Pirated software is free. There is no way to compete with that at any price. People who are willing to pirate software will, no mater what the software costs.
Megatron must be stopped. No matter the cost. Everything else does indeed depend on cost. Plenty of pirates actually buy shit on the cheap. The cost of legit purchases it the purchase price. The cost of piracy is the hassle of finding shit, the hassle of getting it to work, the loss of multiplayer features, the risk of being sued, etc. In many cases shit's super easy to pirate and the cost is low compared to going legit. In many cases, the cost is quite high compared to going legit. See Steam. Yes, Steam DRM has been cracked. Yes there are hacked servers for a bunch of games. No, not very many people engage in Steam piracy.
ON OFF (with or without a stored memory dump to resume from) All other states are simply power saving schemes per device. Display, video card, hard disk, speakers (girlfriend's new laptop will turn the speakers off after 10 seconds of silence), some of the CPU, more of the CPU, LAN port, USB ports, whatever.
No one is going to click the 7 separate links to try to piece together a non-story. If anyone is wondering what this is or why this got posted to slashdot, I've got your answer:
Someone presented something about using computers and shit for education. Bill Gates likes what the presented. Someone on the internet cried "OLD! We've been using computers in education, for like, YEARS now!", despite knowing nothing of the differences between what was shown then (utter trash) and what was shown now (mildly decent tools). theodp submitted a link farm, as usual, to slashdot, and it got approved, as usual. Probably because he threw in some shit about Gates "gushing" over it - read Gates's tweets, he's like this for anything he supports.
theodp is also the submitter behind such recent "greats" as:
Microsoft Patent Deems Comic Books Shameful Stopping The Horror of 'Reply All' Nokia Has a Billion Reasons to Love WP7 Dawn of the TED Dead Microsoft Rewarding Employees Who Phone It In Do Hobbies Decrease Chances of CS Success? Is Google Poisoning PDF?
Basically, theodp submits a lot of linkfarm shit, averaging about 5.5 hyperlinks per submission. The "story" is often fud, non-news, or general flamebait/shit-stirring involving hot button topics.
Fiber gives you bandwidth between its endpoints. The box down the street that the fiber in your house leads to is where the bottleneck is 99% of the time. In that box is a Motorola / Cisco / HP switch. It is old. It is not up to the task. It will be replaced only when it breaks completely.
If you're lucky enough to have a fresh switch at your first hop, repeat the exercise for every hop until you get to your destination. If you hit your ISPs backboine, you can blame everything after that on some other company.
It has something to do with chains and weakest links. "Bububu web! Routes around damage!" Slow isn't "damaged", and beefy switches that serve hundreds or thousands of connections and are throttled will be chosen for your route every time.
It's been true for almost 10 years. In fact Microsoft's support for DirectX has always been better than what OpenGL had. Microsoft made it easy to use with all their programming tools and languages and had a great documentation. The API was always cleaner too. There were tons of books written for DirectX. This is the area Microsoft handles extremely well - their Visual Studio development environment is the best IDE on the market and they create great tools for developers. Their mobile development tools kick Apple's and Google's (C#, Visual Studio and Silverlight against Java...).
It would be nice to see open source community wake up and start developing a competitor, as just now Microsoft is the driving force that innovates new technologies for PC and Xbox360 graphics and gaming. But for once it looks like the fact they're the only one doing so isn't slowing them down - they do a good job.
We know who you are! We have you surrounded!
Step away from the chair and come out with your hands up.
. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used
No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.
OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.
The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards. Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.
To suggest that end users should FIGHT for something INFERIOR just because it aligns with YOUR personal beliefs and Chicken-Little "the royalties are coming!" bullshit is absurd. The bottom line is that BROWSERS should not be decoding this shit themselves. A browser should merely connect to available codecs on the system. MS realizes this, and MS realizes that customers want something that works. So MS made the h.264 plugin for FF. Apple realizes that customers want something that works. So Apple, controlling the browser 99.9% of their customers use, made sure their browser could handle h.264. Whether or not Safari uses codecs on OSX/iOS or whether it comes with its own is irrelevant, since they control both except for the 2 people who actually use Safari on Windows. Opera supports h.264 when the system it's on supports it in an easy-to-access manner. Mobile devices with hardware h.264 decoding? Opera is able and willing to handle that, even though they still cry out for "open" codecs. Once again, Opera is the best choice.
