Where I live, there used to be several brick-and-mortar electronics parts stores where you could pick up a wide variety of parts and supplies; now, aside from the pathetic selection at Fry's, there's absolutely nothing. There also used to be HSC Electronics for surplus, and they're gone from the area as well. The few other independent surplus dealers are also shuttered, years ago. In the SF Bay Area there may or may not be Mike Quinn Electronics (which those of you in the area might have known for building after building of surplus).
I'm likely a prime example of the 'unintended consequences' of their decisions: I'm still on XP, was going to go to 7 finally, but after all this, I'm going to Ubuntu instead and never looking back. I never really trusted them all that much to start with, and now it's clear they can't be trusted at all. Bye bye, Microsoft, I'll be laughing my ass off at you when you either get the living crap sued out of you, you go bankrupt, or both.
Uh, I think you skimmed my original post; I'm DONE with Microsoft products, I don't want any more of them and their nonsense, treating my computer like they own it and not me, and spying on everything I do, forcing updates down my throat, etc. Additionally I'm not spending a dime on an old P4 laptop, it'll work fine the way it is or it won't work at all, but I think it'll be fine; no 'upgrading' anything, it has 2GB of RAM, if some average distro of Linux won't run in that then there's something seriously wrong with Linux. This 'Ubuntu' looks as good as anything else as a starting point. Also, it's a laptop, there are no 'upgrades' for anything anyway, it is what it is.
Your thinking politicians are rational and thoughtful would be absolutely adorable if it wasn't so tragically naive. A person can be smart; people are dumb, ignorant, panicky animals, and politicians even more so. A politician that is actually intelligent and thoughtful is a rare animal indeed, and more likely to run as fast as they can away from politics.
That's the idea; as I said, I have an entire laptop that I can completely blow away and install whatever I want to on it, and not lose anything at all. The plan is to get used to using it on that (including learning my way around the nuts and bolts of the OS, like I do with MS products) before ever running it on any desktop box.
I don't have Windows 7. I might have got a copy of Windows 7 before all this Windows 10 crap hit the fan, but if this is the way Microsoft is going to do business, then I'm done with them for good.
I don't want to have to try to get XP to run in a virtual machine. Why can't I use WINE? I thought that's what it was for.
OK, not the first time I've heard that.. and the lovely part of this is I can try as many distros I want, the laptop in question is rarely used for anything.
Know much about WINE? There is one piece of Windows-only software that is absolutely necessary for me: http://powertap.com/product/po... Think it'll run OK? I believe it's written in Java (yah yah I know, but there really isn't any other software I can use in this case).
I have an old Dell Pentium 4 laptop that's currently running Windows XP that I don't have anything important on; suggestions for a decent distro to put on it? Should also be good for a multi-core desktop, later on I need to build a replacement for the 10+ year old AMD Athlon 64-based desktop I have that's also still running XP.
Sounds to me like your government needs to enact a moratorium on 'emergency legislation' after certain types of emergency situations have occurred, until a 'cooling off' period has passed, because this sounds like either a knee-jerk reaction, or certain people trying to leverage the emergency to further their own political agendas. Either way it should be prevented until everyone has calmed down for a while.
Also: U.S. citizen here, and all jokes about your country aside (because they're all in good fun anyway; je suis Charlie), I think I can speak for many of us here in the U.S. when I say, we're horrified at what's happened there, and want to see the ultimate forces behind it brought down as soon as possible, and here's to your nation's wounds healing as quickly as possible; Vive la France.
Oh and by the way? You got a real funny idea what a troll is. A troll isn't someone who dares to post what they really think, a troll is someone who shitposts just to get a reaction out of people. Just because you or someone else doesn't LIKE my opinion doesn't make ME a troll, it makes me someone whose opinion differs. Please learn the difference, and don't bother me again.
I'm not 'butthurt' about anything, I'm mocking someone else.
