They nickel-and-dime you everything. Some plans include unlimited text, but even my own smartphone plan only has 250 texts, which I easily blew past over the Christmas/new year billing period. And it's $0.20 per outgoing message over the limit.
You're with the wrong company, clearly.
I pay $40/mo to Koodo. That gets me 150 anytime minutes, 5pm evenings/weekends, unlimited nation-wide long distance, call display, voicemail, unlimited text (global, more than 100 countries, and that's an addon that only costs $5/mo), and data. It's not a lot of data, but it's a flex plan, and my usage falls within the $5/25MB tier. The flex plan goes up to $30/3GB, depending on your needs. And it's without a contract. They do subsidize phones through the "tab", and you can get mid-level smart phones for free with them (higher end phones do cost more, though). And they're on Telus' network, so it works basically everywhere. Even if you're on Rogers or Bell, and would be stuck with a $20/mo (up to $400) early termination fee, perhaps you should consider switching, as it'll save you money in the long run. You can even unlock your existing phone and take it with you so you won't have to buy a new one.
And while they still sell locked phones, they will unlock them for you if your account is in good standing.
And if you lived in a big city like Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, or Vancouver, I'd suggest you look at Wind or Mobilicity. In Quebec, look at Videotron. The only reason I'm with Koodo and not Mobilicity is that while I work in Ottawa, I live outside of the city limits, well outside of Wind and Mobilicity's coverage zone. That same $40/mo could get me a much better plan with either carrier, but I'd be paying roaming half the time.
Junta is absolutely correct with gTalk, AIM, etc. You *could* count iMessage if you don't count any portions that send the messages as texts. The other clients/messengers don't use texts, only sending via their protocols over data. *That* is what will kill text messaging (except for the fact carriers put crazy prices on data plans, so either way you're kind of screwed)
In the US, and from a few carriers still stuck in the stone age elsewhere in the world, maybe. In the civilized world, text messages are dirt cheap. I pay $5/mo for unlimited global texting on my phone. Unlimited incoming (regardless of where it comes from, included with the base plan), and a list of over 100 countries I can text to, completely unlimited, without using any of my data. Some of the providers in this country (Canada) haven't woken up to this fact, but texting is as cheap or cheaper with many of them (the carrier I'm on is owned by one of the national networks, so I don't have to worry about coverage zones). Several providers don't charge at all for texts, and include unlimited texting with the base package. The USA is pretty much the only place in the world where texting is expensive, and even there, it's really only with the big three... most of the smaller carriers and MVNO's don't charge for texting at all.
Why on earth would I pay/use data for something that costs me next to nothing? Beyond that, why force me to buy a smart phone if I don't want one? (I have one, but I know a lot of people who don't want one).
Whatever you're smoking, please have the courtesy to share.
It's not a question of "socialists scuttling renewable energy". Actually, around here almost 80% of the electricity comes from renewable sources (that may change, they are building a couple of new nuclear reactors to meet peak demand). It's a question of people accepting underemployment.
And underemployment is worse for the economy than unemployment. Underemployment means that we spent money training you to a level higher than you're employed at (even in the US, universities and colleges receive public funds). It also means that not only are you working below your capacity, but that lower level job is now no longer available to somebody who isn't qualified or experienced enough for a better job. More than that, when you accept full time employment below your capabilities, you are seriously hindering your ability to find a better job and contribute more to the economy. Finding a job is itself a full-time job. It is better for the long-term economy to either keep somebody who's better qualified on unemployment while they find a better job, or to retrain them if there won't be a better job.
Have it enabled by default, sure. But put an option in the control panel to disable it and go back to the Win7 interface. Not having the option easily available is what's going to kill them. Computer gaming is literally the only reason I still have a Windows-based system... everything else I do can easily be replicated on numerous Linux distros, and for people wanting something more mainstream, under OSX. The tiny handful of Windows-only software that I run (or have to run at work) works fine under Crossover, or WINE, or any of the other options out there. In short: there's a lot of portability in the current market, and that trend is only going to increase. There will come a day, very soon, when the tipping point has been reached and there's no longer a business case to run Windows. Metro, specifically, forcing Metro on people without giving them the ability to disable it, will hasten that.
Having to go into another room each time a window picks a different random screen to appear on makes it very obvious that the GUI is not as perfect as the fanboys claim.
