Yes, and if I recall, Packard Bell then proceeded to make some of the worst, crappiest computers known to man.
I can truthfully say that Packard Bell provided me with the one and only opportunity that I have ever had to repair a computer using a hammer and cold chisel.
A guy brought me a new Packard Bell 286 and a CDROM drive back when CDROM drives were the latest thing, and asked me to install it for him. Upon opening the case of the PB machine I discovered that a metal plate had been spot welded across the unused drive bay where the CDROM had to go. I had to get a hammer and chisel and beat it off before I could install the CDROM.
I always wondered what the owner of that computer would have thought if he had seen me pounding his computer with a big hammer like that...
True story: Back when there were quite a few people on Slashdot complaining about the "horrible, intrusive and tasteless" X10 ads, I had no idea what they were talking about. I've been using Junkbuster and (now) Privoxy for so long that I never actually ever saw an X10 ad. I had to go to their website once just to find out what everyone was complaining about.
I use http://www.privoxy.org/ on all of my computers along with a user.action file that I have spent a lot of time working on and fine-tuning.
I had to use a Windows box the other day (for the first time in a few years -- yes, I lead a sheltered life) and was shocked by the amount of ad content on the Internet. Even on a high-speed DSL connection, the response is much more sluggish without privoxy (or similar) in place. And stuff is much easier to read without all of that flashing stuff, bouncing monkeys and whatnot getting in the way of the content.
So if I want to calculate a million digits of pi, will my calculations somehow be more accurate and trustworthy if I record the intermediate steps to some paper medium???
Yes indeed, they will. Recording the intermediate steps to a paper medium allows someone else to check the accuracy of your work and verify it after the fact. Remember your math teacher's instruction: Always show your work!
How does the lost time encompassed in the weasel word "virtually" compare with the trivial cost (in a businees sense) of Office?
How does the lost time encompassed in the weasel words "trivial cost" compare with the time and expense involved in license management, Windows/Office system administraton, patch management and installation, inventory control and the cost and time lost in performance of an audit on demand?
There is one big difference between music and books in public libraries. It generally takes a person a week or two to read a book, while it only takes an hour or so to copy a CD.
And therein lies the problem from the RIAA's point of view.
You aren't supposed to copy the cd that you borrow from the library, just the same as you aren't supposed to photocopy the book that you borrowed from the same place. Read and return; listen and return.
The fact that you stated this viewpoint in such an offhand manner indicates that you didn't consider that difference at all.
It's a product (and service) that you paid for that wasn't provided to you as agreed upon.
I pay for my daily paper too (not the Chicago paper) and expect it to be delivered in a timely fashion in the same manner that I expect a restaurant meal to be brought to my table within a reasonable time after I order it.
How would you feel if you were at McDonalds and ordered and paid for a Big Mac; then after several minutes the counter girl said, "Sorry sir, we're out of Big Mac's so you can't have what you paid for. Tough luck. Next customer please!"
When I was a teenager I was repairing an old tube radio. It ran on 6 volt telephone batteries and hadn't been looked at or hooked up or turned on in probably 40 years.
The thing had those soup-can sized capacitors in it. One of them still held a charge. And I mean a charge! One moment I'm looking inside of that radio, the next moment I'm sitting flat against the wall on the other side of the room. And there is no time in between there....
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*.
That's an assumption based on no known evidence or facts at all.
All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS,
Winmodems, anyone? Brother printer drivers? Etc... and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
As for getting another company's video card, the options are ATi, and Matrox, neither of which are any better in this regard,
I have an Intel 865-based motherboard in this computer and the onboard video gives me 998 to 1003 fps with glxgears. This is under Fedora Core 2 and nothing but the stock driver that Fedora set up by magic when I installed the operating system.
if the user can't be bothered to save in 30 seconds the document isn't that important.
30 whole seconds, eh? What if I'm writing the document and took a moment to walk across the room to the bookcase or filing cabinet to consult a reference of some kind? Or someone just walked in and asked me a question. Or the phone rang. Or...
Can you give an idea of the factors? Does it vary by 5%? 10%?
Or more, depending on other factors as well. Height above sea level is a biggy; the higher you are the the greater the effect.
To be absolutely honest, I haven't been involved with the petroleum industry for... gosh, almost 20 years now. Some of the specifics escape me as I've not thought about that stuff for years.
And how is this a problem? Will people confuse cars from 1981 with cars from 2010?
Yes, when ordering parts from a junkyard (er, automotive parts recycling depot). When you tell Joe to just run over there and fetch the whozit you want to be sure that it fits the frammitz and isn't too tall to go under the stiplarch.
I thought liquids (of a given mass) changed volume very little in relation to temperature and pressure.
I don't know about anything else, but gasoline, diesel fuel and crude oil all change volume significantly with any temperature variations at all.