So the hold outs are FireFox and Chrome. The vast majority of FireFox's waning user base won't give a shit because MS fixed the problem for them. Mozilla is holding out on principle. That's fine, but if they don't see that their stance is going to result in users dropping them in favor of other browsers, they're stupid.
Google is holding out because they don't want to buy into the MPEG-LA group. They could easily afford it financially, but they can NOT afford the hit to their public image, especially after taking such a vocal stance about "openness". In the end, someone will write an add-on for Chrome to do the same damned thing as Firefox. There will be an "app" for h.264 decoding on Android (released by Google, released by Google posing as someone else, or released by someone else) in the same fashion there is Flash on the web. This functionality could be bundled into an update for the Youtube "app", allowing the browser to easily tap into it, since most people still dissociate Google from Youtube and will be less likely to call them out on the flip-flop.
The end result will be OSStards screaming about h.264, and posting weekly FUD articles about impending royalty fees (which no end user will ever have to care about). They'll bitch and moan but they'll secretly install the plugin/app that makes shit work for them. All of 17 holdouts will actually browse the web in a manner that results in them unable to play h.264 content.
Bad UI design means it happens whether the excuse is "really crappy" or not. People who think as you do, just haven't yet been burned badly by bad UIs. When it happens to you, you'll get clued in fast as to why "Pay attention to what you do" is really crappy UI design.
Unless the UI is functionally broken, or shortcuts change with no notice, you have no excuse.
Pay attention to what you're doing. This goes for sending emails, using guns, driving cars, etc. But your Honor! The gas pedal is RIGHT NEXT to the brake! I was coming home after working for 12+ hours! That's a FLAWED DESIGN!!
If you fuck up, it's on you. The whole "I CAN'T be wrong! It's everything else!" mentality is horseshit. This line of "thinking" is what got people to claim that 1 KB should mean 1000 B, and that using 1024 was somehow "wrong". No, shitface, if you're not paying attention to WHAT YOU'RE DOING (dealing with binary data), then it's your fault. KB has always meant 1024 B, and it always will. And there's a damned good reason for it (bits are logical units we count, not measure, and we care about the possible permutations of a certain number of bits for storage and bus width, thus, we use a base 2 exponential).
K is not a magical, sacred symbol. Neither is M. (Does it mean meters? Minutes? A mass constant? Millions? Thousandths?). Even if it was a sacred symbol, and even if we excused the ambiguity the sacred symbol already has, and even if SI had some sort of jurisdiction, the symbol in question is not K, it is KB. The B is either right fucking next to it, or known from context.
I guarantee some electrical engineer DONE FUCKED UP one day, and then, instead of admitting that he doesn't know shit about computers, was lazy, wasn't paying attention, etc., he went for the easy "But K means 1000! It's the LAW!!" horse shit. The hard drive marketers know KB = 1024 B. They just chose to lie.
Bottom line: Pay attention. Own up to your mistakes. Ignorance is not an excuse, and neither is laziness, forgetfulness, etc. While UIs can and should be improved, and tailored to specific users' preferences, operating the UI incorrectly will always be user error. A functionally broken UI (pressing one button, getting a different result) is not user error, but it is NOT what we are talking about.
Then my next missile will be a 100KiloTon yield. Jam away at 1000 watts, I'll be close enough to vaporize you.
Remember the answer to a technical foe is by being crude. They have a lot of tech to make your missile miss the target, make the missile big enough to include the target even at the widest miss.
Classic bully vs nerd scenario. In the end, the bully wins by punching you in the face and not giving a shit about the repercussions. Deal with it.
I want the next gen jammer with built in EMP, cell phone jammer, Universal tv/stereo remote and beer opener. Make it the Acme and not the Apple. The I-jam will have a per use fee and not work on I-phones.
But will it open my garage door? Also, do you have an X-10 compatible version? Or do I have to go back to 1990 when people knew what that was?
"For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates"
What do you think every single school is? Academia isn't some magical, pure, honest, well-intentioned society of ivory tower egg heads. Academia is all too often a heavily politicized, dysfunctional, counter-productive institution centered around cronyism, plagiarism (on the part of those teaching and directing), indoctrination, money-grubbing, and all-around bullshit. Any education of students or advancement of a field that takes place in ancillary.
The legal status of these institutions may be "not for profit", but if you take 2 seconds and look at the salaries, benefits, and other perks (forcing kids to buy your friend's book, him doing the same with your book) of the professors and administrators, you'll see it's all a joke.
And generally, the more "respected" (i.e., elitist, selective, expensive) a school is the more this holds true.
