I'd pick the power cable that needs to have wire run to a plug on the same wall over a speaker cable that needs to be run all the way around the room.
That's a valid point, but having self-powered speakers with a wireless audio connection means that now each speaker has to have its own power source and amp. So you've have to have some sort of nasty "wall wart" at the electical outlet, or incorporate a amplifier in the speaker enclosure itself.
To me, that definitely feels like something that would really add inefficiency and complexity in a lot of respects.
"I think the next big thing will be the widespread adoption of wireless and speakers headphones--cause none of us like a tangle of wires"
I can see the benefit of wireless headphones, but how do wireless speakers even make sense?
I suppose you could eliminate the cable running from the PC to the amplifier if the amplifier was wireless enabled, but you still have to have some sort of wire running to each speaker to provide power. Unless you're planning on running your speakers off of batteries... in which case they'd need frequent recharging and would not be capable of putting out enough juice for decent sound.
...how did a college student afford a brand new flatscreen TV? Perhaps law enforcement agencies were actually picking up a signal from the theft-deterrant tags on the TV.
As far as I've understood, if I let the GDS index my files (when I run it with my user), it creates a _copy_ in a directory accessible to all users. Is this correct, and (it seems so) would the other local users be able to read these?
The GDS index is stored in a subfolder of your personal Application Data subfolder. Unless your file permissions are really screwed up, no other non-admin users should be able to access this directory. And it sounds like your file permissions are fine.:P
When you run GDS, it runs under your Windows login's security context.
Therefore, it only indexes the files that you have permission to see. The article describes a scenario where a user installs GDS and reads pages out of the browser's cache that were left there by other people who used the same Windows login.
Of course those files are visible to GDS. They could have also been retrieved by simply browsing through the cached files normally or using Window's crappy built-in search tool.
Conclusion: DUH. Nothing to see here, move along people...
...and press a desktop into server duty, the one area not to skimp would be the hard drives. CPUs, RAM, and motherboards don't typically blow out on a desktop any more often than they do on a server. I think hard drives will be the most likely point of failure.
1. Go with a mirrored (RAID-1) setup at the very mimimum. If it's anything but the VERY lightest-duty server (a fileserver for a 4-person office or something) invest in something besides consumer-oriented 7,200RPM IDE/SATA drives. Go with SCSI (it's cheaper now) or with those SATA drives that are designed for server use. Simulate drive failures so you make sure that you can recover.
1a. You may also want to experiment with power-saving features on the drives, depending on your environment. Most OSs have an option to spin down the drives after N minutes of inactivity. This will also prolong their life. Obviously there are servers where the spin-up delay would be undesirable. Depends on your situation.
1b. Make sure you have gobs of RAM for whatever task you're doing. If you start thrashing the disks and hitting swap space a lot, it's going to take a heck of a toll on the drives. By the same token, when you have so much ram that everything's running out of memory, it's a beautiful thing. Nothing like seeing a busy database server with only an occaisional flicker of HDD activity, since the entire DB fits into ram.:-)
2. Make sure cooling is adequate. Do some stress-testing that keeps the CPU and disk usage pegged at 100% for at least 24 hours or so. Cases with 120mm fans will move more air than cases with 80mm fans. The 120mm fans will also run more quietly, and will run at lower rpms for a longer lifetime. Try disconnecting one of the fans and seeing if the server remains stable, because the fans WILL die at some point.
3. Test your backup plan. Simulate failures and restores.
Obviously, any of that advice would apply to "real" server hardware as well. You just have to do slightly more work if you're rolling your own servers because they might not come preinstalled with backup software/hardware or cooling.
Even thought I've always used Windows and barely dabbled in other systems, I've always thought that "OK" belonged on the right like GNOME does it.
To me, clicking "OK" means that I want to move forward in the application. "Cancel" means I want to back up or back out. Since most languages and grapshs go from left to right, it only seems natural that "OK" should be on the right.
Especially since a lot of applications use "Wizard"-style dialog boxes when they present a series of dialog boxes to the user. In those dialog boxes, ">" is on the right. And "Next >>" is basically the same thing as "OK"...
