Posts by AJ MacLeod38 posts • joined Thursday 11th May 2006 10:48 GMT
The crunch moment for me was when all that "semantic desktop" garbage became a compulsory part of KDE and kmail in particular - I'd been using KDE very happily for most of a decade until then. Still, sylpheed's not at all bad and e17 does what I want very well, desktop wise.
Windows has never, ever been configurable enough to achieve that, leaving aside the ten million other reasons I won't use it.
I can hardly believe that the only one that got me vaguely interested was a Hyundai. Well, the Morgan's nice of course but just the same as ever (as it should be.)
The occasional mention of Linux or Mac in this review, but it's still not quite what we've been asking for every time a printer review comes round.
Is it really so difficult to state briefly whether PCL or PS are supported? If "Linux Support" means relying on badly written, hard to find, badly packaged and generally out of date custom software (pretty much like most Windows printer drivers actually, come to think of it) then it's really not worth having.
Yes, interesting point... at university we were told by our geology lecturer (and not all that long ago, either) that no soft-bodied creatures were preserved in the fossil record.
Not only is this (obviously) untrue, they're not even rare in the fossil record! The problem is, most people working in this field are indoctrinated to believe that the fossil record represents millions of years of slow and gradual deposition when in fact it's very clear from any rational examination of the evidence that this is not true; the fossil record is evidence of watery destruction on a catastrophic worldwide scale, everything swept away or buried in massive layers of rapidly-deposited silt.
I do Windows (and Linux) installs daily as part of my job, and IME getting correct drivers for every device on the machine is MUCH more work with Windows than with Linux.
I have also seen several machines where Windows point-blank wouldn't install, using any workaround, until the drive had been partitioned and NTFS formatted - using Linux!
Not to mention that a bare-bones Windows install is actually practically useless unless all you want is an unsafe and slightly handicapped platform to browse the web (bearing in mind that plugins such as Flash will need installed manually) whereas with the right Linux Distro it's ready to use straight away with a full set of applications.
Regarding the original topic, it's a perfectly clear attempt by Microsoft to gain more control over other people's hardware; enforcing it on ARM first is just the pragmatic thin-end-of-the-wedge approach.
Let's just hope it's a bit more reliable than their similar efforts over the past few years... I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole, given the number of relatively new high-end HPs I've seen fail with (usually heat-related) motherboard problems.
As to how thick it is... I couldn't care less - make it thick enough to fit a decent cooling system and fans that aren't made by the Christmas cracker factories in their slack periods.
To me almost all these smartphones miss the main point of their existence. I hate greasy, scratchable, un-tactile touchscreens for dialling, and I don't want a miniscule QWERTY keyboard.
I want a PHONE with a PHONE keypad, you know, with numbers on it. As far as I can see the Blackberry Pearl3G is the only smartphone out there that answers this description... not a problem for me just now as I've only had mine a year and hope it lasts a good bit longer yet, but surely I'm not the only one who wants this?
Predictive text has worked well for over a decade now - it's fine for firing off the odd email when out and about, and I'd far rather 12 buttons I can actually find to press individually than fight with the needle-in-a-haystack struggle you end up with when trying to cram a full QWERTY keyboard into a tiny phone.
Er - Yes, it IS largely Microsoft's fault. Why is the screen resolution of my original HP netbook vastly higher than the models which replaced it? Because MS refused to allow manufacturers to continue selling XP unless they crippled the hardware it was sold with.
Incidentally, none of the things you've mentioned are a problem at all with my 2133 - the keyboard is excellent and I genuinely have no idea what I'd want to lug around an optical drive for.
No, the only real problem with it is the VIA C7 CPU which is completely gutless... otherwise it's the perfect little Linux laptop for on-site troubleshooting, with it's nice and solid brushed aluminium case.
The Dell netbooks were also pretty decent little machines when running Linux and kitted out with a SSD, it's a pity they're going.
One thing I could ask - reliability. I had a very similar Samsung all-in-one colour laser and it worked passably well for about a year of very light use (didn't come anywhere near using up the pathetic quarter-full toner cartridges it came with).
After that it got increasingly bad at picking up paper until it basically refused to print anything - I gave it away and have been happily using an old OKI 5300 that I got for nothing ever since.
What, it's possible to create a worse MP3 player than an iPod? Scary thought...
