Yeah, they even did it the right way, putting the 64-bit system into C:\Windows\system32, and the 32-bit equivalents into C:\Windows\SysWOW64.
There's a 64-bit registry and a 32-bit one, and all sorts of 'reflected' paths in the file system.
The 64-bit transition at Microsoft is a total disaster under the hood, they made every compromise, reasonable and unreasonable, to save backward compatibility, and it still wasn't good, so they released XP Mode: an entire VM of their previous OS.
What they should have done is clean stuff up for 64-bit, switched over to an Apple-like 'application bundles' way to distribute binaries (that would allow for x86, x64, and other architectures to run the same 'binary'), and run legacy binaries in a sandbox XP VM, like Apple's Classic.
I know I sound like a fanboy, but Apple's been through 68K to PPC, Classic to OS X, PPC to x86, and x86 to x64 without breaking much or making insane compromises. Microsoft should have taken a lesson from that and said 'it's OK to break old apps on our new system, because we have a built-in fallback runtime for them.', instead they hacked together a beast that will plague us for decades, then had to deliver the fallback anyways.
Linux does a good job of 64-bit too, I know that when I use a 32-bit binary on my x64 Linux box, I don't see a different '/etc' than I do from my 64-bit binary.
The PST format requires a lot of small direct I/O, and when you mount one over CIFS/SMB you run the serious chance of filling up the queues on the client or even the server. I've brought down a fully-loaded and patched Server 2003 box with a PST -> PST transfer over the wire, and by 'down' I mean really down, not responsive, not accepting new connections, and needing a reboot.
I've restored so many corrupt PST files from backup that I'm considering setting up a Dovecot IMAP server just as a mail archive for my users. It wouldn't send or receive mail, just act as an 'archive' for stuff they want to keep around forever.
Also, I take issue with people who think it should be disallowed because 'it's easy, anyone can do it'. The fact of the matter is that it's tremendously demanding. Sex isn't easy, and most people are terrible at it. Your clients want to pay for 'good sex', but they want it to last for a while if they're dropping $250 on it. These women have a physical and mental mastery of the art of sex, and an uncanny ability to be able to tame those 'primal urges' in their clients in order to get them to use protection.
The fact that legal sex work, even in an unregulated environment like Rhode Island, commands prices from $60 (handjob) to over $250 (full service). Given that well over half our population here is women, they must be 'experts' to be able to extract that kind of market power.
* disclaimer: I've never been to these places, but I know people who work at them, and I've done a -lot- of research recently.
Are waitresses also in that camp? I certainly get the 'primal urge' to eat several times a day, while my love life is more like... Well... I'm here posting on Slashdot.
I think you'd be -very- surprised by how wrong you are.
You equate selling sex to letting someone punch you for money. I see it the same as a construction job, where you sweat and work hard to deliver on your contract. Selling sex isn't the same as selling violence. Most sex work isn't violent.
I've dated a sex worker, and lived with another. Both enjoyed their jobs and made GOBS of loot.
One was a single 'cougar' who managed to pay off her house in three years, she was a nurse making $40K before, and she returned afterwards.
She said that it was great because you set your own hours and limits, there's security to make sure you're safe, and you get a hell of a workout dancing, etc.
I'm in a state where we're about to make indoor prostitution illegal (it's been legal here for 30 years), and my extensive research into the field has led me to believe that this whole notion of 'it's bad for you' is just not true. We have massage parlor workers testifying to keep their jobs at legislative hearings, we caught the Craigslist killer because the sex workers can call the police when they're abused or robbed, and we have virtually no street (read: crackwhore) prostitution.
Selling sex, for most of the people in the legal industry is a steppingstone between coming to this country poor and not knowing the language, to home ownership, and paying to raise your kids right or meeting a nice American to get married to.
Is it fair for a large company to straddle many localities and take advantage of chalking-up all it's business in the one that has the sweetest deal, while smaller companies and individuals are stuck paying where they are?
Sorry, dude. Even if you don't agree with corporate taxes on principle, they have to applied uniformly if they exist. Letting large companies get away with this sort of thing stifles innovation by raising the cost-of-entry for startups and smaller companies.
Taxes aren't based on how much 'other good' you do, they're based (theoretically) on the cost of providing services, divided as fairly as possible amongst the consumers.
