So is everything when a voltage spike hits your computer while you're burning your TB-BR. No medium will protect you from a voltage spike that occurs during backup.
True, but the discs you burned yesterday and the day before will still be intact, because they're sitting in a closet. The only way that hard drives wind up being cheaper than optical media is if you keep using the same hard drive, in which case something like a surge wipes out your backup at the same time it destroys your primary data. The 1TB optical drive may cost much more than a hard drive of greater capacity, the question is whether or not the media will be cheap enough to make them competitive on a $/GB comparison.
And your external hard drive will be just as fried from a lightning strike or bad spike as an internal drive is. I don't know why you think only an internal drive would be damaged, they're both connected to the computer with metal conductors that go right to the controller board.
To the submitter and the editors, I wanted to give a rare thanks for not mentioning which political party the employee was supporting. Because ultimately, it doesn't matter (I'm sure it's in the story, and probably commenters bitching about it lower in the threads). The employee needs to be fired regardless of who he was advocating or why. But it would have been easy to put the side he was on in the summary to rile everyone up over how bad "those guys" are on that other team.
I think most people who aren't slave-drivers agree that companies need to be flexible in giving people time for breaks and doing some personal stuff from time to time, or even using their company computer for doing exclusively personal stuff during lunch and outside of work hours. After all, we think about work projects while we're at home in the shower or buying groceries. But there can't be any flexibility when it comes to government employees using taxpayer funded equipment, even in off hours, for partisan activities that aren't specifically a part of their jobs. There's simply too much conflict of interest, no matter how low in the totem pole the employee is or how unrelated the politics are to the agency.
I'm curious which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or WinFS?
I mean, for all the shit we give Duke Nukem, MS has been promising us this file system (with various features, which ironically have only gotten LESS advanced as time went on!) for over 15 years. I just can't imagine how demoralizing it must be to work on this stuff and then have it killed and resurrected every 6 months for your entire career.
It's just one more example of Internet disintermediation changing economics.
Hard as it may be to believe, there are still a lot of businesses that think this "internet fad" is going away, so seeing yet another major industry be dragged into the 21st century economy is interesting to a lot of folks.
Our country has been 4 years of Bush, 8 years of Clinton, and 8 years of Bush already. That means anyone younger than 21 can't even remember a time when one of those two families wasn't in power in our nation!
Given that realization, I'd have to give the nod to Obama over Clinton - just for the sake of "breaking the cycle", if nothing else!
It's even worse than that -- don't forget GHW Bush was vice president for Reagan from 1980-88. Unless you're over 35, chances are you can't remember a country that didn't have a Bush or Clinton in the White House. And I agree, all other things being equal, I'll always vote against a political dynasty. Considering the next president could be in office for 8 years, Hillary would have to make an amazing argument for why only people considering early retirement should remember a non-bush/clinton America by the time she leaves office.
Just to clarify, ever since the it became clear that the Democratic primary wouldn't be quick and easy and over in a few weeks, the DNC leadership as well as most of the campaigns have been saying that they wanted to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, the question was how to do so while still penalizing them for breaking the rules.
So yes, Dean (and everyone else at the DNC) talks about seating the delegates, but only as a public relations issue. As a practical matter, they're basically looking to find a compromise acceptable to all sides that doesn't affect the outcome of the race at all, so that they can make the Florida and Michigan folks feel less left out, but also not reward them in any way.
Hillary is the only person, AFAIK, who has advocated seating all the delegates from either state. Even her own supporters on the DNC rules committee (which will be the group that decides next week what to do about the delegates) say there's no way that will happen.
Obama went opposite directions when he started talking about mandating what temperature I keep my house, how much food I can eat, or how much gas I can buy.
Um...what? I'm curious to see the details of Obama's new Food Police program, care to provide a link?
Sorry, you may not like it, but the Neocons are still running the Republican party (that would probably change change if McCain actually gets elected, of course).
I'll be just as happy as everyone else to see the Republican party embrace the principles they used to espouse, but a political party doesn't get off the hook for fucking up the country by just saying it was all a misunderstanding perpetrated by a few bad apples. Everyone in congress with an (R) next to their name was happy to vote like a sock puppet when Bush was high in the polls.
How would you know? They're obviously not going to say anything.
On the contrary, many of her top fundraisers and several of her staffers have gone on the record in the past weeks acknowledging that it's nearly impossible for her to win it unless pictures of Obama in his Nazi Youth uniform surface, but that they're staying in the race to the end to represent all the people who voted for her already, or to stand up for women, or to make sure all the votes are counted, etc.
