Um, no it isn't. Your eye is vastly more sophisticated. Is it easier to recognize people by their faces or thier voice?
Actually, a lot of times it is easier for me to recognize people by their voices rather than their faces. I can be really bad at remembering faces sometimes, but I have had more than one situation where I remembered somebody by the way their voice sounded and the way they spoke.
Perhaps my previous post was somewhat poorly worded, as it was hastily typed while at work. (As this post is certain to be... it's 2:20am my time.) I did not intend to imply that those services are all that your tax dollars pay for. My point was merely that you are at least getting something for your taxes. Granted, those services I named aren't all that your tax dollars go towards, but those are the few services of which you actually partake.
Yes, our tax system is primarily a wealth distribution system, but it's not entirely a wealth distribution system. That said, I will admit that i maybe don't know as much about our tax system as I should... The wealth distribution system, however, is exactly why you can't just pay for the services that you use. You're helping support the less productive members of society. Whether or not that's a good thing is a debate for another subject.
How is this different than the income tax? I can sit on my arse in a shack year round, using no govt. services and still have to pay the income tax. I make money from the fruit of my labors, "built" with my valuable time, and I still have to give Uncle Sam his cut.
You're not explicitly using any government services. However, you still benefit from those services that are granted to everybody within the borders of the United States. Chiefly, protection from foreign invasion. Local police protection from the wacko's that might hunt down the hermit living in a shack just for sport. You may not ask for those government services, but as long as you are within the borders of the US you will receive those services, whether you want them or not. That's not to mention that the money that you make is in fact a service of Uncle Sam. You could always resort to a system of bartering, but then Uncle Sam wouldn't have any recourse to take their cut, in which place you wouldn't have anything to bitch about anyway.
Simply put, you're always getting something for your tax dollars, whether you asked for it or not.
The biggest advantage of Wireless that I saw on my campus came when some of my friends found out that certain access points on campus didn't have the bandwitdh shapers in place. That meant my friends with laptops would make frequent trips to these areas to do homework and download from the normally slow P2P apps.
Incidentally my alma matter ranked 17th on the list. That's not surprising as they were making a significant push towards setting up the wireless network my last couple of years there.
Oh yeah, one other interesting use: wireless cable TV. One of my friends had a TV tuner in his Linux box in his dorm. So... log into the X server remotely from his laptop and bingo! Wireless cable TV. Pretty neat trick. (Too bad he was too responsible to actually watch the TV during class...)
Re:OT: What I want from a 3D GUI project
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Sphere XP Makes GUI 3D
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· Score: 2, Informative
The calender looks like a calender and is where you would expect it. The Inbox looks like an inbox and is on your table. Your diary is on the table and open to today. You software manuals are on the shelf and look like books, when you move closer you can read the spines.No training required.When you move an cursor (think focus of gaze) over what you want to do icons appear near the object with a list of tasks it can do appear. Move your icon/point of interest away and they go away. Walk down the hall and there is Fred's office , there's Freds stuff. Fred might let you borrow his stuff or he might not. Walk out of that door over there and anything and everything changes and your in the middle of a game. It's ALL transparent and like the real world. (Ok, the game bit is an extension but think local paintball)
Isn't this what Microsoft tried to do with Bob? I may be thinking of another UI that tried to do the same thing, but I distinctly remember at one point using a UI similar to what you describe... and I think it was Bob.
However, I've come to realize the value of a unique ringtone.
This is so true. When I bought my Ericsson T60d almost two years ago, I bought it becuase I didn't know anybody else who owned one. One of the first benefits I noticed when among all of my Nokia/Motorola owning friends was that my standard ring sounded different than theirs. This meant that when one of their phones rang, I was the only chump not digging around to see if it was my phone.
So fast-forward a couple of months and I'm back at school, where I find that the Ericsson T60D is a little more popular. No problem, I'll just program in my own ringtone. That ringtone, in fact, worked out better than the stock ring. Because of the fact that it passed upwards through a couple of octaves, that meant that no matter what the level of background noise was, 90% of the time the phone would eventually emit a tone that was hearable above the rest of the noise.
Unfortunately, I finally lost that ringtone last summer when my phone developed amnesia and for some reason couldn't access half of its memory, including that ringtone. For some reason, when the phone did eventually recover the missing address book entries, the ringtones stayed missing... and I've been too lazy to go back and reprogram that ringtone.
I kind of felt the same way for a while. But, I must say that I do like the safety net that anto-virus software provides. It's essentially a license to act stupid with my own machine, and allows me to safely download and run software that I otherwise might be suspicious of.
That said, the only time I've been infected with a virus/trojan in the past couple of years, I caught it right away without the aid of anti-virus software. Sadly though, it was becuase of the fact that I knew I had virus software installed that I even got infected in the first place. I forgot that I'd turned off my AV software while trying to troubleshoot another application.
Anyway, I think the combination of my NAT router and AV scanning on my ISPs email servers is really enough protection for me. The only real reason I use AV software is to allow me to be stupid. In fact, if more ISPs would run AV software on their email servers, I get the feeling that a lot of these trojans/viruses wouldn't be as big of a problem as they currently are.
