"It's difficult to get a motherboard that doesn't have onboard video anyway"
Just to be an ass, it is hard to get a $30 motherboard w/o onboard video, and all sorts of other crappyness. Those boards aren't meant for any sort of real throughput or use. Word processing? No problem. MP3's? OK. Spyware out the wazzo? Preinstalled! High end hardware accelerated 3d rendering? Hahahhahaha.
But for $65 you can get a MSI Delta something other other, nForce chipset, no onboard video junk. Thats pretty dirt cheap. Comes with onboard audio and NIC, but who cares? They also make them w/o audio, and they make server boards w/o nics.
I must agree with you about trust. I was also thinking of what happens when you're going up a hill a mile out from the gas station and the cells fail. I too would use the batteries as a hard blunt object of beating. Theres a lot of issues, but I think they are workable. I'm sure theres some way to determine if theres been physical damage, and overload/short circuit style of damage as well.
(PS maybe ill use the battery-blunt-weapon on you and your split hairs:P )
The same thing your electric company does, massive fines for getting caught, a hard to understand interface, and the thing being behind a "welded shut" door. The same people who monitor gas stations to make sure that the pumps distribute 1 gallon, no more no less, would monitor the meters.
The thing I see as being "hard" to do about those battery stations is, assuming the major brands make an electric car with swappable batteries, how do you get them to all be the same? Regulation can help, but that takes time, and by then people might be stuck with GM/Ford/Honda/BMW/Mercedes brand batteries, etc.
As long as we're talking regulation, deep cycle lead acid batteries (lets pretend thats what we use, it works for anything) only get so many watts, I would think the government would have to step in and regulate the batteries to receive a maximum of X watt's before they go in for recycling. I don't think cost will be a major issue really, once everyone is using these sorts of things the cost per unit will drop like a rock.
Amen. For those wondering about a silent graphics card, the MSI GeForce FX5200 AGP card is a passively cooled dual head + video out card. It's not the fastest around, but it does get the job done.
Just as an aside, I've seen another neat application of java smart cards in the form of buttons. At the high school I work at we have lockers for the terrorists...uhh...students to stash their books, drugs, guns, etc. Most of the lockers are your standard lockers with dialed combinations and a key for "administrative override". Each of those lockers has 5 combinations in them which is rotatable by the admin key.
Regardless. Some students here do not posess the mental or physical capability to work said dial lockers, or a keyed lock (sorta). So these have iButton readers in them, and the students have ibutton dongles. They, or their aide, presses dongle into locker reader, and the lock pops open. Students are happy, the aides are happy, and the ADA is happy.
Microsoft will get this technology deployed out to people who run 100% windows shops, sending companies comp samples for the various VP/C?O's to work with, and they will think it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. Business weekly will run a 3 page ad from microsoft on it, so all the little PHB's of the world can read it and insist that its better than the rest. Admins will be forced to use it because the regular old smart card tech will need some driver or whatever, while.NET enabled ones will work because of a critical security update pushed out.
Maybe I'm still just bitter about the GDI+ detection tool.
Judging by the size and orientation of that/ie page it is for the IE search bar, check out/microsoft for one which "more" feeling to it.
As for the Firefox page, I would almost bet the Firefox people teamed up with Google and sent them that page as a kit for them to use, in trade for being FireFox's default homepage.
Right. Like Microsoft couldn't just buy back whatever rights they signed away, or ignore them like they do the DOJ. Look at Apple Computer vs. Apple Records. Apple computer keeps buying back their non-compete agreement one clause at a time, valid or otherwise.
Fix some more bugs. Make it automatically restart when it crashes - that would be nice.
Fix more bugs is good, automatically restarting on failure can be very very bad. If the relauncher causes the fatal bug to happen again, the user might not be able to get out of the loop. Let them double click the icon again like with everything else.
Take out a lot of the options that can only be used by editing a text file and stick them in an "advanced" section on preferences.
about:config
Bundle some plugins with the installer package - 95% of users don't care about the developer tools being an option. Adblock would be more sensible.