I realize that it's important to use space efficiently no matter how much you have, but how much horizontal space are you really going to save by going to compact keyboards? I'm thinking... six inches at most.
If these kiosks are THAT cramped for space, I can't imagine them being very pleasant to use, even with a few inches of space freed up by your compact keyboards. Most people aren't going to want to rub shoulders and elbows with total strangers in order to do a little web surfing.
(Perhaps I'm missing something. Maybe they're small kiosks, with each individual kiosk separated by a reasonable amount of space...)
Re:Bullshit all around from AMD fanboys
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
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· Score: 1
I said: "Nothing on any motherboard I've ever used heats up aside from the chipset"
You said: "When's the last time you looked at a modern Intel motherboard? I've got an 865 board behind me and the heat sink on the northbridge is an inch tall"
When people talk about the "chipset" on a motherboard, they're talking about the northbridge+southbridge, basically. So, yes. I do realize that any modern motherboard chipset produces a lot of heat. They've had heatsinks and/or fans for probably 4-5 years now, at least.
Re:Bullshit all around from AMD fanboys
on
AMD 90nm Evaluated
·
· Score: 1
Odd that they take a top tier manufacturer for the AMD tests (Asus), and a manufacturer known for shit (Abit) for the Intel.
I agree that they should have used motherboard from the same manufacturer, but I also can't see this making a measurable difference. Nothing on any motherboard I've ever used heats up aside from the chipset, so I can't imagine the power drain to be significant.
RAM, CPU, chipset, GPU, hard drives... they heat up. Not the motherboard itself.
Also, Abit produces excellent quality motherboards. I've used quite a few in my time, both for personal use, at work, and when building for friends. They've gotten amazing amounts of positive reviews and recommendations from countless reviewers - they're definitely in the top tier of manufacturers along with Abit and they've been there for close to 10 years. Calling their products "shit" betrays a lack of knowledge (or perhaps some unlucky personal experiences) on your part!
What was preventing them from taking some accurate measurements?
I don't think any P4 versus AMD comparison is ever going to be totally "apples to apples" due to the differing chipsets involved as well as the different power demands of the CPUs themselves, which probably necessitate differing amounts of capacitors and so on.
Besides, there ARE no PCI-e motherboards available for the Athlons yet. And the AMD's Hypertransport bus runs at very comparable speeds to PCI-e. But you knew that, right?
Oh, the above setup is for a wired home network of course. Obviously things would need to be a little more "robust" if you're talking about a wireless network, or a office network where you might have hostile/clueless users doing god-knows-what.
My post was a response to people who seem to be indulging on overkill security measures on simple LANs... better too much than too little, but damn...
I see some crazy setups here on this thread. Really, NAT, AV software, and regular software updates are all you need. If you're not on Windows, you could probably even drop the AV stuff. Hell, you can probably drop the AV stuff even if you're ON Windows, as long as you're not installing shady software.
* 8-port Linksys Router/Firewall
Only a few incoming ports are opened - basically the ports needed for Soulseek and Bittorrent. If you're NAT'd behind a hardware firewall/router that blocks incoming connection requests before they even hit your PCs.... not a lot can happen to you aside from installing viruses yourself.
* Norton AV on each Windows PC
This is probably unnecessary, as long as you're not downloading shady warezs and shit, but... why not be safe, right?
* Firefox/Thunderbird
I know there have been a few security adviseries for these, but if you stick to these and don't download shady executable software that comes with Gator-type stuff, your spyware worries are basically nil. I do periodically do a scan with Spybot or Ad-Aware but.... thanks to Firefox they never return anything.
There are some legitimate reasons to dislike the Electoral College, reasons that have been talked about elsewhere on this thread. However, there some compelling benefits of the Electoral College, and a lot of people aren't even aware of them. So it's worth a recap here.
