Tiger Direct seems to have a mixed reputation for service
Having bought a bunch of Audrey's off them and following the hacking community at linux-hacker.net I'd just like to put in a positive word for Tiger Direct. They have treated us well with the Audrey's, taking back defective units even though they expicitly said up front when you bought them that they were not returnable. They repeatedly asked the board for input and comment on pricing and product offerings and finally sold off all the returned machines (some of which there was nothing wrong with) for parts at a dirt cheap price. I would not hesitate to deal with them again.
Getting rid of the wires on things goes a long way to improving your comfort. I highly recommend the Logitech Wireless Keyboard Pro (comes with a wireless mouse) and a set of wireless headphones, Sennheiser makes some decent ones.
I'd like to point out that you can easily get an old pentium 166 laptop (or better) for about $200. This makes a much better mp3 appliance. A 166 runing Linux plays mp3 without any problem. Connect the line out to your stereo and the sound is decent. The screen and interface is much better than you will find on anything like the Rio. If you have a wireless net, you don't need to run any wires. Plus you get the added benifit of being able to surf the web and check your email from your stereo:).
I have to disagree, it's a horrible book. I picked up and was excited by the premise. In a word, it sucked, the premise of the information age happening in victorian england is not well handled and the story is boring. This book was an utter waste of an excellent idea.
True and that is the fundumental problem with these appliances. They cost more than they are worth, therefore noone buys them. I would buy an iMac for a couple hundred more than the original price of an Audrey. I would buy a laptop for a little more that what most web tablets will cost. Until companies can get the unit price of these devices down to what they are worth they are doomed.
It's amazing how good the Audrey actually is, if you want simple internet access from a room like your kitchen. It takes up little space, has a usable browser, calender, address book and email capabilities. What makes the Audrey so nice is that you can integrate it seemlessly into your home LAN. It will talk to your mail and dns server and mount file systems using nfs or smb, no need for some bogus proprietay subscription service.
The reason the Audry failed is simple, it is a great little machine for $89 but it's not worth $499. For $89 you have lots of people buying them and playing. 3Com and other appliance would be smart to follow what is going on over a linux-hacker.net and audreyhacking.com and re-evalutate their market strategies when they see what happens when you make a kickass little toy like the Audrey available to the computer literate community at an accessible price.
X may be old but it has adapted to the times and continues to adapt. Direct frame buffer access is great for games and may be some graphically intensive applications but i'll take the ability to run an application on one machine and display it on another of possibly an entirely different architechure any day. My little pentium 133 laptop is still a very useful machine simply because all it really has to do is run X, i can even access pigs like star office without any problem.
VNC is a cool and useful hack but X is a better solution.
I'm confused by this one. How does making ads more annoying and in your face map onto more money for/.? Do advertisers pay for more screen real estate or is there some magic formula that says that an ad is worth more if it is more in the way of the reader. When are advertisers going to learn that associating their products and corporate image with a feeling of annoyance in the consumer does not sell more product.
I for one would be willing to pay a reasonable amount to support/., say in the range of $50/year.
No one has mentioned yet the coolest part. You can now point lilo at your emacs executable and boot directly into emacs. Yes, that's right no more pesky and redundant operating system in the way, emacs does everything you need anyway.
Get x2vnc it lets you move the mouse and keyboard between monitors by moving it off the side of the screen. Works great except that the mouse wheel scrolls in the wrong direction under windoze.
Basically he says that people should stop working on the Linux desktop because it has no hope of replacing windoze. As a Linux desktop user, sure i'd like to see everyone switch, but even if they don't i still want a good high quality desktop on a real O/S. Just because we may never make windows go away, is no reason to stop working on alternative packages.
No I use Linux almost exclusively and avoid M$ products to the greatest extent possible. The problem is that even with the effort that I take to avoid microsoft, i still an affected by them every day. For example: I have to run a machine at work for the single purpose of reading email, i can not avoid the outhouse/exchange nightmare becuase my employer has made the foolish decision to use it. I often experience service outagage while M$ viruses run rampant around the net. I often have to put up with web sites programmed exclusively to M$ bugs and products. Need i go on.
AOL on the otherhand, well i forgot the netscape connection, i use mozilla and would have to say that if it is an example of the AOL experience then i can't complain, it's great.
I suppose i run into AOL everyday in ways that I'm not aware of. The good news is that I do not feel that they are in any way trying to control my internet experience. Microsoft on the otherhand does nothing but try to control everyone and everything.
... AOL already practically owns the Internet... I don't get this. I am a very heavy internet user and have been since long before AOL and I have to tell you, AOL is not even on my radar. I have no opinion about them because they have no effect on my life whatsoever. M$ on the other hand is in my face every day.
I have to agree with the poster on play lists. I'm trying to set up a laptop in my living room to play mp3's and while xmms is a great player, it's ui to load songs and file simply sucks. What I need is something that my wife can deal with.
