I fail to see why the datacenter is "consuming" water instead of just "using" it. If they develop standards for the cooling system and have the incoming water passively cool internally filtered water, they should be able to pump the hot water out and back into the water system.
Does it surprise anybody that the labels would not drop prices when not forced to? There is no competition between different labels to sell the same product (song) so why would they drop the price on a desired product (song) ?
Oh, but there sure is competition. Among others, from ThePirateBay and similar sites.
It's a battle for convenience. Sure, I'm willing to pay a couple dimes per song if it means I can just mash button and have a nice quality album, including artwork etc. However, if I'm going to pay basically the same ballkpark amount as I would pay for the physical CD, I'll just turn to ThePirateBay for the music and google images for the album artwork. Then, if I like the music, I will buy the physical CD so I can also play it on my HiFi stereo equipment (instead of iPod or crappy computer speakers).
My experience with memtest is you can trust the results if it says the memory is bad, however if the memory passed it could still be bad.
I wonder how strongly RAM stability depends on power fluctuations. While you're testing memory using Memtest, the GPU is not used at all, for example. When playing a game and/or running some heavy compile-jobs, on the other hand, overall power usage will be much higher. I wonder if this may reflect on RAM stability, especially if the power supply is not really up to par?
If so, you might never find out about such a problem by using (only) memtest.
Probably write an ode to the mighty Blue Whale, accompanied by interpretive dancers and a musical stage play.
From your comment I'm guessing that you are aware that such a thing already exists? If not, it's even funnier.
Search for Björk - Bachelorette (Alec Empire "The Ice Princess And The Killer Whale" remix)
This, I must say, is about the strangest combination of noise/music that I have ever enjoyed. Also, don't ever play this if you want to keep a good relationship with your neighbours. Holy shit, like.
Exactly. What is important is not the fact that I'm sitting in front of the TV (as in, the device), the important thing is that when I do, 90% of the time it's switched to the "PC" input to which my Mac Mini is attached, which comes with a remote control, can automatically download TV series using RSS feeds, can play movies, music etc..
So TV as in "the device in your living room" may not be dead, but TV as in "the simultaneous broadcasting of a more or less fixed set of channels and programs, the same for everyone" basically already is.
In Europe it's probably even worse than in the US, because:
1. Already seen it (from torrent when it was aired in the US) 2. Already seen it (from torrent when the movie was released in the US) 3. Intentionally haven't seen it, because it's crap 4. Local "news" broadcasts, which don't cover 10% of what you already read on the internet the day before, and are typically very biased in their choice of subjects that actually make "the news". 5. Commercial breaks, ughhhhhhhhhh (although I'm told this is even worse in the US, I can barely imagine it getting much "worse" than where I live).
But then, speaking of unverified claims from unqualified sources, I'm a computer scientist and probably learned that on NGC or Discovery channel of all places. In any case I googled around a bit and it appeared to be true.
Apparently rats do try to eat whatever equivalents of activated charcoal they can find to neutralize poisons, but apart from that there's not much they can do.
When they come across a foreign substance (a seed, a fruit, a piece of garbage, a nice shiny cable), they'll try a few bites of it. if it makes them sick, they throw it up and remember not to eat it again- apparently they have very good memory.
The first part is probably true, the second part isn't, AFAIK: rats can't throw up. It is physically impossible for them. This is also why they have such a very good memory for what they can and can't eat, and only try a small amount the first time. If they get sick they just have to wait it out basically, and hope they survive. This is why surviving rats learn very well to be careful, and remember insanely well what made them sick.
This is probably why you have to use bio-accumulative poisons to kill rats, I suppose. (And even then they might still learn because they recognize the smell on other dead rats!)
or drag it into the "fonts" folder in the "Windows Directory"??
You can't see the "Windows Directory" because it's hidden (system directory).
You can't unhide the "Windows Directory" because there is no menu bar visible in Explorer.
You need the menu bar to get to the options menu where you could unhide the windows Directory.
Note that I am assuming you know the latter, even though there is no logical basis to expect it should work that way. So basically, without a lot of prior knowledge, there is no such thing as "simply" dragging anything into the "Windows directory".
I guess this must be some new interpretation of the term "intuitive user interface" of which I was previously unaware.
Yeah, the problem being that Vista is installed on it.
As he said, it used to work perfectly fine with Windows XP. Oh sure, so since Vista breaks it, it must obviously be my expensive high-end sound card that is the problem and needs to be replaced. Sure thing, I'll be right at it.
