Actually PCI is semi-hot swappable. An old box I used to use had a loose PCI slot which the ethernet card was connected to. If you moved the computer, the cable would tug on the card and disconnect a few of the pins whose connections were broken. If you slid it back and pushed on the card, the ethernet card would show back up in Windows and the internet automagically worked again. ATA is also kind of hot swappable; it's not reccommended but it works in a pinch.
The worst I've ever seen a computer was a public computer in a house full of cigarette/pot smokers. People had a tendancy to smoke while using the computer (which was in a small closet, so all the smoke went into the fans) and then ash into the computer. I cracked the thing open and there was a 1" thick layer of ash, smoke particles and tar covering everything. I just shut the case and it still soldiers on under Linux to this day.
No, those days are gone not because of the ISPs, but because of the massive amount of dangerous crap out there (outlook worms, windows worms, spyware/trojans, etc.) You can't trust what comes in nor what goes out, so it should be checked in some way.
The days of the ISP as a "carrier" are long gone. They were over pretty much as soon as broadband hit the market. ISPs these days handle such massive amounts of bandwidth with such ignorant users that they have somewhat of a responsibility to the rest of the internet (not to mention their bottom line) to make sure that bandwidth isn't being used for nefarious purposes by hackers or viruses which have taken over the computers of these ignorant users. 99% of users don't need to and will never run a mail server, DNS server, whatever from their cable modem. All leaving these ports open does is allow the spambots and botnets to spread unabated.
The days of the free, trusted internet are gone. Look at it this way: any competent sysadmin runs a firewall on a box that blocks all incoming ports except those which the admin knows are in use. Doing the same with outgoing traffic is not a bad idea, especially considering that most people whose computers are sending these massive crapfloods have no idea what's going on. We've got to protect the internet from itself or it will render itself practically useless.
Yeah, I recall hearing recently that the US military expects to be in Iraq in significant numbers for at least another year. This thing ain't ending anytime soon.
Repeat after me: Market cap means nothing. Market cap can be inflated or deflated on the whims of the stock market. There are many better factors to judge the size of a company by, such as revenue, assets, profit, etc. If market cap were the determining statistic of company size, mutual fund managers would be some of the most powerful people in the world (well, they are, but for other related reasons.) But using market cap as the determining characteristic for company size is like saying one car is faster than another because it has more horsepower. There are a lot of other factors (weight of car, transmission ratios, ride height, etc)
Actually, the PowerMac G5 uses dual channel DDR because it's a 64 bit architecture (though in reality, it's only something like 42-bit addressable.) Still, when dealing with 32-bit RAM, you have to pair them up. It's actually not even really dual channel, the architecture just requires RAM to be installed in parity. If 64 bit DDR was available, it would use that.
A lot of the NVidia chipsets (NForce2/3) support dual channel DDR. There's not a whole lot of speed increase actually, something on the order of 2-3%, which is pretty much negligable. Still, at least on the NForce, using dual channel is optional; you can just install a single DIMM and it'll automatically notice. It helped Rambus a lot more because they REALLY needed the wider memory bus.
The reason this isn't a problem is because AP computer science never gets to these sort of problems; the test is simply not designed to cover much more than basic programming skills. It barely even discusses templates, let alone multiple inheritance. Granted, it's been a few years since I took it (it was woefully outdated in pascal then) but AP CS is supposed to cover the same stuff in that first semester CS intro class and maybe less. Anyone who actually knows how to write decent code already knows this and as such could probably make a perfect score without much if any preparation.
The AP comp sci test is a joke. Most colleges don't even award much credit for doing well on it (my school only gave me 3 hours of ungraded credit for a 5 on the AB test.) The problem is that it's designed for most high school students, who barely know how to turn a computer on much less program one. The topics covered on the test are usually covered within the first month or two of the first "Intro to CS" class. So, yeah, it's really way too easy. But then, so were the physics and calculus exams. (it's been like 4 years since I took them, but I didn't have stellar physics or calc grades and still made 5s)
Actually Sun is more like DEC or the old IBM. They're stuck in the old way of doing things. The days of proprietary enterprise hardware are gone. Why buy a Sun Ultra Enterprise when you can buy 500 cheap PCs at the same price? Sun offers nothing that isn't available at much less cost on Linux on commodity hardware. What do you think when a company gets bids from two vendors for a project. One uses Sun hardware/software and costs 4 times as much as the Linux solution yet has no other real advantages. Not to mention per client licenses, etc. I dunno which one you'd choose, but the choice seems simple to me. They're pretty much irrelevant at this point in the game, other than the fact that they own Java. There's no room to keep them around for sentimental value.