Avoidance of the "Tyranny of the Majority". This sounds like a rather oxymoronic phrase at first glance. But think of a hypothetical simple, small country where 75% of the people are businessmen living in a city. And 25% of the people are farmers living in the countryside. Now suppose this hypothetical country operates its presidential elections via simple majority. What happens is that a presidential candidate in this hypothetical country does not even need to cater to the wishes of the 25% minority. While the minority's votes count, they are effectively useless because they can be easily voted down by the majority. They might as well not even have a vote at all.
That's an extreme hypothetical example, of course, and an electoral college wouldn't completely solve it. But it is a step towards solving it. What America's electoral college does is provide an equalizer so that the smaller states' voices are not completely dwarfed by the larger states. It's the same concept behind the decision to allow every state to have two Senators, regardless of population.
For example, California has about 67 times as many people as Wyoming. But it only has 18 times as many electoral votes. If you think Presidential candidates spend too much time in a few "battleground" states like California, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania NOW... well, the situation would be even worse without the electoral college.
The Electoral College is only one part of a careful system of checks and balances. The Founding Fathers DID want one branch of government (Legislative) to chosen by popular election. The legislative branch is arguably the most powerful, since only it can introduce laws and can even override the President's veto.
Realistically, the winner of the popular vote STILL wins the election. It's not like the electoral college system elects wildly unpopular candidates. While I greatly dislike Bush, even I have to admit that the popular vote differential in 2000 was basically statistically significant.
Now, you may not agree with those reasons. And there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike the electoral college. I myself would favor many reforms to the current system. However, a lot of people who oppose the electoral college do so from a very unreasoned, uneducated, kneejerk standpoint. Some facts needed to be laid down on this thread.:-)
Well, clearly you have zero experience in the corporate world, or you would know how this works. In order to enable a more robust and proven architecture, this company chose a layered information model.
I understand the concept of a layered information model - but if you read the article (or even the parent post!) you'd see that this company was moving from Linux to Windows because their "Linux system" couldn't handle the "layers of information" needed. I was obviously (obviously for most people; although not for you) poking fun at the assertation that one operating system somehow supports more "layers of information" than the other.
I've been a "Windows guy" professionally for about 7 years. I like ASP+IIS+MSSQL as a development platform. But the reasons for abandoning Linux given in the article are just ridiculous. They're symptoms of IT managers who clearly don't know a thing about the systems they run. From the article:
Combe was initially wary about its sites running on Linux, but it moved to offset that risk by making sure its provider contract had built-in service-level agreements. Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
Oracle is the only database on Linux? Wow, that's news to me. On the high end, IBM's DB2 has been available for quite a while on Linux, I believe. In the midrange there's Postgres and Firebird, and in the lower midrange there's MySQL.
The potential savings were quickly erased by ongoing support expenses, Roy said. "We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort.
Uhh... Linux doesn't support enough "layers of information". Riiiiiiiight. Is there a kernel option for more "layers of information" that can perhaps be enabled? Which operating systems support the most "layers of information" right out of the box?::snicker::
"Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system. System failures and escalating costs had the resort reconsidering its Linux decision when, over a weekend in late-summer 2002, in the midst of its season-pass sale--accounting for the sale of about 5,000 passes--the system went down. The e-commerce component stopped working for about a day... There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
This is obviously an application problem and not something intrinsic to the operating system. Sounds like the kind of crappy application error that could happen on any operating system. I can't believe the people involved in these stories even agreed to be interviewed in this article because they look like morons. I would hesitate to share that level of self-cluelessness with a good friend, let alone the world.
...PC gaming is really losing ground to console gaming. One of the reasons for this is that compatibility issues make commercial PC game development an absolute nightmare.
Think about the all the permutations of RAM, CPU, and operating system. Throw in variables like RAM speed, service pack levels of the OS, and so on. The amount of testing required to get a PC game out of the door is pretty insane. And then you have issues like copy protection schemes forced upon you by your publisher that render your game unplayable for a large number of LEGIT users.
Contrast that development process with the console game development process. Sure, you need to pay some licensing fees to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo, but the number of man-hours required for testing is reduced by a pretty amazing amount.
