We'll see if we can get more than a million people into space a year by 2100...
If looks like NASA found the easy way of accomplishing this goal - only send the 'essence' of each person into space. Kind of like how they send orange-juice into space as Tang.
How big is the hard drive in the X-Box? How much do hard drives of that size run for these days?
This is what is killing the XBOX. Manufacturers have a finite amount of space on their factories, and not one of them is willing to make a 8 gig hard-drive for Microsoft's XBOX when they could be making 120 gig hard-drives for DELL - UNLESSS Microsoft is willing to pay roughly the same price as a 120 gig drive.
If drives were sold by the Gig then the XBOX drive should cost $8 - (WD and Maxtor both sell a 250 Gig drive for $250 - that $1 a Gig) - but nobody will sell a drive, even at the smallest of sizes, for less that $50.
You'd expect the dems to be raising hell in the house and the news media about this, but it just isn't happening.
The Democrats are't raising a stink because the're up to their eyeballs in the whole affair as well. Democrat politicians are just as mutch a part of the goold-ol'-boy network as the Republicans, and 9 times out of 10, most companies give equally to both parties.
Witness the broad suppor the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act got from both parites when Disney flung it's mouse-piss tainted money around.
It's in both parties interest to keep quite about crap like this - otherwise some third party 'crackpot' may just have a chance to get in office.
Out of curiousity, have there been complaints from your ISP about the amount of bandwidth your backups are consuming?
Unison and RSymc only trasmit the things that have changed, down to the file level. They are quite efficent and I use both the backup up small offices over 56K without a problem.
Say you had a Quickbooks file that changed, instead of copying over all 28 megs of the file - Unison/RSync only copy the small bits that changed.
So if you only have a 56K connenction - you can seed the backup physically, but a 56K should be fine for 10 users with normal useage paterns.
BTW - Unison uses the RSync diference engine internally.
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
In the course of a recent Microsoft Access programming project, we had three difficult technical problems where we decided to call a support hotline for advice. This article compares the two support numbers we tried: Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network. As a resultof this research, we have come to the following conclusions: 1 ) that Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network are about equal in their ability to provide technical assistance for Microsoft products over the phone ; 2 ) that the Psychic Friends Net work has a distinct edge over Microsoft in the areas of courtesy, response time, and cost of support; but 3) that Microsoft has a generally better refund policy if they fail to solve your problem.
In the paragraphs that follow, we will detail the support calls we made and the responses we received from each pport provider. We will follow this with a discussion of the features provided by each support provider so that readers can do their own rankings of the two services.
Our research began when we called Microsoft regarding a bug that we had detected when executing queries which pulled data from a Sybase Server into Microsoft Access. If we used the same Access database to query two databases on the same server, we found that all of the queries aimed at the second database that we queried were sent to the first database that we had queried. This problem existed no matter which database we queried first. Dan called Microsoft's Technical Solutions Line, gave them $55, and was connected with an official Microsoft Access technical support person. As Dan began to explain the problem, the support person interrupted him, and told him that since it was clear that it was not just a problem with Access but with the two programs together, Microsoft would not try to help us. They did,however, have a consultant referral service with which he would be glad to connect us. Dan then asked if we could have our $55 refunded, since Microsoft was not going to try to answer to our question. The tech support person responded by forwarding Dan to the person in charge of giving refunds. The person officially in charge of giving refunds took Dan's credit card info again, after which Dan asked about the referral service. It was too late, however - the refund folks could not reconnect Dan with the tech support guy he'd been talking with, nor could he put Dan in touch with the referral service hotline. End of Call One.
Our second call came when Dan was creating some line graphs in Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access actually uses a program called Microsoft Graph to create its graphs, and this program has a "feature" that makes the automatic axis scale always start the scale at zero. If all of your data are between 9,800 and 10,000 and you get a scale of 0 to 10,000, your data will appear as a flat line at the top of your graph-not a very interesting chart. Since Dan was writing Visual Basic code to create the graphs, he wanted to be able to use Visual Basic code to change the graph scaling, but he could not find anything in the help files that would tell him how to do this. After working with Microsoft Graph for a while, Dan concluded that it probably didn't have the capability that he needed, but he decided to call Microsoft just to make sure. Dan described his problem to the technical support person, whom we'll call Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob said he'd never gotten a call about Microsoft Graph before. He then left Dan on hold while he went to ask another support person how to use Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Bob came back with the suggestion that Dan use the online help. Dan, however, had already used the online help, and didn't feel that this was an appro
That just shows Cringley's ignorance of how Microsoft functions. Microsoft routinely kills off bad projects,usually before they even make it out to the public...
