To each their own. While I find it easier to see fine detail with dark on light text, I read and focus much faster with light on dark. The difference is huge. I can read a paragraph or sentence in a quick glance with light on dark, but the other way I have to focus on each word individually. Maybe it's just my eyes, but a properly configured light on dark interface is a much better experience.
Since your into that whole self-teaching thing, might I suggest brushing up on tact. Anyone who works in IT is constantly forced to learn new things on our own, that's how our industry works. For some people training is pointless, for others it can make a huge difference in their overall learning efficiency. If someone feels they can better themselves by doing official 'training' there is no need to berate them just because their approach differs from your own.
Oh, and support calls.... it's called CYA. Even if you know sometimes it's a smart idea to confirm with the vendor before taking things too far. Not for little things obviously, but for anything major a documented second opinion is a handy thing to have. If you've got a support contract, you might as well use it.
Conservation of energy. 100w goes into the box, 100w is going to come out. Aside from RF, fan output, and minor vibration energy almost ALL of the incoming energy will be converted to heat at some stage whether it is at the power conversion stage, or all those little electrons buzzing around and heating up chunks of silicon. The fact that those little electrons are actually doing something useful is irrelevant from a thermodynamics perspective.
That's what legislators need to get through their thick heads: If you make normal behaviour illegal, you produce criminals.
The point of law is to produce criminals. The people in power (mainly corps and special interest groups) could care less about what people want and the current definition of normal behavior. What they really care about is creating the future definition of normal behavior.
Legislators are simply shepherds herding the masses or shepherd dogs doing the work for someone else. They take away you freedom a little at a time, until you have no choice but to go with the flow or be trampled. You can go your own way for a while, but once the herd is taken care of they'll come for the stragglers.
I'd welcome my employees to take 30min off for a walk, take a nap, whatever. A break will help productiviy. This doesn't include chatting through a typical messenger client, or taking more than about 5 or 6 personal calls each day. Work isn't the place for socializing with anything other than fellow employees. Do that on your own time.
I agree partially with your premise, but since it's earthink who is making a fundamental change I think the opt-out should work in the other direction. People who don't want 'standard dns' can use xxx.yyy.zzzz.aaaa dns server and access the wonderful site finder service. They could even have the appropriate DNS provided by dhcp based on user settings. Simply send the earthlink user a message advising them of the new 'service' and let them opt-in with a quick click. There are any number of ways they could have considered their customers first.
Earthlink/Embarq DSL here, and the change doesn't appear to be active yet using ns 207.217.126.81
The difference between the home and enterprise version of Norton are absolutely huge. One sucks, one seems to work fairly well. The home version is awful. I mean really, I don't think I could possibly design a worse product. What genius decided that massive dependencies on Internet Explorer is a good idea for an antivirus program. Internet Explorer and related components are usually the ones raped in virus and malware attacks. IE breaks, and the interface to NIS breaks. Brilliant!
Can't uninstall in safe mode. Uninstall works so poorly they even release a standalone uninstaller, which in my experience is necessary almost 50% of the time for broken Norton installs.
The silent breakage. NIS is absolutely famous for this. I get clients call with the broken net access, sluggish response, programs not running correctly, scripting engines not working under IE despite being enabled, etc. Malware, virus, spyware? Nope. It's NIS. I can't count the number of quirky problems fixed simply by uninstalling NIS. It's generally a first step for me anymore.
Learning firewalls are totally pointless for home users. The typical home user can barely check email, and clicks OK to every web-popup. Do you really think they are up to allowing/denying outoing port traffic? Even in the corporate environment, you should never trust a user to make decisions like that. It's not their job. If you're an admin, they pay YOU to do that.
And no NAV, I don't give rats ass unless you actually find an infection. Take your little balloon popups and shove them. If you don't have anything valid to say, leave me the hell alone. All of the major AV programs these days are pretty much adware. "hey look at us, we're working. You paid for us and we're doing something, yeah!". Damn attention whores.
No, all the REAL geeks have plenty of machines for several distros! Go Synergy2.sourceforge Ubuntu works better for my laptop, prefer gentoo for desktop. It's just a distro, no need for a holy war.
Actually in gentoos defense, I have far fewer dependency and break issues than with apt... portage is just really nice. The major benefits of gentoo are portage, documentation, and the forums. The compile time is the price, slightly offset by the optimization.
I've done similar. Cancelled my Dish network subscription over 2 years ago. The 'cost overhead' was double - it was an easy timesink, and I found myself looking for something to watch more often than watching what I was looking for. The extra $ savings applied elsewhere tripled my Internet speed, which is something I appreciate far more.
I occasionally have friends record a show or mini-series, but really it's not missed much. I'd much rather download the shows I actually care about, then become a mindless TV controlled drone again.