I think the "level" designation would be a step in the right direction when it comes to simplifying the compatibility process and would help newbie users. I'm sure that with this "level" scheme, Detailed RAM/CPU/GPU specs would still be there for us knowledgable people, but you have to admit that shit is pretty confusing for regular people. Just look at all the people who shell out good money for PCs that are basically crippled because they ship with only 256MB of RAM and shitty onboard video and get confused when their PC games run like crap. It turns people off to the whole PC experience.
With a "level" system, though, a potential PC gamer could see that today's hot games require a "Level 12" PC or whatever. Then he can see that el-cheapo $500 "Level 4" PC from Gateway he's considering just isn't going to cut it. Then he can plan his purchases a little better.
I've read some really iffy reviews of it. Generally they felt that the movie was visually gorgeous and had a few top-caliber action themes.
But all the reviews also agreed that the movie was very dull and lifeless between the action scenes, with dehumanized and dreary characters spouting off impossibly deep and philosophical babble for the vast majority of the long running time. In other words- like the first GITS movie, multipled by several times. The director himself has cited his recent fascination with dolls as an inspiration for the beautifully rendered but seemingly-soulless people in the movie.
It sounds like there are a lot of interesting aspects to this movie, and may well be worth seeing for a lot of people. I'm just saying that it might not be the gratuitous cyborg-babes-and-guns eye candy that a lot of people are expecting. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on one's point of view. (Note: in case I didn't make it clear, I myself have not seen this personally! Take with a grain of salt!)
Can Windows also prevent me from booting a Knoppix CD to copy files to my USB device?
Not sure if you're joking or not, but that would be a BIOS setting, not an OS setting... of course, you'd think that a "secure" workstation probably wouldn't even include a CDROM drive for most users since software would be installed by an admin over the network...
Serious question, not rhetorical: is there really that much to be learned about cooling a G5? There's only so much heat removal you can do, given a certain amount of space and a CPU which produces a certain amount of heat. I don't know that there's some miracle the Apple design/engineering wizards can really pull out of their proverbial hats on that one. Unless there's some really obvious stuff they're NOT doing at the moment?
I think the thing that leads to a G5 laptop would probably be cooler-running G5 CPUs from IBM, or a newfound desire from Apple to do an unsexy "luggable" laptop. Then again, I suppose the current generation of G5 CPUs would run pretty cool when clocked down to 1 or 1.2ghz, if they really wanted to get one out of the door...
Oh, right. I totally agree with the idea of future-proofing your specs. Better to spend an extra X hundred dollars now and have thing thing last 4-5 years, instead of having to replace the whole darn thing in two years.
What I was poking fun at was the notion that 1.8ghz was really going to make a difference over 1.6ghz. At best that's what, a 12% difference in performance or so. But the actual impact on most applications is going to be almost completely negligible.
I have a 1.8ghz AthlonXP and one running at 2.3ghz, each with a gig of 400mhz RAM, and even as a "power user" (database apps, development environments, etc) it's nearly impossible to tell the difference unless I'm gaming.
I hate how manufacturers bundle upgraded features like that too, though. I was looking at a VW Passat at one point, but in order to get the upgraded engine, I had to buy the luxury package including leather seats and stuff too. Lame!
My department doesn't need the secretarial staff to have 80GB drive nor a DVD-R burning SuperDrive. Yet, I'm forced to buy those components if I want the 1.8GHz machine instead of the 1.6GHz.
Yeah. Because there's no way your secretary could get her work done on a 1.6ghz machine. Moving up to 1.8ghz is an absolute necessity because she is absolutely going to wring that last 200mhz of performance out of her workstation.
...you know, the kind that are $3 at the supermarket. I guess they're called "slaps" or "flip flops" or something else depending on the part of the country you're in.
This is because dorm showers become extremely filthy and disgusting with normal dirt during the week, and even moreso on weekends when you have people vomiting in them and the cleaning staff is usually absent. You do not want to walk around in those suckers barefoot. If you do, your feet will be absolutely filthy by the time you get back to your room and you're going to have some smelly-ass sneakers at best and smelly-ass sneakers AND athlete's foot at worst.