I live in a small city where 52% of the real estate is tied up in 'non-profits' (the universities, hospitals, and the state itself are our three biggest employers), and I can tell you, the $26/$1000 property tax on those foolish enough to remain in the city is turning this place into a lunar wasteland.
I live in a state with one of the highest gasoline taxes in the union, and our gas tax doesn't put a dent in our road maintenance budget, which is already not enough to properly maintain the roads.
Using less gas isn't 'shifting the burden' to those who can't afford a more efficient car, especially since there -are- efficient cheap cars. I bought my small 34 MPG car (on the efficient side for the USA) because I couldn't -afford- anything else.
Your argument tries to use economics as a way to discourage a more efficient system, and also expects consumers to act irrationally in their own worst interests, which goes against some of economics' own principles. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I heard similar arguments against Cash for Clunkers (which I think is lame, but better than cash bailouts for car manufacturers). People were simultaneously castigating the program for 'destroying the cars that could be given to people who need them' and for 'creating a glut of used car parts that will hurt the market'. You can't simultaneously bitch that the program is reducing and increasing prices.
Also, how much did that cheap gas -really- cost us in tax dollars? I'm guessing that the -real fair market- price of gas is around $5 or $6/gallon, but the fact that we live in a country that has 5% of the world's population and spends almost 50% of the world's military dollars keeps the price of gas pretty low. Using less energy is a -good thing- for the economy, and will ultimately -reduce- tax burdens across the board.
For the sake of making things easier on our SMS admins and the field team, we use the Dell/Apple/HP serial or service tag as well, since the manufacturer can keep the specs and the purchase order info themselves.
We do this:
Brand Code is either D for Dell, A for Apple, H for HP, etc.
And VMs under them are:
VM
So right now, my box is CISD6XQDMJ5, but I'm writing on a VM called CISD6XQDMJ5VM04.
The beauty of this is that it lets the admins on SMS easily select departments by building queries that say:
for all machines that begin with "CIS", do this thing.
or
For all machines that the fourth character is "H", do this other thing.
and
for all machines ending in "VM??", do -NOT- do this thing, since it might be hardware-specific.
As for location and/or username, that stuff changes too rapidly to adhere to, if I know what -department- the box is in, I'll probably be able to find it, and the serial number leads back tot he model on the web site, so I can go to Psychology looking for an OptiPlex 270 that's acting-up.
Seriously, Win7 just feels like a lot of good press wrapped around Vista to me. That being said, I'm using it at work already (but I was using Vista pre-SP1 too).
I'm -not- going to enjoy trying to hold-off users from self-deploying this until we're ready to support it. Even with the lead time, there are lots of bits and pieces that wouldn't fit in our environment, and there are far too many 'flavors', especially with the 32 and 64 bit editions for me to handle.
This is a procedure that is performed for babies that are dead or dying in-utero as well.
Do you have any statistics on what proportion of late-term abortions are medically-necessary vs. those that are 'just for moms who don't want kids'? My understanding is that virtually all of the late-term abortions done here are for pretty valid reasons, and they make up a tiny proportion of abortions as a whole anyway.
Seriously, I know it's neat to use a projector and all, but 800x600 wasn't enough for me in 1992, let alone now. I suppose you could play StarCraft on it, and maybe type some things, but that resolution just can't cut it for any sort of thing I'd want to do.
I'd need at least 1024x768 for a reasonable computing experience, and preferably much, much more.
Right now that's actually the only thing keeping me away from the netbooks I've seen, until they have a better screen than my eight year-old Dell's 12" 1024x768 display, I'll stick with 'old high-end' rather than 'new low-end'.
The thing that bothers me is that this is -not- what Microsoft is doing. They aren't building something clean, modern, and new, then sticking the legacy stuff in a VM. Windows 7 has all the nasty crap Vista did, with a little spit-and-polish on it. They just tacked-on an XP VM at the last minute just-in-case.
Instead of using virtualization as a way to safely remove deprecated code from the OS, they're keeping the kludgy, unmaintainable crap, adding an entire legacy runtime, and using it as a buzzword for the PHBs.
What I want is a native 64-bit only Windows OS that runs only 64-bit.NET apps, no 'system32-is-the-64-bit-system, WOW64-is-the-32-bit-system, reflected filesystems and registries, etc.' crap. Give me something that's actually a base for a new decade in computing, then build something like Apple's 'Classic' to run XP apps inside a seamless VM.
