"Perhaps not surprisingly, Stearns, Matheson, and McIntyre are all running for re-election in November."
Everyone referred to as a Congressman (or Representative) is up for election every two years. Members of the House of Representatives are supposed to receive the Congressman honorific, while members of the Senate are called Senators.
Congressmen = elected every two years Senators = elected every six years
I love the loaded editorial here from Zonk. "1up has a short piece saying..." vs. "IGN, meanwhile, is rumourmongering that...". The 1up story cites a sister publication (EGM) but no sources at either SquareEnix or Sony. The IGN article cites two sources, although they're both anonymous. One is from MS, while the other is the dreaded "source close to the company".
I don't generally agree with the editorial content of either site, but I also don't think it's appropriate to give a negative connotation to one site over the other, when both stories are essentially unsubstantiated rumormongering.
Actually, Microsoft claims that the vendors are solely responsible for the bundle madness.
The attach ratio has never been higher because in order to buy a Xbox 360 from Gamestop or EB, you had to spend a minimum of $300 on accessories and games.
It's geek vs. non-geek. The main thing that separates us (the common geek) from them (everyone else) is that we want to know how our stuff (cars, phones, computers, water filtration plants) works, while they just want to know how it can help them.
The good news is those annoying people on their phones in the grocery checkout line will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I bought an old kindergarten desk at auction, the kind with three drawers on a side, which was about two and half feet off the ground. I liked it because it has a huge surface area on the top, it's about 18 sq. ft.
Then I made friends with the guys at a local woodworking shop, and they helped me pry the legs off of it, and replace them with legs I found in their store that are just the right height for me, according to the ergonomic guidelines of the time. I also shellac'd and varnished the top with about 15 coats of stuff, so that it won't get rings or stains from drinks on it.
I cut some foam to go in one of the drawers on the sitting side of the desk, with cutouts for my tools, and have a CD file in the second one. The third is a junk drawer.
It was about a 2 month project, but totally worth the effort. I've had it for almost 10 years now, and it's the best desk I've ever had. It has tons of space on top, and is the perfect height for me.
If you run a decent firewall, keep the OS patched, and are smart, you don't need anti-virus on Windows. I run my home machine, which I use for work, gaming, and email/Internet browsing in that order, with the anti-virus software disabled.
I scan everything once a week, only download software from trusted sources, and keep my OS patched, and the only positive results I ever get are from emailed that sit unclicked in my inbox.
Anti-virus utilities are largely unnecessary if you know how you can be infected, regardless of platform.
Disclaimer: I am the editor in chief of Maximum PC magazine, so my opinion on things like this isn't unbiased.
The aluminum case is not, and has never been dead.
We've reviewed a steady stream of aluminum cases at Maximum PC over the last four years.
To even suggest that is idiotic. I could almost see posting this if it was a roundup of a bunch of the new aluminum cases, but we reviewed this case in the magazine last year.
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.')"
People misuse venerable all the time (this post is a perfect example). The implication with the word is that you're talking about something that is old enough to have earned your reverence.
The PC hardware review sites are the absolute worst. As soon as a new generation of videocards comes out, the last gen instantly becomes not just venerable, but 'the venerable blah blah blah'.
It makes me happy to know that there are other people who feel the same as I do.
I'd have killed to have a Tablet PC when I was in college. A normal laptop wouldn't have worked, because I couldn't draw the chemical formulas and diagrams fast enough using a touchpad or pointing nub, but a tablet is perfect for that. Having an easy way to browse my notes on the computer would have been great.
I don't think I'd get a slate model (with no keyboard) unless I had another desktop PC to use for writing papers and stuff like that, but the convertibles are pretty compelling, if you don't play games.
If you go to a large school and have lots of large lectures, tape recorders are almost useless. Large lecture halls swallow sound, and the tapes are usually unintelligible.
True, it's not exactly a geek book, but it is pretty geeky.