Am I the only one that's more turned off by the Vista UI than the shitload of crap under the hood? I find tasks I can do simply and quickly, and with a fair amount of transparency with the "classic" UI, to be made highly opaque by the Vista (for lack of a better word) UI and involving much more effort, often MORE clicking, MORE bullshitting around
You're not alone. For me, Explorer and the Control Panel especially have been an exercise in frustation especially. For example, I downloaded some text file, which somehow got stored as an MP3 file (!?), I assume due to some incorrect web server setting. Not wanting to change the application to handle MP3's to notepad, I tried to (duh..) simply change the file extension. Simple. Ahahahahah. Of course, Explorer still hides file extensions, for which there has been a setting since Windows 98 or earlier to revert this stupid behavior.
Except now, good luck finding it! After 10 minutes of googling around, I finally figured out that I had to first enable the menu bar through one of the convoluted ribbon-like setting menu's, and then I could finally reach the exact same not very conveniently designed settings dialog that has been present in Explorer since windows 98.
A similar story for Control Panel: if you want to look at a study in convoluted inconsistent UI design, it is a nice start. Sometimes there is a button to go back "home" to the control panel main screen. Then sometimes there isn't. There is however a back button, but it behaves as in your browser, not in the sense of 'navigate up to previous menu'. In fact it appears there is often no way to do so.
The Aero theme is visually overwhelming, and I don't mean that in a good sense. There are so many controls, combined with so many distracting visual elements that are of no apparent use, that having to use this daily would quickly drive me mad.
Suppose instead of this being Zune's firmware it was a microwave you bought 5 years ago. Would you have any claim to have it fixed (out of warranty, etc).
In the case of a microwave or similar household appliance (dish washer, washing machine, fridge etc.), if it breaks within only 5 years or even less from mechanical failure I'd never buy that brand again. If it breaks due to what is obviously a (software) design flaw that the manufacturer subsequently refuses to address (at their cost), same story.
Such stuff should be designed to last 10 years or more given normal usage. If it is designed to break in less than 5 years I ain't buying that shit.
I was going to post this. I know that my fridge, while it is running, consumes 150W, my laptop 25W, ADSL modem (if internet would even work in such a situation) 5W, some lights, say 100W, total less than 300W, and allowing for a power factor of 0.5 this will easily run on a 650VA generator.
Now, I don't live in a place where such snow storms etc. are common or that disrupting, so I can imagine wanting to run dish washer, washing machine etc. off a generator. In that case, a 3500W should easily suffice, as long as you don't try to run everything at the same time.
Oh yeah, we cook using natural gas, so I see how an electrical stove would change matters. My suggestion would be to stock up on some good portable propane burners, with some gasoline-fueled ones (outdoor use only!) as backup in case things go really bad?
The main thing is that Dell now sell most of their hardware at a spec that will run Vista acceptably, as long as you make sure you spec 1 or 2GB ram, and the memory upgrade is only slightly more than the XP cross-grade.
Seriously, 1 GB RAM. Have you actually tried to use Vista with 1 GB RAM? Because I have seen it run on a *rather new* Dell Vostro, 1 GB RAM otherwise pretty standard specs (I'm guessing one of the cheaper models), it came with Vista installed.
So, I have never *ever*, at all, seen the hard-disk light go off on that thing, unless for small fractions of a second or when the system was powered down. This is even true when you literally have not touched the machine for 20+ minutes. The battery life of that *new* system is about 50 minutes. No doubt it came with a cheap (4 cell probably) battery, but still, I mean, seriously. This is how Dell delivers these systems. No doubt it still had superfluous virus scanners and who knows what other crap installed. I didn't bother checking; I refused to further touch the thing after trying to use it for about 5 minutes. Even starting Notepad took like 4-5 seconds on that thing. Paint even longer.
I recently saw Vista run on a newly bought 2 GB RAM Lenovo laptop. Admittedly it ran better, but booting it still takes pretty much forever, and the harddisk just doesn't stop rattling.
There is a reason why people are willing to pay extra for the XP downgrade. Luckily, the Lenovo bussiness laptop come with the XP downgrade included by default (!)
Sure, bio-diesel is great, but what difference does that make to people running cars dependent on refined gasoline?
Until either carmakers start to manufacture vehicles that can accept something other than regular gasoline (petrol)
Uhm, they do?
Except in America, apparently. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, diesel-powered engines are very common, I think in Europe about 1/3rd of new cars sold run on diesel and will accept this bio-diesel without any engine modifications. For trucks (again in Europe), virtually 100% of them run on diesel and it has been this way forever, since diesel engines have high torque at low RPM and are therefore especially suitable to towing heavy loads.