ALWAYS have a spare of any component you can't purchase locally. Large PS, drives, especially mainboards. Nothing is worse than trying to deal with a mainboard swap on a critical machine if you have to switch chipsets. Double the system ram so you can handle a single stick failure without any hiccups.
If you're dealing with high end equipment on a critical machine you might even be able to justify a spare machine. IF you can't why didn't you buy two lower end machines?
If you're relying on overnight shipping you've got a seriously flawed plan imo.
"Lawyers understand the quality of the USPTO far better than the average public"
Of course! A system designed to protect brilliant and innovative ideas requires a lawyer to fully understand it? It should not be necessary. I've noticed in my legal dealings that the best way to deviate from facts, truth, and original intent is to get lawyers involed. Any system that requires a lawyer simply to interpret a patent is a BROKEN system.
As a "Joe Geek", I usually recommend Linux for servers because the cost saved in software can be put somewhere it really counts - the server hardware. Most of my clients are small 5-25 station networks. The saved cost of Windows server licenses allows me to bid better hardware, and backup systems. Businesses don't really care about spending money, so long as it's in the budget.
If you read the article you might notice this is a social studies course, not a science course. I suppose you also think that requiring a certain number of humanities courses to earn a bachelor of science from a 4 year college is useless too?
That's all we need, a buch of highly trained but out of touch scientists. Next thing you know we'll be fending off nano-sharks with tiny little laser beams.
Invividuals form groups, and those seeking power rise to lead them.
If corporations are corrupt, it's because the people that comprise it have allowed the corruption. It's naive to think that a goverment would not be subject to the same results.
It comes down to the old phrase "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Separating focal points of power reduces potential scale of the disaster when the corrupt find thier way into positions of power. And if history has proven ANYTHING it's that the positions of power draw the corrupt like flies to s***.
When I was back in college I used to work the night shift, and trying to find something 'quiet' to do during days off was hard. I ended up buying a set of i-glasses, which are just a bigger version of what the article is refering too.
I used them to watch movies, and recorded shows sometimes up to 4 hours at a time with no noticable eye strain.
That's not entirely true. One person as a corporation or LLC provides absolutely no protection legally. YOU can be sued directly, for actions YOU have done regardless of company status. Limited liability really only comes into play when there is more than one person at a company.
For example an owner, with one employee as an s-corp. Say the employee screws up bigtime. the employee can be sued personally. The s-corp can be sued, and potentially bankrupt - but the owners's personal assets are untouchable. On the other hand if the OWNER screws up and gets sued he risks his personal AND business assets.
One benefit is less paperwork I'd think. If a company 'owns' it, you have to deal with depreciating the equipment over IRS acceptable periods. I've got a computer still on a depreciation scale despite not having a single original component. A non-profit company I work with insists on keeping, and tagging replaced/repaired components as proof of work done on a PC. The extra overhead/paperwork costs money.
Besides, business is about making money, and cash flow. Assets may be cheaper than leased equipment from one perspective, but consider that extra money 'now' has better payoff in most businesses than the cost saving that will take the life of the purchase to recover.
I own a relatively small computer shop, and have to deal with repairing all the Compaq/HP machines sold by the nearby retail chains. By far the biggest problem I have is not coming up with the original media (I have a large collection of original disks), but with obtaining drivers for proprietary hardware. Some companies (Can you scream COMPAQ loudly here please) NEVER have all the drivers for a particular system easily downloadable. If the drivers haven't changed from the versions on the restore disk - good luck finding them. Granted I can eventually find most drivers somewhere given enough quality time with google, but why should we have to. It makes no sense for the company not to keep updated drivers available for customers - unless you consider that doing so is yet another way to force consumers to use restore disks/partitions. Companies like HP and Compaq do not want you to have an upgradable system, they want you to be forced to buy a new computer every few years to stay current. Can you find W2k drivers for that 2 year old compaq notebook? Hard drive upgrade options - anyone remember when Compaq was putting the BIOS configuration utility on the hard drives - the system wouldn't even boot without the original drive.
ON a related note Microsoft also encourages the practice of restore media, over the original disks. As a member of the OEM system builder program I have received requests to not include the original CD when selling an OEM Windows version on new systems.
Any companies selling computer at either Wal-Mart or Radio Shack have since stopped selling computers. The Wal-mart/Radio Shack kiss of death. Good riddance I say. Fare well proprietary Compaq, farewell sub-standard HP!
