I agree, I bought an iBook 500 the day they started shipping with OS X, but sold it after 18 months.
Why? I loved the machine, great form factor, nice fit and finish, and I loved OS X. But, the video card in the iBook 500 simply isn't up to the task of running OS X. Try scrolling through a big Slashdot post like this on a 500mhz white iBook, using IE or Mozilla/Chimera. It's a painful experience, the screen chugs like you're surfing on Pentium 166, which makes sense, because that's about the era of video card that Apple stuck in those early iBooks.
So, I sold my iBook, because I had access to a speedy 2.2Ghz Dell laptop from work. I miss the iBook, it was a nicer machine, but I don't miss the slow-ass video chipset in it. I know the newer models have faster chips, and I'd love to get one, but it's hard to argue with the Dell I've gotten from work for nothing.:)
Though, if I get to pick out my next laptop, it'll be a 12" PowerBook, small size of my old iBook, with the power of a G4.
I'm in Iowa, so that's how I know, but farmers have been driving with hand-throttles on their tractors for several decades. I learned to drive tractor on an International H, we don't need no sissy foot-pedal throttle!
I've got two TiVos, series 2 standalones, had two series 1 boxes before these. Honestly, I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I've been tempted to get a Replay for the show-sharing capability. I have a fast broadband connection 1.5Mbps upload speed, so I actually could send the files to friends fairly quickly.
The one thing holding me back, is that compared to the TiVo devices, it's harder to tell what Replay is going to record. TiVo has the priority season pass list and the ToDo list, and I purposefully have a lot of conflicts set up in my list, so that if Fear Factor is a re-run, it'll record Antiques Roadshow, or if there's a conflict with the Sunday night episode of Oz, TiVo will grab the Tuesday night episode.
From everything I've read, Replay seems to be hit-or-miss about which show it will record, and there's no easy way to see what it is going to choose exactly. That, to me, is the only reason I haven't jumped on Replay. I have a TV with component connnections, and I know Replay offers that as an option on one of their models.
I'd also miss the Suggestions that TiVo records too, but I could live without those. I couldn't deal with ambiguity in the program scheduling though...
I've got Vonage, and it works pretty well, I'm literally days away from canceling my land line. My wife and I use our cells for most of our calls, but I didn't want to have to eat minutes for incoming calls, hence the Vonage line. I got in before they raised the price though, so my bill is only $20/month for 500 outgoing minutes, unlimited incoming.
Anyhow, the only thing holding me back is my second TiVo upstairs, it wouldn't work over Vonage (though I read some people have gotten it to work) so I'm getting a wireless ethernet bridge to just send it via my 802.11b network. I should really wire the house with cat5e, but I'm lazy, and wireless is oh-so-easy.
But, I use Vonage now all the time, no one has ever griped about the quality, and they'd never know I was using Voice over IP. Things have come a long ways since using Netmeeting on your 486.:)
Yes, honestly, defend yourself. Go before a judge, explain what happened, and you might win. You probably won't, of course, but there's a chance you will, especially with something like this.
Do you really think that those companies would want the negative publicity of filing a lawsuit over something this dumb?
If I was at Fatwallet, I'd risk it on this one. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
Re:Four times cheaper for back catalog access
on
Burn A Song For 99 Cents
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· Score: 5, Interesting
If the music industry wants my money, here's what they need to do. I want an online/kiosk service where I can choose from every song ever recorded, arrange them in the order I'd like them to appear on my CD, and pay 25-50 cents per track. The CD would either be burned on the spot at the kiosk, or delivered to me in the mail at home, complete with liner notes with all the lyrics for each song, and the option of including MPEGs of the applicable music videos so that I could watch them on my computer. There is not a single technological reason today why this couldn't be done, and I think most people would agree that it's a pretty reasonable business model. Heck, go one step farther, and make it a dollar per track, but I'm licensed to use that track for my entire lifetime, in whatever current music format is popular, that way I don't have to re-buy the song for my 8-track, cassette, LP and MP3 players. Let's also do away with the traditional album format of 3-4 good songs, and 10 songs of crap, let me mix and burn my own music without the need of my own PC, and give me something (liner notes, lyrics, videos, & cover art) that I can't easily produce on my own. And, while we're on the subject, why does a CD cost more than a cassette, though cassettes cost more for the record labels to produce? And why does a CD with one hour of audio (which cost thousands of dollars to produce) cost as much as a DVD, filled with several hours of video AND audio that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce? If the record companies and artists can't make a profit at the price I'm proposing, then they deserve to fail.