Re:Fix the intel graphics bugs yet?
on
Ubuntu 9.04 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've been using Linux on integrated Intel chipsets since the i810 driver came out and I have no complaints.
I had no complaints with the i810, the i815, the i915, the G33, or the G45 that I currently use. There was one Ubuntu release where the resolution setting didn't match the documentation, so I had to enter some manual stuff into xorg.conf, but before and since then, things have been gravy.
A lot of these bugs look like they're for things that I can't give good marks to -any- drivers, like switching displays on laptops, enabling compositing on ancient chips (really?! why bother!) and other foolishness.
Really, Intel doesn't make great 3D graphics chips, everyone knows that. If you actually want fast 3D, pick someone who fabs hardware that can handle it. The Intel -drivers- on the other hand, are hands-down the most supported and functional open-source drivers that I've used.
Intel not only releases the specs for their hardware, they sponsor the development of the drivers in a totally open-source-friendly way.
If you have complaints about 3D in Linux on integrated Intel graphics chipsets, you'll probably have the same complaints about 3D in Windows on Integrated Intel chipsets. Intel isn't in the mid-to-high-end market, they make excellent 2D chipsets that do 3D 'well enough' for casual non-gaming use.
Two years ago I hurt my neck -badly-, like a day out-of-work every month, numb arms, pain all the time, etc. The funny thing was, my doctor kept asking what I was doing that damaged it so much, and I had no answer. After all the physical therapy and -pain-, my neck got better, but then other things started getting worse, all over. I went back to the doctor and she did a bone scan. Turns out I have the bone density of a sixty year-old... at twenty six. The only culprit she can see is my six-cup-a-day habit that I picked up after stopping Ritalin when I was twelve.
Caffeine is slightly toxic to bone. I have normal PTH level s and blood calcium, but flushing your system with stimulants all the time is definitely -a bad thing-.
Yes, but I've worked many places where they let the software fall so far behind that the admins have -absolutely- no idea what would happen if they upgraded to a recent bugfix release. It might be scary re-flashing your switches and routers on an incremental basis, but I've been shot down on major important upgrades because we had configs that haven't been altered in five years!
I had to hand back my 15" Macbook Pro when I quit my job, and the new one only provided a desktop, so I dug-out my trusty 12" Dell with a 700MHz P3 and 256MB RAM. Lo-and-behold, the thing is -awesome- for what I need it for, which is to connect me to a remote session with my -real- computer. All I need is a keyboard, mouse, screen, and WiFi to do everything I have to.
Personally, I'm happy because I no longer have to 'sync' my work between two machines, there's nothing of -value- on the laptop if it gets stolen, and it's smaller and cheaper. Also, I can run Linux on it, since it's -mine- and it's got no driver problems because it's -old-.
My boss saw me doing this today and asked if he should budget a laptop in for me. I asked if they had any 12" laptops spec'd (knowing we don't), and kindly offered to just keep using my own (with any extra $ going towards RAM for my desktop).
Some day, this ancient laptop will die, and then I'll get a netbook. I think the Atom 300 CPU is exactly what I need for those rare times I am disconnected from the grid for long enough and want to play a movie.
I'm not able to get and test it right now, while I'm at work. What exactly do you get? is this in the same vein as ESXi, an OS that installs to some hardware that I then use another machine (with a client) to connect to? Or is this -only- the console? Or is this a framework that installs into my Linux distro that I can then use to virtualize machines (I'm pretty sure it's not).
Actually, X drivers for Intel hardware from the i810 all the way up to today's latest-and-greatest X4500HD are all open-source and -very- good. The problem is that this particular chipset, the X500, which is -not- as powerful as some of their other existing stuff but is meant for very low-power devices, was licensed from a third party and therefore does not work with the existing -really good- driver.
Honestly, right now, if you want to see a shining star in Linux graphics, it's Intel, excepting this one oddball chip.
Their onboard graphics might not be awesome compared to ATI or Nvidia, but the open-source support for them is absolutely top-notch, leading me to buy Intel GMA chips for all the Linux systems I build.
Woah. I own a four bedroom house outside of Providence. Granted, it's just my girlfriend and I, but we do keep two computers running 24/7, have two fridges, washer and dryer, big screen TV, etc.
My electric bill for December was $35, and I pay about $.18/kWh, which is above the national average.