I don't completely agree with you, obviously; of course there is the ostenisble, 'public' reason for the treaty; it's us extending an olive branch. I speak of the behind-the-scenes motivation, which is exactly as I stated: We give them a chance to abide by it and give up, permanently, the path they were set on (nuking Israel and who knows who else), and they get to re-join the rest of the world. They just use it as a way to buy time to complete the development of a viable weapon and we catch them at it? Then nobody else in the world, or at least nobody that matters, will say a single word when we proceed to bomb them back into the stone age. Hell, a number of our own allies will probably join us in that, if that point is reached. Personally I'd just as well that Iran has had enough and is going to play this straight; there's been more than everyone's fair share of war for one generation.
If you don't agree with my opinion on the matter, then that's your prerogative; but mind you, that's all what you, I, or anyone else has to offer here: an opinion. We're not world leaders, we're not expert political analysts, we're not even identifying ourselves by our legal names; we're just random people on the Internet, and nothing said here decides anything about anything.
Oh look, some butthurt Jihadist sympathizer with moderation points to burn modded me down and labeled me a 'troll', I'm SO hurt, someone get me an ambulance!
Know the real reason they're allowing Iran to sign a treaty? It's called 'giving them enough rope to hang themselves': If they abide by the terms of the treaty, then great, everybody wins, and the average Iranian citizen has time to fix the leadership problems in their own country; if they don't abide by the treaty, then we can throw up our hands and say 'Well, we tried! We gave them a chance! But they just couldn't play it straight!' and then we do things the Hard Way, and nobody will blame us.
At least I'm willing to put my name to what I'm saying here, instead of being a gods-be-damned abject fucking coward like you are, spewing your verbal diarrhea safely behind anonymity. If you think you're so gods-be-damned right, then come out and say it in the light instead of hiding in the shadows, or are you too much of a coward? Or maybe you're a jihadist sympathizer, and all you want is Westerners to be killed? See your Sunni extremist 'brethren' cut off our heads, turn our women into sex slaves? Show yourself!
Has Iran really finally given up on building a nuclear bomb (with which to attack Israel), or have they just moved it to some cave somewhere nobody has found yet, or maybe to another country, and this whole 'treaty' is just them buying time to complete the work? Guess we'll find out won't we? Sorry, but I have a hard time trusting the intentions of any country that teaches their schoolchildren to go around chanting 'death to America'.
There will never be a rainbow-unicorn-we're-all-one world, ever, especially with Islamic radicals.
You'd better fucking hope there is, otherwise the Human Race won't be around much longer, we'll find some creative way to fuck everything up so bad that nothing can live on this planet anymore. Meanwhile fix your shitty attitude, you're not helping.
Imagine how quickly we could get working-class children into their lifetime careers of burger-flipping and form-filling and ditch-digging if we remove all the distraction of a 'well-rounded education'...
Nice impersonation of Corporate America you're doing right there; that's my read on the exact thing they'd like to see: 100% privatization of education from kindergarted on up, turning the whole process into just a lengthy trade school, to produce the workers they want -- and that never learn anything else.
Don't forget to put a 50-ohm termination on that, or it'll radiate/receive anyway, or if you can identify and isolate the final amp, disconnect it from the supply rail.
In this day and age of mass surveillance and the corporate practice of scraping people's lives for data to sell to other corporations, just like so many scammers and malware authors do, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they haven't 'fixed' the 'bug' because it's not a bug, it's a feature, intended to allow them them 'send carefully crafted packets' to allow 'execution of arbitrary code' (read as: 'run code that allows enhanced snooping on what you're doing with your TV, and to turn on the camera and microphone to spy outright on you) so they can collect their otherwise illegal data and still maintain a plausible deniability.
In my opinion you're asking for trouble if you connect a so-called 'smart TV' to any network in the first place. Do yourself a favor and reject the entire idea and buy a non-smart TV instead. You want 'smarts'? Connect it to a media center PC or a DVR or something else. Or maybe just, I dunno, watch TV instead of making it a lifestyle? FFS TVs are turning into just gigantic versions of people's phones. Enough already..