I called it dense because I found myself going back and rereading passages because I felt I'd missed something. There's subtexts in almost every paragraph, and some of the actual sentences are beautiful. It's due for a re-read sometime soon.
Dense isn't a bad thing. I enjoyed it more than just about anything I've read in the last year.
Once you get done with K&C, grab a copy of Summerland. You'll not regret it.
Summerland, by Michael Chabon, is definitely a geek book. It's hard to describe what it is without giving a lot of the fun away. It's a fast read, and very rewarding though. Chabon is the guy who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, about two cousins who live during WW2 and create a Golden Age comic hero. If you've not read Kavalier and Klay, it's very good, but it's pretty dense. I'm a fast reader, and it took me a solid two weeks to mow through it.
I also read Masters of Doom recently, which is about the early days of id software, Carmack, and Romero. It's a New Journalism book, where the author recreated dialog in conversations and things like that so it reads more like a novel than non-fiction. The writing's not the best, but it's entertaining, especially if you remember reading the trials and tribulations of Quake, Quake2, and Daikatana on the Shugashack and Bluesnews.
Finally, if you've not read William Gibsons Count Zero, it's excellent. I've read Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, Idoru and am finishing Virtual Light right now, but I think I like Count Zero better than the others. Virtual Light, Pattern Recognition, Idoru, and Count Zero all share similar themes (strong but secretly vulnerable heroines in trouble with big corporations) but Count Zero does it better than the others.
I also just finished The Diamond Age, by Stevenson. I was pretty unimpressed with it. Its plotlines aren't as intricate as Cryptonomicons, and it seems kind of like Stevenson trying to be Gibson. I was pretty unimpressed. I'm going to pick up another Stevenson book after I finish with Virtual Light.
I could dig up some Amazon links, but I'm too lazy.
I was really excited about DOOM3 until I read that Wired article and saw that the plan Carmack originally pitched was something like the Snow Crash Metaverse.
Damn them for making the sure-fire cash cow instead of the Metaverse!!!///Will
I'm the author of the story you're talking about, and I generally don't respond to criticism like this, but I think it's important to here.
We looked at this board during the second week in December. It was a very early board, and simply didn't run a large number of applications. The situation is a pretty common one for print pubs. Since we have a lead time that ranges from 2-6 weeks between the time we write stuff and the time that magazines get to readers, we occasionally take a look at preview hardware with special terms negotiated with the the vendors in advance. Unlike some other mags, we ALWAYS make it abundantly clear that this is a preview, not a full review. Furthermore, we always make it clear when a vendor specified we run specific benchmarks in these previews. Naturally, in our full reviews, we run whatever benchmarks we please at whatever resolution we like.
Anyway, Alienware wanted nVidia to get this sample in time for our preview story, but the drivers were very raw. In order to make our deadline and get an early look at the board, we agreed to only run a small subset of benchmarks, with a big huge disclaimer that said "Hey, nVidia would only let us run these benchmarks", which we did.
A nVidia rep hand-delivered the board up the same day that the Alienware system arrived, watched me install it, installed the drivers, watched me set up and run the benchmarks, then pulled the card, obliterated the drivers and went on their way. After that, we restored the pre-nVidia hard drive image and benchmarked the Radeon 9700 in the exact same machine.
We don't run other people's benchmarks in Maximum PC. If you see a number on the website or in the magazine, it was run by a staff member in our lab. Period.
I can't understand why you'd think this is a positive thing for nVidia. The overall tone of the story was that the performance is a little weak for something that will cost an arm and a leg, and take up two PCI slots. Heck, it doesn't even beat the 6 month old Radeon 9700 in the programmable shader test, which is the only one that really matters in my eyes. I don't care about 30 more fps in Quake 3. I want a card that will be fast in programmable shader games later this year, and the GeForce FX doesn't appear to be that.
If you're going to spend this kind of money on a pre-modded system, get a Voodoo or an Alienware and get a real warantee, a nicer paintjob, and a faster machine.