UDP does not guarantee delivery. If ISP's want to, they can simply start dropping UDP packets once the total amount exceeds a certain threshold. This should be almost trivial to implement.
Sure, just blindly dropping all types of UDP packets will also degrade VoIP services etc, but certainly this does not need to impact "the entire speed of the internet".
Since VoIP and other "normal" uses of UDP do not need terribly high bandwidth, the problem can be easily solved by imposing a maximum UDP throughput per IP and simply dropping any UDP packets past that limit. That way, VoIP will still work just fine but other services "abusing" UDP will just be effectively capped by the unguaranteed delivery.
I'd love to see lawsuits about this as well, as UDP does not guarantee delivery so you would hardly have a basis to complain when ISP's drop such packets, especially as long as they deliver *most*, but not necessarily all such packets.
Come on editors, using undefined acronyms in the body of an article is bad enough writing as it is, but using them in headlines is a new low (even for Slashdot).
What are people smoking to believe that it takes 15-30 minutes to boot up a computer?
Logging in to a Windows NT domain (ugh) while having more than a trivial amount of data in your profile (My Documents, Desktop etc.)
Since Windows uses this simply *brilliant* setup of comparing your local filesystem with the remote profile one file at a time in the most convoluted way imaginable, and using the slowest networking filesystem known to man, this can indeed easily take 10-15 minutes. Especially if you try to login at the same time as many others (e.g., around 9:00), which obviously does not speed up fileserver performance in any case...
I work at a university and if I would log in to the Windows domain like I'm sortof supposed to, my laptop *easily* spends 10-15 minutes before I even see the Windows desktop. I wish I where joking, too...and my profile is not even very large (not that this should matter, the entire concept is thoroughly retarded).
By the way, in case there are any updates to be installed (yes this happens at startup) of course it takes even longer.
Exactly. Most contracted on-site technicians charge a Minimum rate for even the smallest jobs. The place we go through charges $150 per hour with a half hour minimum charge even if the fix only takes 5 minutes.
Obviously. I mean, perhaps you'd like to be called just so you can drive over to wherever the company is located (probably taking 30 minutes at least round trip), fix the thing in 5 minutes, and send a bill for $10, but personally I'd rather spend my time more efficiently.
I would be fine with the company gathering small tasks so I can do them all at once, at least it gives you the sense that you're accomplishing something useful.
Yeah, sure. And when their PBX goes down because of some obscure network issue, they are now out of communication for two hours while the "IT Guy" shows up. Or when the boss's hard drive stuffs up and he is now out of commission for two hours waiting for "the IT guy" to roll in from whatever previous appointment he may have been.
For most small companies, this kind of occurrence is not the end of the world though. If you had a small company (say 5-10 employees), would you rather pay $500 or so per month to get this kind of "we-call-you, you-fix-it" service, or pay a full-time sysadmin, which I'm guessing would probably be about an order of magnitude more expensive?
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The answer is spelled "legionella".
Oh, but there sure is competition. Among others, from ThePirateBay and similar sites.
It's a battle for convenience. Sure, I'm willing to pay a couple dimes per song if it means I can just mash button and have a nice quality album, including artwork etc. However, if I'm going to pay basically the same ballkpark amount as I would pay for the physical CD, I'll just turn to ThePirateBay for the music and google images for the album artwork. Then, if I like the music, I will buy the physical CD so I can also play it on my HiFi stereo equipment (instead of iPod or crappy computer speakers).
I wonder how strongly RAM stability depends on power fluctuations. While you're testing memory using Memtest, the GPU is not used at all, for example. When playing a game and/or running some heavy compile-jobs, on the other hand, overall power usage will be much higher. I wonder if this may reflect on RAM stability, especially if the power supply is not really up to par?
If so, you might never find out about such a problem by using (only) memtest.
I had not, thanks for suggesting it.
From your comment I'm guessing that you are aware that such a thing already exists? If not, it's even funnier.
Search for Björk - Bachelorette (Alec Empire "The Ice Princess And The Killer Whale" remix)
This, I must say, is about the strangest combination of noise/music that I have ever enjoyed. Also, don't ever play this if you want to keep a good relationship with your neighbours. Holy shit, like.
Exactly. What is important is not the fact that I'm sitting in front of the TV (as in, the device), the important thing is that when I do, 90% of the time it's switched to the "PC" input to which my Mac Mini is attached, which comes with a remote control, can automatically download TV series using RSS feeds, can play movies, music etc..