I suppose if you're approaching the problem with an Edison-like philosophy (no such thing as a failure) then sure, and I didn't mean to imply that the 'work' being done is producing uselessness, but it's not producing true AI, either, just things that give the illusion of AI.
Pretty much how I feel about it. I'm not married, have no family of any kind, no kids. I see no point in 'saving for retirement' unless I finally (doubtful, at this stage of the game) come to a point where 'saving' doesn't mean 'living like a monk'. I also see no point in 'waiting to retire to do the things I want to do', when in the meantime I'll get fat, weak, diseased, and more or less ruin my body permanently, so I can 'retire' and (as you say) spend all my 'retirement savings' on pills, shots, doctors, surgeries, and hospital visits, then die regretting all the things I never did when I was young enough and healthy enough to do them? Screw that. I'm halfway to 100 and know what I'm doing 15-20 hours a week? Riding my bike and going to the gym, training for my 7th season of road racing. Sitting on the couch and watching yourself get old is for dummies. XD
So, basically, there is no 'separation of Church and State' at all? Also, I'm not surprised if everyone lies through their teeth about that, just to be able to run for/hold public office. I'd quickly run out of fingers and toes to count the people I've known over the course of my life, who were complete, total, abject hypocrites when it came to their so-called 'religion', why should {strike}professional liars{/strike} politicians be any different?
That's what this would be: Microsoft and companies like them being able to almost literally black-bag people, take everything they own, and leave them with no legal recourse and no rights, just on their say-so that their alleged trade secrets have been 'stolen'. Sure, no potential for massive abuse here, no sir-eee.
The only real reason a computer can beat a human chess master is that it's equivalent of 'attention span' is virtually unlimited compared to a human being, and the speed at which it can work through different scenarios is orders of magnitude greater than the human brain. It's not really 'thinking' about anything, it's just 'computing'; it's an 'expert system', not sentient or self-aware. This is not real AI.
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Where I live, there used to be several brick-and-mortar electronics parts stores where you could pick up a wide variety of parts and supplies; now, aside from the pathetic selection at Fry's, there's absolutely nothing. There also used to be HSC Electronics for surplus, and they're gone from the area as well. The few other independent surplus dealers are also shuttered, years ago. In the SF Bay Area there may or may not be Mike Quinn Electronics (which those of you in the area might have known for building after building of surplus).
I'm likely a prime example of the 'unintended consequences' of their decisions: I'm still on XP, was going to go to 7 finally, but after all this, I'm going to Ubuntu instead and never looking back. I never really trusted them all that much to start with, and now it's clear they can't be trusted at all. Bye bye, Microsoft, I'll be laughing my ass off at you when you either get the living crap sued out of you, you go bankrupt, or both.
Uh, I think you skimmed my original post; I'm DONE with Microsoft products, I don't want any more of them and their nonsense, treating my computer like they own it and not me, and spying on everything I do, forcing updates down my throat, etc. Additionally I'm not spending a dime on an old P4 laptop, it'll work fine the way it is or it won't work at all, but I think it'll be fine; no 'upgrading' anything, it has 2GB of RAM, if some average distro of Linux won't run in that then there's something seriously wrong with Linux. This 'Ubuntu' looks as good as anything else as a starting point. Also, it's a laptop, there are no 'upgrades' for anything anyway, it is what it is.
Your thinking politicians are rational and thoughtful would be absolutely adorable if it wasn't so tragically naive. A person can be smart; people are dumb, ignorant, panicky animals, and politicians even more so. A politician that is actually intelligent and thoughtful is a rare animal indeed, and more likely to run as fast as they can away from politics.
try it and see what happens
That's the idea; as I said, I have an entire laptop that I can completely blow away and install whatever I want to on it, and not lose anything at all. The plan is to get used to using it on that (including learning my way around the nuts and bolts of the OS, like I do with MS products) before ever running it on any desktop box.
:-)
Thanks for the suggestions.
I don't have Windows 7. I might have got a copy of Windows 7 before all this Windows 10 crap hit the fan, but if this is the way Microsoft is going to do business, then I'm done with them for good.