Licensing issues out the wazoo. You best bet would be to work with Macromedia to see about adding the EULA's to the installer, with checkboxes for "Would you like to install (flash graphic)? (shockwave graphic)?" and each one ungreys a EULA they have to agree to or whatever. AdBlock? You really expect any commercial vendor to take you seriously when you try and block their primary form of advertising?
Unless your company is dealing with top secret stuff I'm surprised *anyone* works there, or your company even exists at all.
I wonder how many of your bosses are running trial versions of WinZip, or some other illegal software. According to their logic Spyware should get you canned, but the bosses may be above the law.
Rules like that are a joke at best. I realize they are afraid of getting an SCO style lawsuit in the mail, but surely they are spending way more $$$ protecting themselves than some small fine SCO or whoever may try to charge. If you find a new job, I would suggest installing a ton of junk on your computer and do a cost benefit analysis including your increased productivity and the better bottom line. Leave it on all your bosses desks when you leave, as high up as your RFID tracker will let you get.
Heck, go to my old house in Florida. Attach a PC speaker or whatnot to anything metal in the house and ground the other side with your fingers, whatever. Voila! Audible sound from the AM station broadcasting behind our house.
Want it really loud? Pick up the phone. Turn on the TV. It took multiple calls to the FCC to get that station to turn its power down. Eventually though the station went broke and came back as someone knew, who again cranked up the power.
Which companies? Dell and Sony hold up to it, those are the only two I've dealt with. If you sell OEM you have to affix that sticker and give the people some way to get at an XP reinstall.
I've sold OEM versions of XP Home/Pro and I remember those were the instructions on the packaging.
Actually, Windows XP licensing requires that companies ship a full copy of Windows XP with their systems. Now, Dell does this true to its word. Sony on the other hand requires you to use their recovery suite and burn a copy of XP for reinstallation purposes.
The other thing is, XP copies all its known drivers to your hard drive anyways, same with Windows 2000. Those will never ask your original product CD. I believe 2000 only does so if you add "windows components" via their add/remove programs interface which lets you like add/remove solitare and such.
I think the point everyone is trying to get across is that if you can unique-ify someone by adding their SSN to the end of their name, you can unique-ify their name by putting 000-00-0001 onto their name. Then 000-00-0002. Call them participant IDs. Hello participant 000-00-4302JDOE How are you today? If you make up the unique ID's then you do not have to worry about overlap.
It is inexcusable, and was the easy way out. No one needs your SSN unless they are filing for state/government funds or payments (IRS and social security programs come to mind). You as a responsible researcher should not have taken the SSN's that the california government shouldn't have let you see in the first place.
I work help desk for a high school / school district. Some of the most non-technical people around are calling and emailing saying "we want that mozilla thing you installed on So and So's computer". People more and more an turning off IE in favor of Mozilla and FireFox. They see it working, it looks slick, and no strange problems like IE was giving them.
How did I convert them? Some people wanted a web page maker "thing", so I gave them composer, some people wanted IE to be not broke so I gave them Mozilla/firefox, others wanted mail to not be outlook, so I gave them Mozilla Mail. They see popups dissapearing, they see web pages looking better and moving faster. Some people I just installed it on their fresh from the box workstation and put Mozilla next to IE and Mail next to Outlook. Next thing I know I'm getting requests from others in the department.
When something works it spreads by word of mouth. A full page ad in the new york times couldn't hurt.
1st link in google search: political signs supreme court homeowner association, yielded a website regarding this, and linked directly to that case in plain blue link text. Sorry to burst your "it's so hard" bubble, or maybe you were hoping someone like me would do the leg work for you. First try on the search as well.
