"The option for securing MSIE on Win2k is the same as on any other platform, including XP - Don't use it"
It's not as simple as don't use IE as a web browser. Outlook and Outlook Express use it. Quicken uses it. Any executable or VBscript could open an IE control and send an exploit to it.
As other threads have pointed out, they won't be porting the XP SP2 enhancements like the popup blocker and the new, safe ActiveX handling (whatever that means). I'm guessing they'll still be releasing patches for exploitable bugs like the recent JPG decoder bug.
Apple doesn't like to discount, but there are deals to be had. Amazon was selling brand new 3rd gen 15GB iPods for $237, free shipping and no tax to most states. The iPod is the one to have, but if you want close enough, the 15GB Dell DJ is $200, and everyone else's hard drive players that also play MP3 files are $250 or less.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but the Dodge Sprinter is a step in the right direction- a full size van that gets 30MPG. It's actually a rebadged Mercedes van from Europe, the land of $4/gallon gas. This one's not built for the soccer moms and SUV yuppies (too slow, ugly and trucky for that). It's a real work truck for plumbers, shuttle vans, those people.
Detroit tried to play that game, but the Japanese beat them on both ends. Any Japanese car with proper maintenance will last 150K easily and their main bread and butter models get a new design every 4 years, that's almost twice as often as American cars.
They're doing so much to build idiotproof cars with these electronic driving aids, the end result will be the world will just build a better idiot. The last thing we need is people paying even less attention to driving than they do now. Like any other/.er I like high tech and gadgets, but I don't like gimmicky gadgets in my car.
BTW in most cases killing someone with a car gets no jail time unless there was drunk driving, street racing, or in those rare cases, evidence of a murder conspiracy, like you planned to kill a specific target by running him down with a car.
When you get below a certain size like say a Smartcar that seats two, a four wheeled car form factor just doesn't make sense. Try the BMW C1. It's an enclosed scooter with a little better weather and crash protection than a traditional scooter. Out of what's available for sale today, the big scooters like a Honda Silverwing or Suzuki Burgman make pretty good commuters and have enough power for the freeway, but they're not cheap at $7000. I ride a motorcycle and I think scooters look dorky as hell, but I can still appreciate their practicality.
It would make sense to use some existing HTML engine whether it's Gecko, KHTML, or IE. Another thread mentioned the Gecko engine which would be cool, but in theory you could make the HTML engine pluggable and switch between all three if you wanted.
Same here. I tried Freeworlddialup, which lets you call toll free POTS numbers for free. The sound quality and lag weren't as good as a regular phone. My friends on Vonage are pretty satisfied though, so maybe you get what you pay for. From what I've seen wireless is replacing landlines more than VoIP. With good signal at home my Verizon Wireless phone sounds as good as a landline and has never dropped a call at home. With bad or no signal it's useless.
You got a point there. Some of the most insightful political commentary I've ever seen has come from South Park, everything from fearmongering in news about child abduction, to illegal immigration, to Rob Reiner and the anti-smoking lobby- you name it. Matt and Trey are blatantly liberal about some things, but there's no way you can call them cheerleaders for the Democratic party. The strangest part is if you google for "South Park conservative", many conservatives even claim South Park as one of their own.
Mike Judge is another comic genius with King of the Hill (it's more political than Beavis & Butthead or Office Space). Texas really is a place where Ward Cleaver and the 50s are colliding with 21st century America, and KotH captures it perfectly.
This is normal. In the '03 California recall campaign there was only one debate that Arnold decided to attend. It really was a sad sight. Arnold, Arianna Huffington (D), and Cruz Bustamente (D) bickering, name calling and shouting over each other like it was Jerry Springer. Compared to them Camejo (Green) and McClintock (very conservative Republican) were absolutely dignified and spoke intelligently from their ends of the politcal spectrum. I really believe the campaign managers have decided that intellectuals just don't play well with the Average Joe voters. More than anything else this dumbing down of the political debate is poison to our democracy. To be fair it's happening on all sides, but it's most blatant with Bush's plain talk and simplistic arguments (You're either with us or against us.).
"Badnarik has no political experience whastoever, only two failed attempts at running for the Texas State House of Representatives"
Sure, a big part of being a politician is understanding bureaucracies and how to get things done in one. The closest example I can think of is Jesse Ventura becoming governor of Minnesota. The state didn't exactly go down the tubes, but he didn't get much passed either. The legislature frequently overrode his vetoes. Arnold the Governator isn't the same. He's been more active in the Republican party in the past.
