C'mon Comcast, if you can't outperform AT&T you just aren't trying.
Here's something that SBC didn't think about when they bought the name "AT&T". (OK, they bought the company too. Probably cost them $5 extra.) By rebranding themselves as "AT&T", they took over that company's reputation for total cluelessness.
If you mean to say that there's no point in arguing with somebody who's determined to give you grief, then I agree with you. But if you think you can just ignore people like that, forget it.
Here's the short answer to creyes123's original question: no you did fine. Some people are jerks, that's all. They flock to online forums of all kinds because they can be a jerk all day, and there are no real consequences.
As I recall, there was nothing secret about those Apollo ESP experiments. They were widely reported at the time. I don't suppose NASA approved, but since he did the experiment on his personal time, there wasn't a lot they could do about it.
But yeah, Mitchell's weird beliefs are not exactly "shocking".
Just want to inform you that threads nor any other multiprogramming mechanisms are necessary for responsive user interfaces,
Huh? Suppose your program is transferring a large amount of data from A to B (copying a file, displaying a graphics-intensive web page, etc.) and you want the user interface to remain response during this activity — if only to allow the user a chance to cancel it. How do you continue to respond without some kind of "multiprograming method"?
The issues you cite are real enough, but you don't show any connection with porn. The penis size issue has been around for ages. Girls who think they're worthless if they don't look like top models are obviously not being influenced by porn actresses, who actually tend to be a tad, uhm, shopworn.
Anti-porn activists take it as a given that any moral or sexual issue has to be blamed on porn. Let's see some actual evidence.
...they punish you at the WHEEL rather than at the bar.
Indeed. Enforcement of the traffic laws is pretty severe. Did you know that the cops travel the autobahns in unmarked vans, and photograph anybody they catch passing on the right? Good for a stiff fine, even if you're passing somebody who's blocking the left lane (also illegal). Something to mention next time you hear somebody citing Germany as proof that there's no connection between speed and safety.
But of course, that's repressive, isn't it? So we don't do that here. Instead we pass tons of moral legislation we have no hope of enforcing.
You mean like the Pilgrims? Pure myth. They actually wanted the kind repressive society we're complaining about here. They left England because it wasn't "pure" enough for them. From Brigham Young to Jim Jones, going off to form your own little society has been about imposing your own vision on the world, not about escaping somebody else's.
And what's this BS about "weak willed"? These censorship things mostly come from the Christian Right. They have many shortcomings, but lack of will is certainly not one of them.
Minimal computers with limited expandability have already replaced beige boxes on many desktops and in many homes. I don't know the numbers, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were approaching a majority of sales. Corporate buyers just don't need all those expansion slots — if the computer isn't powerful enough, they'll just buy a more powerful computer. Home users mostly take a similar attitude. Only hardware geeks worry about expandibility.
And 1 Ghz computers haven't taken over because people want them. They've taken over because that's all you can buy.
I have a sister who bought an eMachine a long time ago with a half-dozen PCI slots. Never used more than one. It came with a modem pre-installed in one slot. A couple years ago, I replaced the modem with an ethernet card so she could use DSL. But the machine was slowly dying, so I found her an off-lease Dell on eBay.
No need for an ethernet card, there's a port on the motherboard, which also has a 64MB onboard VGA adapter. That's enough to run some pretty powerful graphics. So there's no need for expansion. And that's a good thing, because this beast has zero PCI slots.
That's a green thing too, because powering PCI slots means a big, internal power supply. This thing doesn't have one, there's just one of those black, passively cooled wall warts. There's an internal fan, but with no power supply to cool, it doesn't make much noise. Which is actually why I got this particular model — she has a thing about noise.
My sister's absolutely besotted with this machine, because it's drastically more powerful than anything she's owned before. (Even though it's a used, low-end machine!) She'll probably have it for years. Is this a "disposable brick"? She wouldn't agree.
Most parents would agree with you. Unfortunately, there are some very vocal and influential people who don't just want to "protect" their own kids, they want to protect everybody's.
Also, this is not entirely about "protecting the children". People wouldn't be so noisy about keeping something away from the kids if they weren't actually offended by it themselves. But just being offensive is no longer enough, by itself, to justify censorship, either legally or in the minds of most people. So it has to be about The Children.
Personally, I would like to see children protected — but not from porn. The fact is, I just don't see the harm in kids seeing graphic sex. It's not like it's not something they won't need to learn about eventually. On the other hand, it bothers the hell out of me that children are exposed to so much violence in their entertainment. And not just violence, but violence separated from any kind of emotional context. That cannot be a good thing.