If you have it set up so that you obviously can't see both screens at the same time, why the hell would you have it set up so the second desktop is an extension of the first, rather than a clone? Setting it up as a clone would solve your problem....
I don't still have multiple screens set up on my Windows 7 system, but it's not because Windows itself is kludgy with multiple displays, it's because gaming on multiple displays is. Most games aren't written to take advantage of multiple displays, those that are usually do it in a gimicky way, and if you use something like eyefinity to trick the game into running across multiple displays, you have a broken image with a gap in the middle, and that can be a problem for a lot of games. The result is that you either have to run in windowed mode so you can still use the OS, or you have a screen doing absolutely nothing when you're playing a game. Since gaming is the only thing I still do on my Windows system, it seemed pointless to set it up with multiple displays.
Needless to say, but cancer researchers have done a much better job of marketing than those working on heart disease.
That's in part because heart disease is already reasonably well understood. While it is, in many cases, unavoidable, we know what we can do (on average) to prevent or at least delay it, and when it strikes, usually the only option is better diet/exercise, or surgery. While the symptoms can be managed with drugs (my father is taking warfarin for high blood pressure, for example), the only way to "cure" it is through one or both of those two options. Cancer, on the other hand, is a collection of hundreds of different diseases, each with different pathology. Some of them are in the same boat as heart disease: largely unavoidable, and very few treatment options beyond living well. Others are easy to treat with drugs or surgery. That second category of cancers is the reason that the cancer researchers have done a better job at marketing... they discover drugs that can have an effect on certain types of cancer, and they develop them.
That being said, I think it would be *much* better for public health on the whole if more energy was spent on living/eating well. People would be less likely to have certain types of cancer if they didn't have a weakened immune response caused by poor physical health, not to mention the significantly lower risk of heart attack and other forms of heart disease. It's win-win, but the corporatocracy doesn't see it that way.
Yes, but not tail lights, which is what you really need to be seen when it's raining. Especially true if you're driving a grey car that blends in well with the drizzle.
That's just one example, that happens to operate in the city I live in. I know for a fact that similar services are available in London, UK (have seen it on Top Gear), and also several other major metropolises, including several in the US. If I felt so inclined, it probably wouldn't take long to find a similar service in whichever city you live in.
Google is your friend.
The reason that the legal limit isn't 0.0 is because they want to be reasonable with the people who have a glass of wine with dinner. It is not because they expect you to tie one on and then drive home. And the reason bars have parking lots is so that you can park there, not so you can find your car and drive home after drinking. Most bars don't have parking lots anywhere near large enough to handle 1 car per patron... perhaps this means they expect you to carpool with a DD, too? Perhaps the lack of cars when you leave the bar is because enough other people are smart enough to plan ahead and either have a DD or a ride, and not need to take their car to the bar?
It's really simple: if you're going to get behind the wheel of a car, then don't fucking drink. Amazingly, not consuming alcohol really doesn't actually impair a night's entertainment, unless the purpose of the night out is to consume alcohol. And quite bluntly, if you intend to consume alcohol as your sole source of entertainment, then you can do it a *lot* cheaper by stopping by the liquor store and buying a few bottles, then taking them home to drink. If you *really* want to go out for a night on the town and get drunk for the purpose of getting drunk, then plan ahead. Take a taxi or a bus. It's really not that hard, and it doesn't put the lives of everybody else on the road at risk.
Considering that the interview was for work in a prison, perhaps there's another reason?
If I were hiring people to be peace officers, and asked them to show me their Facebook profile during an interview, I would not hire anybody who accepted and let me look at the profile. If they don't understand that it's wrong to search without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing, then I don't want them in that job.
Then again, the fact that I think like that would probably disqualify me from being in a position where I'm making that kind of hiring decision....
I've never met a Mexican or Canadian who was offended by referring to citizens of the USA as "Americans".
I'm not offended by it, no. But I do get bothered when I'm taken as a citizen of the USA because I happen to live in North America and speak English. I accept the moniker "Americans" for the citizens of the USA, because it is shorter and easier to say than "Citizens of the USA". It's not inaccurate to call them Americans, it's imprecise. Strictly speaking I'm an American as well: I was born in America, after all, and do hold citizenship in a country that's in America. Just not the United States of America. The problem is there isn't really a collective noun that specifically refers to citizens of the USA.