I've also heard that the phone companies have a hard time billing you for your minutes, and there's a good chance of getting your phone calls for free, because their system simply can't track you at 600mph.
That said, I haven't completely drank the weblog Kool-Aid, I don't think it's going to revolutionize human communication like Dave Winer and some of the other weblog advocates do, but I do think they're kind of fun, if they're well written.
Now, I'm not saying mine is well written, but some of them are easier to read than others. Many weblogs are written just to appeal to their close circle of friends or colleagues, and are meaningless drivel to outsiders. Some are collections of random links that a person finds surfing the web that day, and some are simply interesting tidbits that a person chooses to share with the rest of the world.
Weblogs do an excellent job of providing information about obscure topics, the referer logs for my own weblog have numerous hits on technical bits that I've posted in the past, errors I've encountered in products, and reviews I've written about stuff that I've purchased. No, it's not going to revolutionize human communication, but if you were about to buy an electric rechargeable lawn mower, wouldn't you want to read a review about it? That's the kind of nuggets of info that weblogs do a good job of providing.
There's a lot of ego involved in many of them too, even in my own, I'll admit it. But there's also a chance to share what's going on in your life, and, as Spider Robinson wrote, shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased.
Bite your friggin' tongue. The thing I like most about Buffy is that there IS continuity. They make one-line references to things that happened 3 seasons ago, and foreshadow things that will happen 4 episodes from now. That's what makes the show intelligent, plot arcs.
I feel like I'm having the debate about which is better, Star Trek: TNG, or Deep Space Nine. For stand-alone episodes, TNG wins hands-down, "The Inner Light" and "Best of Both Worlds" clinch it alone. But, for plot lines, intrigue, and suspense sustained over an entire season, Deep Space Nine wins easily. I'm not going to claim that either series was better than the other, though I'll give ST:TNG credit for fueling a renewed interest in Star Trek in a younger generation.
It's all about what kind of TV you want to watch, if you like being able to watch TV episodes in any order, and having the characters live inside a bubble in which they never reference anything that happened in the past, that's fine, it's your choice. But for people who are really fans of a show, it's a much more rewarding viewing experience to know that each episode is only one part of a larger picture.
I also appreciate that (apart from Vampires, Demons, etc.) Buffy is one of the most realistic shows on TV when it comes to human intereactions. I'm not some hard core Buffy disciple either, I just started watching it this summer when a co-worker convinced me to sic my TiVo on it when FX started showing it from the beginning. For what I mean by realism, watch the episode where Buffy goes to college, and the little things that she and her roomie do to get back at each other.
And, Buffy scores one more point with me for making frequent references to movies and pop culture, especially when Xander does it. Roger Ebert wrote, in his review of Jay & Silent Bob, that it always feels so strange when you watch a movie or TV show in which the characters have apparently never seen a movie or TV show, and they never reference it. Next time you're out with your friends, see how many pop culture references you make to movies or TV shows, then notice how few movies or shows will ever include a reference to another show, it just feels weird. A good example of this was when Buffy and some college guys were turned into cave-people by some tainted beer, Xander said they were out "Questing for Fire", which got a good snicker out of me.:)
Yes, this is absolutely the biggest problem facing Iowa, the majority of the educated folks leave the state after college. I was born in Iowa, then moved to Nevada in the first grade, then came back to Iowa for high school because the school system in Nevada was so abysmal. I got my degree at ISU, but now I work at the University of Northern Iowa, doing IT work.
The problem is, all my friends and peers now work in Chicago, the Twin Cities, Omaha, or Kansas City, causing a "brain-drain" in the State of Iowa.
I've heard that the governor has a plan that will have the state pay back some of the student loans of students who remain in Iowa after graduating from college. It's a good idea, because of state budget problems tuition has jumped almost 30% here in 2 years, and it's only getting worse. This would at least reward and assist students who stayed in the state, and stop spending the dollars of Iowan taxpayers to churn out skilled workers for other states.