From my POV here in Rhode Island, it looks like most 'poor' people have satellite, the middle class have cable and fios. I attribute this to the sat. companies not doing a credit check, which the cable companies seem to do.
The upper-middle class are the only folks I see with 'regular' TVs anymore. They listen to NPR and tune in to PBS or watch the news, but that's pretty much it.
And the rich folks... I wouldn't know. They never invite me over.:-) I would assume they keep high-end HDTV setups, but rarely watch.
I do think that there is an inversely proportional relationship to how much TV you watch and how much money you make though. I don't really ever spot my well-to-do friends watching TV. I haven't figured out if it's because
more disposable income -> better things to do than TV
or
educated and motivated -> more disposable income
The funny thing was, I went over to my parents a few days ago, and they think they're all set because they have cable, which is true in the TV room; but then they flipped on their little black-and-white 4" TV in the kitchen for the news. I pointed out that they'll have to drop about two hundred bucks to replace -that-, to which my dad replied, "Screw it, I'll throw it away."
Come to think of it, I haven't seen -one- actual, installed DTV converter, and I was in a -lot- of houses in the last month. I also don't know anyone who consumes OTA digital TV.
I'll bet there are a -ton- of elderly folks in those huge apartment towers I see all over town that have bunny ears though... They're going to be pissed, and they vote.
I was getting 45-60MB/Sec (basically drive speed) on an old dual-cpu 1Ghz Pentium 3. I had Linux and Samba and no GUI running on it.
Try throwing a low-end dual Core 2 (like an E5200) in an Intel board with a recent ICH chipset. Choose some -quality- drives, like WD RE3s, and a good network switch, like an SMC 8508-T if you don't have something already. Load Ubuntu from the mini.iso, no GUI, only Ubuntu Server and Samba.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they even did it the right way, putting the 64-bit system into C:\Windows\system32, and the 32-bit equivalents into C:\Windows\SysWOW64.
There's a 64-bit registry and a 32-bit one, and all sorts of 'reflected' paths in the file system.
The 64-bit transition at Microsoft is a total disaster under the hood, they made every compromise, reasonable and unreasonable, to save backward compatibility, and it still wasn't good, so they released XP Mode: an entire VM of their previous OS.
What they should have done is clean stuff up for 64-bit, switched over to an Apple-like 'application bundles' way to distribute binaries (that would allow for x86, x64, and other architectures to run the same 'binary'), and run legacy binaries in a sandbox XP VM, like Apple's Classic.
I know I sound like a fanboy, but Apple's been through 68K to PPC, Classic to OS X, PPC to x86, and x86 to x64 without breaking much or making insane compromises. Microsoft should have taken a lesson from that and said 'it's OK to break old apps on our new system, because we have a built-in fallback runtime for them.', instead they hacked together a beast that will plague us for decades, then had to deliver the fallback anyways.
Linux does a good job of 64-bit too, I know that when I use a 32-bit binary on my x64 Linux box, I don't see a different '/etc' than I do from my 64-bit binary.
It's more than MS saying 'don't do that'!
The PST format requires a lot of small direct I/O, and when you mount one over CIFS/SMB you run the serious chance of filling up the queues on the client or even the server. I've brought down a fully-loaded and patched Server 2003 box with a PST -> PST transfer over the wire, and by 'down' I mean really down, not responsive, not accepting new connections, and needing a reboot.
I've restored so many corrupt PST files from backup that I'm considering setting up a Dovecot IMAP server just as a mail archive for my users. It wouldn't send or receive mail, just act as an 'archive' for stuff they want to keep around forever.
Also, I take issue with people who think it should be disallowed because 'it's easy, anyone can do it'. The fact of the matter is that it's tremendously demanding. Sex isn't easy, and most people are terrible at it. Your clients want to pay for 'good sex', but they want it to last for a while if they're dropping $250 on it. These women have a physical and mental mastery of the art of sex, and an uncanny ability to be able to tame those 'primal urges' in their clients in order to get them to use protection.
The fact that legal sex work, even in an unregulated environment like Rhode Island, commands prices from $60 (handjob) to over $250 (full service). Given that well over half our population here is women, they must be 'experts' to be able to extract that kind of market power.
* disclaimer: I've never been to these places, but I know people who work at them, and I've done a -lot- of research recently.
OK. Glad we're on the same page then.
