My conclusions: They get a star sticker for making a universal binary and not locking out the many mac users that still love and use their PowerPC based Macs. Beyond that though, it is crap. The menus are EXTREMELY slow to respond (even on a 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo with 2 GB ram) and unpredictable. The main interface isn't full screen and doesn't even have a full screen option. The shows seem to revert to clips even when you specifically go though seasons to the latest season, and the whole thing feels clunky. I really don't understand the motivation for this. I was just remarking to my girlfriend the other day how I don't mind the commercials, I just want to watch on my own schedule. Why doesn't hulu just embrace boxee and understudy or even make their own frontrow plugin? This would be far more useful than this crapola desktop app... I understand this is still beta, but it acts more like alpha since performance-wise it is jumpy and unwatchable.
Thank you! I wish I had mod points! Webservers are not backups, but servers can be backup servers! You can even write a script to block *everything* from the internet (even disable ethernet) except for the actual time they are doing the backup. Pull the info from the other server and put it in a temp directory, compress and move file to date basted directory for backup. Run CRON to eliminate certain old backups to make more space and when the drive gets above 80% send an email that it is time for an offsite backup on removable media to be made. This scenario is much less vulnerable than saying that two synced webservers are a backup! That's nuts!
This actually refers to William Hearst's purchasing of the New York Journal. In reality it wasn't William Hearst who said it, but rather his mother. He relied on his mother's wealth to pay for the paper and her accountant was becoming concerned with the rate at which he was spending her money (he spent well over $8 million before the paper ever turned a profit). Citizen Kane is based loosely off Hearst and Pulitzer.
I mentioned this in another post, but the court approval is often for pen-registers which is not the same as a warrant. See here: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode50/usc_sup_01_50_10_36_20_III.html
Essentially it is ok to do without seeking a warrant because they are just recording the passage of information, not the contents. To use a house analogy - they are allowed to sit outside and record every person that comes and goes without a warrant, but if they want to know what was said by those people when they are inside they need a warrant.
The "court approval" isn't a warrant though... pen-registers are "court approved" and this has been used in circumstances where that is all what they needed (they weren't tapping information they were just recording coming and going... or in this case the IP address of the person they were after)
Digital cable is actually is pretty open... most cable boxes are MPEG-2 based just like DVD. That is also the preferred format of the government for digital archiving. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/video_preferences.shtml
That said the companies do all sorts of funky stuff to mess with the MPEG-2 standard, but that is the cable company's fault.
My problem with flash isn't it being more open (though that would be nice), it is that if I have anything flash open on my computer it eats up memory and runs the heat through the roof. I don't know what is messed up in their code, but it can be sitting idle int he background and it will eventually bring my computer to a crawl. I've tried on dell desktop, acer laptops - one xp one vista, and on both a powerbook and a macbook and the results are the same: open a flash movie, animation, etc. minimize it, forget about it. realize that computer starts to get REALLY slow after a few hours and the fan runs full blast. Close flash, fan stops, computer returns to normal operation.
Actually Florida does use lots of coal. Over 25% of the energy in Florida is from coal, and another 30% or so is from petrol - not exactly a clean burning fuel. See: http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/states/electricity.cfm/state=FL
That aside, I didn't figure the rebates or anything into my numbers, I just stated that in reality you would be paying less as a resident because of the rebates and incentives. Whether that is "robbing everyone else" or not is beside the point - it is available, it will be used, it will reduce the overall economic impact on residents, and it wasn't used to "fudge" the numbers I used. As for being able to get a loan for 30 years, it is easy to wrap it into a mortgage. People do it with furniture, dishwashers, dryers, fridges, and a variety of other things that won't last 30 years. That said, there are many solar panels over 30-years-old that are up and running just fine. Finally, no I didn't forget the cost of the other equipment. If you had read the gp they mentioned the cost of the entire system, not just the solar panel part - my numbers were derived from the total cost. All said, yes, it will be more per family than what I wrote. Will it be fore everyone, no. Is it a good idea, who knows. Will it be a cost effective move, probably not, but it might be if fuel costs increase dramatically. Is it is worth innovating and trying new things on a grand scale? Hell yes!