As for laptops? Uh, don't leave them unattended or unlocked.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd pick the power cable that needs to have wire run to a plug on the same wall over a speaker cable that needs to be run all the way around the room.
That's a valid point, but having self-powered speakers with a wireless audio connection means that now each speaker has to have its own power source and amp. So you've have to have some sort of nasty "wall wart" at the electical outlet, or incorporate a amplifier in the speaker enclosure itself.
To me, that definitely feels like something that would really add inefficiency and complexity in a lot of respects.
"I think the next big thing will be the widespread adoption of wireless and speakers headphones--cause none of us like a tangle of wires"
I can see the benefit of wireless headphones, but how do wireless speakers even make sense?
I suppose you could eliminate the cable running from the PC to the amplifier if the amplifier was wireless enabled, but you still have to have some sort of wire running to each speaker to provide power. Unless you're planning on running your speakers off of batteries... in which case they'd need frequent recharging and would not be capable of putting out enough juice for decent sound.
...how did a college student afford a brand new flatscreen TV? Perhaps law enforcement agencies were actually picking up a signal from the theft-deterrant tags on the TV.
I guess they can use this recovery CD on their own server, since it was Slashdotted out of existance before the first reply showed up.
As far as I've understood, if I let the GDS index my files (when I run it with my user), it creates a _copy_ in a directory accessible to all users. Is this correct, and (it seems so) would the other local users be able to read these?
:P
The GDS index is stored in a subfolder of your personal Application Data subfolder. Unless your file permissions are really screwed up, no other non-admin users should be able to access this directory. And it sounds like your file permissions are fine.
When you run GDS, it runs under your Windows login's security context.
Therefore, it only indexes the files that you have permission to see. The article describes a scenario where a user installs GDS and reads pages out of the browser's cache that were left there by other people who used the same Windows login.
Of course those files are visible to GDS. They could have also been retrieved by simply browsing through the cached files normally or using Window's crappy built-in search tool.
Conclusion: DUH. Nothing to see here, move along people...
THEY'RE SO CUTE I WANT ONE
...and press a desktop into server duty, the one area not to skimp would be the hard drives. CPUs, RAM, and motherboards don't typically blow out on a desktop any more often than they do on a server. I think hard drives will be the most likely point of failure.
:-)
1. Go with a mirrored (RAID-1) setup at the very mimimum. If it's anything but the VERY lightest-duty server (a fileserver for a 4-person office or something) invest in something besides consumer-oriented 7,200RPM IDE/SATA drives. Go with SCSI (it's cheaper now) or with those SATA drives that are designed for server use. Simulate drive failures so you make sure that you can recover.
1a. You may also want to experiment with power-saving features on the drives, depending on your environment. Most OSs have an option to spin down the drives after N minutes of inactivity. This will also prolong their life. Obviously there are servers where the spin-up delay would be undesirable. Depends on your situation.
1b. Make sure you have gobs of RAM for whatever task you're doing. If you start thrashing the disks and hitting swap space a lot, it's going to take a heck of a toll on the drives. By the same token, when you have so much ram that everything's running out of memory, it's a beautiful thing. Nothing like seeing a busy database server with only an occaisional flicker of HDD activity, since the entire DB fits into ram.
2. Make sure cooling is adequate. Do some stress-testing that keeps the CPU and disk usage pegged at 100% for at least 24 hours or so. Cases with 120mm fans will move more air than cases with 80mm fans. The 120mm fans will also run more quietly, and will run at lower rpms for a longer lifetime. Try disconnecting one of the fans and seeing if the server remains stable, because the fans WILL die at some point.
3. Test your backup plan. Simulate failures and restores.
Obviously, any of that advice would apply to "real" server hardware as well. You just have to do slightly more work if you're rolling your own servers because they might not come preinstalled with backup software/hardware or cooling.
Or how about the "Ok" and "Cancel" button order?
Even thought I've always used Windows and barely dabbled in other systems, I've always thought that "OK" belonged on the right like GNOME does it.
To me, clicking "OK" means that I want to move forward in the application. "Cancel" means I want to back up or back out. Since most languages and grapshs go from left to right, it only seems natural that "OK" should be on the right.