I don't live in a Tech Mecca either, Cedar Falls, Iowa, to be exact, but we've got awesome and cheap cable service from CFU, our municipal utility company.
I had $30/month residential service, which was about 1300kbps/down 192kbps/up. But, I just upgraded to the business class service for $25/month more ($55 total), and that gives me 4000kbps/down and 1400kbps/up. Extra IP addresses are $5/month, not sure what static IP addresses cost yet, I think it's another $20 a month for one of those, but it removes the ban on ports 80 and 23 too. The best part is that they have a 100Mbit bridge between the ISP and the University where I work, it's great for sending stuff to and from my servers.
I'm looking at buying a house right now, and even though I can cross the river into Waterloo and get a house cheaper, I won't buy one outside the Cedar Falls city limits, so I can keep my CFU, it's that good compared to Mediacom. I've had two outages in a year, one was for 5 minutes, the other was when my modem died. I noticed that the modem was out at 6:50 p.m., and they had a guy to my house and me back online by 7:30 p.m. Now that's customer service!
Exactly, I do the PC buying for our division here at the Univeristy of Northern Iowa, and I'm loyal to Dell, not Intel. If Dell shipped an Optiplex series PC with an Athlon, I'd be all over it, though I'd prefer it didn't use a Via chipset if possible...
I've got a custom Duron at home, and my work machine is a Micron PIII, but I like Dell's tools and support, and the Optiplex series are very easy cases to work on when you've got several hundred to support.
I loved Progeny, but since it died, I'm using Libranet now. It's not free-as-in-beer to download the binaries, but the $45 I paid was well worth it for a great debian-based distro that has been rock-solid for me. You can download version 1.9 for free from their site, but the latest version costs money.
Installing Libranet 2.0 was quite painless, other than having to swap two CDs several times, and then having 400MB of stuff to update via apt-get. Thank god I just upgraded my cable modem to the business-class service...
But, since the Libranet guys aren't too keen on giving away the binaries of version 2.0 (though you can download version 1.9 for free) I doubt they'd be too interested in contributing their installer technology...
I wouldn't say it's so easy to turn on that you can do it by accident, it requires you to insert the Windows CD, after choosing to add that component in your control panel.
That's like saying it's too easy to turn my debian box into a mail server, because all I have to do is type apt-get install qmail
Win2k has IIS enabled by default, without making it easy to disable it.
Actually, here in the real world, only Win2K server has IIS installed by default, workstation does not, and it's pretty easy to turn it off, you just go to the Control Panel, go to Add/Remove Components, and remove IIS.
Yup, 6.5.8 works fine, but 7.0.3 does not work. I spent an entire day hosing my two WinXP boxes trying every possible combination to get it to work. Thank god for DriveImage and the SystemRestore feature of WinXP. You can get 7.0.3 installed, but the VPN stuff hoses your TCP/IP stack, and there's no way to get it back...
I own an iBook 2001, and run only OS X on it, but I think what scares many long-time Mac users away from OS X is the interface. If you've ever watched a serious Mac user performing complex tasks in OS 9, you realize that they really customize their OS, and make full use of every feature in OS 9 to work at a higher speed.
I like OS X, but the interface (while pretty) isn't designed for supreme usability in the way that the classic MacOS was. Sure, the dock is kind of cool, but icons tend to move around on you, depending on how many applications you have open. Most of us don't like our toolbars to re-arrange on us at random, as it's hard to develop motor-memory for how to reach them.
I'm not a luddite who doesn't want change, and in fact, I don't even run the classic OS on my iBook, and I'll probably format the drive and throw it out soon. But, OS X doesn't have the same level of user interface that OS 9 did, or even Windows has, especially when it comes to being able to easily turn off all the fancy stuff to squeeze more speed out of your machine.
Even Windows XP has an option to turn off practically every UI feature that's been introduced since Windows 95, so you can use the OS the way you want it. Some of us don't need transparent menus and drop shadows for our windows. Sure, OS X looks great, but I'd rather it ran fast, and that's on my machine that's only 9 months old with 384MB of RAM.
Actually, I put my mouth-money into Libranet this week, it was only $45, and it's debian-based, and so far I'm very happy with it.