One of the most promising new enhancments that I've seen are the Xinerama patches for WindowMaker. These allow for intelligent placement and management of windows on a dual headed setup. A Xinerama aware window manager will not pop up dialogs that cross between two monitors and will try to keep dialogs on the same screen as their parent.
I'm not sure if any of the other managers are working on this but it should be really cool when it is released.
My building is about 4 or 5 blocks away, I got up about 9ish to go
get a coffee and noticed that the air was full of papers, like a ticker tape
parade, then i saw that one of the wtc towers was on fire. I asked some guys in
another office what happened, they said that they had heard that a plane hit it.
A this point we were thinking small plane, accident. While we were
watching, all of the sudden we heard the second one and could see it really
low doing a steep turn. Then we watched it fly right into the second tower. At
that point it was obvious that this was not an accident. I thought, i'm on the
37th floor of one of the buildings cloest to the water, i'm getting the fuck out
of here. Grabbed my stuff went to the elevator. The first one was packed so
i took the stairs. When I got out of the building, i figured that I wanted to
get off the island. I usually take the ferry, but the one i catch is too close
to the wtc so I took the wall street one from the east side of the island. I
didn't care where it was going as long as it was New Jersey. I was pretty early
so i didn't have to wait too long. As my ferry was going up the Hudson beside
the wtc the first tower collapsed, it filled the whole downtown area with thick
black smoke about 100 ft high. I caught a train from Hoboken and got 3/4's of
the way home and the power failed. So i got
off and walked until i found a pay phone, cell phones pretty much didn't work. Called my wife and she
came and picked me up. We gave some other people rides home as well.
In all it was kind of exciting, very unreal and very horrible. I'm sure that the
horror of the whole thing will come out in the next few days.
Since a breakup looks like it is out, what would the next best thing be? My feeling is that the government should address the problem by forcing Microsoft to open all of their IP in areas that they are currently using to lock out competition. This includes at least the following:
File formats
Protocols
RPC's (eg. Outlook to Exchange)
API's
The government should make M$ publish this information so that other vendors can write interoperable software that works with (and instead of) the Windows platform.
You get used to it (or have you stopped watching television?)
Actually I don't watch television any more, i watch Tivo:). Anyway, my point wasn't that advertising isn't necessary or ok at some level, my point was that the totally in your face advertising can't possibly be selling more product, it is probably selling less due to the fact that the advertisers are pissing off rather than attracting customers.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just see Jones internal struggle:
hmmmm
Be true to the book....
or more Liv Tyler
Be true to the book....
or more Live Tyler
....
I had to be a tough choice.
Tiger Direct seems to have a mixed reputation for service
Having bought a bunch of Audrey's off them and following the hacking community at linux-hacker.net I'd just like to put in a positive word for Tiger Direct. They have treated us well with the Audrey's, taking back defective units even though they expicitly said up front when you bought them that they were not returnable. They repeatedly asked the board for input and comment on pricing and product offerings and finally sold off all the returned machines (some of which there was nothing wrong with) for parts at a dirt cheap price. I would not hesitate to deal with them again.
Getting rid of the wires on things goes a long way to improving your comfort. I highly recommend the Logitech Wireless Keyboard Pro (comes with a wireless mouse) and a set of wireless headphones, Sennheiser makes some decent ones.
I'd like to point out that you can easily get an old pentium 166 laptop (or better) for about $200. This makes a much better mp3 appliance. A 166 runing Linux plays mp3 without any problem. Connect the line out to your stereo and the sound is decent. The screen and interface is much better than you will find on anything like the Rio. If you have a wireless net, you don't need to run any wires. Plus you get the added benifit of being able to surf the web and check your email from your stereo :).
About the only thing objectionable about Enterprise thus far :)
...
You forgot to mention the theme song
Is peace on earth and good will to men.
Oh and Osama Bin Ladens head on a pike.
I have to disagree, it's a horrible book. I picked up and was excited by the premise. In a word, it sucked, the premise of the information age happening in victorian england is not well handled and the story is boring. This book was an utter waste of an excellent idea.
True and that is the fundumental problem with these appliances. They cost more than they are worth, therefore noone buys them. I would buy an iMac for a couple hundred more than the original price of an Audrey. I would buy a laptop for a little more that what most web tablets will cost. Until companies can get the unit price of these devices down to what they are worth they are doomed.
It's amazing how good the Audrey actually is, if you want simple internet access from a room like your kitchen. It takes up little space, has a usable browser, calender, address book and email capabilities. What makes the Audrey so nice is that you can integrate it seemlessly into your home LAN. It will talk to your mail and dns server and mount file systems using nfs or smb, no need for some bogus proprietay subscription service.
The reason the Audry failed is simple, it is a great little machine for $89 but it's not worth $499. For $89 you have lots of people buying them and playing. 3Com and other appliance would be smart to follow what is going on over a linux-hacker.net and audreyhacking.com and re-evalutate their market strategies when they see what happens when you make a kickass little toy like the Audrey available to the computer literate community at an accessible price.
