Note: I think this guy is trolling but I think his points are worth answering anyway
Sometimes I have met with outright hostility, and sometimes I am accused of being a "troll" (whatever that is) but since I am getting paid for this, I have to endure it.
Typical marketeer. Whinges about having to work for their money while expecting others to contribute to their projects, career and company's marketing strategy for free.
Indeed it seems such robust interaction is part-and-parcel of the whole "Open source" community. Us Marketers didn't grasp that before, we took our eye off the ball, but trust me, we will not be blindsided again, like we were by the Internet in 1994.
Well, the rest of your post seems to indicate that you're going to be deliberately covering your eyes this time. Just because you're in denial doesn't mean it wont happen.
Linux has no support for de-facto industry standards. DCOM, and DirectX are the main examples, but there are many others.
Sorry, directX is an evil Microsoft development. Not sure about dcom but be sure that if there were any real need for these things, Linux would have them.
Linux lacks the industry standard word processor - Microsoft Word, and spreadsheet - Microsoft Excel
I think most of us on here know why this is. But I don't think you're claiming it's the fault of Linux anyway. If companies want to be tied to MS, I guess that's there call but I really don't see this lasting forever. If and when Linux takes over the world, if these applications are still only available for windows, they will be forced out of the market an replaced with something else for better or worse.
We cannot produce a coherent marketing story for Linux. This is despite having one of the largest marketing budgets in the industry. We therefore cannot hope to sell our software on the Linux platform.
Did you ever consider the option that you just don't "get it"? Seriously? I suspect that for you, "failure is not an option" so when you can't work something out, it can't be your fault, it has to be the fault of the market right?
Our Marketing department was surprised to find that Linux, despite being written by a "communistic" process, actually had quite good security controls
And you wonder why you get labelled "troll"? Linux has some of the foremost people in the field working on it. Clearly your research is pretty shallow if you come up with statements like this.
even compared to the code some of our best (and by best I mean highest paid) hackers
And you guys wonder about being called "suits" when you refer to youe professional programming staff like that?
We spend $millions. Believe me, we would have found it if it existed.
Once again this comes back to the "suit" thing. If a geek can't grok something, he'll go back and readjust his perspective and try again and keep trying until he "gets it". A suit will just assume it's something wrong with the item in question and just dismiss it
The zealots are Linux's market. They are not lucrative. They dissuade naive user takeup of Linux. They talk down, condescend and patronise. They are arrogant. They scare people off. They mumble under their breath about "suits" and "clueless newbies".
And they're part of the thing that drives the success of Linux as well. Their message may be wrong but they bring Linux to the attention of others. Have you ever really used Linux? I mean really and seriously? From the perspective of an admin who's had to put up with all the Microsoft crap moving to Linux with it's power and configurability is enough to put a fanatical gleam in nearly anyone's eye. It's no wonder there are zealots out there. And yes, "clueless newbie" is a standard insult but it's there for a reason. Most of us had to go through all the reading of HOWTOS, misconfigurations and other joys that build our skills, we are not paid to babysit someone who got their redhat CD off the front of a magazine and now wants to know if they can run Linux in a dos window. I repeat, we are not paid but these users demand to know the answers, now, and in full.
Our software company has significant Market share in its chosen niche (some would say too much share). We do not need the incremental revenue that a Linux port of our products would produce.
MINDSHARE!
Therefore we have no plans to port our software to Linux now, or in the next two to three years.
Sure, close your eyes. That steam train is still going to hit you.
Alternatively, get someone on your team who "gets it". Not all of us Linux users out here are zealots. Most of us are too busy doing our jobs to answer your marketing questions. Of course you're going to mostly hear from the zealots. Go find one of your big marketing books and look up "self selection".
Look at the cathedral for a moment. How many medieval markets are still in existence, as they were when first built, and that still perform their intended purpose? Cathedrals 1100 years old still serve their original purposes. This is true in the IT world as well. COBOL engines crunching financial, manufacturing, and distribution data are still at the core of our industry. These systems were built with project management, not collaboration.