I just hope they stay around longer than the Stormix, Progeny, and Corel debian-based distros did. But, since you can only get Libranet 2.0 by paying for it, hopefully they'll keep a strong revenue base.
So, I think you should say that only 4000 Mandrake users put their money where their mouth is, some of us are supporting other distributions.:)
I want to start using Mozilla Mail, but until they add PGP support, I'm going to be using Outlook on Windows and Evolution or Kmail on my Linux box.
There are a lot of people who appreciate a nice integrated PGP or GPG function to our mailer, and hopefully someone will write a PGP plugin once the Mozilla APIs are final in version 1.0.
I only front as much money as I have access to hardware which will become mine until I'm paid back. For instance, I have a company-owned PC at home, if they decide to screw me out of some money, good luck getting that PC, Trinitron display, and laser printer back! I don't mind fronting up to $500, as I always get paid back within a week, but if they asked me to front $2000, I'd be storing a couple of new Dell laptops at home until I got my check.:)
Despite the fact that nothing new has come out of distributed.net for a while now, it's still the best-run distributed computing network. They have the most clients, for the most platforms with the most features, and that's why I continue to install the client on several PCs a month.
I've used SETI@Home and United Devices before, but frankly, I didn't like them much.
SETI has more users than it needs, last time I checked, the same data was being tested over and over again, simply because they have more volunteers than they need. I'd much rather see that CPU time go to the projects that need it.
United Devices has an admirable goal, curing cancer, but a lack of SMP support in their clients, and the lack of a Linux or Mac client pretty much rules them out for me. I use Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X every day, I can't run United Devices on all those platforms...
So come on everybody that's running SETI, save them some bandwidth, come join distributed.net, and we can power through the rest of RC5-64!!!
Just don't get me started on the OGR projects, they've been open for too long, and no one seems to know how to close them. OGR-24 should have been done a long time ago, but isn't, due (apparently) to a lack of managerial oversight, or poor planning.
Go one step further, disable the Windows Scripting Host. It's easy to do, and we do it for all of our users at my shop, with a simple command in the login scripts. Symantec makes a free tool, which you can find here.
This renders those nasty.vbs files as harmless as.txt files, very handy for when a hot virus/worm sneaks past Norton before the new definitions are out. Of course, if you block attachments with executable extensions, you're fine, but, you can never be too paranoid.:)
Something that'd use the knowledge that many Windows NT/2000/XP domain administrators already have, but relate it to the Linux way of doing things. Have the book set up so that you look to the area you'd find the equivalent setting in Windows, and it'd tell you what the Red Hat equivalent was.
I'm not trying to say Red Hat is the only distribution, and I actually prefer debian myself, but it's the most widely known, and would be a good place to start for a book like this.
Such a book would be nice, because it could be written above the "Linux for dummies" level, since it would assume the reader has some technical skills, but would ease the transition to a new system.
I do Windows support for a living, and there are a lot of things that I can do quite quickly in Windows, but I wind up kind of lost trying to find them in Linux, even simple things like changing the resolution/refresh rate/color depth of my display.
Uh, you're wrong. I upgraded my TiVo two weeks ago, when I scored an 80GB drive from OfficeMax for $80 after rebate. I burned a CD image of an.iso file from here, in my Dell computer, running Windows XP Pro. I booted from the CD, with the new hard drive attached, logged in as root, following the instructions, typed one command. Shutdown the system, and installed the drive in my TiVo, using the mounting bracket from here.
Total time from start to finish was less than half an hour, and anyone who'd feel comfortable building a machine from scratch could do it. I've even offered to upgrade several friends' machines for free, it was so easy.
Now, I have extremely basic Linux skills, so I did deviate from the directions, by running the program against/dev/hdc rather than/dev/hda, because I didn't feel like re-wiring my entire case to get the right drive at that IDE location. I've never even compiled a linux kernel, so it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist.
There was also an article in the most recent issue of Maximum PC magazine, showing how to do this in 2 pages.
Upgrading your TiVo isn't like replacing a transmission, it's like installing a hard drive twice, and one of the systems needs a special bracket. The hardest part is making sure you have a T-10 torx bit to remove the cover...
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I agree, I bought an iBook 500 the day they started shipping with OS X, but sold it after 18 months.