Are waitresses also in that camp? I certainly get the 'primal urge' to eat several times a day, while my love life is more like... Well... I'm here posting on Slashdot.
I think you'd be -very- surprised by how wrong you are.
You equate selling sex to letting someone punch you for money. I see it the same as a construction job, where you sweat and work hard to deliver on your contract. Selling sex isn't the same as selling violence. Most sex work isn't violent.
I've dated a sex worker, and lived with another. Both enjoyed their jobs and made GOBS of loot.
One was a single 'cougar' who managed to pay off her house in three years, she was a nurse making $40K before, and she returned afterwards.
She said that it was great because you set your own hours and limits, there's security to make sure you're safe, and you get a hell of a workout dancing, etc.
I'm in a state where we're about to make indoor prostitution illegal (it's been legal here for 30 years), and my extensive research into the field has led me to believe that this whole notion of 'it's bad for you' is just not true. We have massage parlor workers testifying to keep their jobs at legislative hearings, we caught the Craigslist killer because the sex workers can call the police when they're abused or robbed, and we have virtually no street (read: crackwhore) prostitution.
Selling sex, for most of the people in the legal industry is a steppingstone between coming to this country poor and not knowing the language, to home ownership, and paying to raise your kids right or meeting a nice American to get married to.
Check out our site on the issue: http://citizensagainstcriminalization.org/
Just a question from my idle mind... Is escape velocity usually about the same as the lateral velocity of an object in a perfect orbit?
I'm thinking this because the ISS is 350km up, and moves at just over 7,700m/sec.
It seems to make sense that to 'fall around' something, you would have to move 'to the side' just as much as you're 'pulled in' over any given time.
Is it fair for a large company to straddle many localities and take advantage of chalking-up all it's business in the one that has the sweetest deal, while smaller companies and individuals are stuck paying where they are?
Sorry, dude. Even if you don't agree with corporate taxes on principle, they have to applied uniformly if they exist. Letting large companies get away with this sort of thing stifles innovation by raising the cost-of-entry for startups and smaller companies.
Taxes aren't based on how much 'other good' you do, they're based (theoretically) on the cost of providing services, divided as fairly as possible amongst the consumers.
I live in a small city where 52% of the real estate is tied up in 'non-profits' (the universities, hospitals, and the state itself are our three biggest employers), and I can tell you, the $26/$1000 property tax on those foolish enough to remain in the city is turning this place into a lunar wasteland.
A bright future awaits you in the Rhode Island adult entertainment industry.
I live in a state with one of the highest gasoline taxes in the union, and our gas tax doesn't put a dent in our road maintenance budget, which is already not enough to properly maintain the roads.
Using less gas isn't 'shifting the burden' to those who can't afford a more efficient car, especially since there -are- efficient cheap cars. I bought my small 34 MPG car (on the efficient side for the USA) because I couldn't -afford- anything else.
Your argument tries to use economics as a way to discourage a more efficient system, and also expects consumers to act irrationally in their own worst interests, which goes against some of economics' own principles. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
I heard similar arguments against Cash for Clunkers (which I think is lame, but better than cash bailouts for car manufacturers). People were simultaneously castigating the program for 'destroying the cars that could be given to people who need them' and for 'creating a glut of used car parts that will hurt the market'. You can't simultaneously bitch that the program is reducing and increasing prices.
Also, how much did that cheap gas -really- cost us in tax dollars? I'm guessing that the -real fair market- price of gas is around $5 or $6/gallon, but the fact that we live in a country that has 5% of the world's population and spends almost 50% of the world's military dollars keeps the price of gas pretty low. Using less energy is a -good thing- for the economy, and will ultimately -reduce- tax burdens across the board.
For the sake of making things easier on our SMS admins and the field team, we use the Dell/Apple/HP serial or service tag as well, since the manufacturer can keep the specs and the purchase order info themselves.
We do this:
Brand Code is either D for Dell, A for Apple, H for HP, etc.
And VMs under them are:
VM
So right now, my box is CISD6XQDMJ5, but I'm writing on a VM called CISD6XQDMJ5VM04.
The beauty of this is that it lets the admins on SMS easily select departments by building queries that say:
for all machines that begin with "CIS", do this thing.
or
For all machines that the fourth character is "H", do this other thing.
and
for all machines ending in "VM??", do -NOT- do this thing, since it might be hardware-specific.