So TV as in "the device in your living room" may not be dead, but TV as in "the simultaneous broadcasting of a more or less fixed set of channels and programs, the same for everyone" basically already is.
In Europe it's probably even worse than in the US, because:
1. Already seen it (from torrent when it was aired in the US)
2. Already seen it (from torrent when the movie was released in the US)
3. Intentionally haven't seen it, because it's crap
4. Local "news" broadcasts, which don't cover 10% of what you already read on the internet the day before, and are typically very biased in their choice of subjects that actually make "the news".
5. Commercial breaks, ughhhhhhhhhh (although I'm told this is even worse in the US, I can barely imagine it getting much "worse" than where I live).
Exactly. "2012 will be the year of the Android Deskto^H^H^H^H^H^HCellphone".
That said, I do hope so, but at this point it's not much more than "hope".
What, they removed the layers upon layers of DRM-related cruft then?
But then, speaking of unverified claims from unqualified sources, I'm a computer scientist and probably learned that on NGC or Discovery channel of all places. In any case I googled around a bit and it appeared to be true.
Apparently rats do try to eat whatever equivalents of activated charcoal they can find to neutralize poisons, but apart from that there's not much they can do.
The first part is probably true, the second part isn't, AFAIK: rats can't throw up. It is physically impossible for them. This is also why they have such a very good memory for what they can and can't eat, and only try a small amount the first time. If they get sick they just have to wait it out basically, and hope they survive. This is why surviving rats learn very well to be careful, and remember insanely well what made them sick.
This is probably why you have to use bio-accumulative poisons to kill rats, I suppose. (And even then they might still learn because they recognize the smell on other dead rats!)
Really. That is like suggesting Windows users should just use regedit, instead of bitching and moaning.
Not literally, hmmmmmm? Hmmmmmmm.
*looks about conspicuously*
*sips coffee*
You can't see the "Windows Directory" because it's hidden (system directory).
You can't unhide the "Windows Directory" because there is no menu bar visible in Explorer.
You need the menu bar to get to the options menu where you could unhide the windows Directory.
Note that I am assuming you know the latter, even though there is no logical basis to expect it should work that way. So basically, without a lot of prior knowledge, there is no such thing as "simply" dragging anything into the "Windows directory".
I guess this must be some new interpretation of the term "intuitive user interface" of which I was previously unaware.
Yeah, the problem being that Vista is installed on it.
As he said, it used to work perfectly fine with Windows XP. Oh sure, so since Vista breaks it, it must obviously be my expensive high-end sound card that is the problem and needs to be replaced. Sure thing, I'll be right at it.
You're not alone. For me, Explorer and the Control Panel especially have been an exercise in frustation especially. For example, I downloaded some text file, which somehow got stored as an MP3 file (!?), I assume due to some incorrect web server setting. Not wanting to change the application to handle MP3's to notepad, I tried to (duh..) simply change the file extension. Simple. Ahahahahah. Of course, Explorer still hides file extensions, for which there has been a setting since Windows 98 or earlier to revert this stupid behavior.
Except now, good luck finding it! After 10 minutes of googling around, I finally figured out that I had to first enable the menu bar through one of the convoluted ribbon-like setting menu's, and then I could finally reach the exact same not very conveniently designed settings dialog that has been present in Explorer since windows 98.
A similar story for Control Panel: if you want to look at a study in convoluted inconsistent UI design, it is a nice start. Sometimes there is a button to go back "home" to the control panel main screen. Then sometimes there isn't. There is however a back button, but it behaves as in your browser, not in the sense of 'navigate up to previous menu'. In fact it appears there is often no way to do so.
The Aero theme is visually overwhelming, and I don't mean that in a good sense. There are so many controls, combined with so many distracting visual elements that are of no apparent use, that having to use this daily would quickly drive me mad.
In the case of a microwave or similar household appliance (dish washer, washing machine, fridge etc.), if it breaks within only 5 years or even less from mechanical failure I'd never buy that brand again. If it breaks due to what is obviously a (software) design flaw that the manufacturer subsequently refuses to address (at their cost), same story.
Such stuff should be designed to last 10 years or more given normal usage. If it is designed to break in less than 5 years I ain't buying that shit.
I was going to post this. I know that my fridge, while it is running, consumes 150W, my laptop 25W, ADSL modem (if internet would even work in such a situation) 5W, some lights, say 100W, total less than 300W, and allowing for a power factor of 0.5 this will easily run on a 650VA generator.