The actually quality of education of these tech/profession schools is comparable to traditional universities. The only difference is the type of applicants they attract, and thus how dedicated they, individually, are to taking advantage of that education. Traditional universities are stagnant. They fear the job-focused tech schools. They fear the online schools. Decades of increasing course load and requirements for shit unrelated to the degrees students are seeking has resulted in many capable people quitting or skipping college, and the wrong sorts of people sticking with it. The intelligence of college graduates continues to drop. The price of a diploma continues to increase. The usefulness of the diploma rapidly approaches nothing more than a checkbox on a resume. Traditional universities haven't changed much in centuries. Their teaching style and air of self-importance and "tradition" is thousands of years old. When you're teaching art or literature, you can still rely on the pointless Greek-style, name-dropping form of education. Ideas are instilled and indoctrinated, not created. Arguing a point is done in the form of "Famous Dead Guy said...". Actual research is minimal, and follows no scientific rigor. But when you're teaching a result-driven subject (like any sort of engineering-related or programming-related field), you can't go this way. If you're not spending most of your time with hands-on shit, you're not going to produce competitive graduates in those fields. Every time you have a computer science/engineering major take a mandatory art/etc. class, you harm them. They could have used that time to graduate earlier and be less in debt. They could have used that time to take another class in their field. There's supposedly been an outcry of "Engineering students can't write!", or "We need more well-rounded graduates!". I say "supposedly" because I've only ever heard academia refer to it, never an employer, and the typical college graduate is no more literate than your typical high school graduate - the problem is endemic to our entire society now. And yes, we can in part blame the internet, text messaging, and the retard culture that worships and celebrates imbecility, from Paris to Palin to The Situation (be it the Room on CNN or the guido on The Jersey Shore). Either way, the ever-increasing art/writing/history/ethnicity/etc. requirements have done nothing to produce graduates who can write competently, in English or any language, or express themselves, or appreciate art, etc. And the idea of a "well rounded" graduate has just produced job applicants who lack focus (both in education and in drive) in their selected fields. Ultimately, most end up taking a job unrelated to their degree.
When traditional universities see other institutions basically opting out of the rankings and accreditation game, they get antsy. They seek to defame those institutions while secretly being enviou
EFI is a (get this) BIOS! BIOS isn't just 4 capital letters - those letters MEAN something.
EFI is a BIOS. It is not the same BIOS as the one IBM developed and Compaq stole, but it is still a BIOS.
People who talk about (U)EFI only do so because Steve Jobs name dropped in a press conference a couple years ago. The actual useful technical merits of (U)EFI over BIOS are slim.
Preboot shit simply doesn't need 64 bit processing or access to the full memory space. Preboot shit is shit you want to be as minimal as possible.
The changes to how hard disks are handled are good, but the only one that really matters is support for partitions over 2.1 TB. (This has already been hacked around by disk manufacturers though, so even this isn't a big deal.)
The only reason I give a shit about (U)EFI is so I won't have to use a fucking floppy diskette to update firmware on Seagate drives. But this assumes Seagate will actually makes a (U)EFI firmware updater, a version of SeaTools that actually detects the model of drive I bought from them, a firmware worth upgrading to, and a hard drive that doesn't involve "revisions x, y, and z, prior to year 2, with QC sticker color u, are made in China and are just broke, play the RMA lottery until you get one made in taiwan" bullshit.
If they could do all that, they could release a firmware updating tool that worked while booted into Windows / OSX / Maybe even Linux.
Then again, you'd still be fucked if your drives were behind a RAID controller.
How is it unusual that an HP device can connect to your printer? What kind of bizarro universe do you live in where this doesn't happen normally?
What kind of bizarro universe do you live in where this does happen normally? Have you ever installed an HP printer other than the old LaserJets? Today, drivers weigh in at hundreds of MB and take tens of minutes to install on the fastest hardware imaginable, require a reboot, and STILL shit doesn't work right. Except for the "BUY MORE GENUINE HP INK" nag screens.
Please. Let us know when you've moved up from mass-produced stuff to something good, like my Patek Phillipe.
That's a "That's a "Brag post"?" post?
Please. Let us know when you've moved up from "It's got some dude's name on it!" stuff to something that's just as good at orders of magnitude less cost, like my Casio.
Aren't these trades working on a tiny fractional percent profit on each trade though? If so, a 0.01% transaction tax would prevent them, and the guy who sold a million dollars worth of shares for a ten thousand dollar profit would only be paying $10.