No, using less power is considered green. If this machine really uses 2 watts (yeah, I'm skeptical too), then it's saving about 100 watts. Assume that the computer is turned on about 40 hours a week, then it uses 4 kilowatt hours a week.
A little random googling and I came up with it taking a ton of coal to produce 2,460 kilowatt hours of electricity. So if 615 people using a 4-watt computer instead of a 100+ watt computer save a ton of coal a week. Not exactly a major impact, but not trivial either.
(Cue the green-bashing snipers with their "stupid environmentalist cliches". Sorry, not interested.)
Anyway, how does lack of upgradability make a computer a "throwaway brick"? If a computer does what you need it to, why do you need to upgrade it? Most users, especially business users, never install a PCI card. If you buy a computer that already has enough RAM (most are sold undersupplied, to keep the list price down) and a big enough disk (except this thing doesn't need a disk), you probably won't upgrade. Unless you need a fancy video adapter to play Halo. And if you do, you won't buy this kind of computer in the first place.
Yeah, you're right. I just got a voicemail from somebody I know is on a different provider. No "to respond with a voicemail prompt", which I have gotten with other callers.
There's already a way to leave somebody voice mail without actually calling them: call your own voice mail. They all have a "send voice mail" option. Don't know if this works across providers. Probably.
Prices need to come down to about a four year payoff before I'd be really interested.
Or prices can come up. Because let's face it, coal-generated electricity (the main alternative) is way too cheap. You're basically just paying for the cost of digging up the coal, plus the amortization of the infrastructure needed to convert it to electricity and transmit it to the user. The coal itself is basically free.
And why should it be? It's a finite resource. If we had to bid against our descendants for it, it wouldn't be free, it wouldn't even be cheap. Nor is the environmental cost of dumping all that carbon into the atmosphere a minor one.
Oops, here come the dittohead with their "there's no proof that" and their "you eat meat". Not in the mood. Going home now.
(People know that loose != lose. They just can't remember which is which.)
Are Legos that expensive? I just looked online, and you can buy a set with 405 pieces, plus the bucket to hold them in, for $25. Compared to other toys, or injection-molded plastic products in general, that's actually pretty reasonable.
Maybe when you were a kid, that Lego set you couldn't afford was some overpriced Star Wars tie-in. There, you're not paying for the product, you're paying for George Lucas's new yacht.
Or maybe you went through the same thing that I went through when I was a kid. We weren't very well off, but I always had a lot of toys — lots of indulgent family members always ready to buy me stuff. But I always wanted more, because that's what all the crappy TV shows I watched programmed me to want. Face it, when you're a kid in this consumer culture of eyes, you always have a sense of privation, no matter how much stuff you've already got.
Except that's nonsense. DOS and DOS-compatible OSs are still under active development, and appliance applications are a big reason why. I think Microsoft no longer sells it, but IBM does. Though a casual hacker would probably want an open-source product, such as FreeDOS.
90 seconds may not be much if you boot the system at the beginning of the day and then use it all day. But suppose the system is used sporadically throughout the day? The usual solution is to just leave it on all the time, but nowadays people don't like to have a device sitting around sucking up electricity and emitting noise for hours, while waiting for somebody to come use it.
Of course, it would be helpful if we knew exactly why this guy wants to convert old computers into instant-on appliances.
Please don't confuse Batman with a batman. Undignified.
But obviously the scenario you've postulated has actually happened. Bruce Wayne supposedly became Batman in 1939. Obviously we've run through many Batmen since then.
Clearly this is also true for Batman's many opponents. Not only have have they been around as long as Batman, they've changed drastically, and many times. The Joker, for example, was originally just a weirdo who liked to wear whiteface. Then, for no obvious reason, he started dying his hair green. Then he went through a sort of red phase. Then he reinvented himself as a kind of mobster. Now he's supposedly a kind of post-modern nihilist, with rumors that he's gay.
The question we have to ask is, who's going to so much trouble to create all these strange, long-lived characters with a costume fetish who spend all their time fighting each other? I suspect a broad conspiracy to distract us from... something.
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C'mon Comcast, if you can't outperform AT&T you just aren't trying.
Here's something that SBC didn't think about when they bought the name "AT&T". (OK, they bought the company too. Probably cost them $5 extra.) By rebranding themselves as "AT&T", they took over that company's reputation for total cluelessness.
Cute saying, but attributing it to GBS, of all people, is quite lame.
If you mean to say that there's no point in arguing with somebody who's determined to give you grief, then I agree with you. But if you think you can just ignore people like that, forget it.
