þings made clear by Icelandic speaker

You should know, and any Icelandic speaker would tell you, ðat ðe right character to insert for ðe "hard" th is ð, not þ. Admittedly writers of Middle English got lazy and used þ pretty promiscuously, so ðey wrote þings like "þe" for ðe definite article. Since in some calligraphic hands "þ" looks sort of like "y" if you squint just right, people started writing "ye" for "þe" which was a misspelled "ðe" to begin wið, and hence ðe infamous "Ye Olde Knick-Knack Shoppe" syndrome.

I hope ðat ðis makes þings clear.

James Jones

[Bless, Ed.]

Blue and White LEDs. Who leads?

Interesting about white LEDs. As far as I know Nichia are good at blue LEDs but they don't lead in the white ones. The leader there is Luxeon as you can read here...

I have this flashlight and a Nichia based one and even the best Nichias are blueish whereas the Luxeon is completely white and more powerful too.

http://www.ledmuseum.org/ http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/lshp.htm

I have this flashlight and wow, it's great. I love gadgets so I have the old and new Trasers too.

All the best,

Chris

Georgia on our Mind

Hello Mike,

Some georgian guys also read articles on your site :). In regard to "Georgia's Velvet Revolution fuelled by the Internet" I just wanted do say that situation has radically changed, and most georgians now have internet access. (through dial-up though, but there are some not too expensive ADSL solutions as well)

Some boring numbers:

Dial-up connection costs about 0.5$ per hour during the day, and half of that in the night (a bit less than in Germany I think). ADSL in georgia, for the moment means up to 2Mb local traffic (georgian servers, you can download pretty interesting stuff from some, eg divx movies, I am not sure if it is legal though) and only 64kb "real" internet. That's for 50$ per month.

Best regards,
Mikheil Sukhiashvili

P.S.
Sorry for my English. It's obviously not my first language. [Same here, we're Scottish. Ed.]

P.P.S.
Our "Velvet Revolution" was rather fuelled (a bit) by George Soros money. :)

SuSE Q

I read your SUSE 9.0 review with considerable interest, though I don't run/intend to run SUSE (Disclaimer: I am a Debian/Gentoo user)

I would like to protest loudly over the following paragraph:

" The script header included a name that sounds like Indian in origin: H-1B visa or another case of classic Bangalore, India outsourcing? There are culprits for this: Agere Systems, and IBM. "

Kick IBM/Agere if you wish. They are your American companies. I don't care. Why the racist comment about Bangalore or H1B? Does he mean that *all* work done in Bangalore is crap? Can he quote the offensive part? And tell me, why is an Indian name offensive? Remember, it is the American companies who are falling over one another to setup R&D/design centres in Bangalore (and you thought only call centres exist in India) , not the other way round. Does the author know how much crap is written in US (Think MSWindows) Should we Indians make such remark over English names in the code? The remark clearly shows the author's arrogance and bias.

Having gotten that off my chest, here's the rest:

The reviewer seems to very negative towards KDE. I run a IBM R40e with 2GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, CDROM, and the usual stuff. I *always* boot into X+KDE, and run KMail, Konq and all the KDE stuff that your reviewer seems to hate. Even on battery mode. Trust me I love those KDE apps.

I find the performance of KDE pretty good on my machine. I don't care about difference of few seconds during startup. (BTW KDE on Gentoo is very very fast, if you know how to setup). Once my desktop starts up, I startup OO, Konq, Kmail, karamba, konsole and Moz1.6a and stop them only when I am done for the day

. BTW I have never liked Gnome (esp. Evo with its Outlookish UI) and don't use it much.

The reviewer is clearly a Gnome user and has never used KDE long enough to start liking it. KDE with Mosfet's Aqua + OSX buttons.... If one doesn't drool, he must be deadman.....

Regards,
Anand

Rage, Rage against the dying of the LEDs

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33728336

Very interesting thread! Here are a couple quotes:

"As I was playing my Tiger Woods 04, and My Need for speed: UG in the max resolution of 1280x1024 I had to ask myself this question. Why are Nvidia owners playing Tiger Woods at 1600x1200."

"Its painfully obvious in Tiger Woods 2003 AND 2004. Changing your ATI card ID to match a NVidia card ID fixes the water in 2003 and enables the 1600x1200 in 2004."

"personally not only do I think it's morally wrong on both nVidia and EA's side, but I think it should be against the law. Microsoft, walmart, etc get in big ass trouble for doing things like this, but nvidia and ea (small companies in comparison) can get away with it like its nothing. Monopolizing markets SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED. . . IMHO it's no different then if MS were to not let Netscape work on Windows the right way."

"What other explanation can there be when all you have to do to "simply turn it back on for ATi users" is change the device id and NOTHING ELSE?"

"I do not really mind companies putting the Nvidia logo on their box. I mean, Nvidia is paying them millions of dollars for that. But if they intentionally disable some features for ATI users, it becomes unacceptable. Like many people have stated above, ATI users pay the same amount of money as Nvidia users for a game. ATI cards can render the effects just as good, if not better, as Nvidia cards. So why should ATI cards be forced to not run certain effects? This kind of action is totally BS."

I think this kind of info should be known to the public. Although Rage3D is public, I think you guys can let even more people know; for example, the people that don't participate in forums. I'm really hoping there'll be an article about this on your site.

It's the Malvinas Effect, once more

Hello Fernando,
hello Mike,

it was a pleasure reading your SuSe review 'til the very last letter. As a consequence I will switch my environment (8.1 upd, KDE) to GNOME before the year ends.

INQ: [...]
INQ: allow toggling between "Home", with DHCP and no proxy, "Work/Office"
INQ: with a fixed IP and a proxy, and maybe others. There is a Windows INQ: shareware utility that does this
INQ: [...]

On my mobile machine running XP/WLAN this is exactly what I'm looking for. But what shareware utility?

Can you please be more specific?

Alles Gute,
Andreas.Lucks

Google Giggle

** Proprietary **

The Inquirer site isn't helping automated search engines any by putting today's date at the top of every page, even those with articles that are several years old.

Yeah, I know, it's a common fad to do that. But I personally believe that putting the current date at the top of a web page carries zero information content.

Tim. (Shoppa)

[That's enough letters. Ed.]