You can say that again. We were cleaning out the storeroom at work and we found a 10+ year old IBM workstation. I think it was a 50Mhz or so PowerPC. The case wasn't any bigger than an ATX tower, but it must've weighed as much as 3 PC's. Sure don't build 'em like they used to.
That's what I was thinking too. An old cheap laptop with 2 PCMCIA ethernet cards if you want to do firewalling. Just watch for a few things.
-Laptop hardware is built lighter than desktops and most have had a hard life being banged around. Give the hardware a thorough burn in before you trust your data, network, etc. to it. Most important of all the hard drive. It's better to get a brand new drive in most cases.
-Many of those PCMCIA cards with the dongles have cheap connectors that work loose easily. Better to tape them down.
The executive branch enforces the law. Specifically, the Justice Dept. enforces antitrust law. They work for John Ashcroft who works for Bush. The Justice Dept. already won the antitrust suit against Microsoft. The remedy (breakup) was overturned on appeal but the Findings of Fact were as bulletproof as legal findings get. Strangely enough, after Bush took office the Justice Dept. settled for a much lighter remedy after the breakup was overturned. To a casual observer it would look as if Bush called off the hounds and told Justice to lay down and die.
I didn't notice any huge bugs with 10.0 Community, but I did have a hard time upgrading 10.0 Community to 10.0 Official once it was released. I did find these instructions with some googling. I agree with the parent too, wait for Official if you want a stable release.
Small dogs can be good watchdogs, i.e. alert you to the presence of an intruder. They're not good guarddogs. If you want a real guarddog please get the proper training for it. A well trained guarddog can be both a loving pet and a fierce protector of the family, but it's as much a deadly weapon as a gun.
Of course, the personality depends on the breed too. I like golden retrievers, but I suspect if one met a burgler it would probably show him around the house pointing out the valuables and then wander off with its new owner.
This is definitely an issue with IT people. It takes a certain amount of discipline and assertiveness, but it's important to not allow yourself to be interrupted when you're working on something that requires your complete concentration. Do what you have to do whether it's muting the cellphone or hiding out in the server room. One good example is when the network's down and the PHB boss calls every 5 min for a status report. The answer is yes it's still down, yes I'm working on it, and every second I'm talking on the phone with you is another second I'm not fixing the problem. You can't be frivolous about it, but you'll get more work done if you shut out the world when it's absolutely necessary.
"That sounds great! Microsoft really outdid themselves by copying from iTunes^W^W^W innovating this really amazing feature! (end sarcasm)"
OK, ratings are a good feature, but a single rating per song is too coarse. e.g. if I want to mellow out, I don't want a speed metal song to play even if it might be highly rated, and vice-versa. Is there some player that can rate by mood? I know about Synapse and MoodAmp, but haven't played with them enough to see if they work for me. The Allmusic Guide (allmusic.com) that WMP10 uses has very accurate and very descriptive moods for all the artists in its guide. If someone could combine their mood database with a rating system, it would be just about perfect. Right now I manually created playlists in Winamp divided by genres and decades. It's a little clunky, but I've just recently been motivated to organize all my music after getting an iPod.
Still haven't found what I'm looking for
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
My portable gadgets just keep multiplying with no end in sight, and none of them are multipurpose enough to do even close to everything. In no particular order there's:
PocketPC- It's a relatively big and clunky Dell Axim X5. Good but overpowered for calendar, phone book (except it only syncs with Outlook, grr.), ebooks and quicken (actually SPB Finance, a great app). Good for heavier processing tasks like street maps with Mapopolis (unfortunately no GPS so not as useful as it could be) and small videos (with compression to low-res you can easily fit a whole movie on a 128MB flash card). Good for playing music since you can find software players for almost any file format (yes ogg too), but the touchscreen interface is a little clunky compared to a dedicated player. It can run some decent games too, but the directional pad on this PDA feels cheap and sloppy. Pretty much useless for action games, but it will play the SNES Final Fantasy games. It can do WiFi, but web browsing on that tiny 320x240 screen is a joke.