If I were in the middle of a movie, as a non-parent, and they stopped the movie to say "mr/mrs smith your baby is very badly ill please come out" I don't think I would be irritated past the lights turning on. That being said there is already infrastructure in place for "emergency" cell phones and pagers. Give doctors and surgeons and the secret police a pager that can be passed through the cell phone jammer. Give parents a $1 rental/$1 deposit ($2 one returned later) pager that the movie theatre can page you on, and leave the number with the sitter. The hearing impaired things already broadcast on low power RF, same could be done for a local area pager.
Give everyone else longer battery life with this inhouse repeater (could that be done with the encryption on todays phones?) that sets your phone to lowest volume-beep once/vibrate/nothing. This could be a user selectable preference, and your phone could even notify you when you are entering such an area. I'm sure a firmware update could address this issue. On my phone, a cheap year old nokia (my last cheap nokia met its maker in about 5-6 peices...), my "meeting" setting, which I use at work, is a almost inaudible beep once then vibrate, it works perfectly in classrooms and such. A movie theatre would completely drown it out save for anyone sitting with the phone in their lap.
You're telling me it's not? Better than most of the other news sources we have, some even get fancy three letter names, prime time airing on TV, and whole channels named after them.
One thing to note heavily is that some places charge.30->$1.00 (etc) to process that debit card fee. Someone somewhere is making their buck off off using Interlink or whatever networks (read the back of your card) to verify your transaction with a bank. The difference is, the processors have no problem with those fees, and encourage them as much as consumers will bear the cost.
Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover forbid a different cost. If something is offered up as a cash price then handing over your Visa card can not up that price. Some places get around this by offering "cash discounts", but those are mostly small businesses who really can't afford the extra few % a credit card costs.
Another interesting but off topic thing I noticed, is that companies get major discounts from Visa, etc al, if they turn in their signed authorization forms daily (or two days, I forget) for clearing. As well they get another discount for having a phone number appear in their name on the statement. This is sometimes worked to a shady companies advantage knowing you can only see, say, 50 characters, so they make a long name then add the phone number to the end of it, which your credit card bank clips off whent hey print your bill.
The other thing could be in the server room it could be a good 10 degrees colder than the rest of the office. Where I work the lowest temperature that someone can set the AC to is 72 degrees, defaulting to 75 I think (digital thermostat with a 4hour override feature). However the server room has a 60 degree setting and no heater. Opening the case on a computer which is having problems over heating can help in the case of cheaply built PC's, I wouldn't think of it on our more expensive (well designed) mac or sun cases.
So all you do is append::$data to the end of your URL and it bypasses the ASP processor? Oh sorry, wrong year. / for \? So Unix is the cause of Microsofts demise. Of course it's their own fault for not just using / because they have to be different.
Ethernet is designed to use four of the NON-VOICE wires in a standard 8 wire cable.
This was true BackInTheDay, the same way localtalk could run on the unused voice pair in a 2pair cable. However networks have evolved and now if you want to run at a full 100BaseTX you must have all 4 pairs of wire dedicated to the Ethernet connection. The other two pairs make up the CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Detect) part of Ethernet. It speeds switching etc. One pair is dedicated to carrier sense and speed negotiation, the other for collisions.
Our school relys heavily on E-Rate funding to keep the data flowing year to year. We have all Cisco gear and a private WAN connecting all of our campuses. Our upstream ISP is a local college consortium who ever so graciously gives us a ReallyGoodDeal on data connections and some rackspace for our upstream router/PIX.
We of course are blessed with a Sys/Netadmin who built this schools networks/computers from the ground up starting many years ago, and it has now evolved into something wonderful, high speed internet in all the classrooms, provided by "private" bandwidth. Our local phone company provides just that, phone service to our new PBX, and point-to-point connections for our T1's.
If they actually spent the time tracking this corruption people could be looking at serious fines and possibly federal jail time for fraudulently spending government money. I know the best way to get rid of corrupt cops is to simply chop their funding in half, not do an investigation.
Slashdot Mirror
or mace
You know, I had to read that one twice. I kept thinking it said a mace.
I was trying to think how you stayed out of prison all these years.
