Not a good example. Upgrading from 6.06 to 9.04 is only 3 years apart. You can't just update Windows to a new version by the internet of course, but both Linux and Windows can be upgraded from physical media without a clean install. There update path between each iteration of Windows, in most cases your installed applications are carried over. You could avoid a clean install from DOS 6 -> Win3.10 -> Win3.11 -> Win95 -> Win98 (-> WinME) -> WinXP -> Vista -> Win 7. 1992 to 2009.
I find a marked difference between cheap supermarket CFLs and say, brand name ones like Phillips etc. Chinese knock-off bulbs usually relabels as a store-brand are the culprits, They have in some cases very short lifetimes, and dubious components. I've had many start to make scary fizzing popping noises, get hot, burn marks then just die.
I also have a power meter that shows some of these bulbs using much more than twice the power they claim to. Interestingly these ones subsequently die.
On the other hand I have good bulbs, 4+ years old, that have had to come with me when I've moved house the last few times, they just won't die.
Now, the less time exposed to danger, up a ladder, changing bulbs must be priceless.
A good fraction of netbooks have Win XP or Vista basic wiped in favor of Ubuntu et al. Not to mention many being sold with it preinstalled. I would go so far as to say linux has a much higher penetration on netbooks than it does on consumer desktops. It's funny how MS has spun that the other way.
My method is to put a clamp around my ethernet cable. I figure this reduces the diameter of the pipes restricting flow of negative electrons used by hackers coming down the international pipes, this stops the electron buffers in windows from overflowing.
The other way is I wire up my mains postive to the DSL socket negative because the positive electrons neutralise the negative electrons used to inject codes. Proof that it works is in the shower of sparks.
F.E.A.R. Multiplayer (incl. F.E.A.R. Combat): In some maps you can glitch into the walls by running at walls corners and/or crouching. Stuck in a wall where you can't be shot, you could shoot outwards. Some thin walls you could poke your gun through and the same effect would occur. It was more a bug in the poor default maps, but the collision mapping was as vulnerable to hacks as the rest of the game.
Todays SSDs are completely unproven at 10-15 year life spans. They may not significantly outlive a good mechanical HDDs, as there is no proof for another 5-10 years.
Sure, there's plenty of hardware around that is 10-15+ years old that runs nicely. However I have a uneasy feeling in my gut that most of today's consumer and enterprise grade hardware is not as heavily built as stuff once was.
My concern being it is known to be more cost effective in certain situations to replace a certain percentage of hardware under warranty, than it is to build all hardware to a more durable spec out of the factory door. Oh yes and planned obsolescence too.
Prednisone is a artificial corticosteroid, and corticosteroids are the family of adrenal drugs, corsitol included. So it's plausible since I understand this drug is used to supress immune system and adrenal function?
Alcohol fermentation from yeast and plant matter is a carbon neutral cycle. I'd be more concerned with the direct warming effect from the hot air produced by intoxicated humans.
An april fools joke must at least be plausible enough for even the sharpest person to be taken in for a short while, at least part way through reading it. At the headline I face palmed.
All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers. I wonder if this is revealed in the syntax and logic when compared with what say a Chinese developer might come up with if they were tasked with developing a language? And does anyone who's native tongue is not English and has a knowledge of programming syntax want to comment on this?
Many people learning a second language report there is a stage where they start to 'think' in the language they have learned.
From a purely economic perspective, where you can't sell enough units, and you don't make enough money to cover costs, you need to lower the price to drive sales and restore consumer confidence.
You see, there is a strange effect, I call the island of pricing stability.
On a graph of price vs units sold there is a sweet spot that extracts maximum net profit. Basic stuff. But to bolster the bottom line businesses often hike their prices in small increments. Short term this produces a bump to your bottom line as consumers tolerate the price rise, at least initially, which gets some smart guy who suggested it a bonus. Longer term sales take a hit as consumers make other choices, loose interest or merely spend less. Time wears on and your prices creep, overall you begin to loose gross revenue. It's not immediately obvious what is going on, it doesn't show up on short term graphs shown to the brass, nor obvious how to take corrective action (roll back that price change, cut costs, fast). Naturally everything from market forces to competition to alignment of the planets is blamed instead of potentially bad business decisions.