:)
Why? I loved the machine, great form factor, nice fit and finish, and I loved OS X. But, the video card in the iBook 500 simply isn't up to the task of running OS X. Try scrolling through a big Slashdot post like this on a 500mhz white iBook, using IE or Mozilla/Chimera. It's a painful experience, the screen chugs like you're surfing on Pentium 166, which makes sense, because that's about the era of video card that Apple stuck in those early iBooks.
So, I sold my iBook, because I had access to a speedy 2.2Ghz Dell laptop from work. I miss the iBook, it was a nicer machine, but I don't miss the slow-ass video chipset in it. I know the newer models have faster chips, and I'd love to get one, but it's hard to argue with the Dell I've gotten from work for nothing.
Though, if I get to pick out my next laptop, it'll be a 12" PowerBook, small size of my old iBook, with the power of a G4.
I'm in Iowa, so that's how I know, but farmers have been driving with hand-throttles on their tractors for several decades. I learned to drive tractor on an International H, we don't need no sissy foot-pedal throttle!
I've got two TiVos, series 2 standalones, had two series 1 boxes before these. Honestly, I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I've been tempted to get a Replay for the show-sharing capability. I have a fast broadband connection 1.5Mbps upload speed, so I actually could send the files to friends fairly quickly.
The one thing holding me back, is that compared to the TiVo devices, it's harder to tell what Replay is going to record. TiVo has the priority season pass list and the ToDo list, and I purposefully have a lot of conflicts set up in my list, so that if Fear Factor is a re-run, it'll record Antiques Roadshow, or if there's a conflict with the Sunday night episode of Oz, TiVo will grab the Tuesday night episode.
From everything I've read, Replay seems to be hit-or-miss about which show it will record, and there's no easy way to see what it is going to choose exactly. That, to me, is the only reason I haven't jumped on Replay. I have a TV with component connnections, and I know Replay offers that as an option on one of their models.
I'd also miss the Suggestions that TiVo records too, but I could live without those. I couldn't deal with ambiguity in the program scheduling though...
Am I wrong, or is there a way to manage this?
Thanks!
I've got Vonage, and it works pretty well, I'm literally days away from canceling my land line. My wife and I use our cells for most of our calls, but I didn't want to have to eat minutes for incoming calls, hence the Vonage line. I got in before they raised the price though, so my bill is only $20/month for 500 outgoing minutes, unlimited incoming.
:)
Anyhow, the only thing holding me back is my second TiVo upstairs, it wouldn't work over Vonage (though I read some people have gotten it to work) so I'm getting a wireless ethernet bridge to just send it via my 802.11b network. I should really wire the house with cat5e, but I'm lazy, and wireless is oh-so-easy.
But, I use Vonage now all the time, no one has ever griped about the quality, and they'd never know I was using Voice over IP. Things have come a long ways since using Netmeeting on your 486.
Yes, honestly, defend yourself. Go before a judge, explain what happened, and you might win. You probably won't, of course, but there's a chance you will, especially with something like this.
Do you really think that those companies would want the negative publicity of filing a lawsuit over something this dumb?
If I was at Fatwallet, I'd risk it on this one. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
If the music industry wants my money, here's what they need to do. I want an online/kiosk service where I can choose from every song ever recorded, arrange them in the order I'd like them to appear on my CD, and pay 25-50 cents per track. The CD would either be burned on the spot at the kiosk, or delivered to me in the mail at home, complete with liner notes with all the lyrics for each song, and the option of including MPEGs of the applicable music videos so that I could watch them on my computer. There is not a single technological reason today why this couldn't be done, and I think most people would agree that it's a pretty reasonable business model. Heck, go one step farther, and make it a dollar per track, but I'm licensed to use that track for my entire lifetime, in whatever current music format is popular, that way I don't have to re-buy the song for my 8-track, cassette, LP and MP3 players. Let's also do away with the traditional album format of 3-4 good songs, and 10 songs of crap, let me mix and burn my own music without the need of my own PC, and give me something (liner notes, lyrics, videos, & cover art) that I can't easily produce on my own. And, while we're on the subject, why does a CD cost more than a cassette, though cassettes cost more for the record labels to produce? And why does a CD with one hour of audio (which cost thousands of dollars to produce) cost as much as a DVD, filled with several hours of video AND audio that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce? If the record companies and artists can't make a profit at the price I'm proposing, then they deserve to fail.