Ahem...
Windows For Pen Computing NetBUI That stupid MS email protocall, before they adopted POP3 Actimates Barney MS Paint. MS Photo Editor. Notepad with a 32K buffer. Command.com with no real scripting. The whole registry idea. Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 286 Comic Sans-Serif. God that font sucks. DiectX sucked untill it got to 8.0 MS Fortan. MS Quick Pascal. MS C++ untill about a year ago. XENIX. DOS 1.0 diden't even have a directory tree... you get the idea. MS has made plenty of crap to spread around.
It's interesting to note that in each of the 3 cases, you also spelled "they're" differently, none of which being correct. One of those read between the lines kind of joke?;-)
I was just testing Slashdot's Human-Touch(tm) spell-checker. It seems to have worked yet again!;)
So many people here love to claim that MS Word sucks ass, and Outlook blows donkey dicks. In fact, they don't. They do what they're supposed to do, and they do it well.
Yes! Your quite right!
It's Word that blows donkey dicks, not Outlook.
Outlook just looses your emails after 2 megs of data - oh, and it fucks you in the eye if you don't feed it.
A Blanket policy against MS, without allowing for a competitive bidding process or even alternative analysis doesn't seem right.
It's not a policy that Microsoft can't work around. Microsoft is free to submit a package that includs Microsoft Linux, Microsoft OpenOffice couupled with Microsoft's 'world-class' support.
superior to what? I missed the point only half as much as you did, at least it appears to me so.
It's implied that Open Source is superior to Closed Source. The author was expecting that his audience was at least familier with the topic at hand, and was not burdening us with needless repetition about the curent landscape of software development.
The poor europeans will be crushed by the suddenly vaild American software-patentes we have been creating over the last 10 years. EU firms have had no need to create patent portfolios - and will be defenselss to American lawsuits when the EU allows software patents. There will be no 'cross licensing' because EU companyines have no patents to cross license with.
Software patents are horribly evil, and if the EU is stupid enough to follow the us Americans, they will be *very* *very* sorry.
All your EU companies are now belong to IBM, MOT, and MSFT.
MS Filesystems are Internet Enabled!!!!
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 4, Funny
In 1997 Microsoft made a pledge to Internet Enable all of their tehcnologies - and true to their word, even their file-systems are now internet enabled.
It's really easy to administer. Just plug you Windows computer into the internet, wait for a few minuits for a helpfull worm - and PRESTO!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want an empty shell of an OS. I don't use linux because it isn't convenient for me
Windows is the empty shell of an OS.
And in order to make Windows look good as far as features, let's compare it to say.... FreeBSD.
Things that Windows has that FreeBSD doesen't:
DVD playing.
Windows Movie Maker.
FreeBSD includes the following that Windows doesen't:
C++ compiler.
Office Suite.
IDE for Java, C++ etc.
SQL Database.
SSH.
40 (non-card) Games.
Flowchart software.
Vector drawing software
Layer/Bitmap drawing software.
Perl.
Astronomy Software.
Linux (386) binary support.
Secure Firewall with *incoming* VPN support.
RSync.
Non-broken Kerberos 5.
Windows Fileshareing (more than 10 users).
and about another 6000 applications in the port tree....
NetInfo is beleaguered.
I would be worried about fucking with the moon too much. How can we make sure we do not get the moon out of orbit?
That's easy! Make sure you don't cut the string!
We'll see if we can get more than a million people into space a year by 2100...
If looks like NASA found the easy way of accomplishing this goal - only send the 'essence' of each person into space. Kind of like how they send orange-juice into space as Tang.
NASA launches satellites, cremated remains
Recreational vehicles are supposed to be tough and reliable.
Actually, RV need to be noisy and have a nice padded seat;
- perfect for anouncing to the world that there's another fat-assed lazy retard entering the woods.
How big is the hard drive in the X-Box? How much do hard drives of that size run for these days?