Well, I'm not sure where you're from but over here in England, most cathedrals are now just overblown tourist traps filled with gift shops and fat priests rather than houses dedicated to the glory of God and most towns still have thriving markets which whilst admittedly having changed from being the exchange of livestock are still basically about local people selling goods to local people over temporary stalls.
So (as we say) put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Read between the lines as "Company X looks like they might want to release a media player of their own. We don't want that so release a rumour we're going to write one ourselves". After all, once Microsoft do a version of something, the game's over, why bother even trying?
The book? The bible. The rare obscure language? Latin.
During the inquisition, non-clergy who owned and could read a bible were burnt for heresy
The guy who translated it to English (name escapes me) was killed for it (though later, the King John Bible was based almost entirely on his translation)
This is the *real* analogy. Should we nickname this guy "The Torquemada of the Third Millennium"*?
Rich
*Although of course, this is still the second millennium;)
For instance, say you have a string with commas in it? You could escape them but the standard way is to quote the string. But then we have to deal with quotes in the string. That's usually handled by escaping with double quotes so you get something like
0,5,"Luigi ""scarface"" McDowd, Li McFadden",12,12,true
But now you also have the potential for error conditions such as meeting a quote in an unquoted string (,abc"def, which you can treat as not an error if you wish) or a quote in a string after an opening quote where the quote is not followed by a comma or a second quote (,"abc"def",) or strings with unclosed quotes (,"abc,asdasd,123,) which generally break things pretty badly.
Your snippet may work for quick and dirty hacks where you know the file format will be resonably behaved but it is not suitable for production code (unless you're producing for Microsoft).
Try looking at the output from Excel sometime.
That's not to say that XML is necessarily better as I've never really used it just that your exmple doesn't hold water.
Several years ago, a 100 YO man was interviewed on television here. His "best invention" was road surfacing becuase, he said, that before that, you always used to come in covered in dust and have to wash it off.
You could already do this. You don't. Thus you miss anyone who has minimum score set to 1. It's like with anti-theft devices, you won't stop the determined but you do raise the bar just a little and dicourage the casual offender.
Besides, I do find some of the trolls mildly amusing so it wouldn't be such a hardship IMO but it may act as a good filter for the mindless waste-of-time trolls/spam.
Create a new class of user. It works like this. Change the default score for "Anonymous cowards" to -1. Now create a class called "Anonymous user" with a default score of 0.
When you create an account, you also get given an "anonymous user" account.
Now here's the clever bit
There is no link whatsoever between your normal user account and the Anonymous user account. You can use either to post but slashdot keeps no information to link the accounts. Also, there is nothing to distinguish one Anonymous User from another. (Note that a side effect of this is that an individual anonymous user cannot accumulate karma since this could identify someone with high karma (although it might be good to allow karma to be used if the anonymous user wants to)
The good thing is that anonymous cowards drop below the event horizon (unless they get moderated up) but people with genuine comments they may not wished to be attributed to their real personas get to post. If someone abuses their AU persona, it is banned. True they can get another one by re-registering as a new real user but at least that requires some degree of effort and is more likely to discourage the casual spammer.
Ah yes, "chat" full of lively and interesting discussion. Or more realistically, the part/join messages of people who connect to the channel and then go to the other window to get down to the real business of transferring mp3s which after all, is what everyone's there for anyway.
Yes. TCP has a bigger overhead than UDP. By going to UDP, you get rid of that overhead. File transfers do not benefit from streaming. You could greatly increase the file transfer speed and not have to worry about connections timing out (as has happened to me a couple of times about 90% through a transfer
What crap software man? Napster doesn't make me download crap software...
No, not now it doesn't but you're reliant on a central server. They could change the software tomorrow so that to connect to the server, you have to download a new version of napster that flashes adverts all over your screen, or maybe you have to download "Napster instant messaging" or something. They don't do it But they could. A centralised server means that you are at their mercy. Plus if they get shut down tomorrow, well you're SOL.