I've also heard that the phone companies have a hard time billing you for your minutes, and there's a good chance of getting your phone calls for free, because their system simply can't track you at 600mph.
Hey, if you can plug all those blogs, then I want to plug my own:
http://www.sethb.com/weblog/
That said, I haven't completely drank the weblog Kool-Aid, I don't think it's going to revolutionize human communication like Dave Winer and some of the other weblog advocates do, but I do think they're kind of fun, if they're well written.
Now, I'm not saying mine is well written, but some of them are easier to read than others. Many weblogs are written just to appeal to their close circle of friends or colleagues, and are meaningless drivel to outsiders. Some are collections of random links that a person finds surfing the web that day, and some are simply interesting tidbits that a person chooses to share with the rest of the world.
Weblogs do an excellent job of providing information about obscure topics, the referer logs for my own weblog have numerous hits on technical bits that I've posted in the past, errors I've encountered in products, and reviews I've written about stuff that I've purchased. No, it's not going to revolutionize human communication, but if you were about to buy an electric rechargeable lawn mower, wouldn't you want to read a review about it? That's the kind of nuggets of info that weblogs do a good job of providing.
There's a lot of ego involved in many of them too, even in my own, I'll admit it. But there's also a chance to share what's going on in your life, and, as Spider Robinson wrote, shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased.
Hmm, I've got to go with Emma Caulfield, personally, though maybe it's a toss-up between her and Eliza...
Bite your friggin' tongue. The thing I like most about Buffy is that there IS continuity. They make one-line references to things that happened 3 seasons ago, and foreshadow things that will happen 4 episodes from now. That's what makes the show intelligent, plot arcs.
:)
I feel like I'm having the debate about which is better, Star Trek: TNG, or Deep Space Nine. For stand-alone episodes, TNG wins hands-down, "The Inner Light" and "Best of Both Worlds" clinch it alone. But, for plot lines, intrigue, and suspense sustained over an entire season, Deep Space Nine wins easily. I'm not going to claim that either series was better than the other, though I'll give ST:TNG credit for fueling a renewed interest in Star Trek in a younger generation.
It's all about what kind of TV you want to watch, if you like being able to watch TV episodes in any order, and having the characters live inside a bubble in which they never reference anything that happened in the past, that's fine, it's your choice. But for people who are really fans of a show, it's a much more rewarding viewing experience to know that each episode is only one part of a larger picture.
I also appreciate that (apart from Vampires, Demons, etc.) Buffy is one of the most realistic shows on TV when it comes to human intereactions. I'm not some hard core Buffy disciple either, I just started watching it this summer when a co-worker convinced me to sic my TiVo on it when FX started showing it from the beginning. For what I mean by realism, watch the episode where Buffy goes to college, and the little things that she and her roomie do to get back at each other.
And, Buffy scores one more point with me for making frequent references to movies and pop culture, especially when Xander does it. Roger Ebert wrote, in his review of Jay & Silent Bob, that it always feels so strange when you watch a movie or TV show in which the characters have apparently never seen a movie or TV show, and they never reference it. Next time you're out with your friends, see how many pop culture references you make to movies or TV shows, then notice how few movies or shows will ever include a reference to another show, it just feels weird. A good example of this was when Buffy and some college guys were turned into cave-people by some tainted beer, Xander said they were out "Questing for Fire", which got a good snicker out of me.
Yes, this is absolutely the biggest problem facing Iowa, the majority of the educated folks leave the state after college. I was born in Iowa, then moved to Nevada in the first grade, then came back to Iowa for high school because the school system in Nevada was so abysmal. I got my degree at ISU, but now I work at the University of Northern Iowa, doing IT work.
The problem is, all my friends and peers now work in Chicago, the Twin Cities, Omaha, or Kansas City, causing a "brain-drain" in the State of Iowa.
I've heard that the governor has a plan that will have the state pay back some of the student loans of students who remain in Iowa after graduating from college. It's a good idea, because of state budget problems tuition has jumped almost 30% here in 2 years, and it's only getting worse. This would at least reward and assist students who stayed in the state, and stop spending the dollars of Iowan taxpayers to churn out skilled workers for other states.