Actually it isn't $2,200 a year, it is under $1140 a year at 6.5% interest for 30 years (the usual home loan term). You must also consider that Florida has some very favorable rebates for Solar and there are some Federal tax credits too. In summer my electric bill is more than $100, so paying $95 for solar before rebates and tax credits will be almost the same amount as coal. Personally I would rather get my energy from solar. If it lasts more than 30 years it is free, if it doesn't then oh well, same price as coal. Sure, there are some other alternate energy sources, but I commend the experiment.
I pick e) don't sell shit you can't actually deliver.
e involves the cable companies sucking it up and offering what they promised (priced by speed, not total quantity) by laying more lines or not overselling. The alternative is f) I move to other utilities that provide what the cable companies claimed to be selling at similar or lower prices and the cable companies eat-poop-and-die as their business model flails blockbuster-after-netflix-style since everything can be watched on-demand on the internet with no cable subscription and fewer (better targeted) commercials.
Well I feel much safer now knowing that the updater is open source. I have for one have no worries about the code actually being updated... that of course is completely kosher.
unfortunately the way most people save jpegs is lossy too. The TIFF/IT ISO is what most archives use, but the PDF/A ISO actually has man benefits over TIFF including XML metadata which is useful when sorting those 2000 images.
[rant]
Yes, more IE versions to code for, because you aren't having fun coding websites until you have one set of compliant code for Firefox/Safari and 3 or 4 other versions to make IE sort of work under most configurations. Oh, and why is it there is still no easy way to make things like rounded corner on ANY version of IE? I know CSS3 hasn't been adopted yet, but geez. How about an easy workaround that doesn't involve roundish looking images that don't scale well to different resolution... Oh, and Opera - I'm looking at you too, but only about round corners, so you can be forgiven.
[/rant]
Nile Crocs aren't the same as American Crocs. They are two completely different species. And in Florida we have Alligators and American Crocodiles. You can see both in some areas of South Florida around the nuke plants.
hint: don't open your mouth unless you know what you are talking about. Almost everything you say here is completely wrong.
1. OS X is certified Unix. I don't care if you disagree. You can disagree with gravity too if you want, but it will still keep your feet on the ground.
2. You can get pre-OSX machines on a windows/mac environment just fine using third party tools like the ones made by Thursby software or by using a properly configured linux server.
3. There is increased functionality above a "regular linux server". Take xgrid for instance. Many of the tasks it does it can do work only with mac software.
4. OS updates can cause problems with any operating system. Duh. Mac updates are not all or nothing. What in the world do you even mean by that? They have point updates, but so does linux. This doesn't mean they don't have updates for individual OS components too. There was a security update just the other day that wasn't "all or nothing."
that is a good point. I included virus check because it is good practice and my experience is scanning once with a since scanner isn't enough, but yes, if there was something installed recently that would definitely be a good thing to check whether software (including windows updates) or hardware.
This is actually a very common problem. Especially in older machines that get moved around. Maybe you don't have this issue in dry climates, but in high humidity climates this is more common than many people realize. More than once I have seen hard drives blamed when it was actually a cable but the new drive had better error handling and would still boot. Why not at least check? If you already have the case open it takes all of 30 seconds to swap a cable with one you know is good.
First, if he has the latest service packs I wouldn't recommend using zone alarm anymore. Although zone alarm was great in windows 98 I have seen it cause serious trouble post XPSP2. You are better off with windows firewall and a good router that is properly configured. Second, I have seen a great deal get past AVG (as I have past McAfee, Norton, and others). My best personal luck has been with: Avast Home (Free) with Spybot for prevention and Malware Byte (free) and Bit Defender (free on demand) if a problem is suspected (such as cases like yours where things don't seem to be working right). I would also check processes with a tool besides process viewer as many others have mentioned. Be sure to check threads. I would then consider uninstalling and reinstalling software packages one at a time. It could be that something got compromised or just corrupted. I have seen upgrades to the latest firefox (3.0.5) cause trouble even on a few machines. I would be especially suspicious of a bad plugin such as java, quicktime or flash. Bit defender and F-Prot both have bootable linux ISOs that can run a virus scan. It might be worth it to burn one off and have him boot it to look for trouble (note that I recommend trying to ISO first yourself so you know what to expect and you may need to talk him through this on the phone as some video cards etc. cause trouble and need a flag set on boot). Like I said in my other post, don't overlook the trouble hardware drivers or failing hardware can cause. Have him go to device manager and check driver versions.