After a number of price increments, where the profits just seem to keep coming in and nothing is really going wrong, what you eventually reach is a island of stability in pricing. Even far above the sweet spot this is often a nicely profitable model, even if sales decline a little, cutting costs drives revenue back to the bottom line. It is even somewhat sustainable mid term provided reasonable scarcity is maintained, competition doesn't get the lead and demand holds out.
But there is one problem with this model. It's bollocks. This pricing island of stability is right on the edge of a steep slippery slope ready to be pushed off by competition or the slightest breeze of change from the market. Raise your prices further, for example, to try and raise funds for your lower than predicted bottom line, you can watch sales take a nose dive. In the overall picture, you just priced yourselves out of the market.
Now if you ever were looking for an example of the proverbial epic fail. How about a price rise when your sales are already failing in a struggling market with weary consumers that's hardly profitable for anyone anymore?
In the middle of a recession also? Surely this is madness.
If you have women approaching you to admire your laptop they obviously already don't find you repulsive or unapproachable.
That's a damn good start by any measure.
You must also live in a region where having a laptop or a iphone or whatever actually gets you attention, rather being a minimum requirement to not be outright ignored. (hmmm where do you live? what's real estate like there at the momment?)
Most girls do like geeky guys in actual fact. It's an observation of mine that only certain kinds of adolescent females that don't date geeky types, the kind of woman who is at that age rather concerned about her self image and social success (as we all are, infact it's a big measure of self-worth until we grow up a bit). In the real adult world the nice girls will end up with the geeky guys.
It's a assumption (or an outright myth) that Windows XP/2003/Vista/7 has poor uptime.
Many people run all kinds of SETI/Folding@home and looping benchmarks on fully stressed Windows systems for weeks, months and longer without reboots crashes or blue screens. I run benchmarks on overclocked systems looping for stupidly long times also.
Sorry but Windows is rock solid stable by any reasonable and pertinent definition. Most issues are hardware, drivers, or crashing applications, which Windows is much more vulnerable to than Linux. Linux handles hardware crashes better too, when pushing very high overclocks I can often boot into Linux at higher clocks than Windows before BSOD/panic sets in.
Staring at a flat screen does little for depth perception which is seriously underutilized in such a situation. Although interestingly, ones ability to use parallax to calculate spatial depth, rather than stereo vision, must be massively enhanced, since this is the other way we mentally process our spatial environment.
So yes, a FPS gamer may do a lot better with depth perception if he/she suddenly lost one eye.
To give an example, my father was perplexed by the extremely convex side mirrors on his new truck (yes the "objects in this mirror are closer than they appear" kind), which give a great wide field of view yet he would complain the fish eye perspective meant he couldn't judge depth correctly (and this was his excuse for almost backing into things).
So I climb into the cab and start backing the thing up like I've done it for years.
He pointed out my childhood and adolescence saturated with 2D screens helped me have zero problems, where he was very much an outdoorsman from a young age.
No you see, what they are saying is the end is near, which is wrong, the world won't end, we will prevail (we always have) it'll just get seriously messed up and our descendants will be cleaning it up for generations to come.
Slashdot Mirror
DVDDecrypter works fine to extract the .VOB. VLC will convert VOB to most practical formats, slowly, but it works and the quality/options satisfactory.
Not a good example. Upgrading from 6.06 to 9.04 is only 3 years apart. You can't just update Windows to a new version by the internet of course, but both Linux and Windows can be upgraded from physical media without a clean install. There update path between each iteration of Windows, in most cases your installed applications are carried over. You could avoid a clean install from DOS 6 -> Win3.10 -> Win3.11 -> Win95 -> Win98 (-> WinME) -> WinXP -> Vista -> Win 7. 1992 to 2009.