There are numerous theories as to why she's really in, but I tend to think the simplest one is most likely -- with only days left in the primary contest, she can't quit without it being weird. After Pennsylvania, and with the Wright controversy, she was hoping for a rally around her, but it didn't happen, and she's just stuck in this awkward position of knowing she can't win but being so close to the finish line that there's no really graceful way to exit other than waiting to the last primary and then congratulating her opponent.
You're making shit up. The secure mode prompt is ALWAYS the one which performs the actual elevation (specifically, the one displayed by consent.exe) it never pops up just to tell you that it's going to ask more questions.
And moving that folder wont invoke UAC unless you're moving from the Windows or Program Files directories (and what the fuck are you doing that for?)
I wrote the earlier message from a non-Vista computer, so I couldn't check the exact details and wrote them as best I could remember the inanity. You're right, the secure prompt was second, it was an insecure prompt that asked me if it was okay to show the secure prompt. That's no less retarded.
Do it yourself: 1) pick a file, any file. 2) Copy file to c:\ (just because this is the easiest way to trigger the stupid behavior) 3) Vista will throw up an (insecure) prompt that says "you'll need to provide administrator permission to copy to this folder" and offers continue, skip, and cancel. It's telling you that it's going to ask you if it is okay to do what you already told it you want to do, instead of just fucking asking you in the first place. 4) Select continue 5) Now you get the secure prompt, which says "Windows needs your permission to continue" and tells you it is a file operation.
I know I managed to get a confirmation box trifecta at one point when I was setting up the Vista machine and moving some user and app data to it, but the 2 minutes I spent throwing files around didn't get me one again. I had every intention of using Vista as my day to day system, but in the course of moving stuff around to set it up I would continually tell it to move a folder from one place to another, it would throw up a progress bar, it would go away...and the folder wasn't moved. No permissions issues, no errors, just file operations that never took place despite every appearance of having done so successfully. I haven't the slightest idea what happened, I just changed the Vista boot manager to bring up XP as the default and sighed.
There are a bunch of options for open-source firmware that will do traffic-shaping on your router. I personally use Tomato for the AJAXy goodness and overall usability.
You can do limits based on individual devices, which will keep any computer from ever saturating the network, or you can do time-based throttling, or whatever. I found the most useful setup was to make everything default to low priority and then raise the priority of HTTP, SSH, and other things I wanted to run interactively.
As long as nobody on the network is selfish enough to try and run their p2p app over port 80 or something stupid like that, it works fine. But any home router config will depend on the users not trying to get around it -- it's a tool for your mutual convenience, so that people can set their apps to be aggressive and get the most performance, but won't step on others' toes when they're trying to get something done.
It's certainly going a lot better than it was a year or two ago [iraqbodycount.org].
(Posted anonymously due to left-wing Slashdot bias and off-topicness of post.)
If you'd been around on slashdot for more than a few minutes, you'd know it doesn't have an overall political bias (other than the disproportionately large libertarian representation, which is true of both the Internet user population in general and tech industry in particular).
In 2003, Slashdot was a "conservative" website, because most Americans were in support of invading Iraq and let their opinions be known in their comments. Now, when the majority of American opinion has turned against the war, it should be no shock that the majority opinion here has as well.
If you think Slashdot in general has a particular ideological bias, that's pretty much proof that you're the one with a strong and irrational ideological bias, and that you're more interested in disparaging anyone who disagrees with you and claiming the role of victim than in doing anything intellectually honest or productive.
I admire Microsoft for trying to do UAC;... it is annoying, but that isn't Vista's fault.
On the contrary, the annoyingness of UAC is very much the fault of Microsoft. It seems very much to have been implemented in the way that was easiest for their programmers, rather than having it designed by security and UI people and then implemented by the programmers to sane specifications.
For example, on a default install of Vista with UAC turned on, try moving a directory from outside your user directory to inside your user directory. You will be given *three* prompts about this single action!
1) "To do this, we'll have to ask you for administrator level permission, can we ask you for that?" 2) "As administrator, is it allowable to do this?" 3) "Are you sure you want to do this?"
Any sane UI designer can see how stupid and redundant those confirmations are. The first one -- the UAC dialog that takes over the whole screen in secure mode -- does NOTHING but warn you that the system is about to ask you another question!!! WTF is the point of that? The system is asking the user if it can ask them a question!