check in this order: virus (look both for viruses and malware and bad scanners... I've seen antivirus scanner updates hose systems... use more than one virus scanner and more than one malware scanner but NOT AT THE SAME TIME!), drivers (might be badly written,corrupt, or for wrong hardware), rogue processes (startup, services, etc), hardware (run chkdsk/f and defrag, check bios settings and make sure smart hd is enabled if possible and run a memory test), replace cables such as IDE that tend to corrode and cause errors, then start checking components (graphics, memory slots - use just one stick - if it improves use the same stick in another slot until there is a problem or you get to a stick that is causing problems) pci, dongles and adapters) If that fails run linux like you should have done in the first place.;-)
Yes, even with nonprofit discounts we upgrade about every decade... We wait until the last version that is still eligible for "upgrade" discs to avoid paying for full versions. Despite doing everything to save costs while stills staying up to date we still have one branch using pagemaker!
Trust me, I would love to get Scribus to the point it can replace indesign, but even if it is more stable and feature rich, it will still lack the workgroup/departmental breakdown adobe has put in place with incopy. As far as I know there is no open source equivalent (it is used to tag text and allow proof reading independent of page design so designers and editors can work at the same time without getting in the way of each other).
If you think Scribus is a replacement for indesign you obviously haven't worked in design or print media. It is a piss poor equivalent and makes Adobe look like the epitome of stability (and their bloat code crashes with a great deal of regularity). I am all for open source and wish Scribus the best, but it is definitely nowhere near primetime.
I would love to have the users I manage dump IE6. Ask Microsoft to support IE7 or IE8 for Windows 2000. We have some rather expensive hardware at work that requires Windows 2000 due to driver compatibility (XP will NOT work) and a website for a company we work with requires requires Active X... not a common combination, I know, but try getting users to open IE for one site and Firefox for another! It is harder than you might think.
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I have a powerpc mac for my media center computer you insensitive clod.
My conclusions: They get a star sticker for making a universal binary and not locking out the many mac users that still love and use their PowerPC based Macs. Beyond that though, it is crap. The menus are EXTREMELY slow to respond (even on a 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo with 2 GB ram) and unpredictable. The main interface isn't full screen and doesn't even have a full screen option. The shows seem to revert to clips even when you specifically go though seasons to the latest season, and the whole thing feels clunky. I really don't understand the motivation for this. I was just remarking to my girlfriend the other day how I don't mind the commercials, I just want to watch on my own schedule. Why doesn't hulu just embrace boxee and understudy or even make their own frontrow plugin? This would be far more useful than this crapola desktop app... I understand this is still beta, but it acts more like alpha since performance-wise it is jumpy and unwatchable.
Thank you! I wish I had mod points! Webservers are not backups, but servers can be backup servers! You can even write a script to block *everything* from the internet (even disable ethernet) except for the actual time they are doing the backup. Pull the info from the other server and put it in a temp directory, compress and move file to date basted directory for backup. Run CRON to eliminate certain old backups to make more space and when the drive gets above 80% send an email that it is time for an offsite backup on removable media to be made. This scenario is much less vulnerable than saying that two synced webservers are a backup! That's nuts!
This actually refers to William Hearst's purchasing of the New York Journal. In reality it wasn't William Hearst who said it, but rather his mother. He relied on his mother's wealth to pay for the paper and her accountant was becoming concerned with the rate at which he was spending her money (he spent well over $8 million before the paper ever turned a profit). Citizen Kane is based loosely off Hearst and Pulitzer.
I mentioned this in another post, but the court approval is often for pen-registers which is not the same as a warrant. See here: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode50/usc_sup_01_50_10_36_20_III.html Essentially it is ok to do without seeking a warrant because they are just recording the passage of information, not the contents. To use a house analogy - they are allowed to sit outside and record every person that comes and goes without a warrant, but if they want to know what was said by those people when they are inside they need a warrant.