I don't want to have to try to get XP to run in a virtual machine. Why can't I use WINE? I thought that's what it was for.
OK, not the first time I've heard that.. and the lovely part of this is I can try as many distros I want, the laptop in question is rarely used for anything.
Know much about WINE? There is one piece of Windows-only software that is absolutely necessary for me: http://powertap.com/product/po... Think it'll run OK? I believe it's written in Java (yah yah I know, but there really isn't any other software I can use in this case).
I have an old Dell Pentium 4 laptop that's currently running Windows XP that I don't have anything important on; suggestions for a decent distro to put on it? Should also be good for a multi-core desktop, later on I need to build a replacement for the 10+ year old AMD Athlon 64-based desktop I have that's also still running XP.
Sounds to me like your government needs to enact a moratorium on 'emergency legislation' after certain types of emergency situations have occurred, until a 'cooling off' period has passed, because this sounds like either a knee-jerk reaction, or certain people trying to leverage the emergency to further their own political agendas. Either way it should be prevented until everyone has calmed down for a while.
Also: U.S. citizen here, and all jokes about your country aside (because they're all in good fun anyway; je suis Charlie), I think I can speak for many of us here in the U.S. when I say, we're horrified at what's happened there, and want to see the ultimate forces behind it brought down as soon as possible, and here's to your nation's wounds healing as quickly as possible; Vive la France.
Oh and by the way? You got a real funny idea what a troll is. A troll isn't someone who dares to post what they really think, a troll is someone who shitposts just to get a reaction out of people. Just because you or someone else doesn't LIKE my opinion doesn't make ME a troll, it makes me someone whose opinion differs. Please learn the difference, and don't bother me again.
I'm not 'butthurt' about anything, I'm mocking someone else.
I don't completely agree with you, obviously; of course there is the ostenisble, 'public' reason for the treaty; it's us extending an olive branch. I speak of the behind-the-scenes motivation, which is exactly as I stated: We give them a chance to abide by it and give up, permanently, the path they were set on (nuking Israel and who knows who else), and they get to re-join the rest of the world. They just use it as a way to buy time to complete the development of a viable weapon and we catch them at it? Then nobody else in the world, or at least nobody that matters, will say a single word when we proceed to bomb them back into the stone age. Hell, a number of our own allies will probably join us in that, if that point is reached. Personally I'd just as well that Iran has had enough and is going to play this straight; there's been more than everyone's fair share of war for one generation.
If you don't agree with my opinion on the matter, then that's your prerogative; but mind you, that's all what you, I, or anyone else has to offer here: an opinion. We're not world leaders, we're not expert political analysts, we're not even identifying ourselves by our legal names; we're just random people on the Internet, and nothing said here decides anything about anything.
Oh look, some butthurt Jihadist sympathizer with moderation points to burn modded me down and labeled me a 'troll', I'm SO hurt, someone get me an ambulance!
Know the real reason they're allowing Iran to sign a treaty? It's called 'giving them enough rope to hang themselves': If they abide by the terms of the treaty, then great, everybody wins, and the average Iranian citizen has time to fix the leadership problems in their own country; if they don't abide by the treaty, then we can throw up our hands and say 'Well, we tried! We gave them a chance! But they just couldn't play it straight!' and then we do things the Hard Way, and nobody will blame us.
At least I'm willing to put my name to what I'm saying here, instead of being a gods-be-damned abject fucking coward like you are, spewing your verbal diarrhea safely behind anonymity. If you think you're so gods-be-damned right, then come out and say it in the light instead of hiding in the shadows, or are you too much of a coward? Or maybe you're a jihadist sympathizer, and all you want is Westerners to be killed? See your Sunni extremist 'brethren' cut off our heads, turn our women into sex slaves? Show yourself!
Attempting to indict the United States of intentionally killing schoolchildren in foreign countries
Strawman much?