This is what is killing the XBOX. Manufacturers have a finite amount of space on their factories, and not one of them is willing to make a 8 gig hard-drive for Microsoft's XBOX when they could be making 120 gig hard-drives for DELL - UNLESSS Microsoft is willing to pay roughly the same price as a 120 gig drive.
If drives were sold by the Gig then the XBOX drive should cost $8 - (WD and Maxtor both sell a 250 Gig drive for $250 - that $1 a Gig) - but nobody will sell a drive, even at the smallest of sizes, for less that $50.
You'd expect the dems to be raising hell in the house and the news media about this, but it just isn't happening.
The Democrats are't raising a stink because the're up to their eyeballs in the whole affair as well. Democrat politicians are just as mutch a part of the goold-ol'-boy network as the Republicans, and 9 times out of 10, most companies give equally to both parties.
Witness the broad suppor the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act got from both parites when Disney flung it's mouse-piss tainted money around.
It's in both parties interest to keep quite about crap like this - otherwise some third party 'crackpot' may just have a chance to get in office.
Out of curiousity, have there been complaints from your ISP about the amount of bandwidth your backups are consuming?
Unison and RSymc only trasmit the things that have changed, down to the file level. They are quite efficent and I use both the backup up small offices over 56K without a problem.
Say you had a Quickbooks file that changed, instead of copying over all 28 megs of the file - Unison/RSync only copy the small bits that changed.
So if you only have a 56K connenction - you can seed the backup physically, but a 56K should be fine for 10 users with normal useage paterns.
BTW - Unison uses the RSync diference engine internally.
Bill usually knows how to pick a winner, it just takes it a while to cross the line.
I agree. Bill chose Unix way back in the 80's and it looks like Unix will win.
The compairison has been done! Really!
PSN did pretty well compaired to MS.
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
In the course of a recent Microsoft Access programming project, we had three difficult technical problems where we decided to call a support hotline for advice. This article compares the two support numbers we tried: Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network. As a resultof this research, we have come to the following conclusions: 1 ) that Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network are about equal in their ability to provide technical assistance for Microsoft products over the phone ; 2 ) that the Psychic Friends Net work has a distinct edge over Microsoft in the areas of courtesy, response time, and cost of support; but 3) that Microsoft has a generally better refund policy if they fail to solve your problem.
In the paragraphs that follow, we will detail the support calls we made and the responses we received from each pport provider. We will follow this with a discussion of the features provided by each support provider so that readers can do their own rankings of the two services.
Our research began when we called Microsoft regarding a bug that we had detected when executing queries which pulled data from a Sybase Server into Microsoft Access. If we used the same Access database to query two databases on the same server, we found that all of the queries aimed at the second database that we queried were sent to the first database that we had queried. This problem existed no matter which database we queried first. Dan called Microsoft's Technical Solutions Line, gave them $55, and was connected with an official Microsoft Access technical support person. As Dan began to explain the problem, the support person interrupted him, and told him that since it was clear that it was not just a problem with Access but with the two programs together, Microsoft would not try to help us. They did,however, have a consultant referral service with which he would be glad to connect us. Dan then asked if we could have our $55 refunded, since Microsoft was not going to try to answer to our question. The tech support person responded by forwarding Dan to the person in charge of giving refunds. The person officially in charge of giving refunds took Dan's credit card info again, after which Dan asked about the referral service. It was too late, however - the refund folks could not reconnect Dan with the tech support guy he'd been talking with, nor could he put Dan in touch with the referral service hotline. End of Call One.
Our second call came when Dan was creating some line graphs in Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access actually uses a program called Microsoft Graph to create its graphs, and this program has a "feature" that makes the automatic axis scale always start the scale at zero. If all of your data are between 9,800 and 10,000 and you get a scale of 0 to 10,000, your data will appear as a flat line at the top of your graph-not a very interesting chart. Since Dan was writing Visual Basic code to create the graphs, he wanted to be able to use Visual Basic code to change the graph scaling, but he could not find anything in the help files that would tell him how to do this. After working with Microsoft Graph for a while, Dan concluded that it probably didn't have the capability that he needed, but he decided to call Microsoft just to make sure. Dan described his problem to the technical support person, whom we'll call Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob said he'd never gotten a call about Microsoft Graph before. He then left Dan on hold while he went to ask another support person how to use Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Bob came back with the suggestion that Dan use the online help. Dan, however, had already used the online help, and didn't feel that this was an appro
That just shows Cringley's ignorance of how Microsoft functions. Microsoft routinely kills off bad projects,usually before they even make it out to the public...