The stupidity of questions 2 and 3 is that they're confirming the same action, just asking once as admin and once as your normal user account. Wouldn't a rational confirmation system assume that if the user has gone to the trouble of entering administrator credentials to perform a task, he doesn't need to be asked again if he's sure he wants to do it? (in MS's defense, this level of redundancy shows up on some other OSes as well, there's simply no cooperation between applications and the system when it comes to pooling confirmations, but for an OS level app like Explorer that's a pretty thin excuse)
It's absurdity like this that makes Vista UAC so cumulatively annoying to both security conscious experts and casual users.
Artists seem to have a reality-distortion field similar to Steve Jobs, only more introverted. "I'll use chromium-doped litho-phosphate batteries..." and all the real-world issues become moot. Ugh. I don't mind folks pushing the envelope, but this is just mental masturbation. Don't print a pile of technical specifications in an attempt to rationalize the "art." If it's art, just say so. Don't pretend it's an engineered product that actually exists.
Just to clarify, Art Center is where many of the world's best professional transportation designers get their training. It's not unheard of for a car company to pay for a promising new designer to take off a couple years and study there. These aren't bunch of computer graphics nerds sitting around scribbling cool motorcycles in their notebooks, these are folks with money and advisers from every major auto company on Earth. They use the same engineering software and tools that GM or Ducati would use to develop a new product.
Their designs are no different from any concept car you'd see at an auto show -- sure, it may cost $20 million to make, but they aren't inventing critical materials and demanding that the whole frame is made out of Unobtanium. It may well be made entirely out of stuff that is still impractical for mass production, and that seems to be the case with a lot of these designs, but it all exists. If they say it'll do 0-60 in however many seconds, you can bet that under ideal conditions and with a couple million dollars to actually build it, that the claim is only a bit less accurate (due to more exotic materials) than the specs for any new vehicle design that hasn't yet had the first production run.
"Open Source software doesn't cost anything -- how can you beat that price?" "Well, we could pay people to use it." "But then how do you make any money?" "We make it up in volume!"
The biggest frustration I have is when a company does not seem to keep a ticket record of my previous problems and their attempts to fix it.
that's definitely an issue. Anytime you're dealing with high-volume, rigorously scripted Tier 1 tech support, it only makes sense to have some sort of checklist for T1 to go through on their call log to verify they've actually done the "is it plugged in, has it been rebooted" type issues, so that at worst you can quickly run through the list again verifying they were all done when you contact someone new.
Simply restarting anything never solves the problem. It only potentially provides a crude work-around.
Sure it does. It's often the simplest way for a nontechnical user to genuinely solve a problem, like a cache issue or failed synchronization between two network resources. I mean, if you want to drop down to the command lone or use a maintenance tool to achieve the same thing, or try and modify the Windows source code to provide better exception handling so the problem occurs less frequently or is easier to deal with in some other way, feel free. But that doesn't mean the problem wasn't solved.
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully, there's only one guy we're fighting, so it's impossible for him to be two places at once.
True, but the discs you burned yesterday and the day before will still be intact, because they're sitting in a closet. The only way that hard drives wind up being cheaper than optical media is if you keep using the same hard drive, in which case something like a surge wipes out your backup at the same time it destroys your primary data. The 1TB optical drive may cost much more than a hard drive of greater capacity, the question is whether or not the media will be cheap enough to make them competitive on a $/GB comparison.
And your external hard drive will be just as fried from a lightning strike or bad spike as an internal drive is. I don't know why you think only an internal drive would be damaged, they're both connected to the computer with metal conductors that go right to the controller board.
To the submitter and the editors, I wanted to give a rare thanks for not mentioning which political party the employee was supporting. Because ultimately, it doesn't matter (I'm sure it's in the story, and probably commenters bitching about it lower in the threads). The employee needs to be fired regardless of who he was advocating or why. But it would have been easy to put the side he was on in the summary to rile everyone up over how bad "those guys" are on that other team.
I think most people who aren't slave-drivers agree that companies need to be flexible in giving people time for breaks and doing some personal stuff from time to time, or even using their company computer for doing exclusively personal stuff during lunch and outside of work hours. After all, we think about work projects while we're at home in the shower or buying groceries. But there can't be any flexibility when it comes to government employees using taxpayer funded equipment, even in off hours, for partisan activities that aren't specifically a part of their jobs. There's simply too much conflict of interest, no matter how low in the totem pole the employee is or how unrelated the politics are to the agency.
I'm curious which will come first, Duke Nukem Forever or WinFS?