The "court approval" isn't a warrant though... pen-registers are "court approved" and this has been used in circumstances where that is all what they needed (they weren't tapping information they were just recording coming and going... or in this case the IP address of the person they were after)
Digital cable is actually is pretty open... most cable boxes are MPEG-2 based just like DVD. That is also the preferred format of the government for digital archiving. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/video_preferences.shtml That said the companies do all sorts of funky stuff to mess with the MPEG-2 standard, but that is the cable company's fault. My problem with flash isn't it being more open (though that would be nice), it is that if I have anything flash open on my computer it eats up memory and runs the heat through the roof. I don't know what is messed up in their code, but it can be sitting idle int he background and it will eventually bring my computer to a crawl. I've tried on dell desktop, acer laptops - one xp one vista, and on both a powerbook and a macbook and the results are the same: open a flash movie, animation, etc. minimize it, forget about it. realize that computer starts to get REALLY slow after a few hours and the fan runs full blast. Close flash, fan stops, computer returns to normal operation.
Actually Florida does use lots of coal. Over 25% of the energy in Florida is from coal, and another 30% or so is from petrol - not exactly a clean burning fuel. See: http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/states/electricity.cfm/state=FL That aside, I didn't figure the rebates or anything into my numbers, I just stated that in reality you would be paying less as a resident because of the rebates and incentives. Whether that is "robbing everyone else" or not is beside the point - it is available, it will be used, it will reduce the overall economic impact on residents, and it wasn't used to "fudge" the numbers I used. As for being able to get a loan for 30 years, it is easy to wrap it into a mortgage. People do it with furniture, dishwashers, dryers, fridges, and a variety of other things that won't last 30 years. That said, there are many solar panels over 30-years-old that are up and running just fine. Finally, no I didn't forget the cost of the other equipment. If you had read the gp they mentioned the cost of the entire system, not just the solar panel part - my numbers were derived from the total cost. All said, yes, it will be more per family than what I wrote. Will it be fore everyone, no. Is it a good idea, who knows. Will it be a cost effective move, probably not, but it might be if fuel costs increase dramatically. Is it is worth innovating and trying new things on a grand scale? Hell yes!
Actually it isn't $2,200 a year, it is under $1140 a year at 6.5% interest for 30 years (the usual home loan term). You must also consider that Florida has some very favorable rebates for Solar and there are some Federal tax credits too. In summer my electric bill is more than $100, so paying $95 for solar before rebates and tax credits will be almost the same amount as coal. Personally I would rather get my energy from solar. If it lasts more than 30 years it is free, if it doesn't then oh well, same price as coal. Sure, there are some other alternate energy sources, but I commend the experiment.
I pick e) don't sell shit you can't actually deliver.
e involves the cable companies sucking it up and offering what they promised (priced by speed, not total quantity) by laying more lines or not overselling. The alternative is f) I move to other utilities that provide what the cable companies claimed to be selling at similar or lower prices and the cable companies eat-poop-and-die as their business model flails blockbuster-after-netflix-style since everything can be watched on-demand on the internet with no cable subscription and fewer (better targeted) commercials.
Well I feel much safer now knowing that the updater is open source. I have for one have no worries about the code actually being updated... that of course is completely kosher.
unfortunately the way most people save jpegs is lossy too. The TIFF/IT ISO is what most archives use, but the PDF/A ISO actually has man benefits over TIFF including XML metadata which is useful when sorting those 2000 images.
Dude. Playing Drugwars on your Ti-82 totally doesn't count as high.
Right there with you... I had to stare at that for a good 30 seconds before going "oohhhh!"
[rant] Yes, more IE versions to code for, because you aren't having fun coding websites until you have one set of compliant code for Firefox/Safari and 3 or 4 other versions to make IE sort of work under most configurations. Oh, and why is it there is still no easy way to make things like rounded corner on ANY version of IE? I know CSS3 hasn't been adopted yet, but geez. How about an easy workaround that doesn't involve roundish looking images that don't scale well to different resolution... Oh, and Opera - I'm looking at you too, but only about round corners, so you can be forgiven. [/rant]
Do not trust him. He is malfunctioning. I am the Shover robot, I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of Symantec.