I hate Norton and Mcafee because they each run like 6 different processes when the system boots up. Who needs a virus when they have an anti-virus utility that causes more load and overhead than everything else combined.
I totally agree with you on that one. I was having issues with McAfee at one point, so I uninstalled it for a while. I couldn't believe how much faster my computer was starting up. Now, I'm sure that some of the slowdown had to do with McAfee doing some scanning on bootup, but it was amazing nevertheless....And the reason that I uninstalled McAfee? Version 8.0 for home users appears to have a slight bug in it where for some reason it appears to go into some kind of infinite loop or something and basically keeps eating up system resources and slowing your system to a crawl until you kill the process. I've actually got one screenshot showing McAfee has consumed ~380MB physical memory and ~720MB virtual memory. I've seen it higher, but the system was so slow to respond at that point that I was unable to get a screencap.
As you said, who needs viruses when you have virus software that harms your computer worse than a virus.
Yes, you read correctly, $46000. That's roughly the cost of putting a cop on the streets for half a year.
I first read that and though "$46000 for only half of the year? I'm in the wrong line of work." And then I realized that this was in Canada... That's what? About $15,000 USD?;)
What world are you living in? 750Mhz is quite significant in my mind. Other than my Desktop machine (1.67GHz), I have no other PCs that are more than 233Mhz.
I'm sorry.;) (That is a joke, for the trigger-happy mods in the audience.)
Out of the 6 that PCs that I still have, only two are less than 233MHz. And those are the two that I don't even really use.
Sure, most people don't need the fastest for surfing the net, etc. But you don't buy a new PC based on what you will do with it most of the time. You buy a PC based on what is the most that you will sometimes want to do with it. Do I need my 2.6 GHz P4 with 768MB of RAM and three hard drives to surf the web and check email? Nope. But it sure does come in handy when I want to play a round of Battlefield 1942. And it's not like these super fast computers draw maximum power when they aren't being used intensively, so why not buy a nice computer so that you can have the option to play games? Personally, I'm having a hard time seeing a whole lot of uses for computers less than 233MHz. (Other than routers/firewalls. Even using one as a fileserver I don't find too useful as you usually have to use some kind of drive layering utility in order to get the BIOS on a computer that old to talk to a hard drive with sufficiently large enough space to warrant a file server... at least in ATA land you do.) In my experience, my 200MHz Pentium wasn't even all that great as a MP3 box as the combination of the serial port remote receiver and my prefered remote control software package wouldn't work on such a slow machine.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic, and this wasn't meant as a rant or flame or something directed at you specifically. Just suffice it to say that I see no reason not to purchase a fast PC if you think you may need the power in the future, becuase chances are that the power draw from such a machine won't be that much at idle anyway.
(And in my defense, when purchasing a laptop recently I decided to purchase a used P3 850 becuase I knew that any more than that would be overkill for my purposes. And it was cheaper!)
America is one of the few nations in the world where the power going out or setting firest makes the news, in most of the world it happens daily.
Pfft. In some parts of America the power still goes out daily. Our power company back home is absolutely pitiful. I kid you not when I say that, during the summer at least, we have daily power outages. It was actually kind of frustrating, as the frequent power outages have been known to damage some of our home theater equipment until we bought a UPS to smooth out the power for them.
Those two extra cats in our WRX-es are not needed, once the engine warms up. The first cat in the pipe up to the turbo charger is just there for cold start, as is the second cat. The sucky thing is that once it warms up and they aren't needed, they still present a parasitic loss in the exhaust that hinders performance in a big way.
And, from what I understand, could eventually pose a danger to the turbo much later in the car's life should the precat begin to break up and some debris enter the turbo. Plus, I've heard reports that removing that catalytic converter can have a noticable increase in throttle response. (Less restriction means the exhaust gasses are moving quicker when they hit the turbo, which means the turbo spools up quicker resulting in boost building earlier in the RPM range -- makes sense to me.)
I would have looked forward to a new version of WP several years ago, but not so much now. WP was what I was weaned on, and I was probably one of the few WP advocates that I knew. I knew most of the shortcuts for the features I commonly knew and had to really readjust when using Word. What made it really great for me though was the fact that I had WP 8 for both Windows and Linux, which meant that no matter what OS I was working in, I didn't have to reboot to the other just to finish up a friggin paper. Having this kind of support for all of my documents meant that I could effectively use Linux for most of my day to day computing tasks. It also meant that I could print all of my papers on the postscript printers in the CS department.
I only finally made the switch to Word in about July of 2001 when I got a new Dell that came with Word preinstalled. I was fed up with people sending me documents and finding that WP or Abiword or StarOffice wouldn't render them correctly. Not to mention, I got tired of saving documents that would be sent to other people, only to find that a lot of my formatting was lost in the translation to.DOC. It may not be the best way to achieve a standard, but Word docs are standard so I made the difficult (for me) transition to Word. Hell, to this day I still miss the show codes feature, as I sometimes get absolutely fed up with Word's stupid formatting decisions.