"It's difficult to get a motherboard that doesn't have onboard video anyway"
Just to be an ass, it is hard to get a $30 motherboard w/o onboard video, and all sorts of other crappyness. Those boards aren't meant for any sort of real throughput or use. Word processing? No problem. MP3's? OK. Spyware out the wazzo? Preinstalled! High end hardware accelerated 3d rendering? Hahahhahaha.
But for $65 you can get a MSI Delta something other other, nForce chipset, no onboard video junk. Thats pretty dirt cheap. Comes with onboard audio and NIC, but who cares? They also make them w/o audio, and they make server boards w/o nics.
I must agree with you about trust. I was also thinking of what happens when you're going up a hill a mile out from the gas station and the cells fail. I too would use the batteries as a hard blunt object of beating. Theres a lot of issues, but I think they are workable. I'm sure theres some way to determine if theres been physical damage, and overload/short circuit style of damage as well.
:P )
(PS maybe ill use the battery-blunt-weapon on you and your split hairs
The same thing your electric company does, massive fines for getting caught, a hard to understand interface, and the thing being behind a "welded shut" door. The same people who monitor gas stations to make sure that the pumps distribute 1 gallon, no more no less, would monitor the meters.
The thing I see as being "hard" to do about those battery stations is, assuming the major brands make an electric car with swappable batteries, how do you get them to all be the same? Regulation can help, but that takes time, and by then people might be stuck with GM/Ford/Honda/BMW/Mercedes brand batteries, etc.
As long as we're talking regulation, deep cycle lead acid batteries (lets pretend thats what we use, it works for anything) only get so many watts, I would think the government would have to step in and regulate the batteries to receive a maximum of X watt's before they go in for recycling. I don't think cost will be a major issue really, once everyone is using these sorts of things the cost per unit will drop like a rock.
Amen. For those wondering about a silent graphics card, the MSI GeForce FX5200 AGP card is a passively cooled dual head + video out card. It's not the fastest around, but it does get the job done.
Just as an aside, I've seen another neat application of java smart cards in the form of buttons. At the high school I work at we have lockers for the terrorists...uhh...students to stash their books, drugs, guns, etc. Most of the lockers are your standard lockers with dialed combinations and a key for "administrative override". Each of those lockers has 5 combinations in them which is rotatable by the admin key.
.NET enabled ones will work because of a critical security update pushed out.
Regardless. Some students here do not posess the mental or physical capability to work said dial lockers, or a keyed lock (sorta). So these have iButton readers in them, and the students have ibutton dongles. They, or their aide, presses dongle into locker reader, and the lock pops open. Students are happy, the aides are happy, and the ADA is happy.
Microsoft will get this technology deployed out to people who run 100% windows shops, sending companies comp samples for the various VP/C?O's to work with, and they will think it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. Business weekly will run a 3 page ad from microsoft on it, so all the little PHB's of the world can read it and insist that its better than the rest. Admins will be forced to use it because the regular old smart card tech will need some driver or whatever, while
Maybe I'm still just bitter about the GDI+ detection tool.
Judging by the size and orientation of that /ie page it is for the IE search bar, check out /microsoft for one which "more" feeling to it.
As for the Firefox page, I would almost bet the Firefox people teamed up with Google and sent them that page as a kit for them to use, in trade for being FireFox's default homepage.
Right. Like Microsoft couldn't just buy back whatever rights they signed away, or ignore them like they do the DOJ. Look at Apple Computer vs. Apple Records. Apple computer keeps buying back their non-compete agreement one clause at a time, valid or otherwise.
I do believe Yahoo! broke that contract earlier this year in order to start inserting paid stuff back into the results. Just my 2 cents.
Fix some more bugs. Make it automatically restart when it crashes - that would be nice.
Fix more bugs is good, automatically restarting on failure can be very very bad. If the relauncher causes the fatal bug to happen again, the user might not be able to get out of the loop. Let them double click the icon again like with everything else.
Take out a lot of the options that can only be used by editing a text file and stick them in an "advanced" section on preferences.
about:config
Bundle some plugins with the installer package - 95% of users don't care about the developer tools being an option. Adblock would be more sensible.