I don't understand why this is on/.
///Will Smith
Spam makes email useless for me, what to do?
on
The Story of "Nadine"
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've been the technical editor for Maximum PC magazine for almost two years. Before I worked here, I worked for Ars Technica. At some point or another all of my email addresses have been posted on high traffic, public websites. Heavy spam has been a part of my day-to-day life for the past 4 years.
It's gotten much worse lately. On any given day, I get about: 20 viagra sales pitches 20 penile/breast enlargement ads 20 get rich quick schemes 30 different porn ads 10 you've won something messages and another 20 or so messages that don't fit a category
Add anywhere from 3 to 20 assorted virus infected messages, the 20 or so press releases that come in every morning, and I don't know why email's even worth fooling with for the four or five messages that I actually read every day. Most of the repeat spam gets filtered and stored in a special folder, but I still end up seeing 25% of the total spam in my inbox every day.
Does anyone actually think that spam control legislation would help at this point? Most of the stuff I receive comes from the Pac rim countries or Russia. Anyone know any Congressmen or Senators who are pro-spam control?
As a short term solution, does anyone know a spam-filtering good POP3 client, or preferably a proxy I could use to filter spam that uses the MAPS or SPEWS lists?
In the theory that even Universities need quality technical help too, I took a low paying job at my alma mater, expecting to get a raise after proving my worth.
That was two years ago. Right now I have 700 machines that I personally am responsible for, and 2 other people to "help" me. One of those people still believes that Windows 3.1 is the ultimate OS for everything, and the other has a great deal of difficulty installing software if Autoplay doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Have they started including online sales yet or is it still just brick and mortar?
Hunting for sport. No, wait. Hunt-ED!
"Perhaps not surprisingly, Stearns, Matheson, and McIntyre are all running for re-election in November."
Everyone referred to as a Congressman (or Representative) is up for election every two years. Members of the House of Representatives are supposed to receive the Congressman honorific, while members of the Senate are called Senators.
Congressmen = elected every two years
Senators = elected every six years
I love the loaded editorial here from Zonk. "1up has a short piece saying..." vs. "IGN, meanwhile, is rumourmongering that...". The 1up story cites a sister publication (EGM) but no sources at either SquareEnix or Sony. The IGN article cites two sources, although they're both anonymous. One is from MS, while the other is the dreaded "source close to the company".
I don't generally agree with the editorial content of either site, but I also don't think it's appropriate to give a negative connotation to one site over the other, when both stories are essentially unsubstantiated rumormongering.
I'd guess that less than 20% of the overall visitors to /. actually visit the comments. Probably less than 10%.
Actually, Microsoft claims that the vendors are solely responsible for the bundle madness.
The attach ratio has never been higher because in order to buy a Xbox 360 from Gamestop or EB, you had to spend a minimum of $300 on accessories and games.
I, for one, welcome our new rodent overlords.
It's geek vs. non-geek. The main thing that separates us (the common geek) from them (everyone else) is that we want to know how our stuff (cars, phones, computers, water filtration plants) works, while they just want to know how it can help them.
The good news is those annoying people on their phones in the grocery checkout line will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I bought an old kindergarten desk at auction, the kind with three drawers on a side, which was about two and half feet off the ground. I liked it because it has a huge surface area on the top, it's about 18 sq. ft.
Then I made friends with the guys at a local woodworking shop, and they helped me pry the legs off of it, and replace them with legs I found in their store that are just the right height for me, according to the ergonomic guidelines of the time. I also shellac'd and varnished the top with about 15 coats of stuff, so that it won't get rings or stains from drinks on it.
I cut some foam to go in one of the drawers on the sitting side of the desk, with cutouts for my tools, and have a CD file in the second one. The third is a junk drawer.
It was about a 2 month project, but totally worth the effort. I've had it for almost 10 years now, and it's the best desk I've ever had. It has tons of space on top, and is the perfect height for me.