As other people have pointed out, with the exception of a few niche markets such as Lawyers, and (believe it or not) many Schools, WP on the desktop has pretty much died. So, unless Corel can come up with a stable piece of software, can achieve compatibility with the latest Word Document format, and can offer some compelling upgrade features, I don't see this version of Word Perfect being too successful. Most of their niche markets are mostly Windows based anyway.
I've been in gateway stores a time or two. They were almost completely useless. If you wanted a price on particular configuration, the sales droids directed you to an internet-connected machine where you could go to the gateway web site and get a price quote. Duh... I could have done that from home.
That's more or less the same experience that I've had with them. When I asked a guy for some information about a particular digital camcorder they had, he went over to a computer, and came back about 5 minutes later with a print out from the website. And when I asked him a question whose answer wasn't on that piece of paper... he didn't know.
I think their biggest advantage was that a lot of people who might have considered Dell eventually decided upon Gateway simply because of their retail store presence. Since they didn't have a presence in the big low cost retail stores, they were perceived as being better in some way, and perhaps equal to Dell. But with the added comfort of being able to check out demo systems and have a local outlet to take your computer to for repairs. And I think that last one is a biggie. Most people don't feel comfortable enough with their computer to sit on the phone with Dell support and listen to some Indian guy with a barely understandable accent tell you that he wants you to unseat all of your cards and then tell him what the diagnostic lights show. Most people would rather just take their computer back to where they bought it and let them fix it....And now Gateway will lose that advantage.
The only thing I'd miss is Outlook Express. *ducks* I just like the way it handles newsgroups. No other email/NG reader I've ever tries even comes close.
I ran into this when I made my first foray into Linux. (I'm on my second foray now that I have the time/money to spend on extra hardware and learning how to configure a Linux install.) OE just handled newsgroup reading and email reading so seamlessly. Furthermore, and I know this is a small point, but the older versions even allowed you to scroll through messages in a thread using the side buttons on my Intellimouse Explorer. Unfortunately, later versions got rid of this ability, for some reason, pissing me off in the process.
On a side note, I want to comment on how surprised I am at how far Linux has come in the few years that I've been absent. I'm to the point where the first thing I'm going to do when I get my new laptop is repartition the drive and install Linux; probably SuSE 9 as I've had the fewest hardware issues with SuSE distros in the past. (For instance, with Mandrake 10.0 community, I am experiencing random sound card lock ups, and I'm using the ubiquitous Sound Blaster Live!, one of the most popular sound cards sold for a period. And I don't know enough yet to figure out just why it's locking up. Heck, it may even be issues with the 2.6 kernel.) And maybe I'll get back to attempting a Gentoo install on one of my older machines. Hopefully without the machine taking a crap this time.
Anyway, back to what I was saying... it's truly amazing how far Linux has come as far as configurability and software support. OO.org rocks. Evolution mimics Outlook very well. In fact, the level of software support available was one of the reasons I switched back to Windows. I can't really say that's a problem now.
Heh. I just realized that my previous comment may have sounded like a flame, and I just wanted to make sure that you know that it is not. My comment was more a lashing out at the fact that no matter what we do, we still won't change Joe Average's opinions.
As a point of fact, the whole reason I visit slashdot is for the commentary after the articles. That's what makes this site valuable in my opinion.
Well... that and the karma game.;) But I've estimated that even if they hadn't changed away from the numerical system, I'm probably pretty close to the cap...
...if enough consumers stop consuming the shit, companies will desperately try to save themselves from bankruptcy by selling you what you really wanted in the first place.
Here's the problem with these blanket "If enough consumers blah, blah, blah" statements that I always hear on/. and from my friends. Enough people never do. Joe Average wants his entertainment, and although he may not like the cost and bitch about it, he can't live wihtout it, and neither can his family. He continues to pay the exhorbitant costs becuase he wants his entertainment, and so do his wife and kids, each of whom would probably give him shit if he doesn't poney up the cash.
It sucks, but that's the way things are. It's easy enough for us to say and do the "If Joe Average blah, blah, blah" statements because we're not Joe Average. Unfortunately, Joe Average usually doesn't see things the same way, or sometimes does but will continue to pay the costs becuase he's too lazy or has some external forces influencing his decision making.
Personally, I don't pay for cable (other than the basic-basic, broadcast channels without the static package, becuase it was only $5 more per month than just the cable modem subscription). When I moved into my apartment, my roommate and I thought about how much TV we actually watched and decided that it wasn't worth the extra $50 a month just so that there might be something good on whenever we are bored enough to sit down and watch TV. Instead we have the internet, DVDs, and (gasp!) books to keep us entertained.
If I worked as head of IT at any other corporation, I would find it COMPLETELY unacceptable that the users could do anything to install applications onto their PCs. I would find it entirely unacceptable, if our users were compromised by an Email virus. I am not exactly saying that friggin' heads would roll, but it would be pretty darn close to that.