Two phones- one personal, one for work. Both have basic calendar functions and can store a few hundred numbers in the phonebook. One has infrared so I could sync the calendar and contacts with Outlook on my laptop (but not desktop) if I bothered to set it up. The other is manual entry only unless I buy a proprietary data cable.
Handheld GPS- It's a nice unit for the price, an Etrex Legend. It has basic mapping features built in, but only works with Garmin's proprietary maps. I could also buy a data cable to connect it to the PocketPC to use for car navigation. For handheld use like hiking or jogging it's good. Small, tough and waterproof. I'll probably pick up a handlebar mount for the motorcycle too.
iPod- I just bought one and I'm having fun with it. It can sync calendar and contacts too, but the last thing I need is another place to look for phone numbers and schedules.
laptop- No need to explain. You all know a laptop does and what it's good for. My PIII laptop is getting a little long in the tooth. Instant on and battery life are not its strong points. The batteries might last 2.5 hrs on a good day, and it takes maybe 5 min to boot up and log in to Windows or Mandrake.
I'm not counting a Palm III and Rio Volt MP3 CD player that are mostly retired now.
There you go. All my gadgets. Good luck trying to combine them into fewer devices.
It's not about the principles or making enough money. This is about the opportunity cost of not billing their time to another client who actually has cash to pay their hourly rate.
"I can go to Dell and buy a machine for under $600"
You could, but not in an all-in-one small form factor chassis. $600 might buy you a nice system with no monitor or a low end system with a 15" LCD. Price out a Dell with Geforce FX5200 graphics and a 17" LCD. It'll easily be over $1200. Dell doesn't make an all-in-one system, but Gateway sells one called the Profile 5. It starts at $1150 with a Celeron and 15" LCD and $1550 with a P4 and 17" LCD.
I build my own, so I wouldn't consider any of these for my main system. I might consider them for a 2nd system where I needed to save space, but personally I think $1500 is better spent on a laptop as long as I didn't wang the extra CPU speed and FX5200 graphics for light 3D gaming.
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"The option for securing MSIE on Win2k is the same as on any other platform, including XP - Don't use it"
It's not as simple as don't use IE as a web browser. Outlook and Outlook Express use it. Quicken uses it. Any executable or VBscript could open an IE control and send an exploit to it.
As other threads have pointed out, they won't be porting the XP SP2 enhancements like the popup blocker and the new, safe ActiveX handling (whatever that means). I'm guessing they'll still be releasing patches for exploitable bugs like the recent JPG decoder bug.
Apple doesn't like to discount, but there are deals to be had. Amazon was selling brand new 3rd gen 15GB iPods for $237, free shipping and no tax to most states. The iPod is the one to have, but if you want close enough, the 15GB Dell DJ is $200, and everyone else's hard drive players that also play MP3 files are $250 or less.
Lots of cities have these car sharing co-ops.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but the Dodge Sprinter is a step in the right direction- a full size van that gets 30MPG. It's actually a rebadged Mercedes van from Europe, the land of $4/gallon gas. This one's not built for the soccer moms and SUV yuppies (too slow, ugly and trucky for that). It's a real work truck for plumbers, shuttle vans, those people.
Detroit tried to play that game, but the Japanese beat them on both ends. Any Japanese car with proper maintenance will last 150K easily and their main bread and butter models get a new design every 4 years, that's almost twice as often as American cars.
They're doing so much to build idiotproof cars with these electronic driving aids, the end result will be the world will just build a better idiot. The last thing we need is people paying even less attention to driving than they do now. Like any other /.er I like high tech and gadgets, but I don't like gimmicky gadgets in my car.
BTW in most cases killing someone with a car gets no jail time unless there was drunk driving, street racing, or in those rare cases, evidence of a murder conspiracy, like you planned to kill a specific target by running him down with a car.
When you get below a certain size like say a Smartcar that seats two, a four wheeled car form factor just doesn't make sense. Try the BMW C1. It's an enclosed scooter with a little better weather and crash protection than a traditional scooter. Out of what's available for sale today, the big scooters like a Honda Silverwing or Suzuki Burgman make pretty good commuters and have enough power for the freeway, but they're not cheap at $7000. I ride a motorcycle and I think scooters look dorky as hell, but I can still appreciate their practicality.
It would make sense to use some existing HTML engine whether it's Gecko, KHTML, or IE. Another thread mentioned the Gecko engine which would be cool, but in theory you could make the HTML engine pluggable and switch between all three if you wanted.