If you run a decent firewall, keep the OS patched, and are smart, you don't need anti-virus on Windows. I run my home machine, which I use for work, gaming, and email/Internet browsing in that order, with the anti-virus software disabled.
I scan everything once a week, only download software from trusted sources, and keep my OS patched, and the only positive results I ever get are from emailed that sit unclicked in my inbox.
Anti-virus utilities are largely unnecessary if you know how you can be infected, regardless of platform.
Disclaimer: I am the editor in chief of Maximum PC magazine, so my opinion on things like this isn't unbiased.
The aluminum case is not, and has never been dead.
We've reviewed a steady stream of aluminum cases at Maximum PC over the last four years.
To even suggest that is idiotic. I could almost see posting this if it was a roundup of a bunch of the new aluminum cases, but we reviewed this case in the magazine last year.
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.')"
People misuse venerable all the time (this post is a perfect example). The implication with the word is that you're talking about something that is old enough to have earned your reverence.
The PC hardware review sites are the absolute worst. As soon as a new generation of videocards comes out, the last gen instantly becomes not just venerable, but 'the venerable blah blah blah'.
It makes me happy to know that there are other people who feel the same as I do.
Tomorrow perhaps?
I love that everyone from Bloomberg on up is blaming the Canadians.
Everyone sing along now...
Blame Canada, Blame Canada
*mutter, mutter*
Something about Anne Murray, too.
I'd have killed to have a Tablet PC when I was in college. A normal laptop wouldn't have worked, because I couldn't draw the chemical formulas and diagrams fast enough using a touchpad or pointing nub, but a tablet is perfect for that. Having an easy way to browse my notes on the computer would have been great.
I don't think I'd get a slate model (with no keyboard) unless I had another desktop PC to use for writing papers and stuff like that, but the convertibles are pretty compelling, if you don't play games.
If you go to a large school and have lots of large lectures, tape recorders are almost useless. Large lecture halls swallow sound, and the tapes are usually unintelligible.
True, it's not exactly a geek book, but it is pretty geeky.
I called it dense because I found myself going back and rereading passages because I felt I'd missed something. There's subtexts in almost every paragraph, and some of the actual sentences are beautiful. It's due for a re-read sometime soon.
Dense isn't a bad thing. I enjoyed it more than just about anything I've read in the last year.
Once you get done with K&C, grab a copy of Summerland. You'll not regret it.
Summerland, by Michael Chabon, is definitely a geek book. It's hard to describe what it is without giving a lot of the fun away. It's a fast read, and very rewarding though. Chabon is the guy who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, about two cousins who live during WW2 and create a Golden Age comic hero. If you've not read Kavalier and Klay, it's very good, but it's pretty dense. I'm a fast reader, and it took me a solid two weeks to mow through it.
///Will
I also read Masters of Doom recently, which is about the early days of id software, Carmack, and Romero. It's a New Journalism book, where the author recreated dialog in conversations and things like that so it reads more like a novel than non-fiction. The writing's not the best, but it's entertaining, especially if you remember reading the trials and tribulations of Quake, Quake2, and Daikatana on the Shugashack and Bluesnews.
Finally, if you've not read William Gibsons Count Zero, it's excellent. I've read Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, Idoru and am finishing Virtual Light right now, but I think I like Count Zero better than the others. Virtual Light, Pattern Recognition, Idoru, and Count Zero all share similar themes (strong but secretly vulnerable heroines in trouble with big corporations) but Count Zero does it better than the others.
I also just finished The Diamond Age, by Stevenson. I was pretty unimpressed with it. Its plotlines aren't as intricate as Cryptonomicons, and it seems kind of like Stevenson trying to be Gibson. I was pretty unimpressed. I'm going to pick up another Stevenson book after I finish with Virtual Light.
I could dig up some Amazon links, but I'm too lazy.
Hope this helps!
I was really excited about DOOM3 until I read that Wired article and saw that the plan Carmack originally pitched was something like the Snow Crash Metaverse.