I mean, for all the shit we give Duke Nukem, MS has been promising us this file system (with various features, which ironically have only gotten LESS advanced as time went on!) for over 15 years. I just can't imagine how demoralizing it must be to work on this stuff and then have it killed and resurrected every 6 months for your entire career.
It's just one more example of Internet disintermediation changing economics.
Hard as it may be to believe, there are still a lot of businesses that think this "internet fad" is going away, so seeing yet another major industry be dragged into the 21st century economy is interesting to a lot of folks.
Or Jenna
It's even worse than that -- don't forget GHW Bush was vice president for Reagan from 1980-88. Unless you're over 35, chances are you can't remember a country that didn't have a Bush or Clinton in the White House. And I agree, all other things being equal, I'll always vote against a political dynasty. Considering the next president could be in office for 8 years, Hillary would have to make an amazing argument for why only people considering early retirement should remember a non-bush/clinton America by the time she leaves office.
Just to clarify, ever since the it became clear that the Democratic primary wouldn't be quick and easy and over in a few weeks, the DNC leadership as well as most of the campaigns have been saying that they wanted to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates, the question was how to do so while still penalizing them for breaking the rules.
So yes, Dean (and everyone else at the DNC) talks about seating the delegates, but only as a public relations issue. As a practical matter, they're basically looking to find a compromise acceptable to all sides that doesn't affect the outcome of the race at all, so that they can make the Florida and Michigan folks feel less left out, but also not reward them in any way.
Hillary is the only person, AFAIK, who has advocated seating all the delegates from either state. Even her own supporters on the DNC rules committee (which will be the group that decides next week what to do about the delegates) say there's no way that will happen.
Um...what? I'm curious to see the details of Obama's new Food Police program, care to provide a link?
Sorry, you may not like it, but the Neocons are still running the Republican party (that would probably change change if McCain actually gets elected, of course).
I'll be just as happy as everyone else to see the Republican party embrace the principles they used to espouse, but a political party doesn't get off the hook for fucking up the country by just saying it was all a misunderstanding perpetrated by a few bad apples. Everyone in congress with an (R) next to their name was happy to vote like a sock puppet when Bush was high in the polls.
On the contrary, many of her top fundraisers and several of her staffers have gone on the record in the past weeks acknowledging that it's nearly impossible for her to win it unless pictures of Obama in his Nazi Youth uniform surface, but that they're staying in the race to the end to represent all the people who voted for her already, or to stand up for women, or to make sure all the votes are counted, etc.
There are numerous theories as to why she's really in, but I tend to think the simplest one is most likely -- with only days left in the primary contest, she can't quit without it being weird. After Pennsylvania, and with the Wright controversy, she was hoping for a rally around her, but it didn't happen, and she's just stuck in this awkward position of knowing she can't win but being so close to the finish line that there's no really graceful way to exit other than waiting to the last primary and then congratulating her opponent.
The ones that work on GPUs? I'm not sure they ever even showed up for their first day of work.
I wrote the earlier message from a non-Vista computer, so I couldn't check the exact details and wrote them as best I could remember the inanity. You're right, the secure prompt was second, it was an insecure prompt that asked me if it was okay to show the secure prompt. That's no less retarded.
Do it yourself:
1) pick a file, any file.
2) Copy file to c:\ (just because this is the easiest way to trigger the stupid behavior)
3) Vista will throw up an (insecure) prompt that says "you'll need to provide administrator permission to copy to this folder" and offers continue, skip, and cancel. It's telling you that it's going to ask you if it is okay to do what you already told it you want to do, instead of just fucking asking you in the first place.
4) Select continue
5) Now you get the secure prompt, which says "Windows needs your permission to continue" and tells you it is a file operation.
I know I managed to get a confirmation box trifecta at one point when I was setting up the Vista machine and moving some user and app data to it, but the 2 minutes I spent throwing files around didn't get me one again. I had every intention of using Vista as my day to day system, but in the course of moving stuff around to set it up I would continually tell it to move a folder from one place to another, it would throw up a progress bar, it would go away...and the folder wasn't moved. No permissions issues, no errors, just file operations that never took place despite every appearance of having done so successfully. I haven't the slightest idea what happened, I just changed the Vista boot manager to bring up XP as the default and sighed.
There are a bunch of options for open-source firmware that will do traffic-shaping on your router. I personally use Tomato for the AJAXy goodness and overall usability.
You can do limits based on individual devices, which will keep any computer from ever saturating the network, or you can do time-based throttling, or whatever. I found the most useful setup was to make everything default to low priority and then raise the priority of HTTP, SSH, and other things I wanted to run interactively.