Especially since a lot of applications use "Wizard"-style dialog boxes when they present a series of dialog boxes to the user. In those dialog boxes, ">" is on the right. And "Next >>" is basically the same thing as "OK"...
I realize that it's important to use space efficiently no matter how much you have, but how much horizontal space are you really going to save by going to compact keyboards? I'm thinking... six inches at most.
If these kiosks are THAT cramped for space, I can't imagine them being very pleasant to use, even with a few inches of space freed up by your compact keyboards. Most people aren't going to want to rub shoulders and elbows with total strangers in order to do a little web surfing.
(Perhaps I'm missing something. Maybe they're small kiosks, with each individual kiosk separated by a reasonable amount of space...)
I said: "Nothing on any motherboard I've ever used heats up aside from the chipset"
You said: "When's the last time you looked at a modern Intel motherboard? I've got an 865 board behind me and the heat sink on the northbridge is an inch tall"
When people talk about the "chipset" on a motherboard, they're talking about the northbridge+southbridge, basically. So, yes. I do realize that any modern motherboard chipset produces a lot of heat. They've had heatsinks and/or fans for probably 4-5 years now, at least.
Odd that they take a top tier manufacturer for the AMD tests (Asus), and a manufacturer known for shit (Abit) for the Intel.
I agree that they should have used motherboard from the same manufacturer, but I also can't see this making a measurable difference. Nothing on any motherboard I've ever used heats up aside from the chipset, so I can't imagine the power drain to be significant.
RAM, CPU, chipset, GPU, hard drives... they heat up. Not the motherboard itself.
Also, Abit produces excellent quality motherboards. I've used quite a few in my time, both for personal use, at work, and when building for friends. They've gotten amazing amounts of positive reviews and recommendations from countless reviewers - they're definitely in the top tier of manufacturers along with Abit and they've been there for close to 10 years. Calling their products "shit" betrays a lack of knowledge (or perhaps some unlucky personal experiences) on your part!
What was preventing them from taking some accurate measurements?
I don't think any P4 versus AMD comparison is ever going to be totally "apples to apples" due to the differing chipsets involved as well as the different power demands of the CPUs themselves, which probably necessitate differing amounts of capacitors and so on.
Besides, there ARE no PCI-e motherboards available for the Athlons yet. And the AMD's Hypertransport bus runs at very comparable speeds to PCI-e. But you knew that, right?
Oh, the above setup is for a wired home network of course. Obviously things would need to be a little more "robust" if you're talking about a wireless network, or a office network where you might have hostile/clueless users doing god-knows-what.
My post was a response to people who seem to be indulging on overkill security measures on simple LANs... better too much than too little, but damn...
I see some crazy setups here on this thread. Really, NAT, AV software, and regular software updates are all you need. If you're not on Windows, you could probably even drop the AV stuff. Hell, you can probably drop the AV stuff even if you're ON Windows, as long as you're not installing shady software.
* 8-port Linksys Router/Firewall
Only a few incoming ports are opened - basically the ports needed for Soulseek and Bittorrent. If you're NAT'd behind a hardware firewall/router that blocks incoming connection requests before they even hit your PCs.... not a lot can happen to you aside from installing viruses yourself.
* Norton AV on each Windows PC
This is probably unnecessary, as long as you're not downloading shady warezs and shit, but... why not be safe, right?
* Firefox/Thunderbird
I know there have been a few security adviseries for these, but if you stick to these and don't download shady executable software that comes with Gator-type stuff, your spyware worries are basically nil. I do periodically do a scan with Spybot or Ad-Aware but.... thanks to Firefox they never return anything.
What would be the IANAL equivalent?
:-)
I'm not sure you really want to use phrase "I ANAL" when you're talking about dating, unless that's really what you're into.
- Avoidance of the "Tyranny of the Majority". This sounds like a rather oxymoronic phrase at first glance. But think of a hypothetical simple, small country where 75% of the people are businessmen living in a city. And 25% of the people are farmers living in the countryside. Now suppose this hypothetical country operates its presidential elections via simple majority. What happens is that a presidential candidate in this hypothetical country does not even need to cater to the wishes of the 25% minority. While the minority's votes count, they are effectively useless because they can be easily voted down by the majority. They might as well not even have a vote at all.