Ahem...
Windows For Pen Computing
NetBUI
That stupid MS email protocall, before they adopted POP3
Actimates Barney
MS Paint.
MS Photo Editor.
Notepad with a 32K buffer.
Command.com with no real scripting.
The whole registry idea.
Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 286
Comic Sans-Serif. God that font sucks.
DiectX sucked untill it got to 8.0
MS Fortan.
MS Quick Pascal.
MS C++ untill about a year ago.
XENIX.
DOS 1.0 diden't even have a directory tree.
Stupid linux users thinking that vi is a good text editor.
The best thing about vi - is that it workes very well over slow connections, and with non standard keyboards.
I can use VI just fine over a 2400 baud like with a Sony CLIE TG-50 - and the thing doesen't even have an ALT key, let alone a mouse.
GUI things can be great, but somtime vi is the right tool for the job
It's interesting to note that in each of the 3 cases, you also spelled "they're" differently, none of which being correct. One of those read between the lines kind of joke? ;-)
;)
I was just testing Slashdot's Human-Touch(tm) spell-checker. It seems to have worked yet again!
Ask them to spell Microsoft.
If they use a dollar symbol somwhere in the spelling - then the're a Linux expert.
If they spell it Micro-Soft - then ther're really old school DOS expert.
If they spell it MICROS~1 -then there a Windows expert.
You're an underpaid jr. developer....
Your company makes check writing software.....
You want to show them that their software is insecure....
Your Poor. They have checks. Things are insecure.....
Hmm....
So many people here love to claim that MS Word sucks ass, and Outlook blows donkey dicks. In fact, they don't. They do what they're supposed to do, and they do it well.
Yes! Your quite right!
It's Word that blows donkey dicks, not Outlook.
Outlook just looses your emails after 2 megs of data - oh, and it fucks you in the eye if you don't feed it.
since the coke is only 300ish calories in the first place...
For consumers, food calories are really kilo-calories. So in this case, you coke has 300,000 physic-style calories.
If you look at a euopean food-labels, sometime you can seem them writen as kcal.
I know what you mean....
The background texture on my website takes up more memory that what my first computer had. (8k)
My laptop has more memory in it's L2 cache than my fists floppy drive could store.
My server could fit the entire OS of my first multi-tasking compter in it's L3 cache.
Second, not everybody wants to wear a fucking bat-belt for all their gear.
I jusst have a normal bat-belt for all my gear...
where do you buy a fucking bat-belt? It sounds like fun!
A Blanket policy against MS, without allowing for a competitive bidding process or even alternative analysis doesn't seem right.
It's not a policy that Microsoft can't work around. Microsoft is free to submit a package that includs Microsoft Linux, Microsoft OpenOffice couupled with Microsoft's 'world-class' support.
Please have a look at the topic again.
"Open Source Software clearly superior"
superior to what? I missed the point only half as much as you did, at least it appears to me so.
It's implied that Open Source is superior to Closed Source. The author was expecting that his audience was at least familier with the topic at hand, and was not burdening us with needless repetition about the curent landscape of software development.
The poor europeans will be crushed by the suddenly vaild American software-patentes we have been creating over the last 10 years. EU firms have had no need to create patent portfolios - and will be defenselss to American lawsuits when the EU allows software patents. There will be no 'cross licensing' because EU companyines have no patents to cross license with.
Software patents are horribly evil, and if the EU is stupid enough to follow the us Americans, they will be *very* *very* sorry.
All your EU companies are now belong to IBM, MOT, and MSFT.
In 1997 Microsoft made a pledge to Internet Enable all of their tehcnologies - and true to their word, even their file-systems are now internet enabled.
It's really easy to administer. Just plug you Windows computer into the internet, wait for a few minuits for a helpfull worm - and PRESTO!!!
You file system is on the Internet Baby!!!
It's some weird British device. We have dentists, they have these lorry things - good deal, eh? Hehehehe...
Now we finnally know why the British have such horrible teeth.
My Sony TG60 connects with my Ericsson 68i over bluetooth.
I can then SSH into any of my servers anywhere with the little keyboard on the TG60.
No fucking way I'm giving that up - it's really nice and usefull.