I don't live in a Tech Mecca either, Cedar Falls, Iowa, to be exact, but we've got awesome and cheap cable service from CFU, our municipal utility company.
I had $30/month residential service, which was about 1300kbps/down 192kbps/up. But, I just upgraded to the business class service for $25/month more ($55 total), and that gives me 4000kbps/down and 1400kbps/up. Extra IP addresses are $5/month, not sure what static IP addresses cost yet, I think it's another $20 a month for one of those, but it removes the ban on ports 80 and 23 too. The best part is that they have a 100Mbit bridge between the ISP and the University where I work, it's great for sending stuff to and from my servers.
I'm looking at buying a house right now, and even though I can cross the river into Waterloo and get a house cheaper, I won't buy one outside the Cedar Falls city limits, so I can keep my CFU, it's that good compared to Mediacom. I've had two outages in a year, one was for 5 minutes, the other was when my modem died. I noticed that the modem was out at 6:50 p.m., and they had a guy to my house and me back online by 7:30 p.m. Now that's customer service!
Exactly, I do the PC buying for our division here at the Univeristy of Northern Iowa, and I'm loyal to Dell, not Intel. If Dell shipped an Optiplex series PC with an Athlon, I'd be all over it, though I'd prefer it didn't use a Via chipset if possible...
I've got a custom Duron at home, and my work machine is a Micron PIII, but I like Dell's tools and support, and the Optiplex series are very easy cases to work on when you've got several hundred to support.
I loved Progeny, but since it died, I'm using Libranet now. It's not free-as-in-beer to download the binaries, but the $45 I paid was well worth it for a great debian-based distro that has been rock-solid for me. You can download version 1.9 for free from their site, but the latest version costs money.
Installing Libranet 2.0 was quite painless, other than having to swap two CDs several times, and then having 400MB of stuff to update via apt-get. Thank god I just upgraded my cable modem to the business-class service...
But, since the Libranet guys aren't too keen on giving away the binaries of version 2.0 (though you can download version 1.9 for free) I doubt they'd be too interested in contributing their installer technology...
I wouldn't say it's so easy to turn on that you can do it by accident, it requires you to insert the Windows CD, after choosing to add that component in your control panel.
That's like saying it's too easy to turn my debian box into a mail server, because all I have to do is type apt-get install qmail
:)
Win2k has IIS enabled by default, without making it easy to disable it.
Actually, here in the real world, only Win2K server has IIS installed by default, workstation does not, and it's pretty easy to turn it off, you just go to the Control Panel, go to Add/Remove Components, and remove IIS.
Yup, 6.5.8 works fine, but 7.0.3 does not work. I spent an entire day hosing my two WinXP boxes trying every possible combination to get it to work. Thank god for DriveImage and the SystemRestore feature of WinXP. You can get 7.0.3 installed, but the VPN stuff hoses your TCP/IP stack, and there's no way to get it back...
I own an iBook 2001, and run only OS X on it, but I think what scares many long-time Mac users away from OS X is the interface. If you've ever watched a serious Mac user performing complex tasks in OS 9, you realize that they really customize their OS, and make full use of every feature in OS 9 to work at a higher speed.
I like OS X, but the interface (while pretty) isn't designed for supreme usability in the way that the classic MacOS was. Sure, the dock is kind of cool, but icons tend to move around on you, depending on how many applications you have open. Most of us don't like our toolbars to re-arrange on us at random, as it's hard to develop motor-memory for how to reach them.
I'm not a luddite who doesn't want change, and in fact, I don't even run the classic OS on my iBook, and I'll probably format the drive and throw it out soon. But, OS X doesn't have the same level of user interface that OS 9 did, or even Windows has, especially when it comes to being able to easily turn off all the fancy stuff to squeeze more speed out of your machine.
Even Windows XP has an option to turn off practically every UI feature that's been introduced since Windows 95, so you can use the OS the way you want it. Some of us don't need transparent menus and drop shadows for our windows. Sure, OS X looks great, but I'd rather it ran fast, and that's on my machine that's only 9 months old with 384MB of RAM.
Actually, I put my mouth-money into Libranet this week, it was only $45, and it's debian-based, and so far I'm very happy with it.