You have that backwards. He proposes margins to be taxed at 99.99% if you hold the stock for 1 second. So if you buy a bunch of shit then sell it off instantly, you only keep.01% of the profit.
In your scenario, a $10,000 profit yields $1 of actual profit. (You also did the math wrong.)
Interestingly enough the major banks have now just about repaid the money they borrowed with interest, the federal government even made a $20 Billon profit on that.
We're fucking doomed if there are people who actually believe this shit.
Had to fix a computer 2 days ago that had some sort of shit on it. By the time it was brought to me, it was giving a c000002a1 BSOD when trying to boot. That means winlogon or csrss was failing.
System restore and safe mode didn't do shit. I didn't want to spend hours replacing system files at random via the recovery console. So I just did a repair install on top of the existing install.
Of course, the PC was Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 OEM, and I used a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 disc. So it wouldn't get past the "GIMME CD KEY" step using the serial on the sticker on the PC. Grabbed an OEM disc online (Thepiratebay.org to the rescue again) because the PC came with no disc, and it had the typical DELL dozen extra, proprietarily-fucked partitions for who the fuck knows what, but there was no option to get to a fucking factory restore). Instead of trying another dirty install on the existing partition (preserving the files), I just hooked the drive up to another PC and copied everything to an external, then did a format and clean install.
I noticed when backing up the files to the external drive that they had an inetpub folder. Dunno if it was from some stupid shit they installed, some stupid shit that came bundled, some stupid shit that's part of Media Center Edition, or some fucking malware.
Hey slashdot, I know you got rid of <i>, but at least we have <em>. What the fuck do I use to get some underlines in this bitch? <u> don't work for shit (hurr durr, deprecated for no reason), and I can't exactly CSS up my post, now can I?
The story of the Trojan horse is more than a myth. They thought the whole story was a myth until they found the ruins of the actual city of Troy.
No. The story of the Trojan War itself is a fucking myth. It didn't happen. There may have been a small battle at some shit ass place, but it wasn't some Lord of the Rings style epic that waged for decades, and it wasn't over a single fucking woman. They did not find the ruins of Troy. They found a few bowls and shit and said "Hey! People lived here!". That's the sort of shit that gets on the History Channel now - ANCIENT ALIENS, I FOUND THE CHUPACABRA, SECRETS OF THE DA VINCI CODE, THE SCIENCE OF STAR TREK, BATMAN: BEHIND THE MASK, etc. Fuck off with the bullshit, please.
Trojan War didn't happen as it's said to have happened. Troy didn't exist as it's said to have existed. The story of the Trojan horse is deep indeed in the crockpot of bullshit.
Heat: Data centers should be cool. Everyone wants to do things as cheaply as possible, so they spot cool the racks instead of circulating the air and cooling the entire room. Nothing short of abandoning this practice will remove the "it sucks to be in here" factor. The problem isn't so much that it's 100 degrees, but that it's 100 degrees on one side of the rack and 40 degrees on the other. Spend a bit more on cooling costs and get that to 80/60 or even 90/50 and workers will be much less miserable (and equipment will fail less often!). It doesn't have to be a flat "RUN THE HVAC HARDER" solution either.
Run shit efficiently (spot cooling) 24/7. Something breaks? Whatever alert that triggered the SMS to the on-call employee that tells him to come in and fix it can also trigger the HVAC to do a bit more work to make things more comfortable. Scheduled maintenance is even easier. When work is done, go back to miser mode.
As for noise, the answer is so fucking easy. Larger fans. It boggles my mind to see servers using 80mm, 60mm, and smaller fans for the various components. Cut that shit out. Your 1U and 1/2U and Blade style shit might not have much leeway, but bigger, slower fans are certainly an option on everything 2U and up.
Are they worth it? I have 300 win mag with a gun loudener (muzzle break) and it seems no muffs I own are up to that challenge. I end up wearing plugs and muffs at the same time.
"Holster. Bandoleer. Silencer. Loudener. Speed-cocker. And this thing's for shooting down police helicopters."
Slashdot Mirror
Pirated software is free. There is no way to compete with that at any price. People who are willing to pirate software will, no mater what the software costs.
Megatron must be stopped. No matter the cost.
Everything else does indeed depend on cost. Plenty of pirates actually buy shit on the cheap. The cost of legit purchases it the purchase price. The cost of piracy is the hassle of finding shit, the hassle of getting it to work, the loss of multiplayer features, the risk of being sued, etc. In many cases shit's super easy to pirate and the cost is low compared to going legit. In many cases, the cost is quite high compared to going legit. See Steam. Yes, Steam DRM has been cracked. Yes there are hacked servers for a bunch of games. No, not very many people engage in Steam piracy.