Now, I don't live in a place where such snow storms etc. are common or that disrupting, so I can imagine wanting to run dish washer, washing machine etc. off a generator. In that case, a 3500W should easily suffice, as long as you don't try to run everything at the same time.
Oh yeah, we cook using natural gas, so I see how an electrical stove would change matters. My suggestion would be to stock up on some good portable propane burners, with some gasoline-fueled ones (outdoor use only!) as backup in case things go really bad?
...right up until you meet a thief smart enough to simply pull the plug first.
Seriously, 1 GB RAM. Have you actually tried to use Vista with 1 GB RAM? Because I have seen it run on a *rather new* Dell Vostro, 1 GB RAM otherwise pretty standard specs (I'm guessing one of the cheaper models), it came with Vista installed.
So, I have never *ever*, at all, seen the hard-disk light go off on that thing, unless for small fractions of a second or when the system was powered down. This is even true when you literally have not touched the machine for 20+ minutes. The battery life of that *new* system is about 50 minutes. No doubt it came with a cheap (4 cell probably) battery, but still, I mean, seriously. This is how Dell delivers these systems. No doubt it still had superfluous virus scanners and who knows what other crap installed. I didn't bother checking; I refused to further touch the thing after trying to use it for about 5 minutes. Even starting Notepad took like 4-5 seconds on that thing. Paint even longer.
I recently saw Vista run on a newly bought 2 GB RAM Lenovo laptop. Admittedly it ran better, but booting it still takes pretty much forever, and the harddisk just doesn't stop rattling.
There is a reason why people are willing to pay extra for the XP downgrade. Luckily, the Lenovo bussiness laptop come with the XP downgrade included by default (!)
Uhm, they do?
Except in America, apparently. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, diesel-powered engines are very common, I think in Europe about 1/3rd of new cars sold run on diesel and will accept this bio-diesel without any engine modifications. For trucks (again in Europe), virtually 100% of them run on diesel and it has been this way forever, since diesel engines have high torque at low RPM and are therefore especially suitable to towing heavy loads.
UDP does not guarantee delivery. If ISP's want to, they can simply start dropping UDP packets once the total amount exceeds a certain threshold. This should be almost trivial to implement.
Sure, just blindly dropping all types of UDP packets will also degrade VoIP services etc, but certainly this does not need to impact "the entire speed of the internet".
Since VoIP and other "normal" uses of UDP do not need terribly high bandwidth, the problem can be easily solved by imposing a maximum UDP throughput per IP and simply dropping any UDP packets past that limit. That way, VoIP will still work just fine but other services "abusing" UDP will just be effectively capped by the unguaranteed delivery.
I'd love to see lawsuits about this as well, as UDP does not guarantee delivery so you would hardly have a basis to complain when ISP's drop such packets, especially as long as they deliver *most*, but not necessarily all such packets.
What's an EVA?
Come on editors, using undefined acronyms in the body of an article is bad enough writing as it is, but using them in headlines is a new low (even for Slashdot).
Logging in to a Windows NT domain (ugh) while having more than a trivial amount of data in your profile (My Documents, Desktop etc.)
Since Windows uses this simply *brilliant* setup of comparing your local filesystem with the remote profile one file at a time in the most convoluted way imaginable, and using the slowest networking filesystem known to man, this can indeed easily take 10-15 minutes. Especially if you try to login at the same time as many others (e.g., around 9:00), which obviously does not speed up fileserver performance in any case...
I work at a university and if I would log in to the Windows domain like I'm sortof supposed to, my laptop *easily* spends 10-15 minutes before I even see the Windows desktop. I wish I where joking, too...and my profile is not even very large (not that this should matter, the entire concept is thoroughly retarded).
By the way, in case there are any updates to be installed (yes this happens at startup) of course it takes even longer.
Obviously. I mean, perhaps you'd like to be called just so you can drive over to wherever the company is located (probably taking 30 minutes at least round trip), fix the thing in 5 minutes, and send a bill for $10, but personally I'd rather spend my time more efficiently.
I would be fine with the company gathering small tasks so I can do them all at once, at least it gives you the sense that you're accomplishing something useful.
For most small companies, this kind of occurrence is not the end of the world though. If you had a small company (say 5-10 employees), would you rather pay $500 or so per month to get this kind of "we-call-you, you-fix-it" service, or pay a full-time sysadmin, which I'm guessing would probably be about an order of magnitude more expensive?