Has Iran really finally given up on building a nuclear bomb (with which to attack Israel), or have they just moved it to some cave somewhere nobody has found yet, or maybe to another country, and this whole 'treaty' is just them buying time to complete the work? Guess we'll find out won't we? Sorry, but I have a hard time trusting the intentions of any country that teaches their schoolchildren to go around chanting 'death to America'.
There will never be a rainbow-unicorn-we're-all-one world, ever, especially with Islamic radicals.
You'd better fucking hope there is, otherwise the Human Race won't be around much longer, we'll find some creative way to fuck everything up so bad that nothing can live on this planet anymore. Meanwhile fix your shitty attitude, you're not helping.
Imagine how quickly we could get working-class children into their lifetime careers of burger-flipping and form-filling and ditch-digging if we remove all the distraction of a 'well-rounded education'...
Nice impersonation of Corporate America you're doing right there; that's my read on the exact thing they'd like to see: 100% privatization of education from kindergarted on up, turning the whole process into just a lengthy trade school, to produce the workers they want -- and that never learn anything else.
Don't forget to put a 50-ohm termination on that, or it'll radiate/receive anyway, or if you can identify and isolate the final amp, disconnect it from the supply rail.
This is one reason I don't use smart TV at all
There, fixed that for you, friend.
In this day and age of mass surveillance and the corporate practice of scraping people's lives for data to sell to other corporations, just like so many scammers and malware authors do, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they haven't 'fixed' the 'bug' because it's not a bug, it's a feature, intended to allow them them 'send carefully crafted packets' to allow 'execution of arbitrary code' (read as: 'run code that allows enhanced snooping on what you're doing with your TV, and to turn on the camera and microphone to spy outright on you) so they can collect their otherwise illegal data and still maintain a plausible deniability.
In my opinion you're asking for trouble if you connect a so-called 'smart TV' to any network in the first place. Do yourself a favor and reject the entire idea and buy a non-smart TV instead. You want 'smarts'? Connect it to a media center PC or a DVR or something else. Or maybe just, I dunno, watch TV instead of making it a lifestyle? FFS TVs are turning into just gigantic versions of people's phones. Enough already..
I suppose if you're approaching the problem with an Edison-like philosophy (no such thing as a failure) then sure, and I didn't mean to imply that the 'work' being done is producing uselessness, but it's not producing true AI, either, just things that give the illusion of AI.
Pretty much how I feel about it. I'm not married, have no family of any kind, no kids. I see no point in 'saving for retirement' unless I finally (doubtful, at this stage of the game) come to a point where 'saving' doesn't mean 'living like a monk'. I also see no point in 'waiting to retire to do the things I want to do', when in the meantime I'll get fat, weak, diseased, and more or less ruin my body permanently, so I can 'retire' and (as you say) spend all my 'retirement savings' on pills, shots, doctors, surgeries, and hospital visits, then die regretting all the things I never did when I was young enough and healthy enough to do them? Screw that. I'm halfway to 100 and know what I'm doing 15-20 hours a week? Riding my bike and going to the gym, training for my 7th season of road racing. Sitting on the couch and watching yourself get old is for dummies. XD
Is this the real life?
So, basically, there is no 'separation of Church and State' at all?
Also, I'm not surprised if everyone lies through their teeth about that, just to be able to run for/hold public office. I'd quickly run out of fingers and toes to count the people I've known over the course of my life, who were complete, total, abject hypocrites when it came to their so-called 'religion', why should {strike}professional liars{/strike} politicians be any different?
They only get to shoot at us if we get to shoot back, otherwise no deal. XD
That's what this would be: Microsoft and companies like them being able to almost literally black-bag people, take everything they own, and leave them with no legal recourse and no rights, just on their say-so that their alleged trade secrets have been 'stolen'. Sure, no potential for massive abuse here, no sir-eee.
The only real reason a computer can beat a human chess master is that it's equivalent of 'attention span' is virtually unlimited compared to a human being, and the speed at which it can work through different scenarios is orders of magnitude greater than the human brain. It's not really 'thinking' about anything, it's just 'computing'; it's an 'expert system', not sentient or self-aware. This is not real AI.