Except, sometimes you may work for a corporation where their (poorly written) custom applications are not multi user aware, but are being used in a multi user environment... meaning that sometimes the easiest thing to do would be to give the user full access to their computer so they can use the damn programs.
Unfortuantely, I am full up in the computer that my mp3 collection resides. The thing's got 3 hard drives, the requisite 2 optical drives, and the still (barely) sometimes useful floppy drive. There aren't any more bays in the case to install.
That's why I was thinking about backing it up to my linux box. The biggest problem I'm having is that I haven't had a box with Linux on it in a while so I'm having to go through the Linux learning curve again. I'm guessing the best way to do it would be to just smbmount the mp3 drive and then copy the files over. I just need to find a utility that will automatically back up the changes. Or maybe I could devise a homegrown shell script to compare the two drives and then copy the differences... Run ls recursively through the directories, diff the results, then copy what's new maybe? And then set it as a cron job? It shouldn't be hard actually the more I think about it, but like I said, I haven't actively worked in Linux in a while and my skills are rusty. (Welcome to the world of a Windows sysadmin...)
The only other issue I have with that solution is that the TV tuner on my AIW 8500 doesn't appear to be supported in linux (or is it?), and so I still boot back to windows to watch/record TV somewhat frequently.
Don't know about anyone else, but I find it a metric shit-load easier to bring my computer to university -complete with CDs ripped to.mp3 &.ogg on my hard drive- than 200+ CDs.
I did exactly this same thing my junior year of college. I got really tired of having to pick and choose which CDs I wanted to take to university and which ones I wanted to leave at home, only to decide one day that I wish I had CD X at school becuase I really wanted to listen to track Y. (On a side note, when that happened, I usually just fired up a P2P app to just download song Y.) So, my junior year I bought a new hard drive and every time I went home I swapped the already ripped CDs for ones I hadn't ripped yet.
By my senior year, the only CDs I had with me were the ones that were left in the car when I drove down and the ones that I bought while away at school. And if I wanted to listen to CD X in the car, no problem. Just burn a copy, listen to it, and then toss it in the back seat when I got tired of it -- blank CDs are so cheap that they're virtually disposable anyway. I also avoided unnecessary wear and tear on my original CDs this way, insuring that they would always play well in my living room CD player. This method also has the added benefit in that I can now listen to my entire collection from any PC in my apartment, and I can also create several thousand song, shuffled playlists for those times when I want to listen to music from a certain genre, but not to any band in particular.
The only problem that I have now is that my music collection has reached a critical mass where it's no longer feasible to rip all my CDs should I lose my hard drive, but it's also not feasible to back up my collection to traditional recordable media. So, I either need a tape backup drive, or I need to devise a solution to back up my collection onto my linux box. Any suggestions?
Haha. Actually, we started talking about DB units before I ever read Chopping Block. That said, I am a bit of a fan of the comic, but I haven't really read it in about a year and a half for lack of time.
I hereby propose a new measurement standard... We have Volkswagens for mass foolball fields for distance and VCD Days for storage.
My friends and I like to use dead bodies as a measurement for trunk/cargo space on vehicles. You should see some of the looks we've gotten from salesmen when we start to talk about how many dead bodies would fit in the trunk of this car he's showing us.
Or even some old 10 gig drive that you found in some computer while you were dumpster diving?
Thanks for sharing with us how you like to spend your spare time!!!
I still remember the first time I got an invitation to go dumpster diving back while I was in high school. It was a Friday night and I'd made a run to Taco Bell before going to meet some friends. While at Taco Bell I ran into some of the local computer geeks whom I was also friends with. We got to talking and then they mentioned: "Yeah, after this we're going to go dumpster diving at the high school." "I heard that Mr. Crowder just threw away some old computers." "Wanna go with us?"
How do you tell your friends that you're going to go meet some girls instead of diging around in the trash behind the high school looking for some 386s.
Oh yeah. You laugh at them, and then explain how you have a job and might just buy a shiny new Pentium 233 for the girl you're going to meet in an hour.
I currently work for a small Electronic Medical Records company. At some level I worry about potentially killing someone every day. In fact our bug tracking tool has a special category in it called "Patient Safety" which is the highest priority bug. We deal with things most of you probably wouldn't think of such as a tool for writing Prescriptions, which given the fact that many drugs interact ( potentially fatally) has to catch and alert the physician to such cases. I also deal with lab results which if reported incorrectly could lead to a potentially fatal decision by the doctor and so forth.
Back when I was working as a consultant I primarily worked in the healthcare field. However, it was reasons like the above that always made me more stressed when I was working at a hospital. Most of the time the life threatening equipment would be handled by the head IS guys at that facility or by outside vendors, but there were still those thoughts.
Now, I work in a business office and love it. There are still mission critical priorities (as with any job), but in this case if something goes wrong and I can't fix it, the wose that could happen is that I would only lose my job.
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Um, no it isn't. Your eye is vastly more sophisticated. Is it easier to recognize people by their faces or thier voice?