As for location and/or username, that stuff changes too rapidly to adhere to, if I know what -department- the box is in, I'll probably be able to find it, and the serial number leads back tot he model on the web site, so I can go to Psychology looking for an OptiPlex 270 that's acting-up.
I'm sure next year's new Apple craze will be 'magnesium cases'.
OOH! MAGNESIUM!
Sexy lightweight metal when you buy it, and nothing but a lot of light, heat, and a sprinkling of white ash left when it self-combusts.
Bend Over, Here It Comes Again!
Seriously, Win7 just feels like a lot of good press wrapped around Vista to me. That being said, I'm using it at work already (but I was using Vista pre-SP1 too).
I'm -not- going to enjoy trying to hold-off users from self-deploying this until we're ready to support it. Even with the lead time, there are lots of bits and pieces that wouldn't fit in our environment, and there are far too many 'flavors', especially with the 32 and 64 bit editions for me to handle.
This is a procedure that is performed for babies that are dead or dying in-utero as well.
Do you have any statistics on what proportion of late-term abortions are medically-necessary vs. those that are 'just for moms who don't want kids'? My understanding is that virtually all of the late-term abortions done here are for pretty valid reasons, and they make up a tiny proportion of abortions as a whole anyway.
Seriously, I know it's neat to use a projector and all, but 800x600 wasn't enough for me in 1992, let alone now. I suppose you could play StarCraft on it, and maybe type some things, but that resolution just can't cut it for any sort of thing I'd want to do.
I'd need at least 1024x768 for a reasonable computing experience, and preferably much, much more.
Right now that's actually the only thing keeping me away from the netbooks I've seen, until they have a better screen than my eight year-old Dell's 12" 1024x768 display, I'll stick with 'old high-end' rather than 'new low-end'.
The thing that bothers me is that this is -not- what Microsoft is doing. They aren't building something clean, modern, and new, then sticking the legacy stuff in a VM. Windows 7 has all the nasty crap Vista did, with a little spit-and-polish on it. They just tacked-on an XP VM at the last minute just-in-case.
Instead of using virtualization as a way to safely remove deprecated code from the OS, they're keeping the kludgy, unmaintainable crap, adding an entire legacy runtime, and using it as a buzzword for the PHBs.
What I want is a native 64-bit only Windows OS that runs only 64-bit .NET apps, no 'system32-is-the-64-bit-system, WOW64-is-the-32-bit-system, reflected filesystems and registries, etc.' crap. Give me something that's actually a base for a new decade in computing, then build something like Apple's 'Classic' to run XP apps inside a seamless VM.
I've been using Linux on integrated Intel chipsets since the i810 driver came out and I have no complaints.
I had no complaints with the i810, the i815, the i915, the G33, or the G45 that I currently use. There was one Ubuntu release where the resolution setting didn't match the documentation, so I had to enter some manual stuff into xorg.conf, but before and since then, things have been gravy.
A lot of these bugs look like they're for things that I can't give good marks to -any- drivers, like switching displays on laptops, enabling compositing on ancient chips (really?! why bother!) and other foolishness.
Really, Intel doesn't make great 3D graphics chips, everyone knows that. If you actually want fast 3D, pick someone who fabs hardware that can handle it. The Intel -drivers- on the other hand, are hands-down the most supported and functional open-source drivers that I've used.
Intel not only releases the specs for their hardware, they sponsor the development of the drivers in a totally open-source-friendly way.
If you have complaints about 3D in Linux on integrated Intel graphics chipsets, you'll probably have the same complaints about 3D in Windows on Integrated Intel chipsets. Intel isn't in the mid-to-high-end market, they make excellent 2D chipsets that do 3D 'well enough' for casual non-gaming use.
Two years ago I hurt my neck -badly-, like a day out-of-work every month, numb arms, pain all the time, etc. The funny thing was, my doctor kept asking what I was doing that damaged it so much, and I had no answer. After all the physical therapy and -pain-, my neck got better, but then other things started getting worse, all over. I went back to the doctor and she did a bone scan. Turns out I have the bone density of a sixty year-old... at twenty six. The only culprit she can see is my six-cup-a-day habit that I picked up after stopping Ritalin when I was twelve.
Caffeine is slightly toxic to bone. I have normal PTH level s and blood calcium, but flushing your system with stimulants all the time is definitely -a bad thing-.