Hrm.. some of us are actually in shape *boggle* There's a lot to the world outside your bedroom, go explore it.;) This looks really interesting though (and not to mention useful for me; click the link in my sig for more info) I've been looking for one of these for a while, that way I don't have to dick with a bunch of SSH shit from my laptop at a Starbucks in B.F.E.
Well, also, under a system like this you also have to worry about the districts being drawn fairly. In Texas, the Republicans recently redrew the lines in a blatant power grab to where they will likely win *14* more house seats in the next elections. So in essence, this is just shifting the same problem from the state level to the district level. The only fair solution, IMO, is to do the presidential election entirely from the popular vote. If no candidate gets 50%, take the top 2 and have a runoff. Yeah, it won't be entirely fair, but it's definitely not very fair as-is.
It should be more to the point about how fucked up our electoral system is. The press largely ignores how fucking rigged it is because they really have no stake in it either way and it would cause chaos if people were to lose faith in our "democratic" process. The electoral college is bullshit. It's basically like rounding up everything before calculating a final result. Sure, you'll get a result that's close to what you want, but there's obviously something fishy about it. This just makes it easier to rig elections because you can concentrate your efforts on those 4 or 5 states that are close and ignore the rest. Nevermind that the Florida verification process was very, very biased (Bush's fucking brother was governor and all the state officials worked for him.) Anyway, if he wins again, viva Mexico!
You forget the most profitable part of leasing; after getting some dope to make 3 years of payments on it, the dealership still owns it and can sell it for about half of the MSRP. Also, most leases have mileage limits, usually around 30,000 miles a year. If you go over, they charge you for that too.
Still, leases aren't all bad. If you own your own business, you can lease a car as a business expense (up to something absurd like a $50,000 car) and it's a total tax write-off. That way you basically get a new car every three years and it doesn't cost you much at all. That way you don't have to worry about expensive maintenance; as anything really expensive (read: engine block, computers, drivetrain) will usually be covered under warranty. But the general idea here is that paying a little more for a lease is better than paying 33.5% to the IRS.
(just FYI; most of those "low, low monthly payments" are 5 year leases/loans, which are just stupid. You don't want to be still paying for the car after it breaks. 2 or 3 year leases/loans are where it's at)
Yes, but ESPN is the place sports nuts go to get their news. It's like the Slashdot of sports, only there are a lot more sports nuts than tech geeks. I'm actually surprised espn.com isn't in the top 5.
Many Linux distros are vulnerable out of the box; it's just that the vulnerabilities haven't been found yet. If you install Debian today and never run apt-get upgrade, chances are that a year from now something in that install will have been found to be vulnerable. The same thing goes for Windows. Windows 2000 is almost 5 years old. For fair comparison, you'd need to compare that Windows 2000 install to Debian stable from 5 years ago. Chances are that it ships with some now-known holes. Hell, even a 5 year old virgin OpenBSD install has remote holes. Oh, and most Linux distros will enable RPC services by default, even if you tell them not to. I know because I got bit in the ass by one.
Essentially, a computer is a computer. An operating system is an operating system. One is not inherently better than the other; they just do different things. Yes, I realize this is oversimplifying it a good deal, but at an ISP I used to work at we ran Win 2k web servers because there was no way to run VB.ASP files on Linux. Our customers wanted to do this, and we weren't about to tell them "No, use PHP you dumbass." We could run perl and PHP just fine on IIS (though we eventually moved most of the stuff to Apache) so in that case, Windows was a better solution. The point here is that you should choose what technology to use based on what you need it to do, not what the cool geek trends tell you to. If you need a cheap web/mail/dns/whatever server and don't have customers who need lots of proprietary stuff, then Linux is probably the better choice. But it isn't always.
The best solution, IMO, is to just throw everything behind a firewall and explicitly allow that which you want to get through. This applies to Linux, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, whatever. There is too often a "holier than thou" attitude on this kind of crap, and there shouldn't be. Most of the people who make these kind of claims are bandwagoners anyway; using Linux and dissing Windows is "cool" so they do it. The real point is that if you're even having the argument, you're probably not really all that "cool" to begin with.
Apple has to charge sales tax in states where it has retail stores. IIRC most states require sales tax on mail/internet orders if the company has a brick and mortar presence in the state. I could be wrong though; IANAL applies.
You make the same mistake most non-Americans make in assuming that everyone in America thinks with a like mind. This is very much not so; our fascist president just doesn't like to let anyone hear opposing opinions. The "fat cats" rig the elections; the media doesn't like to report on stories of election fraud, which is actually pretty rampant in America, because it undermines our belief in democracy.