I think you'll find that samba is in fact quite heavily used by all sorts of devices...
The claims of the MS lawyer are almost hilariously ridiculous though.
Not that I care, but some of those designs take me right back to the 90s! I agree that an indication of postscript / PCL capabilities and/or Apple / *nix support would make this kind of review much more useful.
The first time I saw his name mentioned as a security consultant a few years ago it instantly brought me back to this -- http://www.grahamcluley.com/humbug.html -- and this -- http://www.grahamcluley.com/jim.html
Well worth playing, even after all these years...
So these union members are providing critical public services... about time they recognised that THEY have primary responsibility for what happens. It's the Union that are destroying the public service with their characteristic greed; their members were fortunate to be offered any kind of pay rise and if they don't think it's reflective of their worth they can move to those other companies who will pay them massively more. Or perhaps not.
Unions... String them up, the lot of them, and we might actually get some industry back. They might be a nice idea in theory but the practice is as ugly as can be...
The above are indeed all abominations and infuriating in their efforts to make exactly the same mistakes as the closed-source world.
Having just rebuilt my own machine on new disks I did suffer Gnome 2 for a week or so (the semantic desktop garbage in KDE 4 finally drove me away from KDE after using it since the pre-1.0 days) but E17 is definitely my choice for the forseeable future. The Everything launcher is great, I've no need of a "start" style menu or ribbon as part of my desktop at all.
As usual, the open source world provides you with real choice...
I think you'll find that most hard disks have had temperature sensors built in for quite a long time now... Apple aren't interested in keeping your documents safe, they're interested in selling you overpriced replacement components.
Ah yes... the good old "you're wrong because I'm me and I have a position" argument - very convincing reasoning there.
People are paid to teach all sorts of things - regurgitating wrongs doesn't make them right, no matter how convinced you are of their veracity.
The main problem with incest (or at least, closely related people breeding) is the accumulation of harmful genetic mutations... with a starting point of "genetically perfect" people, incest would be no issue at all, for a very long time. Which is no doubt why incest was not initially prohibited in Scripture...
I really think you should learn about the pioneers of immunisation and their religious beliefs (which in many cases were one of the main reasons for their caring about their fellow men).
Radiological dating is not a con, but is limited in its usefulness by our knowledge of several factors throughout the time concerned. Anyone who truly believes that we can know for certain the absolute age of anything claimed to be millions of years old is employing an impressive degree of faith (or more likely, has never or is unwilling to consider the scaffold of assumptions it employs.)
And in 3D! If only there was a 3d version of the full colour close up video... impressive none the less
Enlightenment is a Window Manager; ESD is / was a network-capable mixing sound daemon (sort of precursor to pulseaudio indeed, only it generally worked without requiring a supercomputer to run.)
They are related, but not the same thing. Enlightenment is very much still around and I've fairly recently switched back to using it after over ten years mostly using KDE.
LibreOffice can apparently handle a million... funnily enough I seem to recall that it's only very Excel has been able to handle anything like that, eventually catching up to ancient versions of Quattro Pro...
Narrow, uninformed and plain wrong. I live in a small village, with a very infrequent bus service - nearest town is about ten miles away. In order to earn my living, I have to be able to visit customers in their homes and offices, anything up to 200 miles away - often collecting and delivering bulky, heavy computers and associated equipment, and carrying my tools.
Yes, a lot of work can be done remotely, and is... but much more can't be and requires physical access.
Your answer to my problem is... what? I cycle to customers and get them to post their stuff to me by rail freight if it needs off-site work? Much as I love cycling, I don't have that kind of time to spend in between jobs, and there's no railway station closer than 5 miles away anyhow (and never will be.)
I frequently wish that someone could batter into the thick skulls of the hordes of clueless deluded city-dwelling climate change doom-mongers that lots of people DON'T live under the same circumstances that they do :-(
I agree that society is more important... more important than following whatever pointless and unfounded "green" fad is currently fashionable.
Pity these look (and will almost certainly feel) cheap and plasticky, like practically every other laptop on the market.
I'm certainly no fan of Apple but I couldn't find anything at all comparable in quality feel to the 13" Macbook Pro when I was looking earlier this month.
You can certainly get much better specs for much less cash (it's definitely not worth the full £1020) but overall the solid quality feel and the superb trackpad are unmatched as far as I can see and it's easily powerful enough for what it was purchased for.