That being said, being Canadian isn't exactly something to be proud of in the world today. I'm really not pleased with what my government is doing... Harper has managed to turn us from respected diplomats into an international laughingstock.:(
Generally I've found it's faster to rip to hard drive without compressing/transcoding before passing it through Handbrake anyway. Maybe not important when you're ripping 2 or 3 DVD's and will be done in a couple of hours anyway, but when you're converting a library of 400+ (that was my project for the fall, took 2 months, though it could have been faster if I didn't have to go to work 5 days a week). During the days off, I'd rip as many DVD's to the hard drive as I had space for, and then queue up the transcode to h.264 and let it run during the work week.
Back then, I attributed the minimization of effect was due in large part to the publicity. People took precautionary measures. Same as the Y2K problem. It got so much press that people actually took action.
My father did a programming contract for the Bank of Canada in 1984, to update their systems to be capable of holding a 4-digit year. They, like many banks, did it because 25-year loans (say, for a mortgage) would have already been impacted by the Y2K bug in 1985. I think if you do a little digging, you'll find that all of the mission-critical systems had been updated to be Y2K complaint *long* before the media ever heard that it was a problem. Kind of like the Y2038 problem in Unix... everybody knows that the problem exists, and pretty much everybody is already running a system that won't be affected by it, even though it's not supposed to land until 26 years from now.
BTW, the was an easy way to get rid of Michelangelo, back in the day: boot from a clean OS install disk, and type "FDISK/MBR".
You do realize that you're supposed to scan the road, and be aware of the signage around an intersection long before you actually reach the intersection, right? It's not some vast conspiracy, putting no right turn signs at the side of the road so you can't see them when you're stopped at the intersection, it's people making the (perhaps incorrect) assumption that you know how to drive and have enough situational awareness to have seen the sign before you reached the intersection.
Just the grape koolaid the Conservatives have been drinking. Most of us think that they're a bunch of nutjobs, but unfortunately, because of the fucked up way our electoral system is set up, and the appallingly low voter turnout, they managed to get a majority government.
There's something to be said for the Australian system, where you could lose your citizenship if you don't vote.
I agree that this is the definition AT&T wants to use, but it's not advertised as "uncapped," it's advertised as "unlimited." Throttling is limiting. I'm sure there are many synonymous ways you could define "bandwidth throttling" which doesn't include the word "limit," but by reducing the available bandwith, you are limiting. Something which is limited cannot be called unlimited.
To be completely and utterly pedantic, I feel the need to point out that it's not advertised at all. They don't still sell the "unlimited" package, it's a legacy package that people who were subscribers to another carrier were grandfathered in on when they took it over. It was advertised as "unlimited", and for a while it was "unlimited", but this is not a service they still sell.
It's also worth mentioning that I have not seen their contract in writing, so I have no idea how they define "limiting". It could make it very clear that they're talking about data usage caps, and not bandwidth... in fact, while they may use different nomenclature, I would be very surprised if they didn't point out that they're not talking about bandwidth, because they have no way to ensure that there will be enough bandwidth available on a given cell at a given time of day to handle your data use.
Ultimately, I don't care. ATT shafts their customers. Ok. Thanks for the warning. Next time I'm shopping for a carrier, I'll keep that in mind. But the carrier I'm on has a flex data plan, and my usage is so low that I'm on the bottom tier of it ($5/mo for data on my smartphone), so I doubt that I'd be all that worried about the upper limits of data tiers: no other carrier has a data tier as low/cheap as the one I'm using right now.
I seriously don't understand how people can have Firefox blow up to 1GB of RAM. What add-ons and plug-ins do you have installed that it balloons up that big that fast?
Not sure it's the addons. I think it's the sites. gdocs is an ajax-based website which does use a fair amount of resources, but if that's the only "resource-intensive" site you're using, I have no trouble believing that you're staying under 400MB of RAM. FF10 is much better about freeing up memory when you close a tab than previous versions were, and if you're in the habit of closing tabs you don't need open, then you should be fine. With the exception of Flash, most addons simply don't use that much memory, and Flash usually doesn't start eating up the memory until you start using it. Right now, I'm on my work system... I use Firefox for work tools/sites, and Chrome for personal browsing. Chrome, I close when I leave for the night (and several times throughout the day when I want to get rid of the distractions and focus on work), but Firefox I usually leave open and just lock my workstation. 5 days usage (today's my friday, so I'll be rebooting when I leave), with dozens of tabs being opened/closed, and at this moment there's 10 tabs open... Firefox is using 205MB of RAM. The complete list of addons I have installed is: Adblock Plus, AutoAuth, IE Tab 2, View Bookmarks in New Tab, and Vertical Tabs.
