"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Stolen from a FB post:
“Freedom is not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle.” – P.J. O’Rourke
Same new toy as earlier, just a few more observations.
More pleased with this thing for web surfing, email and general office, computing tasks, etc., than I’d thought I’d be. Oh, I was sure it’d be OK for general computing, web surfing, etc., but that this lil notebook has proven so very easy to adapt to for everyday use has been a bit of a surprise. Oh, placement of some keys on this almost full-size keyboard and avoiding the touchpad while typing sometimes causes minor glitches in use, but apart from those things, it’s capable of replacing my main machine for ordinary tasks.
Nice.
The 15.6″ “widescreen” (1366X768) is nearly as good as my nice 23″ display on my desktop. Love the numeric keypad. I’m using a M$ Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 most of the time, since that just leaves me less of a transition to my other computers and to those I work on, but it’d not be a deal breaker if I didn’t have it plugged in.
The bad? Almost all the ASUS software it came loaded with. Who really needs some Dock-like piece of crap (ASUS ControlDeck) to navigate with? People who need training wheels on their tricycles? And ASUS WebStorage? *feh* ASUS EeePC users get 500GB of online storage just for buying their midget computers. I get an ASUS WebStorage app that won’t even let me register, but even if it did, I’d qualify for a measly 1GB of storage. Useless. Even M$ SkyDrive (which works flawlessly, BTW) gives me 25GB of storage for free.
The rest of the ASUS utilities and applications are all things I can live without, though most are innocuous. Still, I’ve killed loading every one of them at Windows startup.
Killed off ALL the trialware the computer came with, as well as a lot of really stupid games. Chess and Freecell: all the games I’ll ever want on this puppy.
The only hardware quibble I really have is that all the USB ports (4 of ’em) are on the left and right sides of the computer. I’d like to have seen two on the back edge, but that’s really just a quibble. I can see some folks breaking off connectors/damaging ports just as easily there as on the left/right sides, as I’m more likely to do. OTOH, I like the media card port dead center in front. I run Thunderbird Portable off the thing, and it’s nice having all my email archived on a handily-ejected media card front and center. Since I now collect it all at Gmail as well, I’m pretty well covered in the email archiving stuff, especially if I just copy the mail folder off to other removable media every now and then.
Everything about this lil 15.6″ notebook says, “well built” and for $500? *sheesh* I walk by WallyWorld displays selling much less capable lil toys for as much or more. Still wondering if I ought to pinch myself. *heh*
Still, it does have limited uses as a platform for installing multiple VMs–only a 320GB HDD (and a max of only about 280 of that actually available for use right now because of the partitioning scheme) and just 4GB of RAM–not ideal for running several OSes simultaneously. And some of the other uses I have for computers aren’t best met by a lil notebook like this. But. It’s ideally suited as a “couch computer” when mated with this:
The rubber feet on the laptop grip the top of the lapdesk nicely, and the lil mouse “likes” the surface. The storage is just lagniappe.
Long line of cars in the right-turn lane, stopped behind some yokel who shouldn’t have a driver’s license. As in most of the country, “right turn on red after stop” is the law in America’s Third World County. So, light turns green, cars move forward and… stop as light turns red again and the illiterate, lazy, stupid boob in front of me just sits there. Oh, had I not mentioned that this is a “T” intersection and there is NO traffic to prevent proceeding after a stop, unless oncoming traffic on the street I was on (there was none) has a left turn arrow?
I honked a couple of times to wake the “Bela Vista driver*” ahead of me, but to no avail.
Idiot.
*Driver had an Arkansas tag. Bella Vista, Arkansas got its start as a planned community for retirees. Around here, when someone begins showing evidence of “Oldtimers’ Disease” we call that a “BellaVista moment”.
Whah?!? Busy coupla months. Stop for air and… nothing substantive’s changed. The Big Zero and his minions are still blocking all sensible efforts to stop the oopsie in the Gulf. No real progress in blocking the (about half) BP-written crap-n-tax. The wussification and socialization (redundancy alert) of the US under the White, urm, Café-au-lait House, Congressional Dhimmicraps and Repugnicants (or as Jerry Pournelle likes to style them, after a Peggy Noonan article, Nuts and Creeps *heh*) and Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind is still proceeding unabated.