Actually, a lot of times it is easier for me to recognize people by their voices rather than their faces. I can be really bad at remembering faces sometimes, but I have had more than one situation where I remembered somebody by the way their voice sounded and the way they spoke.
But I think I'm just a freak...
Perhaps my previous post was somewhat poorly worded, as it was hastily typed while at work. (As this post is certain to be... it's 2:20am my time.) I did not intend to imply that those services are all that your tax dollars pay for. My point was merely that you are at least getting something for your taxes. Granted, those services I named aren't all that your tax dollars go towards, but those are the few services of which you actually partake.
Yes, our tax system is primarily a wealth distribution system, but it's not entirely a wealth distribution system. That said, I will admit that i maybe don't know as much about our tax system as I should... The wealth distribution system, however, is exactly why you can't just pay for the services that you use. You're helping support the less productive members of society. Whether or not that's a good thing is a debate for another subject.
How is this different than the income tax? I can sit on my arse in a shack year round, using no govt. services and still have to pay the income tax. I make money from the fruit of my labors, "built" with my valuable time, and I still have to give Uncle Sam his cut.
You're not explicitly using any government services. However, you still benefit from those services that are granted to everybody within the borders of the United States. Chiefly, protection from foreign invasion. Local police protection from the wacko's that might hunt down the hermit living in a shack just for sport. You may not ask for those government services, but as long as you are within the borders of the US you will receive those services, whether you want them or not. That's not to mention that the money that you make is in fact a service of Uncle Sam. You could always resort to a system of bartering, but then Uncle Sam wouldn't have any recourse to take their cut, in which place you wouldn't have anything to bitch about anyway.
Simply put, you're always getting something for your tax dollars, whether you asked for it or not.
The biggest advantage of Wireless that I saw on my campus came when some of my friends found out that certain access points on campus didn't have the bandwitdh shapers in place. That meant my friends with laptops would make frequent trips to these areas to do homework and download from the normally slow P2P apps.
Incidentally my alma matter ranked 17th on the list. That's not surprising as they were making a significant push towards setting up the wireless network my last couple of years there.
Oh yeah, one other interesting use: wireless cable TV. One of my friends had a TV tuner in his Linux box in his dorm. So... log into the X server remotely from his laptop and bingo! Wireless cable TV. Pretty neat trick. (Too bad he was too responsible to actually watch the TV during class...)
The calender looks like a calender and is where you would expect it. The Inbox looks like an inbox and is on your table. Your diary is on the table and open to today. You software manuals are on the shelf and look like books, when you move closer you can read the spines.No training required.When you move an cursor (think focus of gaze) over what you want to do icons appear near the object with a list of tasks it can do appear. Move your icon/point of interest away and they go away. Walk down the hall and there is Fred's office , there's Freds stuff. Fred might let you borrow his stuff or he might not. Walk out of that door over there and anything and everything changes and your in the middle of a game. It's ALL transparent and like the real world. (Ok, the game bit is an extension but think local paintball)
Isn't this what Microsoft tried to do with Bob? I may be thinking of another UI that tried to do the same thing, but I distinctly remember at one point using a UI similar to what you describe... and I think it was Bob.
However, I've come to realize the value of a unique ringtone.
This is so true. When I bought my Ericsson T60d almost two years ago, I bought it becuase I didn't know anybody else who owned one. One of the first benefits I noticed when among all of my Nokia/Motorola owning friends was that my standard ring sounded different than theirs. This meant that when one of their phones rang, I was the only chump not digging around to see if it was my phone.
So fast-forward a couple of months and I'm back at school, where I find that the Ericsson T60D is a little more popular. No problem, I'll just program in my own ringtone. That ringtone, in fact, worked out better than the stock ring. Because of the fact that it passed upwards through a couple of octaves, that meant that no matter what the level of background noise was, 90% of the time the phone would eventually emit a tone that was hearable above the rest of the noise.
Unfortunately, I finally lost that ringtone last summer when my phone developed amnesia and for some reason couldn't access half of its memory, including that ringtone. For some reason, when the phone did eventually recover the missing address book entries, the ringtones stayed missing... and I've been too lazy to go back and reprogram that ringtone.
I kind of felt the same way for a while. But, I must say that I do like the safety net that anto-virus software provides. It's essentially a license to act stupid with my own machine, and allows me to safely download and run software that I otherwise might be suspicious of.
That said, the only time I've been infected with a virus/trojan in the past couple of years, I caught it right away without the aid of anti-virus software. Sadly though, it was becuase of the fact that I knew I had virus software installed that I even got infected in the first place. I forgot that I'd turned off my AV software while trying to troubleshoot another application.
Anyway, I think the combination of my NAT router and AV scanning on my ISPs email servers is really enough protection for me. The only real reason I use AV software is to allow me to be stupid. In fact, if more ISPs would run AV software on their email servers, I get the feeling that a lot of these trojans/viruses wouldn't be as big of a problem as they currently are.