X may be old but it has adapted to the times and continues to adapt. Direct frame buffer access is great for games and may be some graphically intensive applications but i'll take the ability to run an application on one machine and display it on another of possibly an entirely different architechure any day. My little pentium 133 laptop is still a very useful machine simply because all it really has to do is run X, i can even access pigs like star office without any problem.
VNC is a cool and useful hack but X is a better solution.
I'm confused by this one. How does making ads more annoying and in your face map onto more money for /.? Do advertisers pay for more screen real estate or is there some magic formula that says that an ad is worth more if it is more in the way of the reader. When are advertisers going to learn that associating their products and corporate image with a feeling of annoyance in the consumer does not sell more product.
/., say in the range of $50/year.
I for one would be willing to pay a reasonable amount to support
No one has mentioned yet the coolest part. You can now point lilo at your emacs executable and boot directly into emacs. Yes, that's right no more pesky and redundant operating system in the way, emacs does everything you need anyway.
Get x2vnc it lets you move the mouse and keyboard between monitors by moving it off the side of the screen. Works great except that the mouse wheel scrolls in the wrong direction under windoze.
I'm giving my brothers 3Com Audreys this year. These are really hackable and are great little toys.
Basically he says that people should stop working on the Linux desktop because it has no hope of replacing windoze. As a Linux desktop user, sure i'd like to see everyone switch, but even if they don't i still want a good high quality desktop on a real O/S. Just because we may never make windows go away, is no reason to stop working on alternative packages.
No I use Linux almost exclusively and avoid M$ products to the greatest extent possible. The problem is that even with the effort that I take to avoid microsoft, i still an affected by them every day. For example: I have to run a machine at work for the single purpose of reading email, i can not avoid the outhouse/exchange nightmare becuase my employer has made the foolish decision to use it. I often experience service outagage while M$ viruses run rampant around the net. I often have to put up with web sites programmed exclusively to M$ bugs and products. Need i go on.
AOL on the otherhand, well i forgot the netscape connection, i use mozilla and would have to say that if it is an example of the AOL experience then i can't complain, it's great.
I suppose i run into AOL everyday in ways that I'm not aware of. The good news is that I do not feel that they are in any way trying to control my internet experience. Microsoft on the otherhand does nothing but try to control everyone and everything.
... AOL already practically owns the Internet...
I don't get this. I am a very heavy internet user and have been since long before AOL and I have to tell you, AOL is not even on my radar. I have no opinion about them because they have no effect on my life whatsoever. M$ on the other hand is in my face every day.
I have to agree with the poster on play lists. I'm trying to set up a laptop in my living room to play mp3's and while xmms is a great player, it's ui to load songs and file simply sucks. What I need is something that my wife can deal with.
One of the most promising new enhancments that I've seen are the Xinerama patches for WindowMaker. These allow for intelligent placement and management of windows on a dual headed setup. A Xinerama aware window manager will not pop up dialogs that cross between two monitors and will try to keep dialogs on the same screen as their parent.
I'm not sure if any of the other managers are working on this but it should be really cool when it is released.
Is this rely hard? Has it already been done?
it's called a polygone
My story is here.
:)
Have to add content to get past the lameness filter
My building is about 4 or 5 blocks away, I got up about 9ish to go
get a coffee and noticed that the air was full of papers, like a ticker tape
parade, then i saw that one of the wtc towers was on fire. I asked some guys in
another office what happened, they said that they had heard that a plane hit it.
A this point we were thinking small plane, accident. While we were
watching, all of the sudden we heard the second one and could see it really
low doing a steep turn. Then we watched it fly right into the second tower. At
that point it was obvious that this was not an accident. I thought, i'm on the
37th floor of one of the buildings cloest to the water, i'm getting the fuck out
of here. Grabbed my stuff went to the elevator. The first one was packed so
i took the stairs. When I got out of the building, i figured that I wanted to
get off the island. I usually take the ferry, but the one i catch is too close
to the wtc so I took the wall street one from the east side of the island. I
didn't care where it was going as long as it was New Jersey. I was pretty early
so i didn't have to wait too long. As my ferry was going up the Hudson beside
the wtc the first tower collapsed, it filled the whole downtown area with thick
black smoke about 100 ft high. I caught a train from Hoboken and got 3/4's of
the way home and the power failed. So i got
off and walked until i found a pay phone, cell phones pretty much didn't work. Called my wife and she
came and picked me up. We gave some other people rides home as well.
In all it was kind of exciting, very unreal and very horrible. I'm sure that the
horror of the whole thing will come out in the next few days.
The government should make M$ publish this information so that other vendors can write interoperable software that works with (and instead of) the Windows platform.
You get used to it (or have you stopped watching television?)
:). Anyway, my point wasn't that advertising isn't necessary or ok at some level, my point was that the totally in your face advertising can't possibly be selling more product, it is probably selling less due to the fact that the advertisers are pissing off rather than attracting customers.
Actually I don't watch television any more, i watch Tivo