:)
I just hope they stay around longer than the Stormix, Progeny, and Corel debian-based distros did. But, since you can only get Libranet 2.0 by paying for it, hopefully they'll keep a strong revenue base.
So, I think you should say that only 4000 Mandrake users put their money where their mouth is, some of us are supporting other distributions.
I want to start using Mozilla Mail, but until they add PGP support, I'm going to be using Outlook on Windows and Evolution or Kmail on my Linux box.
There are a lot of people who appreciate a nice integrated PGP or GPG function to our mailer, and hopefully someone will write a PGP plugin once the Mozilla APIs are final in version 1.0.
I only front as much money as I have access to hardware which will become mine until I'm paid back. For instance, I have a company-owned PC at home, if they decide to screw me out of some money, good luck getting that PC, Trinitron display, and laser printer back! I don't mind fronting up to $500, as I always get paid back within a week, but if they asked me to front $2000, I'd be storing a couple of new Dell laptops at home until I got my check. :)
Despite the fact that nothing new has come out of distributed.net for a while now, it's still the best-run distributed computing network. They have the most clients, for the most platforms with the most features, and that's why I continue to install the client on several PCs a month.
I've used SETI@Home and United Devices before, but frankly, I didn't like them much.
SETI has more users than it needs, last time I checked, the same data was being tested over and over again, simply because they have more volunteers than they need. I'd much rather see that CPU time go to the projects that need it.
United Devices has an admirable goal, curing cancer, but a lack of SMP support in their clients, and the lack of a Linux or Mac client pretty much rules them out for me. I use Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X every day, I can't run United Devices on all those platforms...
So come on everybody that's running SETI, save them some bandwidth, come join distributed.net, and we can power through the rest of RC5-64!!!
Just don't get me started on the OGR projects, they've been open for too long, and no one seems to know how to close them. OGR-24 should have been done a long time ago, but isn't, due (apparently) to a lack of managerial oversight, or poor planning.
Go one step further, disable the Windows Scripting Host. It's easy to do, and we do it for all of our users at my shop, with a simple command in the login scripts. Symantec makes a free tool, which you can find here.
.vbs files as harmless as .txt files, very handy for when a hot virus/worm sneaks past Norton before the new definitions are out. Of course, if you block attachments with executable extensions, you're fine, but, you can never be too paranoid. :)
This renders those nasty
I'd like to see one like:
Windows Administrator's guide to Red Hat Linux
Something that'd use the knowledge that many Windows NT/2000/XP domain administrators already have, but relate it to the Linux way of doing things. Have the book set up so that you look to the area you'd find the equivalent setting in Windows, and it'd tell you what the Red Hat equivalent was.
I'm not trying to say Red Hat is the only distribution, and I actually prefer debian myself, but it's the most widely known, and would be a good place to start for a book like this.
Such a book would be nice, because it could be written above the "Linux for dummies" level, since it would assume the reader has some technical skills, but would ease the transition to a new system.
I do Windows support for a living, and there are a lot of things that I can do quite quickly in Windows, but I wind up kind of lost trying to find them in Linux, even simple things like changing the resolution/refresh rate/color depth of my display.
Uh, you're wrong. I upgraded my TiVo two weeks ago, when I scored an 80GB drive from OfficeMax for $80 after rebate. I burned a CD image of an .iso file from here, in my Dell computer, running Windows XP Pro. I booted from the CD, with the new hard drive attached, logged in as root, following the instructions, typed one command. Shutdown the system, and installed the drive in my TiVo, using the mounting bracket from here.
/dev/hdc rather than /dev/hda, because I didn't feel like re-wiring my entire case to get the right drive at that IDE location. I've never even compiled a linux kernel, so it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist.
Total time from start to finish was less than half an hour, and anyone who'd feel comfortable building a machine from scratch could do it. I've even offered to upgrade several friends' machines for free, it was so easy.
Now, I have extremely basic Linux skills, so I did deviate from the directions, by running the program against
There was also an article in the most recent issue of Maximum PC magazine, showing how to do this in 2 pages.
Upgrading your TiVo isn't like replacing a transmission, it's like installing a hard drive twice, and one of the systems needs a special bracket. The hardest part is making sure you have a T-10 torx bit to remove the cover...