Licensing issues out the wazoo. You best bet would be to work with Macromedia to see about adding the EULA's to the installer, with checkboxes for "Would you like to install (flash graphic)? (shockwave graphic)?" and each one ungreys a EULA they have to agree to or whatever. AdBlock? You really expect any commercial vendor to take you seriously when you try and block their primary form of advertising?
Unless your company is dealing with top secret stuff I'm surprised *anyone* works there, or your company even exists at all.
I wonder how many of your bosses are running trial versions of WinZip, or some other illegal software. According to their logic Spyware should get you canned, but the bosses may be above the law.
Rules like that are a joke at best. I realize they are afraid of getting an SCO style lawsuit in the mail, but surely they are spending way more $$$ protecting themselves than some small fine SCO or whoever may try to charge. If you find a new job, I would suggest installing a ton of junk on your computer and do a cost benefit analysis including your increased productivity and the better bottom line. Leave it on all your bosses desks when you leave, as high up as your RFID tracker will let you get.
Heck, go to my old house in Florida. Attach a PC speaker or whatnot to anything metal in the house and ground the other side with your fingers, whatever. Voila! Audible sound from the AM station broadcasting behind our house.
Want it really loud? Pick up the phone. Turn on the TV. It took multiple calls to the FCC to get that station to turn its power down. Eventually though the station went broke and came back as someone knew, who again cranked up the power.
Which companies? Dell and Sony hold up to it, those are the only two I've dealt with. If you sell OEM you have to affix that sticker and give the people some way to get at an XP reinstall.
I've sold OEM versions of XP Home/Pro and I remember those were the instructions on the packaging.
Actually, Windows XP licensing requires that companies ship a full copy of Windows XP with their systems. Now, Dell does this true to its word. Sony on the other hand requires you to use their recovery suite and burn a copy of XP for reinstallation purposes.
The other thing is, XP copies all its known drivers to your hard drive anyways, same with Windows 2000. Those will never ask your original product CD. I believe 2000 only does so if you add "windows components" via their add/remove programs interface which lets you like add/remove solitare and such.
I think the point everyone is trying to get across is that if you can unique-ify someone by adding their SSN to the end of their name, you can unique-ify their name by putting 000-00-0001 onto their name. Then 000-00-0002. Call them participant IDs. Hello participant 000-00-4302JDOE How are you today? If you make up the unique ID's then you do not have to worry about overlap.
It is inexcusable, and was the easy way out. No one needs your SSN unless they are filing for state/government funds or payments (IRS and social security programs come to mind). You as a responsible researcher should not have taken the SSN's that the california government shouldn't have let you see in the first place.
I work help desk for a high school / school district. Some of the most non-technical people around are calling and emailing saying "we want that mozilla thing you installed on So and So's computer". People more and more an turning off IE in favor of Mozilla and FireFox. They see it working, it looks slick, and no strange problems like IE was giving them.
How did I convert them? Some people wanted a web page maker "thing", so I gave them composer, some people wanted IE to be not broke so I gave them Mozilla/firefox, others wanted mail to not be outlook, so I gave them Mozilla Mail. They see popups dissapearing, they see web pages looking better and moving faster. Some people I just installed it on their fresh from the box workstation and put Mozilla next to IE and Mail next to Outlook. Next thing I know I'm getting requests from others in the department.
When something works it spreads by word of mouth. A full page ad in the new york times couldn't hurt.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?c ourt=us&vol=000&invol=u10373
1st link in google search: political signs supreme court homeowner association, yielded a website regarding this, and linked directly to that case in plain blue link text. Sorry to burst your "it's so hard" bubble, or maybe you were hoping someone like me would do the leg work for you. First try on the search as well.