I find a marked difference between cheap supermarket CFLs and say, brand name ones like Phillips etc. Chinese knock-off bulbs usually relabels as a store-brand are the culprits, They have in some cases very short lifetimes, and dubious components. I've had many start to make scary fizzing popping noises, get hot, burn marks then just die.
I also have a power meter that shows some of these bulbs using much more than twice the power they claim to. Interestingly these ones subsequently die.
On the other hand I have good bulbs, 4+ years old, that have had to come with me when I've moved house the last few times, they just won't die.
Now, the less time exposed to danger, up a ladder, changing bulbs must be priceless.
It can't be long before we see the first practical LED bulbs on shelves: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/philips-master-led-light-bulb-set-for-us-release-in-july/
I'm doubting the veracity of these claims. We lack the technology to send spies down mains wires.
A good fraction of netbooks have Win XP or Vista basic wiped in favor of Ubuntu et al. Not to mention many being sold with it preinstalled. I would go so far as to say linux has a much higher penetration on netbooks than it does on consumer desktops. It's funny how MS has spun that the other way.
My method is to put a clamp around my ethernet cable. I figure this reduces the diameter of the pipes restricting flow of negative electrons used by hackers coming down the international pipes, this stops the electron buffers in windows from overflowing.
The other way is I wire up my mains postive to the DSL socket negative because the positive electrons neutralise the negative electrons used to inject codes. Proof that it works is in the shower of sparks.
By a Cylon virus. I still think we shouldn't have networked our computers.
F.E.A.R. Multiplayer (incl. F.E.A.R. Combat): In some maps you can glitch into the walls by running at walls corners and/or crouching. Stuck in a wall where you can't be shot, you could shoot outwards. Some thin walls you could poke your gun through and the same effect would occur. It was more a bug in the poor default maps, but the collision mapping was as vulnerable to hacks as the rest of the game.
Todays SSDs are completely unproven at 10-15 year life spans. They may not significantly outlive a good mechanical HDDs, as there is no proof for another 5-10 years.
Sure, there's plenty of hardware around that is 10-15+ years old that runs nicely. However I have a uneasy feeling in my gut that most of today's consumer and enterprise grade hardware is not as heavily built as stuff once was.
My concern being it is known to be more cost effective in certain situations to replace a certain percentage of hardware under warranty, than it is to build all hardware to a more durable spec out of the factory door. Oh yes and planned obsolescence too.
April 1st, does everyone not bother getting on the net because most news articles are april fools jokes?
Prednisone is a artificial corticosteroid, and corticosteroids are the family of adrenal drugs, corsitol included. So it's plausible since I understand this drug is used to supress immune system and adrenal function?
Alcohol fermentation from yeast and plant matter is a carbon neutral cycle. I'd be more concerned with the direct warming effect from the hot air produced by intoxicated humans.
An april fools joke must at least be plausible enough for even the sharpest person to be taken in for a short while, at least part way through reading it. At the headline I face palmed.
Oh wait... some of you did buy it?
All the main programming languages were invented in the English speaking world, by English speakers for English speakers. I wonder if this is revealed in the syntax and logic when compared with what say a Chinese developer might come up with if they were tasked with developing a language? And does anyone who's native tongue is not English and has a knowledge of programming syntax want to comment on this?
Many people learning a second language report there is a stage where they start to 'think' in the language they have learned.
From a purely economic perspective, where you can't sell enough units, and you don't make enough money to cover costs, you need to lower the price to drive sales and restore consumer confidence.
You see, there is a strange effect, I call the island of pricing stability.
On a graph of price vs units sold there is a sweet spot that extracts maximum net profit. Basic stuff. But to bolster the bottom line businesses often hike their prices in small increments. Short term this produces a bump to your bottom line as consumers tolerate the price rise, at least initially, which gets some smart guy who suggested it a bonus. Longer term sales take a hit as consumers make other choices, loose interest or merely spend less. Time wears on and your prices creep, overall you begin to loose gross revenue. It's not immediately obvious what is going on, it doesn't show up on short term graphs shown to the brass, nor obvious how to take corrective action (roll back that price change, cut costs, fast). Naturally everything from market forces to competition to alignment of the planets is blamed instead of potentially bad business decisions.