I have written substantial amounts of logging software for the petroleum industry, from drilling to retail gas stations, and temperature corrections are always a big part of the formulas.
When dipping a gas tank manually (using a dipstick), your friendly pump jockey has to consult a chart of temperature corrections to calculate the actual amount of gas in the tank. In many (most - maybe all) jurisdictions underground gas storage tanks have to be dipped and logged daily, and balanced against the volume of gasoline or diesel sold for the purpose of guarding against undetected leaks. When you think about it, you can see that an underground tank could leak for years and the first thing anyone would know about it is when gas starts leaking into the basement of the shop across the street or something.
The building that I own, live in, and run my business in was originally built in 1946. It's built like a blockhouse -- 16" concrete walls, small windows with steel bars behind them, and so on. Cellphones don't work worth a damn in here. That doesn't hurt my feelings at all because my business is a movie theatre.
On the negative side, AM and FM radio signals aren't worth listening to here either, so to get around this I have a car radio with an outdoor antenna set up in my kitchen so I can listen to the news.
How much storage would it take to hold every C=64 game you ever played?
You might be surprised. I have pretty much every game ever released for the C64. They are floppy disk images and/or tape images, all run through bzip2. My C64 games directory is 965mb; it would probably be at least double that or more if every image was uncompressed.
What did the disks hold? 360k? Maybe less?
Less. The floppy disks were single-sided. Each floppy disk image that I have is exactly 174848 bytes, uncompressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and if I recall, Packard Bell then proceeded to make some of the worst, crappiest computers known to man.
I can truthfully say that Packard Bell provided me with the one and only opportunity that I have ever had to repair a computer using a hammer and cold chisel.
A guy brought me a new Packard Bell 286 and a CDROM drive back when CDROM drives were the latest thing, and asked me to install it for him. Upon opening the case of the PB machine I discovered that a metal plate had been spot welded across the unused drive bay where the CDROM had to go. I had to get a hammer and chisel and beat it off before I could install the CDROM.
I always wondered what the owner of that computer would have thought if he had seen me pounding his computer with a big hammer like that...
On that note, did you know that Eve was the very first computer operator?
She really was!
She had an Apple in one hand and a Wang in the other!
ba da bing!
I shall buy an X10 camera in their memory.
True story: Back when there were quite a few people on Slashdot complaining about the "horrible, intrusive and tasteless" X10 ads, I had no idea what they were talking about. I've been using Junkbuster and (now) Privoxy for so long that I never actually ever saw an X10 ad. I had to go to their website once just to find out what everyone was complaining about.
Believe it or not.
I use http://www.privoxy.org/ on all of my computers along with a user.action file that I have spent a lot of time working on and fine-tuning.
I had to use a Windows box the other day (for the first time in a few years -- yes, I lead a sheltered life) and was shocked by the amount of ad content on the Internet. Even on a high-speed DSL connection, the response is much more sluggish without privoxy (or similar) in place. And stuff is much easier to read without all of that flashing stuff, bouncing monkeys and whatnot getting in the way of the content.
So if I want to calculate a million digits of pi, will my calculations somehow be more accurate and trustworthy if I record the intermediate steps to some paper medium???
Yes indeed, they will. Recording the intermediate steps to a paper medium allows someone else to check the accuracy of your work and verify it after the fact. Remember your math teacher's instruction: Always show your work!
How does the lost time encompassed in the weasel word "virtually" compare with the trivial cost (in a businees sense) of Office?
How does the lost time encompassed in the weasel words "trivial cost" compare with the time and expense involved in license management, Windows/Office system administraton, patch management and installation, inventory control and the cost and time lost in performance of an audit on demand?
recorded at your local highschool orchestra concert where they play shubert, or mozart;
No good. The arrangements are copyrighted, even though the actual music is in the public domain.
It's illegal for the school to photocopy extra copies of the scores for the band members too.
There is already a full-blown album of music licensed under that license.
75% of the contents of which (9 of 12 tracks) are licensed under the "yellow" license that specifically forbids free commercial use.
So that CD would be of no use to any business establishment wanting to avoid payment for "music in the waiting room" situations, either.
/. CBC?
http://sask.cbc.cagets a bit sluggish during the afternoon when lots of folks hit it to get the Saskatchewan news headlines and so on.
There is one big difference between music and books in public libraries. It generally takes a person a week or two to read a book, while it only takes an hour or so to copy a CD.
And therein lies the problem from the RIAA's point of view.
You aren't supposed to copy the cd that you borrow from the library, just the same as you aren't supposed to photocopy the book that you borrowed from the same place. Read and return; listen and return.
The fact that you stated this viewpoint in such an offhand manner indicates that you didn't consider that difference at all.