Oh, and of all the people the American government fucks over, none does it fuck over more than its own people. I gotta pay taxes so they can line the pockets of corporations like Halliburton and Lockheed while not getting decent government services that most other industrialized nations have such as health care and breathable air. Any single European women out there who wanna get hitched?
You're right, but in most cases, only the best songs are released as singles/get videos made for them/etc. In the case of pop artists, the most popular songs are usually the best ones. Other artists may have some really good songs that just don't lend themselves to airplay (a band like Radiohead is a good example of this.) But for the most part, yeah, the most popular songs ARE the best ones.
That's why a lot of tech companies had clauses in their contracts that said you could not work for another tech company for 2 years after leaving. I'm not sure how legal that is, but this has been a problem for a while. I personally think that people/companies are too proud of their code; the end result is what you're selling anyway. MAYBE something like cryptography or specialized applications (a la Google) requires "secret" algorithms, but in 90% of the stuff anyone around here ever sees, there's nothing so secret that you can't learn it from a published book.
No; Apple is in the business of selling hardware. They create the software to sell the hardware. You'd still have to pay for the R&D on that software even if you don't want it, because they pay for the software by selling the hardware. Essentially, the software costs them nothing because they don't have to pay any per-machine licenses. But OS X is the reason most people buy a Mac. You'd probably just pirate a copy of OS X to put on it anyway; if you want a daily-usable unix system, OS X blows Linux out of the water on hardware support, commercial app support, basically everything you might want to do that doesn't involve programming. And even then, Apple's free IDE is pretty fucking sweet.
Actually most of the plot points were ripped straight out of the comic books that were produced around the time of the original Metroid. And besides, like any truly great action game, you can blow through the game without reading any of the story and still have a blast.
Well, also, they're failing to realize what the CD industry failed to realize: It only takes one guy to crack the protection for it to end up all over the internet anyway. I'm sure TiVo is the more immediate threat, but there will be some way around the protection. There always is.
In today's world, the best laid out and most carefully thought out plans are often the quickest to go down in flames. All this legislation isn't going to do shit if nobody cares.
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Well, what that means is that it works sometimes, though the tech specs say it shouldn't. ;)
Actually PCI is semi-hot swappable. An old box I used to use had a loose PCI slot which the ethernet card was connected to. If you moved the computer, the cable would tug on the card and disconnect a few of the pins whose connections were broken. If you slid it back and pushed on the card, the ethernet card would show back up in Windows and the internet automagically worked again. ATA is also kind of hot swappable; it's not reccommended but it works in a pinch.
The worst I've ever seen a computer was a public computer in a house full of cigarette/pot smokers. People had a tendancy to smoke while using the computer (which was in a small closet, so all the smoke went into the fans) and then ash into the computer. I cracked the thing open and there was a 1" thick layer of ash, smoke particles and tar covering everything. I just shut the case and it still soldiers on under Linux to this day.
No, those days are gone not because of the ISPs, but because of the massive amount of dangerous crap out there (outlook worms, windows worms, spyware/trojans, etc.) You can't trust what comes in nor what goes out, so it should be checked in some way.
The days of the ISP as a "carrier" are long gone. They were over pretty much as soon as broadband hit the market. ISPs these days handle such massive amounts of bandwidth with such ignorant users that they have somewhat of a responsibility to the rest of the internet (not to mention their bottom line) to make sure that bandwidth isn't being used for nefarious purposes by hackers or viruses which have taken over the computers of these ignorant users. 99% of users don't need to and will never run a mail server, DNS server, whatever from their cable modem. All leaving these ports open does is allow the spambots and botnets to spread unabated.
The days of the free, trusted internet are gone. Look at it this way: any competent sysadmin runs a firewall on a box that blocks all incoming ports except those which the admin knows are in use. Doing the same with outgoing traffic is not a bad idea, especially considering that most people whose computers are sending these massive crapfloods have no idea what's going on. We've got to protect the internet from itself or it will render itself practically useless.
Yeah, I recall hearing recently that the US military expects to be in Iraq in significant numbers for at least another year. This thing ain't ending anytime soon.