File lists could be multicast, updated every couple of minutes, files could be UDP transfered with back filling for dropped blocks. No server dependency, slicker, more reliable file transfer.
I'm not saying don't use napster, I'm just saying there are probably better ways of doing things. And I'm not complaining about it, I would only do that if I was willing to write something myself.
What protocol does this use for transfer of files? And for that matter, what does napster use?
I'm pretty sure napster uses TCP which IMO is a bit of a waste due to all the acks and setups that are required. Much better would be to use UDP. Multicasting song lists would also be a good idea to remove the obvious target of a centralised server (plus avoid having the possibility of pulling a Microsoft and changing the server so you have to download a bunch of their other crap software that you didn't want just so you can continue to use it [re: netmeeting/instant messanger])
The thing that actually sickened me was watching the ball drop in times square (on TV) right onto a huge Discover(tm) ad. Nowhere else in the world (that i saw) was advertising space so blatantly exploited.
America has just gone totally OTT on advertising anyway. Driving down an interstate (I40), 50 miles from Nashville and there are 40 foot high advertisements for this or that every hundred yards or so. In England, driving around the M25 , a (one hundred and twenty something miles long) ringroad surrounding England's (and one of the world's) major city, all you have is a couple of (regulation) understated signs for the (two?) service stations.
It's pretty bad driving through a street with stores on too. Every one of them has to have a fourty foot high sign advertising their presence. In England, you typically get something about eighteen foot by three stuck to the front of the shop.
God help me when I move out to the States later this year:)
Rich
No part of this post should be taken as an attempt to insult Americans (especially since my wife is one). And yes, I know there's plenty wrong with England too. Just pointing out a difference in culture.
Was that the one with a weird clown or something? Cant remember the name. I think I got the first issue. I maybe even still have it. Hmm. Wonder if it's worth anything...
It doesn't double as a deli slicer, scraping the living $h!t out of your knuckles, fingertips, wrist, arm, etc. every single goddamn time you open it.
Agreed
If you drop a screw into the case, it rattles around like a pachinko machine and comes out in a tray at the bottom after ringing a little bell.
Screws should be banned in self-assembly cases. THey're great for speeding up assembly lines but clearly something more friendly could be used for those of us building bespoke systems (clips perhaps)
USB, joystick, mouse, keyboard ports in front; video, parallel, serial ports in back.
Definitely not the back. With the Rio adaptor I got for christmas and the parallel cable as well, I dont think my PC will fit where the old one was. However, I think I would prefer a removable panel on the side where the cables plug in in a similar direction as they do now but actually slightly inside the case. USB/serial and keyboard and mouse should be in recessed slots at the front (similar to the way many video recorders do audio/video in now). In fact, everything could go in the front but put the connectors at 45 degrees downwards, not sticking straight out.
The critical side slides up like a roll-top desk to get to the slots, memory, and CPU.
Nice idea but too many moving parts. and too much spare space inside the case required. I'd settle for a clip off panel.
The front bays remove to install additions -- without opening the rest of the case and without screws.
Yes, maybe with pcmcia style "eject" buttons. With the cable auto-detaching too. Some of the case people have at least realised it's better to have the mountings for the drives to be removable by a single screw so you can work on the drives away from the PC than having to undo the four screws in them
There's a washable dust filter, removable from the front panel, and it automatically tells you when it's dirty.
And washes it for you too?:)
Cable routing -- one unit smarter than "stuff it all in there and hope it doesn't touch the CPU fan".
Hmm. This is the kind of thing you can get from any electrical store worth its salt. And the case manufactures can kind-of be excused for not being able to predict what kind of cables you'll have in your system. Still, I suppose with a more intelligent design, the cabling would be intrinsic to the case, when you install the components into the case, you plug them into the case as well and bingo, no cabling required. There is no real reson why the mobo (and even expansion cards) should have any external connectors on it at all (in fact , it quite stifles the possibilities for case design)
My ideal case? I plan to build a desk with a PC integrated. floppy/CD built into the wood at the front and the main electronics cunningly hidden behind the drawer section. Maybe a trackball built into the surface (or a graphics tablet), an LCD screen on top (not flat on the surface but maybe able to fold down) and *drool*, *drool*
OK, it's in England and I cant vouch for the quality/useability and I've had a problem with the company shipping me a used case but just to prove that rackmount is not necessarily 4 figures...