If I were in the middle of a movie, as a non-parent, and they stopped the movie to say "mr/mrs smith your baby is very badly ill please come out" I don't think I would be irritated past the lights turning on. That being said there is already infrastructure in place for "emergency" cell phones and pagers. Give doctors and surgeons and the secret police a pager that can be passed through the cell phone jammer. Give parents a $1 rental/$1 deposit ($2 one returned later) pager that the movie theatre can page you on, and leave the number with the sitter. The hearing impaired things already broadcast on low power RF, same could be done for a local area pager.
Give everyone else longer battery life with this inhouse repeater (could that be done with the encryption on todays phones?) that sets your phone to lowest volume-beep once/vibrate/nothing. This could be a user selectable preference, and your phone could even notify you when you are entering such an area. I'm sure a firmware update could address this issue. On my phone, a cheap year old nokia (my last cheap nokia met its maker in about 5-6 peices...), my "meeting" setting, which I use at work, is a almost inaudible beep once then vibrate, it works perfectly in classrooms and such. A movie theatre would completely drown it out save for anyone sitting with the phone in their lap.
You're telling me it's not? Better than most of the other news sources we have, some even get fancy three letter names, prime time airing on TV, and whole channels named after them.
One thing to note heavily is that some places charge .30->$1.00 (etc) to process that debit card fee. Someone somewhere is making their buck off off using Interlink or whatever networks (read the back of your card) to verify your transaction with a bank. The difference is, the processors have no problem with those fees, and encourage them as much as consumers will bear the cost.
Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover forbid a different cost. If something is offered up as a cash price then handing over your Visa card can not up that price. Some places get around this by offering "cash discounts", but those are mostly small businesses who really can't afford the extra few % a credit card costs.
Another interesting but off topic thing I noticed, is that companies get major discounts from Visa, etc al, if they turn in their signed authorization forms daily (or two days, I forget) for clearing. As well they get another discount for having a phone number appear in their name on the statement. This is sometimes worked to a shady companies advantage knowing you can only see, say, 50 characters, so they make a long name then add the phone number to the end of it, which your credit card bank clips off whent hey print your bill.
The other thing could be in the server room it could be a good 10 degrees colder than the rest of the office. Where I work the lowest temperature that someone can set the AC to is 72 degrees, defaulting to 75 I think (digital thermostat with a 4hour override feature). However the server room has a 60 degree setting and no heater. Opening the case on a computer which is having problems over heating can help in the case of cheaply built PC's, I wouldn't think of it on our more expensive (well designed) mac or sun cases.
I thought (forgive me, I forget the wire numbers specifically)) but that 1-2 was used for RX, 3-6 for TX, and the other two for CS and CD?
So all you do is append ::$data to the end of your URL and it bypasses the ASP processor? Oh sorry, wrong year. / for \? So Unix is the cause of Microsofts demise. Of course it's their own fault for not just using / because they have to be different.
Ethernet is designed to use four of the NON-VOICE wires in a standard 8 wire cable.
This was true BackInTheDay, the same way localtalk could run on the unused voice pair in a 2pair cable. However networks have evolved and now if you want to run at a full 100BaseTX you must have all 4 pairs of wire dedicated to the Ethernet connection. The other two pairs make up the CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Detect) part of Ethernet. It speeds switching etc. One pair is dedicated to carrier sense and speed negotiation, the other for collisions.
Our school relys heavily on E-Rate funding to keep the data flowing year to year. We have all Cisco gear and a private WAN connecting all of our campuses. Our upstream ISP is a local college consortium who ever so graciously gives us a ReallyGoodDeal on data connections and some rackspace for our upstream router/PIX.
We of course are blessed with a Sys/Netadmin who built this schools networks/computers from the ground up starting many years ago, and it has now evolved into something wonderful, high speed internet in all the classrooms, provided by "private" bandwidth. Our local phone company provides just that, phone service to our new PBX, and point-to-point connections for our T1's.
If they actually spent the time tracking this corruption people could be looking at serious fines and possibly federal jail time for fraudulently spending government money. I know the best way to get rid of corrupt cops is to simply chop their funding in half, not do an investigation.