I'm not sure about the current Hollywood+ decoders, but I recently e-mailed Sigma Designs to express an interest in Linux drivers.... it looks like they may consider linux support atleast.// Mail Exerpt from 10/3/1999 Hi Doug, Thank you for writing us on your interest in Linux support. We have come to realize the same thing and are currently working on Linux support for our future DVD playback products. I will keep your email address and notify you when updates become available. In the mean time enjoy your REALmagic product. Regards, Arthur Bao Webmaster Sigma Designs, Inc. Visit our web site for the best products in PC-DVD Hardware Decoder www.realmagic.com or www.sigmadesigns.com// End Exerpt
To each their own. While I find it easier to see fine detail with dark on light text, I read and focus much faster with light on dark. The difference is huge. I can read a paragraph or sentence in a quick glance with light on dark, but the other way I have to focus on each word individually. Maybe it's just my eyes, but a properly configured light on dark interface is a much better experience.
Since your into that whole self-teaching thing, might I suggest brushing up on tact. Anyone who works in IT is constantly forced to learn new things on our own, that's how our industry works. For some people training is pointless, for others it can make a huge difference in their overall learning efficiency. If someone feels they can better themselves by doing official 'training' there is no need to berate them just because their approach differs from your own.
Oh, and support calls.... it's called CYA. Even if you know sometimes it's a smart idea to confirm with the vendor before taking things too far. Not for little things obviously, but for anything major a documented second opinion is a handy thing to have. If you've got a support contract, you might as well use it.
And I'm only interested in services who do not need my email address at all. Fortunately the net is big enough we can both have what we want.
Conservation of energy. 100w goes into the box, 100w is going to come out. Aside from RF, fan output, and minor vibration energy almost ALL of the incoming energy will be converted to heat at some stage whether it is at the power conversion stage, or all those little electrons buzzing around and heating up chunks of silicon. The fact that those little electrons are actually doing something useful is irrelevant from a thermodynamics perspective.
The point of law is to produce criminals. The people in power (mainly corps and special interest groups) could care less about what people want and the current definition of normal behavior. What they really care about is creating the future definition of normal behavior.
Legislators are simply shepherds herding the masses or shepherd dogs doing the work for someone else. They take away you freedom a little at a time, until you have no choice but to go with the flow or be trampled. You can go your own way for a while, but once the herd is taken care of they'll come for the stragglers.
Social lives, mind wandering = not at work.
I'd welcome my employees to take 30min off for a walk, take a nap, whatever. A break will help productiviy. This doesn't include chatting through a typical messenger client, or taking more than about 5 or 6 personal calls each day. Work isn't the place for socializing with anything other than fellow employees. Do that on your own time.
I agree partially with your premise, but since it's earthink who is making a fundamental change I think the opt-out should work in the other direction. People who don't want 'standard dns' can use xxx.yyy.zzzz.aaaa dns server and access the wonderful site finder service. They could even have the appropriate DNS provided by dhcp based on user settings. Simply send the earthlink user a message advising them of the new 'service' and let them opt-in with a quick click. There are any number of ways they could have considered their customers first.
Earthlink/Embarq DSL here, and the change doesn't appear to be active yet using ns 207.217.126.81
The difference between the home and enterprise version of Norton are absolutely huge. One sucks, one seems to work fairly well. The home version is awful. I mean really, I don't think I could possibly design a worse product. What genius decided that massive dependencies on Internet Explorer is a good idea for an antivirus program. Internet Explorer and related components are usually the ones raped in virus and malware attacks. IE breaks, and the interface to NIS breaks. Brilliant!
Can't uninstall in safe mode. Uninstall works so poorly they even release a standalone uninstaller, which in my experience is necessary almost 50% of the time for broken Norton installs.
The silent breakage. NIS is absolutely famous for this. I get clients call with the broken net access, sluggish response, programs not running correctly, scripting engines not working under IE despite being enabled, etc. Malware, virus, spyware? Nope. It's NIS. I can't count the number of quirky problems fixed simply by uninstalling NIS. It's generally a first step for me anymore.
Learning firewalls are totally pointless for home users. The typical home user can barely check email, and clicks OK to every web-popup. Do you really think they are up to allowing/denying outoing port traffic? Even in the corporate environment, you should never trust a user to make decisions like that. It's not their job. If you're an admin, they pay YOU to do that.
And no NAV, I don't give rats ass unless you actually find an infection. Take your little balloon popups and shove them. If you don't have anything valid to say, leave me the hell alone. All of the major AV programs these days are pretty much adware. "hey look at us, we're working. You paid for us and we're doing something, yeah!". Damn attention whores.
Dude, she was right on the mark. I'm going to format and go install windows right now!
No, all the REAL geeks have plenty of machines for several distros! Go Synergy2.sourceforge Ubuntu works better for my laptop, prefer gentoo for desktop. It's just a distro, no need for a holy war.
Actually in gentoos defense, I have far fewer dependency and break issues than with apt... portage is just really nice. The major benefits of gentoo are portage, documentation, and the forums. The compile time is the price, slightly offset by the optimization.