Nothing I do with this instance of Firefox is particularly resource intensive... most of the tools I use at work are static pages that get generated by server-side scripts. If I were using Firefox to view stuff like Youtube, or play Angry Birds, or some other resource-intensive pointless waste of time, however, I have no trouble believing that it would be using up more memory.:)
in fact, the PPC Quad core 2.5ghz box here is FASTER at rendering HD video than the new Quad Core i7 box they bought. I'd say old PPC machines still kick the arse of the new stuff.
If that's the case, you're using the wrong software (or you're using the right software, but it's outdated, or written by a monkey).
Rendering video is embarrassingly parallel, as it's mostly linear data processing that's not really dependent on the results of the data processing from other sections, and the branches are easy to predict. It can be broken up into a thousand threads, if you can find a processor that can handle it (and in fact, a modern video card does exactly that when rendering video games). While it will benefit from the shorter instruction pipe on the PPC, the higher clock speed, coupled with the ability to run twice as many threads on the Core i7 should more than outweigh that advantage, with software that's written to take advantage of multi-threaded performance.
My guess is, whatever you're using to render on the i7 is either (as evilsofa points out) trying to emulate PPC hardware, or it's not running multi-threaded. That's not to say that the PPC can't do the job, just that it shouldn't be outperforming well-written software on an i7 quad/ht for that kind of application.
It's not luddism to decline to upgrade something that's working effectively, especially when the upgrade has high cost and questionable benefits.
I would argue that when the "something that's working effectively" is a computer where you have to ask whether it meets the spec for Windows XP, and which is out-powered by many cellular telephones, the "high cost and questionable benefits" goes out the window.
Consider: you can buy a cheap laptop for $400 or so. If you don't mind recycling your old monitor, you can get a cheap desktop for $300 or so. For that, you get a system that is *significantly* faster, which should equate to a large savings in time, not to mention the ability to run a modern OS, which brings security advantages. And that's without even considering the electricity savings that could be had by building a system with a modern 80plus power supply.
Total cost, $200. And half of that is the hard drive, so if you're willing to salvage the old hard drive and throw in an IDE to SATA conversion kit, you can put it together for about $120. And that's a computer that will run Windows 7 (I've run Win7 x32 on a Via c7 1.5GHz system with 2GB of RAM, and it performed relatively well). Linux would fly on it. It'll still wipe the floor with a 10+-year old Windows 2000 system in performance, and it'll use a fraction of the electricity, possibly low enough to cover the initial $120 outlay within a few months (and certainly within a year). And you don't need an optical drive, because Windows 7 and Linux can both be installed from USB. (even if you did want an optical drive, it only adds $20 to the equation).
So no. It is luddism to refuse to upgrade it. Either that, or a false sense of economy.
You do realize that Windows updates come out on a regular schedule (commonly called "Black Tuesday"), and that if you want to avoid your Windows deciding to reboot itself in the middle of a gaming session, you could simply boot it up the day after Black Tuesday and run the updates manually?
It's no different from updating your Linux system on a regular basis, which I would hope you're doing....
You could also simply install PlayOnLinux, and find that many (if not all) of your games are playable on Linux, and that in some cases, they perform better than they do on Windows.:)
Slashdot Mirror
$5 per month gets me unlimited global texting.
Convert that to kilobytes, and get back to me on whether that's expensive compared to paying for smartphone data. :)
They nickel-and-dime you everything. Some plans include unlimited text, but even my own smartphone plan only has 250 texts, which I easily blew past over the Christmas/new year billing period. And it's $0.20 per outgoing message over the limit.
You're with the wrong company, clearly.