Just by the by, the case I chose for my Athlon was the "Frontier Taurus" from the same company. I felt it had just a little more style than the standard block. Unfortunately, only available in beige and grey, not blue and white like in the picture. Quality seems ok and removable side-panels are a definite improvement over the "all at once" case on my old PC which required Krypton-factor style skills to fit back on. Bit of a finger slicer though, giving me three cuts (two pretty deep) on the build.
A proxy could do this (I don't know if any [such as junkbusters] already do). It kind of brings up an interesting idea though. Banner adverts fund sites right? So what if ISPs, perhaps an especially "popular" one like AOL decided to start intercepting the requests for the banner ads and substituted their own? (Apparently there are already "in-line" caches out there that are invisible to the client.) What would be the legal ramifications? Rich
The British fellow thought that this was just so amusing that he had to go and tell his friends about it first thing when he got home. "You see, they eat what they can," he told them, "and what they can't, they put up!"
I'm sorry, I'm British and I dont get this. Can soemone explain it to me. I assume it works on the belief that to the British, to can something means to put up? (As in "To can something" where can is a contraction of trashcan?) Sorry, over here we use "bin", a contraction of dustbin (or pedalbin). So as far as I can see, it just doesn't work.
This kind of thing has been tried before in the UK. Debenhams (a department store) hosted a shop (which I forget the name of now) to sell 8-bit micros. It didn't last too long. I think it either gets so successful that being limited by the host store is a pain or people take the view that if you want computer stuff, go to a computer shop. I think they ended up getting absorbed into the Dixons group (the computer place, not Debenhams)
Of course, Microsoft is a completely different animal and Radio Shack is at least in the same ballpark of supply but I still don't think it's a really great idea. Maybe as a stepping-stone for Microsoft to open their own high-street stores, just test the water first?
On an semi-related note, when I was younger, I heard a lot about how RadioShack(USA) was so cool with all this electronics stuff to buy. Their sister-chain here (Tandy) is pretty disappointing with electronics components stretching to audio cables, a few resistors and LEDs and some chips (that you would have to go to a proper component store to get the support components for anyway). As such, I was really looking forward to actually visiting a RadioShack in the States but to my dismay, it was almost just the same. Oh well, maybe it's just one more thing where I missed the window on when it was good (Like I hear that MTV was actually something to enjoy watching once upon a time)
Oh well, at least now there's plenty of Maplins (though they've started to get a little to heavily into consumer electronics) and Frasers (a small shop in Portsmouth with excellent stock and prices)
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I have met with outright hostility, and sometimes I am accused of being a "troll" (whatever that is) but since I am getting paid for this, I have to endure it.
Typical marketeer. Whinges about having to work for their money while expecting others to contribute to their projects, career and company's marketing strategy for free.
Indeed it seems such robust interaction is part-and-parcel of the whole "Open source" community. Us Marketers didn't grasp that before, we took our eye off the ball, but trust me, we will not be blindsided again, like we were by the Internet in 1994.
Well, the rest of your post seems to indicate that you're going to be deliberately covering your eyes this time. Just because you're in denial doesn't mean it wont happen.
Linux has no support for de-facto industry standards. DCOM, and DirectX are the main examples, but there are many others.
Sorry, directX is an evil Microsoft development. Not sure about dcom but be sure that if there were any real need for these things, Linux would have them.
Linux lacks the industry standard word processor - Microsoft Word, and spreadsheet - Microsoft Excel
I think most of us on here know why this is. But I don't think you're claiming it's the fault of Linux anyway. If companies want to be tied to MS, I guess that's there call but I really don't see this lasting forever. If and when Linux takes over the world, if these applications are still only available for windows, they will be forced out of the market an replaced with something else for better or worse.