- The Electoral College is only one part of a careful system of checks and balances. The Founding Fathers DID want one branch of government (Legislative) to chosen by popular election. The legislative branch is arguably the most powerful, since only it can introduce laws and can even override the President's veto.
- Realistically, the winner of the popular vote STILL wins the election. It's not like the electoral college system elects wildly unpopular candidates. While I greatly dislike Bush, even I have to admit that the popular vote differential in 2000 was basically statistically significant.
Now, you may not agree with those reasons. And there are plenty of valid reasons to dislike the electoral college. I myself would favor many reforms to the current system. However, a lot of people who oppose the electoral college do so from a very unreasoned, uneducated, kneejerk standpoint. Some facts needed to be laid down on this thread.That's an extreme hypothetical example, of course, and an electoral college wouldn't completely solve it. But it is a step towards solving it. What America's electoral college does is provide an equalizer so that the smaller states' voices are not completely dwarfed by the larger states. It's the same concept behind the decision to allow every state to have two Senators, regardless of population. For example, California has about 67 times as many people as Wyoming. But it only has 18 times as many electoral votes. If you think Presidential candidates spend too much time in a few "battleground" states like California, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania NOW... well, the situation would be even worse without the electoral college.
Well, clearly you have zero experience in the corporate world, or you would know how this works. In order to enable a more robust and proven architecture, this company chose a layered information model.
I understand the concept of a layered information model - but if you read the article (or even the parent post!) you'd see that this company was moving from Linux to Windows because their "Linux system" couldn't handle the "layers of information" needed. I was obviously (obviously for most people; although not for you) poking fun at the assertation that one operating system somehow supports more "layers of information" than the other.
I've been a "Windows guy" professionally for about 7 years. I like ASP+IIS+MSSQL as a development platform. But the reasons for abandoning Linux given in the article are just ridiculous. They're symptoms of IT managers who clearly don't know a thing about the systems they run. From the article:
::snicker::
Combe was initially wary about its sites running on Linux, but it moved to offset that risk by making sure its provider contract had built-in service-level agreements. Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
Oracle is the only database on Linux? Wow, that's news to me. On the high end, IBM's DB2 has been available for quite a while on Linux, I believe. In the midrange there's Postgres and Firebird, and in the lower midrange there's MySQL.
The potential savings were quickly erased by ongoing support expenses, Roy said. "We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort.
Uhh... Linux doesn't support enough "layers of information". Riiiiiiiight. Is there a kernel option for more "layers of information" that can perhaps be enabled? Which operating systems support the most "layers of information" right out of the box?
"Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system. System failures and escalating costs had the resort reconsidering its Linux decision when, over a weekend in late-summer 2002, in the midst of its season-pass sale--accounting for the sale of about 5,000 passes--the system went down. The e-commerce component stopped working for about a day... There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
This is obviously an application problem and not something intrinsic to the operating system. Sounds like the kind of crappy application error that could happen on any operating system. I can't believe the people involved in these stories even agreed to be interviewed in this article because they look like morons. I would hesitate to share that level of self-cluelessness with a good friend, let alone the world.
...PC gaming is really losing ground to console gaming. One of the reasons for this is that compatibility issues make commercial PC game development an absolute nightmare.
Think about the all the permutations of RAM, CPU, and operating system. Throw in variables like RAM speed, service pack levels of the OS, and so on. The amount of testing required to get a PC game out of the door is pretty insane. And then you have issues like copy protection schemes forced upon you by your publisher that render your game unplayable for a large number of LEGIT users.
Contrast that development process with the console game development process. Sure, you need to pay some licensing fees to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo, but the number of man-hours required for testing is reduced by a pretty amazing amount.