I pay $40/mo to Koodo. That gets me 150 anytime minutes, 5pm evenings/weekends, unlimited nation-wide long distance, call display, voicemail, unlimited text (global, more than 100 countries, and that's an addon that only costs $5/mo), and data. It's not a lot of data, but it's a flex plan, and my usage falls within the $5/25MB tier. The flex plan goes up to $30/3GB, depending on your needs. And it's without a contract. They do subsidize phones through the "tab", and you can get mid-level smart phones for free with them (higher end phones do cost more, though). And they're on Telus' network, so it works basically everywhere. Even if you're on Rogers or Bell, and would be stuck with a $20/mo (up to $400) early termination fee, perhaps you should consider switching, as it'll save you money in the long run. You can even unlock your existing phone and take it with you so you won't have to buy a new one.
And while they still sell locked phones, they will unlock them for you if your account is in good standing.
And if you lived in a big city like Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, or Vancouver, I'd suggest you look at Wind or Mobilicity. In Quebec, look at Videotron. The only reason I'm with Koodo and not Mobilicity is that while I work in Ottawa, I live outside of the city limits, well outside of Wind and Mobilicity's coverage zone. That same $40/mo could get me a much better plan with either carrier, but I'd be paying roaming half the time.
Junta is absolutely correct with gTalk, AIM, etc. You *could* count iMessage if you don't count any portions that send the messages as texts. The other clients/messengers don't use texts, only sending via their protocols over data. *That* is what will kill text messaging (except for the fact carriers put crazy prices on data plans, so either way you're kind of screwed)
In the US, and from a few carriers still stuck in the stone age elsewhere in the world, maybe. In the civilized world, text messages are dirt cheap. I pay $5/mo for unlimited global texting on my phone. Unlimited incoming (regardless of where it comes from, included with the base plan), and a list of over 100 countries I can text to, completely unlimited, without using any of my data. Some of the providers in this country (Canada) haven't woken up to this fact, but texting is as cheap or cheaper with many of them (the carrier I'm on is owned by one of the national networks, so I don't have to worry about coverage zones). Several providers don't charge at all for texts, and include unlimited texting with the base package. The USA is pretty much the only place in the world where texting is expensive, and even there, it's really only with the big three... most of the smaller carriers and MVNO's don't charge for texting at all.
Why on earth would I pay/use data for something that costs me next to nothing? Beyond that, why force me to buy a smart phone if I don't want one? (I have one, but I know a lot of people who don't want one).
Whatever you're smoking, please have the courtesy to share.
It's not a question of "socialists scuttling renewable energy". Actually, around here almost 80% of the electricity comes from renewable sources (that may change, they are building a couple of new nuclear reactors to meet peak demand). It's a question of people accepting underemployment.
And underemployment is worse for the economy than unemployment. Underemployment means that we spent money training you to a level higher than you're employed at (even in the US, universities and colleges receive public funds). It also means that not only are you working below your capacity, but that lower level job is now no longer available to somebody who isn't qualified or experienced enough for a better job. More than that, when you accept full time employment below your capabilities, you are seriously hindering your ability to find a better job and contribute more to the economy. Finding a job is itself a full-time job. It is better for the long-term economy to either keep somebody who's better qualified on unemployment while they find a better job, or to retrain them if there won't be a better job.
Isn't $20 an hour better than no job at all? Or is there some reason the electricians can't work for that amount?
A good electrician can easily pull $65/hr around here. Some of them make upwards of $85/hr.
Unemployment insurance pays better.
It shouldn't need a registry hack to turn off.
Have it enabled by default, sure. But put an option in the control panel to disable it and go back to the Win7 interface. Not having the option easily available is what's going to kill them. Computer gaming is literally the only reason I still have a Windows-based system... everything else I do can easily be replicated on numerous Linux distros, and for people wanting something more mainstream, under OSX. The tiny handful of Windows-only software that I run (or have to run at work) works fine under Crossover, or WINE, or any of the other options out there. In short: there's a lot of portability in the current market, and that trend is only going to increase. There will come a day, very soon, when the tipping point has been reached and there's no longer a business case to run Windows. Metro, specifically, forcing Metro on people without giving them the ability to disable it, will hasten that.
Having to go into another room each time a window picks a different random screen to appear on makes it very obvious that the GUI is not as perfect as the fanboys claim.
If you have it set up so that you obviously can't see both screens at the same time, why the hell would you have it set up so the second desktop is an extension of the first, rather than a clone? Setting it up as a clone would solve your problem....