And on 7, you don't even need the R key.
Commands run from the search box by default.
Sleep
Suspend
Standby
Hibernate
Shutdown
Power state naming schemes are retarded.
ON
OFF (with or without a stored memory dump to resume from)
All other states are simply power saving schemes per device. Display, video card, hard disk, speakers (girlfriend's new laptop will turn the speakers off after 10 seconds of silence), some of the CPU, more of the CPU, LAN port, USB ports, whatever.
Wasn't that a quote from the LotRs films?
I think that's just a myth.
No one is going to click the 7 separate links to try to piece together a non-story. If anyone is wondering what this is or why this got posted to slashdot, I've got your answer:
Someone presented something about using computers and shit for education.
Bill Gates likes what the presented.
Someone on the internet cried "OLD! We've been using computers in education, for like, YEARS now!", despite knowing nothing of the differences between what was shown then (utter trash) and what was shown now (mildly decent tools).
theodp submitted a link farm, as usual, to slashdot, and it got approved, as usual. Probably because he threw in some shit about Gates "gushing" over it - read Gates's tweets, he's like this for anything he supports.
theodp is also the submitter behind such recent "greats" as:
Microsoft Patent Deems Comic Books Shameful
Stopping The Horror of 'Reply All'
Nokia Has a Billion Reasons to Love WP7
Dawn of the TED Dead
Microsoft Rewarding Employees Who Phone It In
Do Hobbies Decrease Chances of CS Success?
Is Google Poisoning PDF?
Basically, theodp submits a lot of linkfarm shit, averaging about 5.5 hyperlinks per submission. The "story" is often fud, non-news, or general flamebait/shit-stirring involving hot button topics.
Fiber gives you bandwidth between its endpoints.
The box down the street that the fiber in your house leads to is where the bottleneck is 99% of the time. In that box is a Motorola / Cisco / HP switch.
It is old. It is not up to the task. It will be replaced only when it breaks completely.
If you're lucky enough to have a fresh switch at your first hop, repeat the exercise for every hop until you get to your destination. If you hit your ISPs backboine, you can blame everything after that on some other company.
It has something to do with chains and weakest links. "Bububu web! Routes around damage!" Slow isn't "damaged", and beefy switches that serve hundreds or thousands of connections and are throttled will be chosen for your route every time.
It's been true for almost 10 years. In fact Microsoft's support for DirectX has always been better than what OpenGL had. Microsoft made it easy to use with all their programming tools and languages and had a great documentation. The API was always cleaner too. There were tons of books written for DirectX. This is the area Microsoft handles extremely well - their Visual Studio development environment is the best IDE on the market and they create great tools for developers. Their mobile development tools kick Apple's and Google's (C#, Visual Studio and Silverlight against Java...).
It would be nice to see open source community wake up and start developing a competitor, as just now Microsoft is the driving force that innovates new technologies for PC and Xbox360 graphics and gaming. But for once it looks like the fact they're the only one doing so isn't slowing them down - they do a good job.
We know who you are!
We have you surrounded!
Step away from the chair and come out with your hands up.
. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used
No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.
OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.
The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.
Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.
To suggest that end users should FIGHT for something INFERIOR just because it aligns with YOUR personal beliefs and Chicken-Little "the royalties are coming!" bullshit is absurd. The bottom line is that BROWSERS should not be decoding this shit themselves. A browser should merely connect to available codecs on the system. MS realizes this, and MS realizes that customers want something that works. So MS made the h.264 plugin for FF. Apple realizes that customers want something that works. So Apple, controlling the browser 99.9% of their customers use, made sure their browser could handle h.264. Whether or not Safari uses codecs on OSX/iOS or whether it comes with its own is irrelevant, since they control both except for the 2 people who actually use Safari on Windows. Opera supports h.264 when the system it's on supports it in an easy-to-access manner. Mobile devices with hardware h.264 decoding? Opera is able and willing to handle that, even though they still cry out for "open" codecs. Once again, Opera is the best choice.
So the hold outs are FireFox and Chrome. The vast majority of FireFox's waning user base won't give a shit because MS fixed the problem for them. Mozilla is holding out on principle. That's fine, but if they don't see that their stance is going to result in users dropping them in favor of other browsers, they're stupid.