We cannot produce a coherent marketing story for Linux. This is despite having one of the largest marketing budgets in the industry. We therefore cannot hope to sell our software on the Linux platform.
Did you ever consider the option that you just don't "get it"? Seriously? I suspect that for you, "failure is not an option" so when you can't work something out, it can't be your fault, it has to be the fault of the market right?
Our Marketing department was surprised to find that Linux, despite being written by a "communistic" process, actually had quite good security controls
And you wonder why you get labelled "troll"? Linux has some of the foremost people in the field working on it. Clearly your research is pretty shallow if you come up with statements like this.
even compared to the code some of our best (and by best I mean highest paid) hackers
And you guys wonder about being called "suits" when you refer to youe professional programming staff like that?
We spend $millions. Believe me, we would have found it if it existed.
Once again this comes back to the "suit" thing. If a geek can't grok something, he'll go back and readjust his perspective and try again and keep trying until he "gets it". A suit will just assume it's something wrong with the item in question and just dismiss it
The zealots are Linux's market. They are not lucrative. They dissuade naive user takeup of Linux. They talk down, condescend and patronise. They are arrogant. They scare people off. They mumble under their breath about "suits" and "clueless newbies".
And they're part of the thing that drives the success of Linux as well. Their message may be wrong but they bring Linux to the attention of others. Have you ever really used Linux? I mean really and seriously? From the perspective of an admin who's had to put up with all the Microsoft crap moving to Linux with it's power and configurability is enough to put a fanatical gleam in nearly anyone's eye. It's no wonder there are zealots out there. And yes, "clueless newbie" is a standard insult but it's there for a reason. Most of us had to go through all the reading of HOWTOS, misconfigurations and other joys that build our skills, we are not paid to babysit someone who got their redhat CD off the front of a magazine and now wants to know if they can run Linux in a dos window. I repeat, we are not paid but these users demand to know the answers, now, and in full.
Our software company has significant Market share in its chosen niche (some would say too much share). We do not need the incremental revenue that a Linux port of our products would produce.
MINDSHARE!
Therefore we have no plans to port our software to Linux now, or in the next two to three years.
Sure, close your eyes. That steam train is still going to hit you.
Alternatively, get someone on your team who "gets it". Not all of us Linux users out here are zealots. Most of us are too busy doing our jobs to answer your marketing questions. Of course you're going to mostly hear from the zealots. Go find one of your big marketing books and look up "self selection".
Rich
Well, I'm not sure where you're from but over here in England, most cathedrals are now just overblown tourist traps filled with gift shops and fat priests rather than houses dedicated to the glory of God and most towns still have thriving markets which whilst admittedly having changed from being the exchange of livestock are still basically about local people selling goods to local people over temporary stalls.
So (as we say) put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Rich
Did you look behind the couch? Stuff always turns up behind the couch.
Rich
Same old Microsoft, same old FUD
Rich
During the inquisition, non-clergy who owned and could read a bible were burnt for heresy
The guy who translated it to English (name escapes me) was killed for it (though later, the King John Bible was based almost entirely on his translation)
This is the *real* analogy. Should we nickname this guy "The Torquemada of the Third Millennium"*?
Rich
*Although of course, this is still the second millennium ;)
Rich
Rich
0,5,"Luigi ""scarface"" McDowd, Li McFadden",12,12,true
But now you also have the potential for error conditions such as meeting a quote in an unquoted string ( ,abc"def, which you can treat as not an error if you wish) or a quote in a string after an opening quote where the quote is not followed by a comma or a second quote (,"abc"def",) or strings with unclosed quotes (,"abc,asdasd,123,) which generally break things pretty badly.
Your snippet may work for quick and dirty hacks where you know the file format will be resonably behaved but it is not suitable for production code (unless you're producing for Microsoft).
Try looking at the output from Excel sometime.