I don't still have multiple screens set up on my Windows 7 system, but it's not because Windows itself is kludgy with multiple displays, it's because gaming on multiple displays is. Most games aren't written to take advantage of multiple displays, those that are usually do it in a gimicky way, and if you use something like eyefinity to trick the game into running across multiple displays, you have a broken image with a gap in the middle, and that can be a problem for a lot of games. The result is that you either have to run in windowed mode so you can still use the OS, or you have a screen doing absolutely nothing when you're playing a game. Since gaming is the only thing I still do on my Windows system, it seemed pointless to set it up with multiple displays.
Needless to say, but cancer researchers have done a much better job of marketing than those working on heart disease.
That's in part because heart disease is already reasonably well understood. While it is, in many cases, unavoidable, we know what we can do (on average) to prevent or at least delay it, and when it strikes, usually the only option is better diet/exercise, or surgery. While the symptoms can be managed with drugs (my father is taking warfarin for high blood pressure, for example), the only way to "cure" it is through one or both of those two options. Cancer, on the other hand, is a collection of hundreds of different diseases, each with different pathology. Some of them are in the same boat as heart disease: largely unavoidable, and very few treatment options beyond living well. Others are easy to treat with drugs or surgery. That second category of cancers is the reason that the cancer researchers have done a better job at marketing... they discover drugs that can have an effect on certain types of cancer, and they develop them.
That being said, I think it would be *much* better for public health on the whole if more energy was spent on living/eating well. People would be less likely to have certain types of cancer if they didn't have a weakened immune response caused by poor physical health, not to mention the significantly lower risk of heart attack and other forms of heart disease. It's win-win, but the corporatocracy doesn't see it that way.
Yes, but not tail lights, which is what you really need to be seen when it's raining. Especially true if you're driving a grey car that blends in well with the drizzle.
Hey...you got to get your car home for work the next day somehow.
It isn't like a magic fairy will drive it home for you overnight.
I'm undoing mod points by posting this extremely insightful comment: you're an idiot.
http://www.responsiblechoice.ca/index2.htm
That's just one example, that happens to operate in the city I live in. I know for a fact that similar services are available in London, UK (have seen it on Top Gear), and also several other major metropolises, including several in the US. If I felt so inclined, it probably wouldn't take long to find a similar service in whichever city you live in.
Google is your friend.
The reason that the legal limit isn't 0.0 is because they want to be reasonable with the people who have a glass of wine with dinner. It is not because they expect you to tie one on and then drive home. And the reason bars have parking lots is so that you can park there, not so you can find your car and drive home after drinking. Most bars don't have parking lots anywhere near large enough to handle 1 car per patron... perhaps this means they expect you to carpool with a DD, too? Perhaps the lack of cars when you leave the bar is because enough other people are smart enough to plan ahead and either have a DD or a ride, and not need to take their car to the bar?
It's really simple: if you're going to get behind the wheel of a car, then don't fucking drink. Amazingly, not consuming alcohol really doesn't actually impair a night's entertainment, unless the purpose of the night out is to consume alcohol. And quite bluntly, if you intend to consume alcohol as your sole source of entertainment, then you can do it a *lot* cheaper by stopping by the liquor store and buying a few bottles, then taking them home to drink. If you *really* want to go out for a night on the town and get drunk for the purpose of getting drunk, then plan ahead. Take a taxi or a bus. It's really not that hard, and it doesn't put the lives of everybody else on the road at risk.
No, the last time I set foot in the US was almost a decade ago. Your country has some seriously screwed up ideas that frankly scare me.
Considering that the interview was for work in a prison, perhaps there's another reason?
If I were hiring people to be peace officers, and asked them to show me their Facebook profile during an interview, I would not hire anybody who accepted and let me look at the profile. If they don't understand that it's wrong to search without probable cause to suspect wrongdoing, then I don't want them in that job.
Then again, the fact that I think like that would probably disqualify me from being in a position where I'm making that kind of hiring decision....
Seriously ? I live in a third world country on the other side of the world and even I know there's no such language as "Mexican".
There is a dialect, though... give him the benefit of the doubt. :) Mexican Spanish is different from the Spanish spoken in Spain.
(but I have met Americans in my travels who responded "what state is that in?" when I told them I was from Canada....)
I've never met a Mexican or Canadian who was offended by referring to citizens of the USA as "Americans".