Google is holding out because they don't want to buy into the MPEG-LA group. They could easily afford it financially, but they can NOT afford the hit to their public image, especially after taking such a vocal stance about "openness". In the end, someone will write an add-on for Chrome to do the same damned thing as Firefox. There will be an "app" for h.264 decoding on Android (released by Google, released by Google posing as someone else, or released by someone else) in the same fashion there is Flash on the web. This functionality could be bundled into an update for the Youtube "app", allowing the browser to easily tap into it, since most people still dissociate Google from Youtube and will be less likely to call them out on the flip-flop.
The end result will be OSStards screaming about h.264, and posting weekly FUD articles about impending royalty fees (which no end user will ever have to care about). They'll bitch and moan but they'll secretly install the plugin/app that makes shit work for them. All of 17 holdouts will actually browse the web in a manner that results in them unable to play h.264 content.
Bad UI design means it happens whether the excuse is "really crappy" or not. People who think as you do, just haven't yet been burned badly by bad UIs. When it happens to you, you'll get clued in fast as to why "Pay attention to what you do" is really crappy UI design.
Unless the UI is functionally broken, or shortcuts change with no notice, you have no excuse.
Pay attention to what you're doing. This goes for sending emails, using guns, driving cars, etc.
But your Honor! The gas pedal is RIGHT NEXT to the brake! I was coming home after working for 12+ hours! That's a FLAWED DESIGN!!
If you fuck up, it's on you. The whole "I CAN'T be wrong! It's everything else!" mentality is horseshit. This line of "thinking" is what got people to claim that 1 KB should mean 1000 B, and that using 1024 was somehow "wrong". No, shitface, if you're not paying attention to WHAT YOU'RE DOING (dealing with binary data), then it's your fault. KB has always meant 1024 B, and it always will. And there's a damned good reason for it (bits are logical units we count, not measure, and we care about the possible permutations of a certain number of bits for storage and bus width, thus, we use a base 2 exponential).
K is not a magical, sacred symbol. Neither is M. (Does it mean meters? Minutes? A mass constant? Millions? Thousandths?). Even if it was a sacred symbol, and even if we excused the ambiguity the sacred symbol already has, and even if SI had some sort of jurisdiction, the symbol in question is not K, it is KB. The B is either right fucking next to it, or known from context.
I guarantee some electrical engineer DONE FUCKED UP one day, and then, instead of admitting that he doesn't know shit about computers, was lazy, wasn't paying attention, etc., he went for the easy "But K means 1000! It's the LAW!!" horse shit. The hard drive marketers know KB = 1024 B. They just chose to lie.
Bottom line: Pay attention. Own up to your mistakes. Ignorance is not an excuse, and neither is laziness, forgetfulness, etc. While UIs can and should be improved, and tailored to specific users' preferences, operating the UI incorrectly will always be user error. A functionally broken UI (pressing one button, getting a different result) is not user error, but it is NOT what we are talking about.
Then my next missile will be a 100KiloTon yield. Jam away at 1000 watts, I'll be close enough to vaporize you.
Remember the answer to a technical foe is by being crude. They have a lot of tech to make your missile miss the target, make the missile big enough to include the target even at the widest miss.
Classic bully vs nerd scenario.
In the end, the bully wins by punching you in the face and not giving a shit about the repercussions.
Deal with it.
I want the next gen jammer with built in EMP, cell phone jammer, Universal tv/stereo remote and beer opener.
Make it the Acme and not the Apple. The I-jam will have a per use fee and not work on I-phones.
But will it open my garage door?
Also, do you have an X-10 compatible version? Or do I have to go back to 1990 when people knew what that was?
This is not the flagship.
This is the super aircraft carrier.
The flagship is the one the defines the generation.
The flagship is almost always the one that is launched first.
The AMD flagship for this generation is the 6970.
The 6990 is simply two of them on a single PCB.
"For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates"
What do you think every single school is?
Academia isn't some magical, pure, honest, well-intentioned society of ivory tower egg heads. Academia is all too often a heavily politicized, dysfunctional, counter-productive institution centered around cronyism, plagiarism (on the part of those teaching and directing), indoctrination, money-grubbing, and all-around bullshit. Any education of students or advancement of a field that takes place in ancillary.
The legal status of these institutions may be "not for profit", but if you take 2 seconds and look at the salaries, benefits, and other perks (forcing kids to buy your friend's book, him doing the same with your book) of the professors and administrators, you'll see it's all a joke.
And generally, the more "respected" (i.e., elitist, selective, expensive) a school is the more this holds true.