That's not to say that XML is necessarily better as I've never really used it just that your exmple doesn't hold water.
Rich
It uses the ID tags for the search I think. Rich
Rich
Besides, I do find some of the trolls mildly amusing so it wouldn't be such a hardship IMO but it may act as a good filter for the mindless waste-of-time trolls/spam.
Rich
When you create an account, you also get given an "anonymous user" account.
Now here's the clever bit
There is no link whatsoever between your normal user account and the Anonymous user account. You can use either to post but slashdot keeps no information to link the accounts. Also, there is nothing to distinguish one Anonymous User from another. (Note that a side effect of this is that an individual anonymous user cannot accumulate karma since this could identify someone with high karma (although it might be good to allow karma to be used if the anonymous user wants to)
The good thing is that anonymous cowards drop below the event horizon (unless they get moderated up) but people with genuine comments they may not wished to be attributed to their real personas get to post. If someone abuses their AU persona, it is banned. True they can get another one by re-registering as a new real user but at least that requires some degree of effort and is more likely to discourage the casual spammer.
Rich
Ah yes, "chat" full of lively and interesting discussion. Or more realistically, the part/join messages of people who connect to the channel and then go to the other window to get down to the real business of transferring mp3s which after all, is what everyone's there for anyway.
Rich
Yes. TCP has a bigger overhead than UDP. By going to UDP, you get rid of that overhead. File transfers do not benefit from streaming. You could greatly increase the file transfer speed and not have to worry about connections timing out (as has happened to me a couple of times about 90% through a transfer
What crap software man? Napster doesn't make me download crap software...
No, not now it doesn't but you're reliant on a central server. They could change the software tomorrow so that to connect to the server, you have to download a new version of napster that flashes adverts all over your screen, or maybe you have to download "Napster instant messaging" or something. They don't do it But they could. A centralised server means that you are at their mercy. Plus if they get shut down tomorrow, well you're SOL.
File lists could be multicast, updated every couple of minutes, files could be UDP transfered with back filling for dropped blocks. No server dependency, slicker, more reliable file transfer.
I'm not saying don't use napster, I'm just saying there are probably better ways of doing things. And I'm not complaining about it, I would only do that if I was willing to write something myself.
Rich
I'm pretty sure napster uses TCP which IMO is a bit of a waste due to all the acks and setups that are required. Much better would be to use UDP. Multicasting song lists would also be a good idea to remove the obvious target of a centralised server (plus avoid having the possibility of pulling a Microsoft and changing the server so you have to download a bunch of their other crap software that you didn't want just so you can continue to use it [re: netmeeting/instant messanger])
Rich
Hmm, I did type that in as polluting the atmosphere with his fish processing plant but I guess sigs get trimmed. Reads kinda funny now. Rich
America has just gone totally OTT on advertising anyway. Driving down an interstate (I40), 50 miles from Nashville and there are 40 foot high advertisements for this or that every hundred yards or so. In England, driving around the M25 , a (one hundred and twenty something miles long) ringroad surrounding England's (and one of the world's) major city, all you have is a couple of (regulation) understated signs for the (two?) service stations.
It's pretty bad driving through a street with stores on too. Every one of them has to have a fourty foot high sign advertising their presence. In England, you typically get something about eighteen foot by three stuck to the front of the shop.
God help me when I move out to the States later this year :)
Rich
No part of this post should be taken as an attempt to insult Americans (especially since my wife is one). And yes, I know there's plenty wrong with England too. Just pointing out a difference in culture.
Rich
For the record, I didn't think it was much good.
Rich
Agreed
If you drop a screw into the case, it rattles around like a pachinko machine and comes out in a tray at the bottom after ringing a little bell.
Screws should be banned in self-assembly cases. THey're great for speeding up assembly lines but clearly something more friendly could be used for those of us building bespoke systems (clips perhaps)
USB, joystick, mouse, keyboard ports in front; video, parallel, serial ports in back.