I'm not offended by it, no. But I do get bothered when I'm taken as a citizen of the USA because I happen to live in North America and speak English. I accept the moniker "Americans" for the citizens of the USA, because it is shorter and easier to say than "Citizens of the USA". It's not inaccurate to call them Americans, it's imprecise. Strictly speaking I'm an American as well: I was born in America, after all, and do hold citizenship in a country that's in America. Just not the United States of America. The problem is there isn't really a collective noun that specifically refers to citizens of the USA.
That being said, being Canadian isn't exactly something to be proud of in the world today. I'm really not pleased with what my government is doing... Harper has managed to turn us from respected diplomats into an international laughingstock. :(
I thought it was Los Gringos....
Generally I've found it's faster to rip to hard drive without compressing/transcoding before passing it through Handbrake anyway. Maybe not important when you're ripping 2 or 3 DVD's and will be done in a couple of hours anyway, but when you're converting a library of 400+ (that was my project for the fall, took 2 months, though it could have been faster if I didn't have to go to work 5 days a week). During the days off, I'd rip as many DVD's to the hard drive as I had space for, and then queue up the transcode to h.264 and let it run during the work week.
Back then, I attributed the minimization of effect was due in large part to the publicity. People took precautionary measures. Same as the Y2K problem. It got so much press that people actually took action.
My father did a programming contract for the Bank of Canada in 1984, to update their systems to be capable of holding a 4-digit year. They, like many banks, did it because 25-year loans (say, for a mortgage) would have already been impacted by the Y2K bug in 1985. I think if you do a little digging, you'll find that all of the mission-critical systems had been updated to be Y2K complaint *long* before the media ever heard that it was a problem. Kind of like the Y2038 problem in Unix... everybody knows that the problem exists, and pretty much everybody is already running a system that won't be affected by it, even though it's not supposed to land until 26 years from now.
BTW, the was an easy way to get rid of Michelangelo, back in the day: boot from a clean OS install disk, and type "FDISK /MBR".
You do realize that you're supposed to scan the road, and be aware of the signage around an intersection long before you actually reach the intersection, right? It's not some vast conspiracy, putting no right turn signs at the side of the road so you can't see them when you're stopped at the intersection, it's people making the (perhaps incorrect) assumption that you know how to drive and have enough situational awareness to have seen the sign before you reached the intersection.
Just the grape koolaid the Conservatives have been drinking. Most of us think that they're a bunch of nutjobs, but unfortunately, because of the fucked up way our electoral system is set up, and the appallingly low voter turnout, they managed to get a majority government.
There's something to be said for the Australian system, where you could lose your citizenship if you don't vote.
I agree that this is the definition AT&T wants to use, but it's not advertised as "uncapped," it's advertised as "unlimited." Throttling is limiting. I'm sure there are many synonymous ways you could define "bandwidth throttling" which doesn't include the word "limit," but by reducing the available bandwith, you are limiting. Something which is limited cannot be called unlimited.
To be completely and utterly pedantic, I feel the need to point out that it's not advertised at all. They don't still sell the "unlimited" package, it's a legacy package that people who were subscribers to another carrier were grandfathered in on when they took it over. It was advertised as "unlimited", and for a while it was "unlimited", but this is not a service they still sell.
It's also worth mentioning that I have not seen their contract in writing, so I have no idea how they define "limiting". It could make it very clear that they're talking about data usage caps, and not bandwidth... in fact, while they may use different nomenclature, I would be very surprised if they didn't point out that they're not talking about bandwidth, because they have no way to ensure that there will be enough bandwidth available on a given cell at a given time of day to handle your data use.
Ultimately, I don't care. ATT shafts their customers. Ok. Thanks for the warning. Next time I'm shopping for a carrier, I'll keep that in mind. But the carrier I'm on has a flex data plan, and my usage is so low that I'm on the bottom tier of it ($5/mo for data on my smartphone), so I doubt that I'd be all that worried about the upper limits of data tiers: no other carrier has a data tier as low/cheap as the one I'm using right now.
I seriously don't understand how people can have Firefox blow up to 1GB of RAM. What add-ons and plug-ins do you have installed that it balloons up that big that fast?