The actually quality of education of these tech/profession schools is comparable to traditional universities. The only difference is the type of applicants they attract, and thus how dedicated they, individually, are to taking advantage of that education. ...". Actual research is minimal, and follows no scientific rigor. But when you're teaching a result-driven subject (like any sort of engineering-related or programming-related field), you can't go this way. If you're not spending most of your time with hands-on shit, you're not going to produce competitive graduates in those fields. Every time you have a computer science/engineering major take a mandatory art/etc. class, you harm them. They could have used that time to graduate earlier and be less in debt. They could have used that time to take another class in their field. There's supposedly been an outcry of "Engineering students can't write!", or "We need more well-rounded graduates!". I say "supposedly" because I've only ever heard academia refer to it, never an employer, and the typical college graduate is no more literate than your typical high school graduate - the problem is endemic to our entire society now. And yes, we can in part blame the internet, text messaging, and the retard culture that worships and celebrates imbecility, from Paris to Palin to The Situation (be it the Room on CNN or the guido on The Jersey Shore).
Traditional universities are stagnant. They fear the job-focused tech schools. They fear the online schools. Decades of increasing course load and requirements for shit unrelated to the degrees students are seeking has resulted in many capable people quitting or skipping college, and the wrong sorts of people sticking with it. The intelligence of college graduates continues to drop. The price of a diploma continues to increase. The usefulness of the diploma rapidly approaches nothing more than a checkbox on a resume.
Traditional universities haven't changed much in centuries. Their teaching style and air of self-importance and "tradition" is thousands of years old. When you're teaching art or literature, you can still rely on the pointless Greek-style, name-dropping form of education. Ideas are instilled and indoctrinated, not created. Arguing a point is done in the form of "Famous Dead Guy said
Either way, the ever-increasing art/writing/history/ethnicity/etc. requirements have done nothing to produce graduates who can write competently, in English or any language, or express themselves, or appreciate art, etc. And the idea of a "well rounded" graduate has just produced job applicants who lack focus (both in education and in drive) in their selected fields. Ultimately, most end up taking a job unrelated to their degree.
When traditional universities see other institutions basically opting out of the rankings and accreditation game, they get antsy. They seek to defame those institutions while secretly being enviou
Why are we comparing a robot cheetah's speed to a human's speed?
Is it faster than a real cheetah?
EFI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface
EFI is a (get this) BIOS!
BIOS isn't just 4 capital letters - those letters MEAN something.
EFI is a BIOS.
It is not the same BIOS as the one IBM developed and Compaq stole, but it is still a BIOS.
People who talk about (U)EFI only do so because Steve Jobs name dropped in a press conference a couple years ago.
The actual useful technical merits of (U)EFI over BIOS are slim.
Preboot shit simply doesn't need 64 bit processing or access to the full memory space.
Preboot shit is shit you want to be as minimal as possible.
The changes to how hard disks are handled are good, but the only one that really matters is support for partitions over 2.1 TB. (This has already been hacked around by disk manufacturers though, so even this isn't a big deal.)
The only reason I give a shit about (U)EFI is so I won't have to use a fucking floppy diskette to update firmware on Seagate drives.
But this assumes Seagate will actually makes a (U)EFI firmware updater, a version of SeaTools that actually detects the model of drive I bought from them, a firmware worth upgrading to, and a hard drive that doesn't involve "revisions x, y, and z, prior to year 2, with QC sticker color u, are made in China and are just broke, play the RMA lottery until you get one made in taiwan" bullshit.
If they could do all that, they could release a firmware updating tool that worked while booted into Windows / OSX / Maybe even Linux.
Then again, you'd still be fucked if your drives were behind a RAID controller.
How is it unusual that an HP device can connect to your printer? What kind of bizarro universe do you live in where this doesn't happen normally?
What kind of bizarro universe do you live in where this does happen normally?
Have you ever installed an HP printer other than the old LaserJets? Today, drivers weigh in at hundreds of MB and take tens of minutes to install on the fastest hardware imaginable, require a reboot, and STILL shit doesn't work right. Except for the "BUY MORE GENUINE HP INK" nag screens.
I still prefer my Rolex.
That's a "Brag post"?
Please. Let us know when you've moved up from mass-produced stuff to something good, like my Patek Phillipe.
That's a "That's a "Brag post"?" post?
Please. Let us know when you've moved up from "It's got some dude's name on it!" stuff to something that's just as good at orders of magnitude less cost, like my Casio.