I hate Norton and Mcafee because they each run like 6 different processes when the system boots up. Who needs a virus when they have an anti-virus utility that causes more load and overhead than everything else combined.
...And the reason that I uninstalled McAfee? Version 8.0 for home users appears to have a slight bug in it where for some reason it appears to go into some kind of infinite loop or something and basically keeps eating up system resources and slowing your system to a crawl until you kill the process. I've actually got one screenshot showing McAfee has consumed ~380MB physical memory and ~720MB virtual memory. I've seen it higher, but the system was so slow to respond at that point that I was unable to get a screencap.
I totally agree with you on that one. I was having issues with McAfee at one point, so I uninstalled it for a while. I couldn't believe how much faster my computer was starting up. Now, I'm sure that some of the slowdown had to do with McAfee doing some scanning on bootup, but it was amazing nevertheless.
As you said, who needs viruses when you have virus software that harms your computer worse than a virus.
This is completely off-topic, but, Dammit man! Get your site back up so I can check out your 20B Convertible! :-P
Yes, you read correctly, $46000. That's roughly the cost of putting a cop on the streets for half a year.
;)
I first read that and though "$46000 for only half of the year? I'm in the wrong line of work." And then I realized that this was in Canada... That's what? About $15,000 USD?
(This is a joke, so laugh a little mods.)
What world are you living in? 750Mhz is quite significant in my mind. Other than my Desktop machine (1.67GHz), I have no other PCs that are more than 233Mhz.
;)
I'm sorry.
(That is a joke, for the trigger-happy mods in the audience.)
Out of the 6 that PCs that I still have, only two are less than 233MHz. And those are the two that I don't even really use.
Sure, most people don't need the fastest for surfing the net, etc. But you don't buy a new PC based on what you will do with it most of the time. You buy a PC based on what is the most that you will sometimes want to do with it. Do I need my 2.6 GHz P4 with 768MB of RAM and three hard drives to surf the web and check email? Nope. But it sure does come in handy when I want to play a round of Battlefield 1942. And it's not like these super fast computers draw maximum power when they aren't being used intensively, so why not buy a nice computer so that you can have the option to play games? Personally, I'm having a hard time seeing a whole lot of uses for computers less than 233MHz. (Other than routers/firewalls. Even using one as a fileserver I don't find too useful as you usually have to use some kind of drive layering utility in order to get the BIOS on a computer that old to talk to a hard drive with sufficiently large enough space to warrant a file server... at least in ATA land you do.) In my experience, my 200MHz Pentium wasn't even all that great as a MP3 box as the combination of the serial port remote receiver and my prefered remote control software package wouldn't work on such a slow machine.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic, and this wasn't meant as a rant or flame or something directed at you specifically. Just suffice it to say that I see no reason not to purchase a fast PC if you think you may need the power in the future, becuase chances are that the power draw from such a machine won't be that much at idle anyway.
(And in my defense, when purchasing a laptop recently I decided to purchase a used P3 850 becuase I knew that any more than that would be overkill for my purposes. And it was cheaper!)
America is one of the few nations in the world where the power going out or setting firest makes the news, in most of the world it happens daily.
Pfft. In some parts of America the power still goes out daily. Our power company back home is absolutely pitiful. I kid you not when I say that, during the summer at least, we have daily power outages. It was actually kind of frustrating, as the frequent power outages have been known to damage some of our home theater equipment until we bought a UPS to smooth out the power for them.
Those two extra cats in our WRX-es are not needed, once the engine warms up. The first cat in the pipe up to the turbo charger is just there for cold start, as is the second cat. The sucky thing is that once it warms up and they aren't needed, they still present a parasitic loss in the exhaust that hinders performance in a big way.
And, from what I understand, could eventually pose a danger to the turbo much later in the car's life should the precat begin to break up and some debris enter the turbo. Plus, I've heard reports that removing that catalytic converter can have a noticable increase in throttle response. (Less restriction means the exhaust gasses are moving quicker when they hit the turbo, which means the turbo spools up quicker resulting in boost building earlier in the RPM range -- makes sense to me.)
I would have looked forward to a new version of WP several years ago, but not so much now. WP was what I was weaned on, and I was probably one of the few WP advocates that I knew. I knew most of the shortcuts for the features I commonly knew and had to really readjust when using Word. What made it really great for me though was the fact that I had WP 8 for both Windows and Linux, which meant that no matter what OS I was working in, I didn't have to reboot to the other just to finish up a friggin paper. Having this kind of support for all of my documents meant that I could effectively use Linux for most of my day to day computing tasks. It also meant that I could print all of my papers on the postscript printers in the CS department.
.DOC. It may not be the best way to achieve a standard, but Word docs are standard so I made the difficult (for me) transition to Word. Hell, to this day I still miss the show codes feature, as I sometimes get absolutely fed up with Word's stupid formatting decisions.