Yes, but I've worked many places where they let the software fall so far behind that the admins have -absolutely- no idea what would happen if they upgraded to a recent bugfix release. It might be scary re-flashing your switches and routers on an incremental basis, but I've been shot down on major important upgrades because we had configs that haven't been altered in five years!
I had to hand back my 15" Macbook Pro when I quit my job, and the new one only provided a desktop, so I dug-out my trusty 12" Dell with a 700MHz P3 and 256MB RAM. Lo-and-behold, the thing is -awesome- for what I need it for, which is to connect me to a remote session with my -real- computer. All I need is a keyboard, mouse, screen, and WiFi to do everything I have to.
Personally, I'm happy because I no longer have to 'sync' my work between two machines, there's nothing of -value- on the laptop if it gets stolen, and it's smaller and cheaper. Also, I can run Linux on it, since it's -mine- and it's got no driver problems because it's -old-.
My boss saw me doing this today and asked if he should budget a laptop in for me. I asked if they had any 12" laptops spec'd (knowing we don't), and kindly offered to just keep using my own (with any extra $ going towards RAM for my desktop).
Some day, this ancient laptop will die, and then I'll get a netbook. I think the Atom 300 CPU is exactly what I need for those rare times I am disconnected from the grid for long enough and want to play a movie.
I'm not able to get and test it right now, while I'm at work. What exactly do you get? is this in the same vein as ESXi, an OS that installs to some hardware that I then use another machine (with a client) to connect to? Or is this -only- the console? Or is this a framework that installs into my Linux distro that I can then use to virtualize machines (I'm pretty sure it's not).
Actually, X drivers for Intel hardware from the i810 all the way up to today's latest-and-greatest X4500HD are all open-source and -very- good. The problem is that this particular chipset, the X500, which is -not- as powerful as some of their other existing stuff but is meant for very low-power devices, was licensed from a third party and therefore does not work with the existing -really good- driver.
Honestly, right now, if you want to see a shining star in Linux graphics, it's Intel, excepting this one oddball chip.
Their onboard graphics might not be awesome compared to ATI or Nvidia, but the open-source support for them is absolutely top-notch, leading me to buy Intel GMA chips for all the Linux systems I build.
Woah. I own a four bedroom house outside of Providence. Granted, it's just my girlfriend and I, but we do keep two computers running 24/7, have two fridges, washer and dryer, big screen TV, etc.
My electric bill for December was $35, and I pay about $.18/kWh, which is above the national average.
Debt?
All you have to do is sign those things you get in the mail all the time and send them back. For each one they send you a $500 'gift card'!
From my POV here in Rhode Island, it looks like most 'poor' people have satellite, the middle class have cable and fios. I attribute this to the sat. companies not doing a credit check, which the cable companies seem to do.
The upper-middle class are the only folks I see with 'regular' TVs anymore. They listen to NPR and tune in to PBS or watch the news, but that's pretty much it.
And the rich folks... I wouldn't know. They never invite me over. :-) I would assume they keep high-end HDTV setups, but rarely watch.
I do think that there is an inversely proportional relationship to how much TV you watch and how much money you make though. I don't really ever spot my well-to-do friends watching TV. I haven't figured out if it's because
more disposable income -> better things to do than TV
or
educated and motivated -> more disposable income
The funny thing was, I went over to my parents a few days ago, and they think they're all set because they have cable, which is true in the TV room; but then they flipped on their little black-and-white 4" TV in the kitchen for the news. I pointed out that they'll have to drop about two hundred bucks to replace -that-, to which my dad replied, "Screw it, I'll throw it away."
Come to think of it, I haven't seen -one- actual, installed DTV converter, and I was in a -lot- of houses in the last month. I also don't know anyone who consumes OTA digital TV.
I'll bet there are a -ton- of elderly folks in those huge apartment towers I see all over town that have bunny ears though... They're going to be pissed, and they vote.
8-9 MB/Sec? Really?
I was getting 45-60MB/Sec (basically drive speed) on an old dual-cpu 1Ghz Pentium 3. I had Linux and Samba and no GUI running on it.
Try throwing a low-end dual Core 2 (like an E5200) in an Intel board with a recent ICH chipset. Choose some -quality- drives, like WD RE3s, and a good network switch, like an SMC 8508-T if you don't have something already. Load Ubuntu from the mini.iso, no GUI, only Ubuntu Server and Samba.