Not sure it's the addons. I think it's the sites. gdocs is an ajax-based website which does use a fair amount of resources, but if that's the only "resource-intensive" site you're using, I have no trouble believing that you're staying under 400MB of RAM. FF10 is much better about freeing up memory when you close a tab than previous versions were, and if you're in the habit of closing tabs you don't need open, then you should be fine. With the exception of Flash, most addons simply don't use that much memory, and Flash usually doesn't start eating up the memory until you start using it. Right now, I'm on my work system... I use Firefox for work tools/sites, and Chrome for personal browsing. Chrome, I close when I leave for the night (and several times throughout the day when I want to get rid of the distractions and focus on work), but Firefox I usually leave open and just lock my workstation. 5 days usage (today's my friday, so I'll be rebooting when I leave), with dozens of tabs being opened/closed, and at this moment there's 10 tabs open... Firefox is using 205MB of RAM. The complete list of addons I have installed is: Adblock Plus, AutoAuth, IE Tab 2, View Bookmarks in New Tab, and Vertical Tabs.
Nothing I do with this instance of Firefox is particularly resource intensive... most of the tools I use at work are static pages that get generated by server-side scripts. If I were using Firefox to view stuff like Youtube, or play Angry Birds, or some other resource-intensive pointless waste of time, however, I have no trouble believing that it would be using up more memory. :)
Worked for Pat Volkerding....
in fact, the PPC Quad core 2.5ghz box here is FASTER at rendering HD video than the new Quad Core i7 box they bought. I'd say old PPC machines still kick the arse of the new stuff.
If that's the case, you're using the wrong software (or you're using the right software, but it's outdated, or written by a monkey).
Rendering video is embarrassingly parallel, as it's mostly linear data processing that's not really dependent on the results of the data processing from other sections, and the branches are easy to predict. It can be broken up into a thousand threads, if you can find a processor that can handle it (and in fact, a modern video card does exactly that when rendering video games). While it will benefit from the shorter instruction pipe on the PPC, the higher clock speed, coupled with the ability to run twice as many threads on the Core i7 should more than outweigh that advantage, with software that's written to take advantage of multi-threaded performance.
My guess is, whatever you're using to render on the i7 is either (as evilsofa points out) trying to emulate PPC hardware, or it's not running multi-threaded. That's not to say that the PPC can't do the job, just that it shouldn't be outperforming well-written software on an i7 quad/ht for that kind of application.
It's not luddism to decline to upgrade something that's working effectively, especially when the upgrade has high cost and questionable benefits.
I would argue that when the "something that's working effectively" is a computer where you have to ask whether it meets the spec for Windows XP, and which is out-powered by many cellular telephones, the "high cost and questionable benefits" goes out the window.
Consider: you can buy a cheap laptop for $400 or so. If you don't mind recycling your old monitor, you can get a cheap desktop for $300 or so. For that, you get a system that is *significantly* faster, which should equate to a large savings in time, not to mention the ability to run a modern OS, which brings security advantages. And that's without even considering the electricity savings that could be had by building a system with a modern 80plus power supply.
Just doing a basic pricing on the cheapest system I can build on Newegg, try:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138326 ($60 - cpu/motherboard/vga, via c7-d 1.8ghz dual core, mini itx)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154061 ($40 - case, mini itx/atx, with 240W power supply)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313102 ($20 - memory 2x2GB DDR3)
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152181 ($80 - hard drive, 500GB)
Total cost, $200. And half of that is the hard drive, so if you're willing to salvage the old hard drive and throw in an IDE to SATA conversion kit, you can put it together for about $120. And that's a computer that will run Windows 7 (I've run Win7 x32 on a Via c7 1.5GHz system with 2GB of RAM, and it performed relatively well). Linux would fly on it. It'll still wipe the floor with a 10+-year old Windows 2000 system in performance, and it'll use a fraction of the electricity, possibly low enough to cover the initial $120 outlay within a few months (and certainly within a year). And you don't need an optical drive, because Windows 7 and Linux can both be installed from USB. (even if you did want an optical drive, it only adds $20 to the equation).
So no. It is luddism to refuse to upgrade it. Either that, or a false sense of economy.
You do realize that Windows updates come out on a regular schedule (commonly called "Black Tuesday"), and that if you want to avoid your Windows deciding to reboot itself in the middle of a gaming session, you could simply boot it up the day after Black Tuesday and run the updates manually?
It's no different from updating your Linux system on a regular basis, which I would hope you're doing....
You could also simply install PlayOnLinux, and find that many (if not all) of your games are playable on Linux, and that in some cases, they perform better than they do on Windows. :)