I only finally made the switch to Word in about July of 2001 when I got a new Dell that came with Word preinstalled. I was fed up with people sending me documents and finding that WP or Abiword or StarOffice wouldn't render them correctly. Not to mention, I got tired of saving documents that would be sent to other people, only to find that a lot of my formatting was lost in the translation to
As other people have pointed out, with the exception of a few niche markets such as Lawyers, and (believe it or not) many Schools, WP on the desktop has pretty much died. So, unless Corel can come up with a stable piece of software, can achieve compatibility with the latest Word Document format, and can offer some compelling upgrade features, I don't see this version of Word Perfect being too successful. Most of their niche markets are mostly Windows based anyway.
I've been in gateway stores a time or two. They were almost completely useless. If you wanted a price on particular configuration, the sales droids directed you to an internet-connected machine where you could go to the gateway web site and get a price quote. Duh... I could have done that from home.
...And now Gateway will lose that advantage.
That's more or less the same experience that I've had with them. When I asked a guy for some information about a particular digital camcorder they had, he went over to a computer, and came back about 5 minutes later with a print out from the website. And when I asked him a question whose answer wasn't on that piece of paper... he didn't know.
I think their biggest advantage was that a lot of people who might have considered Dell eventually decided upon Gateway simply because of their retail store presence. Since they didn't have a presence in the big low cost retail stores, they were perceived as being better in some way, and perhaps equal to Dell. But with the added comfort of being able to check out demo systems and have a local outlet to take your computer to for repairs. And I think that last one is a biggie. Most people don't feel comfortable enough with their computer to sit on the phone with Dell support and listen to some Indian guy with a barely understandable accent tell you that he wants you to unseat all of your cards and then tell him what the diagnostic lights show. Most people would rather just take their computer back to where they bought it and let them fix it.
The only thing I'd miss is Outlook Express. *ducks* I just like the way it handles newsgroups. No other email/NG reader I've ever tries even comes close.
I ran into this when I made my first foray into Linux. (I'm on my second foray now that I have the time/money to spend on extra hardware and learning how to configure a Linux install.) OE just handled newsgroup reading and email reading so seamlessly. Furthermore, and I know this is a small point, but the older versions even allowed you to scroll through messages in a thread using the side buttons on my Intellimouse Explorer. Unfortunately, later versions got rid of this ability, for some reason, pissing me off in the process.
On a side note, I want to comment on how surprised I am at how far Linux has come in the few years that I've been absent. I'm to the point where the first thing I'm going to do when I get my new laptop is repartition the drive and install Linux; probably SuSE 9 as I've had the fewest hardware issues with SuSE distros in the past. (For instance, with Mandrake 10.0 community, I am experiencing random sound card lock ups, and I'm using the ubiquitous Sound Blaster Live!, one of the most popular sound cards sold for a period. And I don't know enough yet to figure out just why it's locking up. Heck, it may even be issues with the 2.6 kernel.) And maybe I'll get back to attempting a Gentoo install on one of my older machines. Hopefully without the machine taking a crap this time.
Anyway, back to what I was saying... it's truly amazing how far Linux has come as far as configurability and software support. OO.org rocks. Evolution mimics Outlook very well. In fact, the level of software support available was one of the reasons I switched back to Windows. I can't really say that's a problem now.
I have been impressed...
Heh. I just realized that my previous comment may have sounded like a flame, and I just wanted to make sure that you know that it is not. My comment was more a lashing out at the fact that no matter what we do, we still won't change Joe Average's opinions.
;) But I've estimated that even if they hadn't changed away from the numerical system, I'm probably pretty close to the cap...
As a point of fact, the whole reason I visit slashdot is for the commentary after the articles. That's what makes this site valuable in my opinion.
Well... that and the karma game.
...if enough consumers stop consuming the shit, companies will desperately try to save themselves from bankruptcy by selling you what you really wanted in the first place.
/. and from my friends. Enough people never do. Joe Average wants his entertainment, and although he may not like the cost and bitch about it, he can't live wihtout it, and neither can his family. He continues to pay the exhorbitant costs becuase he wants his entertainment, and so do his wife and kids, each of whom would probably give him shit if he doesn't poney up the cash.
Here's the problem with these blanket "If enough consumers blah, blah, blah" statements that I always hear on
It sucks, but that's the way things are. It's easy enough for us to say and do the "If Joe Average blah, blah, blah" statements because we're not Joe Average. Unfortunately, Joe Average usually doesn't see things the same way, or sometimes does but will continue to pay the costs becuase he's too lazy or has some external forces influencing his decision making.
Personally, I don't pay for cable (other than the basic-basic, broadcast channels without the static package, becuase it was only $5 more per month than just the cable modem subscription). When I moved into my apartment, my roommate and I thought about how much TV we actually watched and decided that it wasn't worth the extra $50 a month just so that there might be something good on whenever we are bored enough to sit down and watch TV. Instead we have the internet, DVDs, and (gasp!) books to keep us entertained.
If I worked as head of IT at any other corporation, I would find it COMPLETELY unacceptable that the users could do anything to install applications onto their PCs. I would find it entirely unacceptable, if our users were compromised by an Email virus. I am not exactly saying that friggin' heads would roll, but it would be pretty darn close to that.