Here's the short answer to creyes123's original question: no you did fine. Some people are jerks, that's all. They flock to online forums of all kinds because they can be a jerk all day, and there are no real consequences.
As I recall, there was nothing secret about those Apollo ESP experiments. They were widely reported at the time. I don't suppose NASA approved, but since he did the experiment on his personal time, there wasn't a lot they could do about it.
But yeah, Mitchell's weird beliefs are not exactly "shocking".
Just want to inform you that threads nor any other
multiprogramming mechanisms are necessary for
responsive user interfaces,
Huh? Suppose your program is transferring a large amount of data from A to B (copying a file, displaying a graphics-intensive web page, etc.) and you want the user interface to remain response during this activity — if only to allow the user a chance to cancel it. How do you continue to respond without some kind of "multiprograming method"?
So why is threading off by default? In a CPU-intensive application like this, multithreading always makes sense, even on a single-core system.
The issues you cite are real enough, but you don't show any connection with porn. The penis size issue has been around for ages. Girls who think they're worthless if they don't look like top models are obviously not being influenced by porn actresses, who actually tend to be a tad, uhm, shopworn.
Anti-porn activists take it as a given that any moral or sexual issue has to be blamed on porn. Let's see some actual evidence.
Personally, I don't find anything attractive about the world of the MadMax movies. Would you really want to live there? I mean... *that's* anarchy.
Everybody gets to drive around a lot at really high speeds. That's all that some people want out of life. So what if there's not enough to eat?
You're going to need a monitor in any case. We're calculating how much you can save, not how much you're using.
Which means that my original calculation (1 week, one ton of coal) was correct.
...they punish you at the WHEEL rather than at the bar.
Indeed. Enforcement of the traffic laws is pretty severe. Did you know that the cops travel the autobahns in unmarked vans, and photograph anybody they catch passing on the right? Good for a stiff fine, even if you're passing somebody who's blocking the left lane (also illegal). Something to mention next time you hear somebody citing Germany as proof that there's no connection between speed and safety.
But of course, that's repressive, isn't it? So we don't do that here. Instead we pass tons of moral legislation we have no hope of enforcing.
You mean like the Pilgrims? Pure myth. They actually wanted the kind repressive society we're complaining about here. They left England because it wasn't "pure" enough for them. From Brigham Young to Jim Jones, going off to form your own little society has been about imposing your own vision on the world, not about escaping somebody else's.
And what's this BS about "weak willed"? These censorship things mostly come from the Christian Right. They have many shortcomings, but lack of will is certainly not one of them.
Minimal computers with limited expandability have already replaced beige boxes on many desktops and in many homes. I don't know the numbers, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were approaching a majority of sales. Corporate buyers just don't need all those expansion slots — if the computer isn't powerful enough, they'll just buy a more powerful computer. Home users mostly take a similar attitude. Only hardware geeks worry about expandibility.
And 1 Ghz computers haven't taken over because people want them. They've taken over because that's all you can buy.
I have a sister who bought an eMachine a long time ago with a half-dozen PCI slots. Never used more than one. It came with a modem pre-installed in one slot. A couple years ago, I replaced the modem with an ethernet card so she could use DSL. But the machine was slowly dying, so I found her an off-lease Dell on eBay.
No need for an ethernet card, there's a port on the motherboard, which also has a 64MB onboard VGA adapter. That's enough to run some pretty powerful graphics. So there's no need for expansion. And that's a good thing, because this beast has zero PCI slots.
That's a green thing too, because powering PCI slots means a big, internal power supply. This thing doesn't have one, there's just one of those black, passively cooled wall warts. There's an internal fan, but with no power supply to cool, it doesn't make much noise. Which is actually why I got this particular model — she has a thing about noise.
My sister's absolutely besotted with this machine, because it's drastically more powerful than anything she's owned before. (Even though it's a used, low-end machine!) She'll probably have it for years. Is this a "disposable brick"? She wouldn't agree.
Most parents would agree with you. Unfortunately, there are some very vocal and influential people who don't just want to "protect" their own kids, they want to protect everybody's.
Also, this is not entirely about "protecting the children". People wouldn't be so noisy about keeping something away from the kids if they weren't actually offended by it themselves. But just being offensive is no longer enough, by itself, to justify censorship, either legally or in the minds of most people. So it has to be about The Children.
Personally, I would like to see children protected — but not from porn. The fact is, I just don't see the harm in kids seeing graphic sex. It's not like it's not something they won't need to learn about eventually. On the other hand, it bothers the hell out of me that children are exposed to so much violence in their entertainment. And not just violence, but violence separated from any kind of emotional context. That cannot be a good thing.