Definitely not the back. With the Rio adaptor I got for christmas and the parallel cable as well, I dont think my PC will fit where the old one was. However, I think I would prefer a removable panel on the side where the cables plug in in a similar direction as they do now but actually slightly inside the case. USB/serial and keyboard and mouse should be in recessed slots at the front (similar to the way many video recorders do audio/video in now). In fact, everything could go in the front but put the connectors at 45 degrees downwards, not sticking straight out.
The critical side slides up like a roll-top desk to get to the slots, memory, and CPU.
Nice idea but too many moving parts. and too much spare space inside the case required. I'd settle for a clip off panel.
The front bays remove to install additions -- without opening the rest of the case and without screws.
Yes, maybe with pcmcia style "eject" buttons. With the cable auto-detaching too. Some of the case people have at least realised it's better to have the mountings for the drives to be removable by a single screw so you can work on the drives away from the PC than having to undo the four screws in them
There's a washable dust filter, removable from the front panel, and it automatically tells you when it's dirty.
And washes it for you too? :)
Cable routing -- one unit smarter than "stuff it all in there and hope it doesn't touch the CPU fan".
Hmm. This is the kind of thing you can get from any electrical store worth its salt. And the case manufactures can kind-of be excused for not being able to predict what kind of cables you'll have in your system. Still, I suppose with a more intelligent design, the cabling would be intrinsic to the case, when you install the components into the case, you plug them into the case as well and bingo, no cabling required. There is no real reson why the mobo (and even expansion cards) should have any external connectors on it at all (in fact , it quite stifles the possibilities for case design)
My ideal case? I plan to build a desk with a PC integrated. floppy/CD built into the wood at the front and the main electronics cunningly hidden behind the drawer section. Maybe a trackball built into the surface (or a graphics tablet), an LCD screen on top (not flat on the surface but maybe able to fold down) and *drool*, *drool*
Rich
Ah, is that another of those American slang words for "condom"?
Rich
Look here
Just by the by, the case I chose for my Athlon was the "Frontier Taurus" from the same company. I felt it had just a little more style than the standard block. Unfortunately, only available in beige and grey, not blue and white like in the picture. Quality seems ok and removable side-panels are a definite improvement over the "all at once" case on my old PC which required Krypton-factor style skills to fit back on. Bit of a finger slicer though, giving me three cuts (two pretty deep) on the build.
Rich
A proxy could do this (I don't know if any [such as junkbusters] already do).
It kind of brings up an interesting idea though. Banner adverts fund sites right? So what if ISPs, perhaps an especially "popular" one like AOL decided to start intercepting the requests for the banner ads and substituted their own? (Apparently there are already "in-line" caches out there that are invisible to the client.) What would be the legal ramifications? Rich
I'm sorry, I'm British and I dont get this. Can soemone explain it to me. I assume it works on the belief that to the British, to can something means to put up? (As in "To can something" where can is a contraction of trashcan?) Sorry, over here we use "bin", a contraction of dustbin (or pedalbin). So as far as I can see, it just doesn't work.
Or maybe I just don't get it :)
Rich
Of course, Microsoft is a completely different animal and Radio Shack is at least in the same ballpark of supply but I still don't think it's a really great idea. Maybe as a stepping-stone for Microsoft to open their own high-street stores, just test the water first?
On an semi-related note, when I was younger, I heard a lot about how RadioShack(USA) was so cool with all this electronics stuff to buy. Their sister-chain here (Tandy) is pretty disappointing with electronics components stretching to audio cables, a few resistors and LEDs and some chips (that you would have to go to a proper component store to get the support components for anyway). As such, I was really looking forward to actually visiting a RadioShack in the States but to my dismay, it was almost just the same. Oh well, maybe it's just one more thing where I missed the window on when it was good (Like I hear that MTV was actually something to enjoy watching once upon a time)
Oh well, at least now there's plenty of Maplins (though they've started to get a little to heavily into consumer electronics) and Frasers (a small shop in Portsmouth with excellent stock and prices)
Erm, relevance? What's that?
Rich