Repeat after me: Market cap means nothing. Market cap can be inflated or deflated on the whims of the stock market. There are many better factors to judge the size of a company by, such as revenue, assets, profit, etc. If market cap were the determining statistic of company size, mutual fund managers would be some of the most powerful people in the world (well, they are, but for other related reasons.) But using market cap as the determining characteristic for company size is like saying one car is faster than another because it has more horsepower. There are a lot of other factors (weight of car, transmission ratios, ride height, etc)
Actually, the PowerMac G5 uses dual channel DDR because it's a 64 bit architecture (though in reality, it's only something like 42-bit addressable.) Still, when dealing with 32-bit RAM, you have to pair them up. It's actually not even really dual channel, the architecture just requires RAM to be installed in parity. If 64 bit DDR was available, it would use that.
A lot of the NVidia chipsets (NForce2/3) support dual channel DDR. There's not a whole lot of speed increase actually, something on the order of 2-3%, which is pretty much negligable. Still, at least on the NForce, using dual channel is optional; you can just install a single DIMM and it'll automatically notice. It helped Rambus a lot more because they REALLY needed the wider memory bus.
The reason this isn't a problem is because AP computer science never gets to these sort of problems; the test is simply not designed to cover much more than basic programming skills. It barely even discusses templates, let alone multiple inheritance. Granted, it's been a few years since I took it (it was woefully outdated in pascal then) but AP CS is supposed to cover the same stuff in that first semester CS intro class and maybe less. Anyone who actually knows how to write decent code already knows this and as such could probably make a perfect score without much if any preparation.
The AP comp sci test is a joke. Most colleges don't even award much credit for doing well on it (my school only gave me 3 hours of ungraded credit for a 5 on the AB test.) The problem is that it's designed for most high school students, who barely know how to turn a computer on much less program one. The topics covered on the test are usually covered within the first month or two of the first "Intro to CS" class. So, yeah, it's really way too easy. But then, so were the physics and calculus exams. (it's been like 4 years since I took them, but I didn't have stellar physics or calc grades and still made 5s)
Actually Sun is more like DEC or the old IBM. They're stuck in the old way of doing things. The days of proprietary enterprise hardware are gone. Why buy a Sun Ultra Enterprise when you can buy 500 cheap PCs at the same price? Sun offers nothing that isn't available at much less cost on Linux on commodity hardware. What do you think when a company gets bids from two vendors for a project. One uses Sun hardware/software and costs 4 times as much as the Linux solution yet has no other real advantages. Not to mention per client licenses, etc. I dunno which one you'd choose, but the choice seems simple to me. They're pretty much irrelevant at this point in the game, other than the fact that they own Java. There's no room to keep them around for sentimental value.
Hrm.. some of us are actually in shape *boggle* There's a lot to the world outside your bedroom, go explore it. ;) This looks really interesting though (and not to mention useful for me; click the link in my sig for more info) I've been looking for one of these for a while, that way I don't have to dick with a bunch of SSH shit from my laptop at a Starbucks in B.F.E.
Well, also, under a system like this you also have to worry about the districts being drawn fairly. In Texas, the Republicans recently redrew the lines in a blatant power grab to where they will likely win *14* more house seats in the next elections. So in essence, this is just shifting the same problem from the state level to the district level. The only fair solution, IMO, is to do the presidential election entirely from the popular vote. If no candidate gets 50%, take the top 2 and have a runoff. Yeah, it won't be entirely fair, but it's definitely not very fair as-is.
It should be more to the point about how fucked up our electoral system is. The press largely ignores how fucking rigged it is because they really have no stake in it either way and it would cause chaos if people were to lose faith in our "democratic" process. The electoral college is bullshit. It's basically like rounding up everything before calculating a final result. Sure, you'll get a result that's close to what you want, but there's obviously something fishy about it. This just makes it easier to rig elections because you can concentrate your efforts on those 4 or 5 states that are close and ignore the rest. Nevermind that the Florida verification process was very, very biased (Bush's fucking brother was governor and all the state officials worked for him.) Anyway, if he wins again, viva Mexico!
You forget the most profitable part of leasing; after getting some dope to make 3 years of payments on it, the dealership still owns it and can sell it for about half of the MSRP. Also, most leases have mileage limits, usually around 30,000 miles a year. If you go over, they charge you for that too.
Still, leases aren't all bad. If you own your own business, you can lease a car as a business expense (up to something absurd like a $50,000 car) and it's a total tax write-off. That way you basically get a new car every three years and it doesn't cost you much at all. That way you don't have to worry about expensive maintenance; as anything really expensive (read: engine block, computers, drivetrain) will usually be covered under warranty. But the general idea here is that paying a little more for a lease is better than paying 33.5% to the IRS.
(just FYI; most of those "low, low monthly payments" are 5 year leases/loans, which are just stupid. You don't want to be still paying for the car after it breaks. 2 or 3 year leases/loans are where it's at)
The official jargon line for reality TV these days is "unscripted drama."