///Will
Damn them for making the sure-fire cash cow instead of the Metaverse!!!
I'm the author of the story you're talking about, and I generally don't respond to criticism like this, but I think it's important to here.
We looked at this board during the second week in December. It was a very early board, and simply didn't run a large number of applications. The situation is a pretty common one for print pubs. Since we have a lead time that ranges from 2-6 weeks between the time we write stuff and the time that magazines get to readers, we occasionally take a look at preview hardware with special terms negotiated with the the vendors in advance. Unlike some other mags, we ALWAYS make it abundantly clear that this is a preview, not a full review. Furthermore, we always make it clear when a vendor specified we run specific benchmarks in these previews. Naturally, in our full reviews, we run whatever benchmarks we please at whatever resolution we like.
Anyway, Alienware wanted nVidia to get this sample in time for our preview story, but the drivers were very raw. In order to make our deadline and get an early look at the board, we agreed to only run a small subset of benchmarks, with a big huge disclaimer that said "Hey, nVidia would only let us run these benchmarks", which we did.
A nVidia rep hand-delivered the board up the same day that the Alienware system arrived, watched me install it, installed the drivers, watched me set up and run the benchmarks, then pulled the card, obliterated the drivers and went on their way. After that, we restored the pre-nVidia hard drive image and benchmarked the Radeon 9700 in the exact same machine.
We don't run other people's benchmarks in Maximum PC. If you see a number on the website or in the magazine, it was run by a staff member in our lab. Period.
I can't understand why you'd think this is a positive thing for nVidia. The overall tone of the story was that the performance is a little weak for something that will cost an arm and a leg, and take up two PCI slots. Heck, it doesn't even beat the 6 month old Radeon 9700 in the programmable shader test, which is the only one that really matters in my eyes. I don't care about 30 more fps in Quake 3. I want a card that will be fast in programmable shader games later this year, and the GeForce FX doesn't appear to be that.
Will Smith
If you're going to spend this kind of money on a pre-modded system, get a Voodoo or an Alienware and get a real warantee, a nicer paintjob, and a faster machine.
/.
///Will Smith
I don't understand why this is on
I've been the technical editor for Maximum PC magazine for almost two years. Before I worked here, I worked for Ars Technica. At some point or another all of my email addresses have been posted on high traffic, public websites. Heavy spam has been a part of my day-to-day life for the past 4 years.
It's gotten much worse lately. On any given day, I get about:
20 viagra sales pitches
20 penile/breast enlargement ads
20 get rich quick schemes
30 different porn ads
10 you've won something messages
and another 20 or so messages that don't fit a category
Add anywhere from 3 to 20 assorted virus infected messages, the 20 or so press releases that come in every morning, and I don't know why email's even worth fooling with for the four or five messages that I actually read every day. Most of the repeat spam gets filtered and stored in a special folder, but I still end up seeing 25% of the total spam in my inbox every day.
Does anyone actually think that spam control legislation would help at this point? Most of the stuff I receive comes from the Pac rim countries or Russia. Anyone know any Congressmen or Senators who are pro-spam control?
As a short term solution, does anyone know a spam-filtering good POP3 client, or preferably a proxy I could use to filter spam that uses the MAPS or SPEWS lists?
///Will Smith
In the theory that even Universities need quality technical help too, I took a low paying job at my alma mater, expecting to get a raise after proving my worth.
:o)
That was two years ago. Right now I have 700 machines that I personally am responsible for, and 2 other people to "help" me. One of those people still believes that Windows 3.1 is the ultimate OS for everything, and the other has a great deal of difficulty installing software if Autoplay doesn't work.
I love my job.
Then on the side, I work for a little website
///Will Smith
Actually I voted for Homeworld *wink* ///Gonzo
You bastard! I actually had to take off work to wait in line to get tix at the Uptown.
God I love that theatre.
///Gonzo