Same here. I tried Freeworlddialup, which lets you call toll free POTS numbers for free. The sound quality and lag weren't as good as a regular phone. My friends on Vonage are pretty satisfied though, so maybe you get what you pay for. From what I've seen wireless is replacing landlines more than VoIP. With good signal at home my Verizon Wireless phone sounds as good as a landline and has never dropped a call at home. With bad or no signal it's useless.
"I'd rather read the Onion than Drudge"
You got a point there. Some of the most insightful political commentary I've ever seen has come from South Park, everything from fearmongering in news about child abduction, to illegal immigration, to Rob Reiner and the anti-smoking lobby- you name it. Matt and Trey are blatantly liberal about some things, but there's no way you can call them cheerleaders for the Democratic party. The strangest part is if you google for "South Park conservative", many conservatives even claim South Park as one of their own.
Mike Judge is another comic genius with King of the Hill (it's more political than Beavis & Butthead or Office Space). Texas really is a place where Ward Cleaver and the 50s are colliding with 21st century America, and KotH captures it perfectly.
This is normal. In the '03 California recall campaign there was only one debate that Arnold decided to attend. It really was a sad sight. Arnold, Arianna Huffington (D), and Cruz Bustamente (D) bickering, name calling and shouting over each other like it was Jerry Springer. Compared to them Camejo (Green) and McClintock (very conservative Republican) were absolutely dignified and spoke intelligently from their ends of the politcal spectrum. I really believe the campaign managers have decided that intellectuals just don't play well with the Average Joe voters. More than anything else this dumbing down of the political debate is poison to our democracy. To be fair it's happening on all sides, but it's most blatant with Bush's plain talk and simplistic arguments (You're either with us or against us.).
"Badnarik has no political experience whastoever, only two failed attempts at running for the Texas State House of Representatives"
Sure, a big part of being a politician is understanding bureaucracies and how to get things done in one. The closest example I can think of is Jesse Ventura becoming governor of Minnesota. The state didn't exactly go down the tubes, but he didn't get much passed either. The legislature frequently overrode his vetoes. Arnold the Governator isn't the same. He's been more active in the Republican party in the past.
"Not to mention heavy as hell"
You can say that again. We were cleaning out the storeroom at work and we found a 10+ year old IBM workstation. I think it was a 50Mhz or so PowerPC. The case wasn't any bigger than an ATX tower, but it must've weighed as much as 3 PC's. Sure don't build 'em like they used to.
That's what I was thinking too. An old cheap laptop with 2 PCMCIA ethernet cards if you want to do firewalling. Just watch for a few things.
-Laptop hardware is built lighter than desktops and most have had a hard life being banged around. Give the hardware a thorough burn in before you trust your data, network, etc. to it. Most important of all the hard drive. It's better to get a brand new drive in most cases.
-Many of those PCMCIA cards with the dongles have cheap connectors that work loose easily. Better to tape them down.
"And what does Bush have to do with this anyway?"
The executive branch enforces the law. Specifically, the Justice Dept. enforces antitrust law. They work for John Ashcroft who works for Bush. The Justice Dept. already won the antitrust suit against Microsoft. The remedy (breakup) was overturned on appeal but the Findings of Fact were as bulletproof as legal findings get. Strangely enough, after Bush took office the Justice Dept. settled for a much lighter remedy after the breakup was overturned. To a casual observer it would look as if Bush called off the hounds and told Justice to lay down and die.
I didn't notice any huge bugs with 10.0 Community, but I did have a hard time upgrading 10.0 Community to 10.0 Official once it was released. I did find these instructions with some googling. I agree with the parent too, wait for Official if you want a stable release.
If you waited for a sale you could get a 12 pack or Schaefer or Olympia for $3. That's some nasty shit.
Small dogs can be good watchdogs, i.e. alert you to the presence of an intruder. They're not good guarddogs. If you want a real guarddog please get the proper training for it. A well trained guarddog can be both a loving pet and a fierce protector of the family, but it's as much a deadly weapon as a gun.
Of course, the personality depends on the breed too. I like golden retrievers, but I suspect if one met a burgler it would probably show him around the house pointing out the valuables and then wander off with its new owner.
Me fail English? That unpossible.