Yes, but ESPN is the place sports nuts go to get their news. It's like the Slashdot of sports, only there are a lot more sports nuts than tech geeks. I'm actually surprised espn.com isn't in the top 5.
Many Linux distros are vulnerable out of the box; it's just that the vulnerabilities haven't been found yet. If you install Debian today and never run apt-get upgrade, chances are that a year from now something in that install will have been found to be vulnerable. The same thing goes for Windows. Windows 2000 is almost 5 years old. For fair comparison, you'd need to compare that Windows 2000 install to Debian stable from 5 years ago. Chances are that it ships with some now-known holes. Hell, even a 5 year old virgin OpenBSD install has remote holes. Oh, and most Linux distros will enable RPC services by default, even if you tell them not to. I know because I got bit in the ass by one.
.ASP files on Linux. Our customers wanted to do this, and we weren't about to tell them "No, use PHP you dumbass." We could run perl and PHP just fine on IIS (though we eventually moved most of the stuff to Apache) so in that case, Windows was a better solution. The point here is that you should choose what technology to use based on what you need it to do, not what the cool geek trends tell you to. If you need a cheap web/mail/dns/whatever server and don't have customers who need lots of proprietary stuff, then Linux is probably the better choice. But it isn't always.
Essentially, a computer is a computer. An operating system is an operating system. One is not inherently better than the other; they just do different things. Yes, I realize this is oversimplifying it a good deal, but at an ISP I used to work at we ran Win 2k web servers because there was no way to run VB
The best solution, IMO, is to just throw everything behind a firewall and explicitly allow that which you want to get through. This applies to Linux, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, whatever. There is too often a "holier than thou" attitude on this kind of crap, and there shouldn't be. Most of the people who make these kind of claims are bandwagoners anyway; using Linux and dissing Windows is "cool" so they do it. The real point is that if you're even having the argument, you're probably not really all that "cool" to begin with.
Apple has to charge sales tax in states where it has retail stores. IIRC most states require sales tax on mail/internet orders if the company has a brick and mortar presence in the state. I could be wrong though; IANAL applies.
You make the same mistake most non-Americans make in assuming that everyone in America thinks with a like mind. This is very much not so; our fascist president just doesn't like to let anyone hear opposing opinions. The "fat cats" rig the elections; the media doesn't like to report on stories of election fraud, which is actually pretty rampant in America, because it undermines our belief in democracy.
Oh, and of all the people the American government fucks over, none does it fuck over more than its own people. I gotta pay taxes so they can line the pockets of corporations like Halliburton and Lockheed while not getting decent government services that most other industrialized nations have such as health care and breathable air. Any single European women out there who wanna get hitched?
Maybe outsourcing to India isn't such a bad idea after all...
You're right, but in most cases, only the best songs are released as singles/get videos made for them/etc. In the case of pop artists, the most popular songs are usually the best ones. Other artists may have some really good songs that just don't lend themselves to airplay (a band like Radiohead is a good example of this.) But for the most part, yeah, the most popular songs ARE the best ones.
That's why a lot of tech companies had clauses in their contracts that said you could not work for another tech company for 2 years after leaving. I'm not sure how legal that is, but this has been a problem for a while. I personally think that people/companies are too proud of their code; the end result is what you're selling anyway. MAYBE something like cryptography or specialized applications (a la Google) requires "secret" algorithms, but in 90% of the stuff anyone around here ever sees, there's nothing so secret that you can't learn it from a published book.
No; Apple is in the business of selling hardware. They create the software to sell the hardware. You'd still have to pay for the R&D on that software even if you don't want it, because they pay for the software by selling the hardware. Essentially, the software costs them nothing because they don't have to pay any per-machine licenses. But OS X is the reason most people buy a Mac. You'd probably just pirate a copy of OS X to put on it anyway; if you want a daily-usable unix system, OS X blows Linux out of the water on hardware support, commercial app support, basically everything you might want to do that doesn't involve programming. And even then, Apple's free IDE is pretty fucking sweet.
Actually most of the plot points were ripped straight out of the comic books that were produced around the time of the original Metroid. And besides, like any truly great action game, you can blow through the game without reading any of the story and still have a blast.
Well, also, they're failing to realize what the CD industry failed to realize: It only takes one guy to crack the protection for it to end up all over the internet anyway. I'm sure TiVo is the more immediate threat, but there will be some way around the protection. There always is.
In today's world, the best laid out and most carefully thought out plans are often the quickest to go down in flames. All this legislation isn't going to do shit if nobody cares.