After a number of price increments, where the profits just seem to keep coming in and nothing is really going wrong, what you eventually reach is a island of stability in pricing. Even far above the sweet spot this is often a nicely profitable model, even if sales decline a little, cutting costs drives revenue back to the bottom line. It is even somewhat sustainable mid term provided reasonable scarcity is maintained, competition doesn't get the lead and demand holds out.
But there is one problem with this model. It's bollocks. This pricing island of stability is right on the edge of a steep slippery slope ready to be pushed off by competition or the slightest breeze of change from the market. Raise your prices further, for example, to try and raise funds for your lower than predicted bottom line, you can watch sales take a nose dive. In the overall picture, you just priced yourselves out of the market.
Now if you ever were looking for an example of the proverbial epic fail. How about a price rise when your sales are already failing in a struggling market with weary consumers that's hardly profitable for anyone anymore?
In the middle of a recession also? Surely this is madness.
Considered case mods? Nothing gets your man card reissued quicker than customization of your gadget using manly things like power tools and solder.
If you have women approaching you to admire your laptop they obviously already don't find you repulsive or unapproachable.
That's a damn good start by any measure.
You must also live in a region where having a laptop or a iphone or whatever actually gets you attention, rather being a minimum requirement to not be outright ignored. (hmmm where do you live? what's real estate like there at the momment?)
Most girls do like geeky guys in actual fact. It's an observation of mine that only certain kinds of adolescent females that don't date geeky types, the kind of woman who is at that age rather concerned about her self image and social success (as we all are, infact it's a big measure of self-worth until we grow up a bit). In the real adult world the nice girls will end up with the geeky guys.
"I'm not convinced, I have a fairly old desktop at work I keep for Outlook use only. "
There's your problem then Outlook != Windows. Don't you believe the magic 8 ball? Outlook not good
*can confirm ludicrous windows uptimes*
It's a assumption (or an outright myth) that Windows XP/2003/Vista/7 has poor uptime. Many people run all kinds of SETI/Folding@home and looping benchmarks on fully stressed Windows systems for weeks, months and longer without reboots crashes or blue screens. I run benchmarks on overclocked systems looping for stupidly long times also.
Sorry but Windows is rock solid stable by any reasonable and pertinent definition. Most issues are hardware, drivers, or crashing applications, which Windows is much more vulnerable to than Linux. Linux handles hardware crashes better too, when pushing very high overclocks I can often boot into Linux at higher clocks than Windows before BSOD/panic sets in.
I find that when playing 3D FPS games for too long, my eyes start having a hard time with depth.
Go play paintball.
Staring at a flat screen does little for depth perception which is seriously underutilized in such a situation. Although interestingly, ones ability to use parallax to calculate spatial depth, rather than stereo vision, must be massively enhanced, since this is the other way we mentally process our spatial environment.
So yes, a FPS gamer may do a lot better with depth perception if he/she suddenly lost one eye.
To give an example, my father was perplexed by the extremely convex side mirrors on his new truck (yes the "objects in this mirror are closer than they appear" kind), which give a great wide field of view yet he would complain the fish eye perspective meant he couldn't judge depth correctly (and this was his excuse for almost backing into things).
So I climb into the cab and start backing the thing up like I've done it for years.
He pointed out my childhood and adolescence saturated with 2D screens helped me have zero problems, where he was very much an outdoorsman from a young age.
Security experts claim fears of a global internet meltdown have been gr
No you see, what they are saying is the end is near, which is wrong, the world won't end, we will prevail (we always have) it'll just get seriously messed up and our descendants will be cleaning it up for generations to come.
... either way. The only certainty is security experts have differing opinion on this.
One thing is for sure, the worse is better principal applies to operating systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Somewhere there is an alternate universe where Windows 95/98/ME/Vista never happend, where OS/2 was the major OS on desktops.