I havan't seen anyone redistributing Enterprise Linux 3.0 ISOs.
Now you have.
What is so important about that newspaper?
It's a product (and service) that you paid for that wasn't provided to you as agreed upon.
I pay for my daily paper too (not the Chicago paper) and expect it to be delivered in a timely fashion in the same manner that I expect a restaurant meal to be brought to my table within a reasonable time after I order it.
How would you feel if you were at McDonalds and ordered and paid for a Big Mac; then after several minutes the counter girl said, "Sorry sir, we're out of Big Mac's so you can't have what you paid for. Tough luck. Next customer please!"
is why people keep saying that "Windows" is trademarked.
Probably because it is.
"Windows" by itself is not trademarked,
Unfortunately, "Windows" by itself is indeed trademarked.
whereas "Microsoft Windows" is.
"Microsoft" is also trademarked. "Microsoft Windows" is two separately trademarked words side by side.
Ever been shocked by a capacitor?
When I was a teenager I was repairing an old tube radio. It ran on 6 volt telephone batteries and hadn't been looked at or hooked up or turned on in probably 40 years.
The thing had those soup-can sized capacitors in it. One of them still held a charge. And I mean a charge! One moment I'm looking inside of that radio, the next moment I'm sitting flat against the wall on the other side of the room. And there is no time in between there....
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*.
That's an assumption based on no known evidence or facts at all.
All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS,
Winmodems, anyone? Brother printer drivers? Etc...
and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
See above. It's 100% guesswork.
As for getting another company's video card, the options are ATi, and Matrox, neither of which are any better in this regard,
I have an Intel 865-based motherboard in this computer and the onboard video gives me 998 to 1003 fps with glxgears. This is under Fedora Core 2 and nothing but the stock driver that Fedora set up by magic when I installed the operating system.
if the user can't be bothered to save in 30 seconds the document isn't that important.
30 whole seconds, eh? What if I'm writing the document and took a moment to walk across the room to the bookcase or filing cabinet to consult a reference of some kind? Or someone just walked in and asked me a question. Or the phone rang. Or...
30 whole seconds?
Can you give an idea of the factors? Does it vary by 5%? 10%?
Or more, depending on other factors as well. Height above sea level is a biggy; the higher you are the the greater the effect.
To be absolutely honest, I haven't been involved with the petroleum industry for... gosh, almost 20 years now. Some of the specifics escape me as I've not thought about that stuff for years.
And how is this a problem? Will people confuse cars from 1981 with cars from 2010?
Yes, when ordering parts from a junkyard (er, automotive parts recycling depot). When you tell Joe to just run over there and fetch the whozit you want to be sure that it fits the frammitz and isn't too tall to go under the stiplarch.
See?
I thought liquids (of a given mass) changed volume very little in relation to temperature and pressure.
I don't know about anything else, but gasoline, diesel fuel and crude oil all change volume significantly with any temperature variations at all.
I have written substantial amounts of logging software for the petroleum industry, from drilling to retail gas stations, and temperature corrections are always a big part of the formulas.
When dipping a gas tank manually (using a dipstick), your friendly pump jockey has to consult a chart of temperature corrections to calculate the actual amount of gas in the tank. In many (most - maybe all) jurisdictions underground gas storage tanks have to be dipped and logged daily, and balanced against the volume of gasoline or diesel sold for the purpose of guarding against undetected leaks. When you think about it, you can see that an underground tank could leak for years and the first thing anyone would know about it is when gas starts leaking into the basement of the shop across the street or something.
most schools have a legal defense team for their students.
So? What gives you the idea that most hobbyist programmers are students?
building a structure with metal walls.
The building that I own, live in, and run my business in was originally built in 1946. It's built like a blockhouse -- 16" concrete walls, small windows with steel bars behind them, and so on. Cellphones don't work worth a damn in here. That doesn't hurt my feelings at all because my business is a movie theatre.
On the negative side, AM and FM radio signals aren't worth listening to here either, so to get around this I have a car radio with an outdoor antenna set up in my kitchen so I can listen to the news.
Are there any good non-adware PC weather tools?
The gnome gweather desktop applet.
How much storage would it take to hold every C=64 game you ever played?
You might be surprised. I have pretty much every game ever released for the C64. They are floppy disk images and/or tape images, all run through bzip2. My C64 games directory is 965mb; it would probably be at least double that or more if every image was uncompressed.
What did the disks hold? 360k? Maybe less?
Less. The floppy disks were single-sided. Each floppy disk image that I have is exactly 174848 bytes, uncompressed.
Microsoft Word for DOS 5.5a is available for free download from Microsoft here.
To install run "wd55_ben -d" after downloading, then run setup.exe
No, I have no idea why it's available for free download, but there it is,
free for all comers apparently.