Except, sometimes you may work for a corporation where their (poorly written) custom applications are not multi user aware, but are being used in a multi user environment... meaning that sometimes the easiest thing to do would be to give the user full access to their computer so they can use the damn programs.
Unfortuantely, I am full up in the computer that my mp3 collection resides. The thing's got 3 hard drives, the requisite 2 optical drives, and the still (barely) sometimes useful floppy drive. There aren't any more bays in the case to install.
That's why I was thinking about backing it up to my linux box. The biggest problem I'm having is that I haven't had a box with Linux on it in a while so I'm having to go through the Linux learning curve again. I'm guessing the best way to do it would be to just smbmount the mp3 drive and then copy the files over. I just need to find a utility that will automatically back up the changes. Or maybe I could devise a homegrown shell script to compare the two drives and then copy the differences... Run ls recursively through the directories, diff the results, then copy what's new maybe? And then set it as a cron job? It shouldn't be hard actually the more I think about it, but like I said, I haven't actively worked in Linux in a while and my skills are rusty. (Welcome to the world of a Windows sysadmin...)
The only other issue I have with that solution is that the TV tuner on my AIW 8500 doesn't appear to be supported in linux (or is it?), and so I still boot back to windows to watch/record TV somewhat frequently.
Don't know about anyone else, but I find it a metric shit-load easier to bring my computer to university -complete with CDs ripped to .mp3 & .ogg on my hard drive- than 200+ CDs.
I did exactly this same thing my junior year of college. I got really tired of having to pick and choose which CDs I wanted to take to university and which ones I wanted to leave at home, only to decide one day that I wish I had CD X at school becuase I really wanted to listen to track Y. (On a side note, when that happened, I usually just fired up a P2P app to just download song Y.) So, my junior year I bought a new hard drive and every time I went home I swapped the already ripped CDs for ones I hadn't ripped yet.
By my senior year, the only CDs I had with me were the ones that were left in the car when I drove down and the ones that I bought while away at school. And if I wanted to listen to CD X in the car, no problem. Just burn a copy, listen to it, and then toss it in the back seat when I got tired of it -- blank CDs are so cheap that they're virtually disposable anyway. I also avoided unnecessary wear and tear on my original CDs this way, insuring that they would always play well in my living room CD player. This method also has the added benefit in that I can now listen to my entire collection from any PC in my apartment, and I can also create several thousand song, shuffled playlists for those times when I want to listen to music from a certain genre, but not to any band in particular.
The only problem that I have now is that my music collection has reached a critical mass where it's no longer feasible to rip all my CDs should I lose my hard drive, but it's also not feasible to back up my collection to traditional recordable media. So, I either need a tape backup drive, or I need to devise a solution to back up my collection onto my linux box. Any suggestions?
Haha. Actually, we started talking about DB units before I ever read Chopping Block. That said, I am a bit of a fan of the comic, but I haven't really read it in about a year and a half for lack of time.
I hereby propose a new measurement standard...
We have Volkswagens for mass
foolball fields for distance
and VCD Days for storage.
My friends and I like to use dead bodies as a measurement for trunk/cargo space on vehicles. You should see some of the looks we've gotten from salesmen when we start to talk about how many dead bodies would fit in the trunk of this car he's showing us.
Or even some old 10 gig drive that you found in some computer while you were dumpster diving?
Thanks for sharing with us how you like to spend your spare time!!!
I still remember the first time I got an invitation to go dumpster diving back while I was in high school. It was a Friday night and I'd made a run to Taco Bell before going to meet some friends. While at Taco Bell I ran into some of the local computer geeks whom I was also friends with. We got to talking and then they mentioned:
"Yeah, after this we're going to go dumpster diving at the high school."
"I heard that Mr. Crowder just threw away some old computers."
"Wanna go with us?"
How do you tell your friends that you're going to go meet some girls instead of diging around in the trash behind the high school looking for some 386s.
Oh yeah. You laugh at them, and then explain how you have a job and might just buy a shiny new Pentium 233 for the girl you're going to meet in an hour.
I wonder if that was too harsh of a response...
I currently work for a small Electronic Medical Records company. At some level I worry about potentially killing someone every day. In fact our bug tracking tool has a special category in it called "Patient Safety" which is the highest priority bug. We deal with things most of you probably wouldn't think of such as a tool for writing Prescriptions, which given the fact that many drugs interact ( potentially fatally) has to catch and alert the physician to such cases. I also deal with lab results which if reported incorrectly could lead to a potentially fatal decision by the doctor and so forth.
Back when I was working as a consultant I primarily worked in the healthcare field. However, it was reasons like the above that always made me more stressed when I was working at a hospital. Most of the time the life threatening equipment would be handled by the head IS guys at that facility or by outside vendors, but there were still those thoughts.
Now, I work in a business office and love it. There are still mission critical priorities (as with any job), but in this case if something goes wrong and I can't fix it, the wose that could happen is that I would only lose my job.