture?
I know that IBM manufactures the same hardware for IDE and SCSI. With the exception of a small part of the external circuitry (ie: connector etc) and the EEPROM contents, they are the same.
Companies charge a larger markup on SCSI devices because they can. They're "not consumer" devices - they're more for specialists etc..
Chicken and egg! I know the retail volume is lower, but if someone came out with a SCSI drive at an "IDE" price, I think it would change.
Quick comparison from the local store:
IDE: IBM Deskstar 60GXP 60.0GB UDMA100 7200rpm 8.5msec 2MB DM 430SCSI: IBM Ultrastar 36LP 36.9GB Ultra160 7200rpm 6.8msec 4MB DM 730
SCSI: IBM Ultrastar 36LZX 36.9GB Ultra160 10000rpm 4.9msec 4MB DM 960
It's not just the size! There's no question which is faster, and I know SCSI has less overhead/more bandwidth etc, but for most of us it's not worth it. I wonder why we don't see larger lower-speed SCSI drives. (Those two are the largest ones any shop around here has to offer.)
-- Steve
I was wondering about this. Maybe the people at the FBI realise that the DMCA is going to be nothing but a big barrel of headaches, and have decided to push it far enough that it breaks - far enough that it's more than obvious that it's very wrong.
The "for financial gain" bit had be thinking too. Since when has selling something for financial gain been wrong?
There's also the whole question of legitimate juresdiction. If they can arrest someone for breaking a US law outside of the US, the opposite must also apply - any other country could arrest a US citizen for something they might have done legally in the US.
Quote from Dire Straits (hopefully not illegal!):
If the law is allowed to stand, it will backfire for sure. I think the FBI probably sees that.
-- Steve
If he did it solely and entirely to make a financial gain, then sure I can see this case having a point. But without that, it's entirely pointless.
I don't get it. The primary purpose of any business is to make money. What's the point of selling a product if not for financial gain?
I work for private financial gain. This is a base element of capitalism. Is there something wrong with wanting to make money?
Anyway, if that's one of the points against him, it's extremely hypocritical. The DMCA only exists so that others can make money.
-- Steve
It's not just the speed - if you fly, you can basically go in a straight line. Ground vehicles have to stick to where the roads/rails are, and that's generally not as direct.
An example: Stuttgart is around 600km from London. If I drive it using the "Autobahns" (fastest route) via Aachen, Brussels and Calais I'll travel about 1000km.
The ICE trains cruise at 240km/h (150mph), but not on windy or hilly stretches. If one can average 200km/h over 1000km that's 5 hours. If a Zep can do 150km/h (94mph?) over 600km, that's 4 hours. Also, a train is much more likely to have to stop en route; flights tend to be direct.
All of this is of course completely ignoring the English channel, which could cause significant delay.
For me as a passenger, the deciding factor would be price. I could see the Zeps being of significant interest as freight transporters, especially as they would be able to land much closer to depots.
-- Steve
PS. There's a new route through Luxembourg which I haven't tried yet, but going that way saves about 100km.
The HP laptops are made by the same people who make the Dell ones. The new models even have some of the same numbers! The colour is slightly different, but that's about it. The insides are identical.
-- Steve
I don't know anyone at all who has a 30 foot TV. Most people seem to have 2' - 3' TVs (24" - 36").
-- Steve
Ideally, I'd want all my webservers, etc. to be just as impregnable at port 80 as on port 8000, so why bother hiding it?
Didn't you read the article? He explained why using another port is a good idea. You still have to secure it like you would port 80, but someone scanning default ports only would miss your server altogether. Someone scanning over lots of ports would find it, but scanning lots of ports makes much more "noise" which you can then pick up.
-- Steve
As a MiniDisc user, I like to copy my CDs to MD digitally via an optical cable (my car radio has MD and not CD). This means I have no DA-AD conversion and it automatically puts in the track breaks on the MD. It also sets the "copy bit".
Over the last few years I've noticed that a large number of consumer CD players (for home systems - not portables) have optical out. My soundcard has optical in - more and more soundcards have this feature, including some of the newer SoundBlasters. AFAIK the optical connection is part of the SP/DIF standard. Optical cables aren't particularly expensive either.
If the new copy-protection is supposed to hinder CDs from being played in CD-ROM devices, it's not a big problem to use an external player with a digital interface. If the CD won't play in a standalone consumer CD player, it will definately go back to the shop.
As an aside, sound cards tend to ignore the copy bit on data coming in over the digital interfaces.
-- Steve
Last try
1. gfreeman:
"I will be absent from the office from July 16 through August 3...
Wasn't he the guy who caused all that trouble at Black Mesa? I thought the government were still after him, in which case it's no wonder he' "absent".
:-)
-- Steve
Know what a "Vectra" is? Is it:
It's both. I don't see GM and HP in court over either...
-- Steve
I don't know that conventional wisdom kept things quiet, but the Phoenecians certainly did. This was a middle-eastern race, who had probably the most advanced navigational capapbilities of their time. I seem to recall that there is evidence which suggests that they were not only going to the Americas, but that they were getting as far away as New Zealand.
Apparently they were very secretive and would rather scuttle a ship than let someone following find out where they were going. It doesn't surprise me that none of their knowledge got passed on to us.
-- Steve
I've had a Dell Inspiron 7500 with the 15.4" screen for nearly a year now. It works well for games too. Certainly, 2D style games in the native resolution (in this case 1280x1024) are crystal clear.
3D is a bit lacking though. The ATI 8Mb chipset (Rage mobility) isn't bad, but my much slower tower with a P-II 350 and original TNT is miles better in both frame rate and image quality.
Not to say it's not usable though - you'll probably have to use 640x480 to get a decent frame rate, and you'll need at least DirectX 7.
Also, the contrast of 3D images is not so good. It might be the TFT screen, as that affects such things anyhow, but I think the chipset doesn't do an amazing job (I tried it with a monitor too).
Other things to note about the laptop: the VGA out can be used as a second screen (Win98/Win2K) as well as just a replica of the primary display. That's nice. The laptop also works very well with Linux (sound and all).
-- Steve
should we drive on the left side of the streets too?
I think Germany was driving on the left until 1912 or thereabouts - just before WW1. Most places used to drive on the left; Napoleon made driving on the right law and the change filtered through. In some cases it took longer than others (certain north European countries I think).
Back to the metric system: the UK changed officially from Imperial to metric over 20 years ago, but the road signs still show miles instead of km. Everyone learns metric in school though - to the extent that most don't know the exact relationship between the old units.
The easiest way for America to change over is to change what is taught in schools first, then start placing both types of units on consumer products. When that generation has grown up, there will be no need for the old units and they can be dropped.
It's worrying to hear that advanced scientific projects (ie: NASA Mars probe) are not using metric already though.
-- Steve
Where have all the good game makers gone?
I think they went to Valve! Although, I'm not too sure about the new TFC models.
--Steve
I'd buy one tomorrow (are you listening HP?), doublely so if they could make it have some sort of battery adapter to take standard sized cells.
I'm not sure that'd be sooo helpful. I have a 320LX - a predecessor to the Jornada. It uses 2 AA batteries; I have 1500mAh cells, and I get up to a couple of weeks usage per charge, and I use the thing all the time. The Jornada is significantly more power-hungry though. Mine has a passive LCD screen (optionally backlit). The Jornada has an active matrix screen. This alone makes a big difference. Also, the Jornada has a significantly faster processor and more memory, which also makes a difference. You'll probably find that the Jornada's cell (lithium-ion?) is more of necessity.
-- Steve
-- Steve