About time Sony et al got their act together and started building some solid feeling and classy looking machines instead of charging premium prices for things that feel like they came free with cereal...
Ah yes, "Evolutionary Psychologist"... either of those two words alerts the reader that what follows will be a pile of completely unscientific twaddle. Which certainly was the case here...
Off-centre touchpads are an abomination that really infuriate me every time I have to use them. Common on bigger laptops with numeric keypads to the side of the main keyboard, I suppose the idea is that the touchpad lies centrally beneath the main keyboard... but it's a retarded idea.
The problem is that if you're typing away on the main keyboard, you're not using the touchpad. When you do want to use the touchpad, your hands will almost certainly naturally fall to the middle of the laptop along the bottom edge, NOT the middle of the main keyboard (which might as well not exist for the time you're using the touchpad.)
Between this and the use of a single strip instead of two buttons, it's enough to have me ready to take a sledgehammer to the things...
Actually, in many cases you CAN'T get the parts easily (sometimes you can get them elsewhere, but at truly ridiculous prices) - as one of the 3rd parties referred to above that sorts out Mac problems, I can say from plenty of experience that repairs are not a doddle compared to most of the PCs out there; they're more often than not more time consuming and fiddly. Not impossible of course, but generally made more difficult than necessary by the obstructive and controlling ways of the company.
Sony is perhaps a bad example, but most Dells are stuffed with parts that are easy to source; even in the case of laptops or the more unusual form factor machines you're usually pretty sure of getting the bits you need. Not to mention the freely available service documentation (useful in the case of some laptops)...
It's not so much the cost of repairs that annoy me, but the way they won't supply parts. They repeatedly claim not to have a price list! My guess that they pluck a large figure out of thin air and add £100 didn't go down too well...
All the Apple gear I've dealt with is overpriced and poorly engineered tat, despite what the fanatics believe.
Almost none of the comments mention ease of use from the keyboard, which is a primary consideration for me. Webmail is fine if you get three messages a day and don't mind clicking from one to the next, but none of the web clients are even tolerably nice to use from the keyboard and that means I'll be sticking with kmail for the forseeable future. I did try to like Thunderbird (especially as I really do like Lightning) but found it too uncomfortable and switched back to kmail pretty quickly...
You kind of spoiled it with the quote supposedly from OOorg which talks about using Excel spreadsheets...
Given that the single least reliable component of a PC is IME the hard disk, I'm not one bit tempted towards using them for "backups"... will stick with LTO for a while yet, I think.
AC: Your statement shows your utter dearth of knowledge and understanding of history. You have simply regurgitated a myth which is popular, displaying precisely the lack of critical thinking and research which this item was allegedly reporting.
As for the supposed incompatibility between Christianity and real personal freedom... just see how free the people living under anti-theist communist rule have been and are now.
Clearly Peter R is unfamiliar with the massive range of "works out of the box on Linux" devices (cameras, mp3 players - practically everything worth using, in fact).
Even so, a large proportion of IT items I buy these days come with Linux drivers on the CD, or give instructions on installation under Linux.
Most Windows users are addicted to shoving CDs full of badly written drivers and awful, bloated and downright unnecessary apps into their machines (I know this, because I often have to sort out the damage they cause).
Perhaps in your particular living room remote desktop displays are not a requirement. Please do not extrapolate from that to assert that the rest of the world is identical to your living room; for a significant proportion of Linux users (including people in my living room) the network transparency of X is essential. Thin clients never did go away, you know - and they make just as much sense today as ever before.
We already have a common kernel across distros - it's called Linux. You can use pretty much whichever version you want - it's exceptionally unlikely to cause problems at a used-by-granny application level. Use what came with your distro and you aren't likely to go far wrong.
As for point 3... no. Not much more to be said there, really; if you're a technically inept user, stick to the packages provided by your distro - it's at least as easy if not more so to install these than it is to install most legit software on Windows.
It's a feature Volvo developed (who else?) and thus Ford as the parent company have been able to use it.
Obviously if people relied on it 100% as a replacement for proper observation it'd be dangerous; as a "backup" (and who doesn't have the odd lapse of concentration now and again?) it's a good thing.
Ah, I see - it's all down to evolution again. Except... why hasn't evolution provided us with extra-super-all-powerful eyes rather than this, the sign of degrading processes which are observable everywhere in this world?