You're right, I dropped a decimal point. So it takes 10 weeks to save that ton of coal, not 1 week. Still a significant savings.
No, using less power is considered green. If this machine really uses 2 watts (yeah, I'm skeptical too), then it's saving about 100 watts. Assume that the computer is turned on about 40 hours a week, then it uses 4 kilowatt hours a week.
A little random googling and I came up with it taking a ton of coal to produce 2,460 kilowatt hours of electricity. So if 615 people using a 4-watt computer instead of a 100+ watt computer save a ton of coal a week. Not exactly a major impact, but not trivial either.
(Cue the green-bashing snipers with their "stupid environmentalist cliches". Sorry, not interested.)
Anyway, how does lack of upgradability make a computer a "throwaway brick"? If a computer does what you need it to, why do you need to upgrade it? Most users, especially business users, never install a PCI card. If you buy a computer that already has enough RAM (most are sold undersupplied, to keep the list price down) and a big enough disk (except this thing doesn't need a disk), you probably won't upgrade. Unless you need a fancy video adapter to play Halo. And if you do, you won't buy this kind of computer in the first place.
Yeah, you're right. I just got a voicemail from somebody I know is on a different provider. No "to respond with a voicemail prompt", which I have gotten with other callers.
There's already a way to leave somebody voice mail without actually calling them: call your own voice mail. They all have a "send voice mail" option. Don't know if this works across providers. Probably.
Prices need to come down to about a four year payoff before I'd be really interested.
Or prices can come up. Because let's face it, coal-generated electricity (the main alternative) is way too cheap. You're basically just paying for the cost of digging up the coal, plus the amortization of the infrastructure needed to convert it to electricity and transmit it to the user. The coal itself is basically free.
And why should it be? It's a finite resource. If we had to bid against our descendants for it, it wouldn't be free, it wouldn't even be cheap. Nor is the environmental cost of dumping all that carbon into the atmosphere a minor one.
Oops, here come the dittohead with their "there's no proof that" and their "you eat meat". Not in the mood. Going home now.
(People know that loose != lose. They just can't remember which is which.)
Are Legos that expensive? I just looked online, and you can buy a set with 405 pieces, plus the bucket to hold them in, for $25. Compared to other toys, or injection-molded plastic products in general, that's actually pretty reasonable.
Maybe when you were a kid, that Lego set you couldn't afford was some overpriced Star Wars tie-in. There, you're not paying for the product, you're paying for George Lucas's new yacht.
Or maybe you went through the same thing that I went through when I was a kid. We weren't very well off, but I always had a lot of toys — lots of indulgent family members always ready to buy me stuff. But I always wanted more, because that's what all the crappy TV shows I watched programmed me to want. Face it, when you're a kid in this consumer culture of eyes, you always have a sense of privation, no matter how much stuff you've already got.
No, TFA said that the factory is controlled by "mainframes". That's probably just nongeekspeak for "really fancy computer", but even so...
That implies that The Phantom has something resembling a family life. That makes him pretty implausible as a superhero!
The guy specifically said "DOS is too old".
Except that's nonsense. DOS and DOS-compatible OSs are still under active development, and appliance applications are a big reason why. I think Microsoft no longer sells it, but IBM does. Though a casual hacker would probably want an open-source product, such as FreeDOS.
how does shaving that 90 seconds save anything?
90 seconds may not be much if you boot the system at the beginning of the day and then use it all day. But suppose the system is used sporadically throughout the day? The usual solution is to just leave it on all the time, but nowadays people don't like to have a device sitting around sucking up electricity and emitting noise for hours, while waiting for somebody to come use it.
Of course, it would be helpful if we knew exactly why this guy wants to convert old computers into instant-on appliances.
Please don't confuse Batman with a batman. Undignified.
But obviously the scenario you've postulated has actually happened. Bruce Wayne supposedly became Batman in 1939. Obviously we've run through many Batmen since then.
Clearly this is also true for Batman's many opponents. Not only have have they been around as long as Batman, they've changed drastically, and many times. The Joker, for example, was originally just a weirdo who liked to wear whiteface. Then, for no obvious reason, he started dying his hair green. Then he went through a sort of red phase. Then he reinvented himself as a kind of mobster. Now he's supposedly a kind of post-modern nihilist, with rumors that he's gay.
The question we have to ask is, who's going to so much trouble to create all these strange, long-lived characters with a costume fetish who spend all their time fighting each other? I suspect a broad conspiracy to distract us from... something.
Lying in a good cause is actually good for your soul!