Aren't these trades working on a tiny fractional percent profit on each trade though? If so, a 0.01% transaction tax would prevent them, and the guy who sold a million dollars worth of shares for a ten thousand dollar profit would only be paying $10.
You have that backwards. .01% of the profit.
He proposes margins to be taxed at 99.99% if you hold the stock for 1 second.
So if you buy a bunch of shit then sell it off instantly, you only keep
In your scenario, a $10,000 profit yields $1 of actual profit.
(You also did the math wrong.)
Interestingly enough the major banks have now just about repaid the money they borrowed with interest, the federal government even made a $20 Billon profit on that.
We're fucking doomed if there are people who actually believe this shit.
Lean against the wrong wall for a minute, get cancer.
USA
Had to fix a computer 2 days ago that had some sort of shit on it.
By the time it was brought to me, it was giving a c000002a1 BSOD when trying to boot.
That means winlogon or csrss was failing.
System restore and safe mode didn't do shit.
I didn't want to spend hours replacing system files at random via the recovery console.
So I just did a repair install on top of the existing install.
Of course, the PC was Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 OEM , and I used a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 disc. So it wouldn't get past the "GIMME CD KEY" step using the serial on the sticker on the PC. Grabbed an OEM disc online (Thepiratebay.org to the rescue again) because the PC came with no disc, and it had the typical DELL dozen extra, proprietarily-fucked partitions for who the fuck knows what, but there was no option to get to a fucking factory restore). Instead of trying another dirty install on the existing partition (preserving the files), I just hooked the drive up to another PC and copied everything to an external, then did a format and clean install.
I noticed when backing up the files to the external drive that they had an inetpub folder. Dunno if it was from some stupid shit they installed, some stupid shit that came bundled, some stupid shit that's part of Media Center Edition, or some fucking malware.
Hey slashdot, I know you got rid of <i>, but at least we have <em>. What the fuck do I use to get some underlines in this bitch? <u> don't work for shit (hurr durr, deprecated for no reason), and I can't exactly CSS up my post, now can I?
The story of the Trojan horse is more than a myth. They thought the whole story was a myth until they found the ruins of the actual city of Troy.
No.
The story of the Trojan War itself is a fucking myth.
It didn't happen. There may have been a small battle at some shit ass place, but it wasn't some Lord of the Rings style epic that waged for decades, and it wasn't over a single fucking woman. They did not find the ruins of Troy. They found a few bowls and shit and said "Hey! People lived here!". That's the sort of shit that gets on the History Channel now - ANCIENT ALIENS, I FOUND THE CHUPACABRA, SECRETS OF THE DA VINCI CODE, THE SCIENCE OF STAR TREK, BATMAN: BEHIND THE MASK, etc. Fuck off with the bullshit, please.
Trojan War didn't happen as it's said to have happened.
Troy didn't exist as it's said to have existed.
The story of the Trojan horse is deep indeed in the crockpot of bullshit.
I know my personal record is fixing someone's computer only to find it had over 16,000 difference pieces of malware on it
Tracking cookies don't count, damn it.
Heat: Data centers should be cool. Everyone wants to do things as cheaply as possible, so they spot cool the racks instead of circulating the air and cooling the entire room. Nothing short of abandoning this practice will remove the "it sucks to be in here" factor. The problem isn't so much that it's 100 degrees, but that it's 100 degrees on one side of the rack and 40 degrees on the other. Spend a bit more on cooling costs and get that to 80/60 or even 90/50 and workers will be much less miserable (and equipment will fail less often!). It doesn't have to be a flat "RUN THE HVAC HARDER" solution either.
Run shit efficiently (spot cooling) 24/7.
Something breaks? Whatever alert that triggered the SMS to the on-call employee that tells him to come in and fix it can also trigger the HVAC to do a bit more work to make things more comfortable. Scheduled maintenance is even easier. When work is done, go back to miser mode.
As for noise, the answer is so fucking easy. Larger fans. It boggles my mind to see servers using 80mm, 60mm, and smaller fans for the various components.
Cut that shit out. Your 1U and 1/2U and Blade style shit might not have much leeway, but bigger, slower fans are certainly an option on everything 2U and up.
But as long as cost is king, nothing will change.
Are they worth it?
I have 300 win mag with a gun loudener (muzzle break) and it seems no muffs I own are up to that challenge. I end up wearing plugs and muffs at the same time.
"Holster. Bandoleer. Silencer. Loudener. Speed-cocker. And this thing's for shooting down police helicopters."