I've done similar. Cancelled my Dish network subscription over 2 years ago. The 'cost overhead' was double - it was an easy timesink, and I found myself looking for something to watch more often than watching what I was looking for. The extra $ savings applied elsewhere tripled my Internet speed, which is something I appreciate far more.
I occasionally have friends record a show or mini-series, but really it's not missed much. I'd much rather download the shows I actually care about, then become a mindless TV controlled drone again.
ALWAYS have a spare of any component you can't purchase locally. Large PS, drives, especially mainboards. Nothing is worse than trying to deal with a mainboard swap on a critical machine if you have to switch chipsets. Double the system ram so you can handle a single stick failure without any hiccups.
If you're dealing with high end equipment on a critical machine you might even be able to justify a spare machine. IF you can't why didn't you buy two lower end machines?
If you're relying on overnight shipping you've got a seriously flawed plan imo.
"Lawyers understand the quality of the USPTO far better than the average public"
Of course! A system designed to protect brilliant and innovative ideas requires a lawyer to fully understand it? It should not be necessary. I've noticed in my legal dealings that the best way to deviate from facts, truth, and original intent is to get lawyers involed. Any system that requires a lawyer simply to interpret a patent is a BROKEN system.
As a "Joe Geek", I usually recommend Linux for servers because the cost saved in software can be put somewhere it really counts - the server hardware. Most of my clients are small 5-25 station networks. The saved cost of Windows server licenses allows me to bid better hardware, and backup systems. Businesses don't really care about spending money, so long as it's in the budget.
If you read the article you might notice this is a social studies course, not a science course. I suppose you also think that requiring a certain number of humanities courses to earn a bachelor of science from a 4 year college is useless too?
That's all we need, a buch of highly trained but out of touch scientists. Next thing you know we'll be fending off nano-sharks with tiny little laser beams.
Absolutely.
Invividuals form groups, and those seeking power rise to lead them.
If corporations are corrupt, it's because the people that comprise it have allowed the corruption. It's naive to think that a goverment would not be subject to the same results.
It comes down to the old phrase "don't put all your eggs in one basket". Separating focal points of power reduces potential scale of the disaster when the corrupt find thier way into positions of power. And if history has proven ANYTHING it's that the positions of power draw the corrupt like flies to s***.
When I was back in college I used to work the night shift, and trying to find something 'quiet' to do during days off was hard. I ended up buying a set of i-glasses, which are just a bigger version of what the article is refering too.
I used them to watch movies, and recorded shows sometimes up to 4 hours at a time with no noticable eye strain.
That's not entirely true. One person as a corporation or LLC provides absolutely no protection legally. YOU can be sued directly, for actions YOU have done regardless of company status. Limited liability really only comes into play when there is more than one person at a company.
For example an owner, with one employee as an s-corp. Say the employee screws up bigtime. the employee can be sued personally. The s-corp can be sued, and potentially bankrupt - but the owners's personal assets are untouchable. On the other hand if the OWNER screws up and gets sued he risks his personal AND business assets.
One benefit is less paperwork I'd think. If a company 'owns' it, you have to deal with depreciating the equipment over IRS acceptable periods. I've got a computer still on a depreciation scale despite not having a single original component. A non-profit company I work with insists on keeping, and tagging replaced/repaired components as proof of work done on a PC. The extra overhead/paperwork costs money.
Besides, business is about making money, and cash flow. Assets may be cheaper than leased equipment from one perspective, but consider that extra money 'now' has better payoff in most businesses than the cost saving that will take the life of the purchase to recover.
ON a related note Microsoft also encourages the practice of restore media, over the original disks. As a member of the OEM system builder program I have received requests to not include the original CD when selling an OEM Windows version on new systems.
Any companies selling computer at either Wal-Mart or Radio Shack have since stopped selling computers. The Wal-mart/Radio Shack kiss of death. Good riddance I say. Fare well proprietary Compaq, farewell sub-standard HP!
If your into anime, especially on dvd format this site is a must: www.animeondvd.com
I'm not sure about the current Hollywood+ decoders, but I recently e-mailed Sigma Designs to express an interest in Linux drivers.... it looks like they may consider linux support atleast. // Mail Exerpt from 10/3/1999 Hi Doug, Thank you for writing us on your interest in Linux support. We have come to realize the same thing and are currently working on Linux support for our future DVD playback products. I will keep your email address and notify you when updates become available. In the mean time enjoy your REALmagic product. Regards, Arthur Bao Webmaster Sigma Designs, Inc. Visit our web site for the best products in PC-DVD Hardware Decoder www.realmagic.com or www.sigmadesigns.com // End Exerpt