This is definitely an issue with IT people. It takes a certain amount of discipline and assertiveness, but it's important to not allow yourself to be interrupted when you're working on something that requires your complete concentration. Do what you have to do whether it's muting the cellphone or hiding out in the server room. One good example is when the network's down and the PHB boss calls every 5 min for a status report. The answer is yes it's still down, yes I'm working on it, and every second I'm talking on the phone with you is another second I'm not fixing the problem. You can't be frivolous about it, but you'll get more work done if you shut out the world when it's absolutely necessary.
"That sounds great! Microsoft really outdid themselves by copying from iTunes^W^W^W innovating this really amazing feature! (end sarcasm)"
OK, ratings are a good feature, but a single rating per song is too coarse. e.g. if I want to mellow out, I don't want a speed metal song to play even if it might be highly rated, and vice-versa. Is there some player that can rate by mood? I know about Synapse and MoodAmp, but haven't played with them enough to see if they work for me. The Allmusic Guide (allmusic.com) that WMP10 uses has very accurate and very descriptive moods for all the artists in its guide. If someone could combine their mood database with a rating system, it would be just about perfect. Right now I manually created playlists in Winamp divided by genres and decades. It's a little clunky, but I've just recently been motivated to organize all my music after getting an iPod.
"You're being silly! WMP is software meant to be run on a desktop or laptop machine."
True. WMP10 is for PCs, but they timed its release to coincide with the launch of Windows Mobile Portable Media Center.
My portable gadgets just keep multiplying with no end in sight, and none of them are multipurpose enough to do even close to everything. In no particular order there's:
PocketPC- It's a relatively big and clunky Dell Axim X5. Good but overpowered for calendar, phone book (except it only syncs with Outlook, grr.), ebooks and quicken (actually SPB Finance, a great app). Good for heavier processing tasks like street maps with Mapopolis (unfortunately no GPS so not as useful as it could be) and small videos (with compression to low-res you can easily fit a whole movie on a 128MB flash card). Good for playing music since you can find software players for almost any file format (yes ogg too), but the touchscreen interface is a little clunky compared to a dedicated player. It can run some decent games too, but the directional pad on this PDA feels cheap and sloppy. Pretty much useless for action games, but it will play the SNES Final Fantasy games. It can do WiFi, but web browsing on that tiny 320x240 screen is a joke.
Two phones- one personal, one for work. Both have basic calendar functions and can store a few hundred numbers in the phonebook. One has infrared so I could sync the calendar and contacts with Outlook on my laptop (but not desktop) if I bothered to set it up. The other is manual entry only unless I buy a proprietary data cable.
Handheld GPS- It's a nice unit for the price, an Etrex Legend. It has basic mapping features built in, but only works with Garmin's proprietary maps. I could also buy a data cable to connect it to the PocketPC to use for car navigation. For handheld use like hiking or jogging it's good. Small, tough and waterproof. I'll probably pick up a handlebar mount for the motorcycle too.
iPod- I just bought one and I'm having fun with it. It can sync calendar and contacts too, but the last thing I need is another place to look for phone numbers and schedules.
laptop- No need to explain. You all know a laptop does and what it's good for. My PIII laptop is getting a little long in the tooth. Instant on and battery life are not its strong points. The batteries might last 2.5 hrs on a good day, and it takes maybe 5 min to boot up and log in to Windows or Mandrake.
I'm not counting a Palm III and Rio Volt MP3 CD player that are mostly retired now.
There you go. All my gadgets. Good luck trying to combine them into fewer devices.
It's not about the principles or making enough money. This is about the opportunity cost of not billing their time to another client who actually has cash to pay their hourly rate.
"I can go to Dell and buy a machine for under $600"
You could, but not in an all-in-one small form factor chassis. $600 might buy you a nice system with no monitor or a low end system with a 15" LCD. Price out a Dell with Geforce FX5200 graphics and a 17" LCD. It'll easily be over $1200. Dell doesn't make an all-in-one system, but Gateway sells one called the Profile 5. It starts at $1150 with a Celeron and 15" LCD and $1550 with a P4 and 17" LCD.
I build my own, so I wouldn't consider any of these for my main system. I might consider them for a 2nd system where I needed to save space, but personally I think $1500 is better spent on a laptop as long as I didn't wang the extra CPU speed and FX5200 graphics for light 3D gaming.