IOW, no news.
Seems the summer news slump has hit an early low. I may as well pull a Rip Van Winkle. *sigh*
OK, so M$Office 2010 is pretty good. I like the built-in integration with SkyDrive and other M$ web thingies, and otherwise, it just works. I do NOT like the still proprietary formats, and some of the eye candy and hand-holding is over the top, but if I had to I could live with those things.
OpenOffice 3.2.1, OTOH, just works. Oh, cool stuff to match OneNote isn’t a part of the mix, and if one actually needed the page layout capabilities of Publisher it’d be a tad of a stretch for OO Writer, but overall I feel more comfy with OpenOffice’s approach.
Personal taste. Oh, a few other nice things were in M$Office, but most folks won’t install the Office Professional Plus 2010 version of M$Office I did–which included some TechNet-only additions to Office most readers here won’t be concerned with–some back end–such as Sharepoint (Designer and Workspace) so a straight-up quick look at just the primary components–word processing, database, spreadsheet and presentation software–is all I’ve done so far.
One thing OO really has in its favor: I can use it on all my computers without any compatibility layer intruding. Linux, BSD, Windows: OO just doesn’t care, since it works natively on ’em all.
OK, so it’s not really night here, but at 6:10p.m., it’s hot. At the local high school, which supplies NOAA readings:
Current: 97°F
Hi: 101°F
Heat Index: 111°F
Humidity: 48%
Little wonder our AC has been struggling a tad this afternoon.
No, I did not do any yard work today. I’m not that stupid. Yet. 🙂
You’ve all heard the phrase from Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptists,” about a “wall of separation between Church & State” and know the use that Big Government and libtard advocates make of it in oppressing primarily Christian practice of religion, but understanding its actual use requires more than simply grasping its use as a tool of oppressing religious practice. We must also understand that it’s about more than controlling the expression of religious views but also about the imposition of political thought upon religious practice. Take for example, this:
Bullet points inside the material intended for distribution by a government agency to churches include doozies like this:
Urm, can anyone say, “advancing an extra-Constitutional, Big Government agenda?”
So (especially Christian) churches are forbidden from being involved in politics to curb government infringement on their moral imperatives but Big Government is just fine pushing its own agendas in churches, eh? That’s what “wall of separation” means to Big Government and libtard advocates.
This is completely unrelated–and was for the 2000 Census, but…
While Jerry Pournelle didn’t include the last (“stupidity”–doing things that don’t get the results supposedly “expected” over and over again–e.g., “welfare”–just putting more time, effort and resources into the failed processes) in a recent short essay, I think that’s the only idea that fits with his disquisition that he missed.
I believe that the upcoming election is the most important election in decades, and that its effects will be felt for decades to come. What’s at stake are the very principles of this nation. Surely that’s clear enough? Clearly I believe that those who voted in this government were mistaken…
If you’re not already involved at some level working to turn things around at the voting booth, then get busy. If you don’t care enough to get involved, then shame on you.
(See also Woody’s succinct post graphically noting a central issue you should be concerned about.)
So, I let WP do the automagic upgrade to 3.0 business, and what to my eyes does so stupidly appear? First time I click to start a new post, the software “helpfully” places “Enter title here” in the title bar.
*feh* That’s just insulting. Is there really any great number of WP users who are so abysmally stupid that huge masses of WP users cannot figure out where the post title goes? The way I see it, if a WP user cannot figure out where to put the post title, then that user should be assigned a guardian, placed in an “Assisted Computing Facility” (“Here, dearie, let me make that mouse click for you!”),strapped into a straitjacket (or chained to a Mac; same difference *heh*) and fed through a tube.
“Enter title here” MHWA!
A day of unscheduled time. After more than a bunch of 12+ hour days, just doing yard work and shoveling out one stall of the Augean Stable (my “office” so-called–more a junk room at present *sigh*) seems like a vacation.
Oh, catching up on “life as we know it” should fit in there somewhere, too.
Of course I’ll include a lil play time in the mix today. A start on a head-to-head between M$Office 2010 and OpenOffice on Lil Zark should make for some interesting play time.