As long as nobody on the network is selfish enough to try and run their p2p app over port 80 or something stupid like that, it works fine. But any home router config will depend on the users not trying to get around it -- it's a tool for your mutual convenience, so that people can set their apps to be aggressive and get the most performance, but won't step on others' toes when they're trying to get something done.
If you'd been around on slashdot for more than a few minutes, you'd know it doesn't have an overall political bias (other than the disproportionately large libertarian representation, which is true of both the Internet user population in general and tech industry in particular).
In 2003, Slashdot was a "conservative" website, because most Americans were in support of invading Iraq and let their opinions be known in their comments. Now, when the majority of American opinion has turned against the war, it should be no shock that the majority opinion here has as well.
If you think Slashdot in general has a particular ideological bias, that's pretty much proof that you're the one with a strong and irrational ideological bias, and that you're more interested in disparaging anyone who disagrees with you and claiming the role of victim than in doing anything intellectually honest or productive.
On the contrary, the annoyingness of UAC is very much the fault of Microsoft. It seems very much to have been implemented in the way that was easiest for their programmers, rather than having it designed by security and UI people and then implemented by the programmers to sane specifications.
For example, on a default install of Vista with UAC turned on, try moving a directory from outside your user directory to inside your user directory. You will be given *three* prompts about this single action!
1) "To do this, we'll have to ask you for administrator level permission, can we ask you for that?"
2) "As administrator, is it allowable to do this?"
3) "Are you sure you want to do this?"
Any sane UI designer can see how stupid and redundant those confirmations are. The first one -- the UAC dialog that takes over the whole screen in secure mode -- does NOTHING but warn you that the system is about to ask you another question!!! WTF is the point of that? The system is asking the user if it can ask them a question!
The stupidity of questions 2 and 3 is that they're confirming the same action, just asking once as admin and once as your normal user account. Wouldn't a rational confirmation system assume that if the user has gone to the trouble of entering administrator credentials to perform a task, he doesn't need to be asked again if he's sure he wants to do it? (in MS's defense, this level of redundancy shows up on some other OSes as well, there's simply no cooperation between applications and the system when it comes to pooling confirmations, but for an OS level app like Explorer that's a pretty thin excuse)
It's absurdity like this that makes Vista UAC so cumulatively annoying to both security conscious experts and casual users.
I'm wearing my amici briefs right now!
Just to clarify, Art Center is where many of the world's best professional transportation designers get their training. It's not unheard of for a car company to pay for a promising new designer to take off a couple years and study there. These aren't bunch of computer graphics nerds sitting around scribbling cool motorcycles in their notebooks, these are folks with money and advisers from every major auto company on Earth. They use the same engineering software and tools that GM or Ducati would use to develop a new product.
Their designs are no different from any concept car you'd see at an auto show -- sure, it may cost $20 million to make, but they aren't inventing critical materials and demanding that the whole frame is made out of Unobtanium. It may well be made entirely out of stuff that is still impractical for mass production, and that seems to be the case with a lot of these designs, but it all exists. If they say it'll do 0-60 in however many seconds, you can bet that under ideal conditions and with a couple million dollars to actually build it, that the claim is only a bit less accurate (due to more exotic materials) than the specs for any new vehicle design that hasn't yet had the first production run.
I'm disappointed in the complete lack of Mospeada references posted so far.
If it doesn't have wheels on my shoulders and a jet pack, I'm not interested.
Yeah, but it's mass hysteria with hipsters and threesomes with hot vegetarian girls protesting the war.
This comment could be subtitled "Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from Pet Semetary"
Yeah, a few years ago this was only a joke.
"Open Source software doesn't cost anything -- how can you beat that price?"
"Well, we could pay people to use it."
"But then how do you make any money?"
"We make it up in volume!"
that's definitely an issue. Anytime you're dealing with high-volume, rigorously scripted Tier 1 tech support, it only makes sense to have some sort of checklist for T1 to go through on their call log to verify they've actually done the "is it plugged in, has it been rebooted" type issues, so that at worst you can quickly run through the list again verifying they were all done when you contact someone new.
Simply restarting anything never solves the problem. It only potentially provides a crude work-around.
Sure it does. It's often the simplest way for a nontechnical user to genuinely solve a problem, like a cache issue or failed synchronization between two network resources. I mean, if you want to drop down to the command lone or use a maintenance tool to achieve the same thing, or try and modify the Windows source code to provide better exception handling so the problem occurs less frequently or is easier to deal with in some other way, feel free. But that doesn't mean the problem wasn't solved.