I think the "level" designation would be a step in the right direction when it comes to simplifying the compatibility process and would help newbie users. I'm sure that with this "level" scheme, Detailed RAM/CPU/GPU specs would still be there for us knowledgable people, but you have to admit that shit is pretty confusing for regular people. Just look at all the people who shell out good money for PCs that are basically crippled because they ship with only 256MB of RAM and shitty onboard video and get confused when their PC games run like crap. It turns people off to the whole PC experience.
With a "level" system, though, a potential PC gamer could see that today's hot games require a "Level 12" PC or whatever. Then he can see that el-cheapo $500 "Level 4" PC from Gateway he's considering just isn't going to cut it. Then he can plan his purchases a little better.
I've read some really iffy reviews of it. Generally they felt that the movie was visually gorgeous and had a few top-caliber action themes.
But all the reviews also agreed that the movie was very dull and lifeless between the action scenes, with dehumanized and dreary characters spouting off impossibly deep and philosophical babble for the vast majority of the long running time. In other words- like the first GITS movie, multipled by several times. The director himself has cited his recent fascination with dolls as an inspiration for the beautifully rendered but seemingly-soulless people in the movie.
It sounds like there are a lot of interesting aspects to this movie, and may well be worth seeing for a lot of people. I'm just saying that it might not be the gratuitous cyborg-babes-and-guns eye candy that a lot of people are expecting. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on one's point of view. (Note: in case I didn't make it clear, I myself have not seen this personally! Take with a grain of salt!)
Can Windows also prevent me from booting a Knoppix CD to copy files to my USB device?
Not sure if you're joking or not, but that would be a BIOS setting, not an OS setting... of course, you'd think that a "secure" workstation probably wouldn't even include a CDROM drive for most users since software would be installed by an admin over the network...
I agree with you.
Serious question, not rhetorical: is there really that much to be learned about cooling a G5? There's only so much heat removal you can do, given a certain amount of space and a CPU which produces a certain amount of heat. I don't know that there's some miracle the Apple design/engineering wizards can really pull out of their proverbial hats on that one. Unless there's some really obvious stuff they're NOT doing at the moment?
I think the thing that leads to a G5 laptop would probably be cooler-running G5 CPUs from IBM, or a newfound desire from Apple to do an unsexy "luggable" laptop. Then again, I suppose the current generation of G5 CPUs would run pretty cool when clocked down to 1 or 1.2ghz, if they really wanted to get one out of the door...
Oh, right. I totally agree with the idea of future-proofing your specs. Better to spend an extra X hundred dollars now and have thing thing last 4-5 years, instead of having to replace the whole darn thing in two years.
What I was poking fun at was the notion that 1.8ghz was really going to make a difference over 1.6ghz. At best that's what, a 12% difference in performance or so. But the actual impact on most applications is going to be almost completely negligible.
I have a 1.8ghz AthlonXP and one running at 2.3ghz, each with a gig of 400mhz RAM, and even as a "power user" (database apps, development environments, etc) it's nearly impossible to tell the difference unless I'm gaming.
I hate how manufacturers bundle upgraded features like that too, though. I was looking at a VW Passat at one point, but in order to get the upgraded engine, I had to buy the luxury package including leather seats and stuff too. Lame!
My department doesn't need the secretarial staff to have 80GB drive nor a DVD-R burning SuperDrive. Yet, I'm forced to buy those components if I want the 1.8GHz machine instead of the 1.6GHz.
Yeah. Because there's no way your secretary could get her work done on a 1.6ghz machine. Moving up to 1.8ghz is an absolute necessity because she is absolutely going to wring that last 200mhz of performance out of her workstation.
Seriously, care to explain your reasoning there?
...you know, the kind that are $3 at the supermarket. I guess they're called "slaps" or "flip flops" or something else depending on the part of the country you're in.
This is because dorm showers become extremely filthy and disgusting with normal dirt during the week, and even moreso on weekends when you have people vomiting in them and the cleaning staff is usually absent. You do not want to walk around in those suckers barefoot. If you do, your feet will be absolutely filthy by the time you get back to your room and you're going to have some smelly-ass sneakers at best and smelly-ass sneakers AND athlete's foot at worst.
As for laptops? Uh, don't leave them unattended or unlocked.