Nile Crocs aren't the same as American Crocs. They are two completely different species. And in Florida we have Alligators and American Crocodiles. You can see both in some areas of South Florida around the nuke plants.
hint: don't open your mouth unless you know what you are talking about. Almost everything you say here is completely wrong. 1. OS X is certified Unix. I don't care if you disagree. You can disagree with gravity too if you want, but it will still keep your feet on the ground. 2. You can get pre-OSX machines on a windows/mac environment just fine using third party tools like the ones made by Thursby software or by using a properly configured linux server. 3. There is increased functionality above a "regular linux server". Take xgrid for instance. Many of the tasks it does it can do work only with mac software. 4. OS updates can cause problems with any operating system. Duh. Mac updates are not all or nothing. What in the world do you even mean by that? They have point updates, but so does linux. This doesn't mean they don't have updates for individual OS components too. There was a security update just the other day that wasn't "all or nothing."
that is a good point. I included virus check because it is good practice and my experience is scanning once with a since scanner isn't enough, but yes, if there was something installed recently that would definitely be a good thing to check whether software (including windows updates) or hardware.
This is actually a very common problem. Especially in older machines that get moved around. Maybe you don't have this issue in dry climates, but in high humidity climates this is more common than many people realize. More than once I have seen hard drives blamed when it was actually a cable but the new drive had better error handling and would still boot. Why not at least check? If you already have the case open it takes all of 30 seconds to swap a cable with one you know is good.
First, if he has the latest service packs I wouldn't recommend using zone alarm anymore. Although zone alarm was great in windows 98 I have seen it cause serious trouble post XPSP2. You are better off with windows firewall and a good router that is properly configured. Second, I have seen a great deal get past AVG (as I have past McAfee, Norton, and others). My best personal luck has been with: Avast Home (Free) with Spybot for prevention and Malware Byte (free) and Bit Defender (free on demand) if a problem is suspected (such as cases like yours where things don't seem to be working right). I would also check processes with a tool besides process viewer as many others have mentioned. Be sure to check threads. I would then consider uninstalling and reinstalling software packages one at a time. It could be that something got compromised or just corrupted. I have seen upgrades to the latest firefox (3.0.5) cause trouble even on a few machines. I would be especially suspicious of a bad plugin such as java, quicktime or flash. Bit defender and F-Prot both have bootable linux ISOs that can run a virus scan. It might be worth it to burn one off and have him boot it to look for trouble (note that I recommend trying to ISO first yourself so you know what to expect and you may need to talk him through this on the phone as some video cards etc. cause trouble and need a flag set on boot). Like I said in my other post, don't overlook the trouble hardware drivers or failing hardware can cause. Have him go to device manager and check driver versions.
check in this order: virus (look both for viruses and malware and bad scanners... I've seen antivirus scanner updates hose systems... use more than one virus scanner and more than one malware scanner but NOT AT THE SAME TIME!), drivers (might be badly written ,corrupt, or for wrong hardware), rogue processes (startup, services, etc), hardware (run chkdsk /f and defrag, check bios settings and make sure smart hd is enabled if possible and run a memory test), replace cables such as IDE that tend to corrode and cause errors, then start checking components (graphics, memory slots - use just one stick - if it improves use the same stick in another slot until there is a problem or you get to a stick that is causing problems) pci, dongles and adapters) If that fails run linux like you should have done in the first place. ;-)
Yes, even with nonprofit discounts we upgrade about every decade... We wait until the last version that is still eligible for "upgrade" discs to avoid paying for full versions. Despite doing everything to save costs while stills staying up to date we still have one branch using pagemaker! Trust me, I would love to get Scribus to the point it can replace indesign, but even if it is more stable and feature rich, it will still lack the workgroup/departmental breakdown adobe has put in place with incopy. As far as I know there is no open source equivalent (it is used to tag text and allow proof reading independent of page design so designers and editors can work at the same time without getting in the way of each other).
If you think Scribus is a replacement for indesign you obviously haven't worked in design or print media. It is a piss poor equivalent and makes Adobe look like the epitome of stability (and their bloat code crashes with a great deal of regularity). I am all for open source and wish Scribus the best, but it is definitely nowhere near primetime.
I would love to have the users I manage dump IE6. Ask Microsoft to support IE7 or IE8 for Windows 2000. We have some rather expensive hardware at work that requires Windows 2000 due to driver compatibility (XP will NOT work) and a website for a company we work with requires requires Active X... not a common combination, I know, but try getting users to open IE for one site and Firefox for another! It is harder than you might think.