Well it is 1st April, here in Melbourne. Catch up already!
The BS has got to stop, definitely. Every year/. runs stories purporting to be funny "April Fools" jokes, but are actually incredibly dumb, unimaginative and far from funny. Thanks for reminding me not to visit this site tomorrow.
Why did you talk to an account manager about online security and passwords? Unless they're a really small organisation, that would seem to be really daft.
I've noticed a drop in quality going from the Canon S3 to Canon S5. It's compensated for by the S5 being a better camera in other areas. Having a higher pixel count doesn't allow me to blow the pictures up larger, as that just emphasises the underlying issues in the image.
What is the right thing? You seem to be implying that shaping isn't and letting customers go at it. Maybe the business model doesn't support that, or gives more customers a poor internet experience than would be affected by shaping.
That's still expensive. I was paying CAD$25/mo (currently about AUD$30) for a 6Mb/s down 800Kb/s up on a DSL connection in Canada, 100GB limit. I could have had no limits if I didn't care about latency (they used lower quality peers/transits or something).
ADSL2+ 20Mb/s by 1Mb/s with 15GB usage seems to about AUD$80-90 (at least here in Victoria). If you don't qualify for ADSL2+, you might get 8Mb/s by 384Kb/s and 15GB for AUD$80. 384Kb/s upstream is pathetic, and the first time I'd seen that for a decade. I've seen numerous people with 64Kb/s upstream, which is mind-boggling - you don't know how much affect upstream has, until you lose it.
"If the machine hasn't had a fresh XP install in over a year, then it's time to reinstall anyway,"
Why?
My work laptop is five years old, never reinstalled XP. It's fine. Until I replaced it with a MacBook Pro, my home computer hadn't been reinstalled for years either. Why would I want to do so?
Best thing you can do on XP is logon as a normal user (not admin, nor power user), and learn how to deal with the occasional problems caused by having insufficient privs. Aaron Margosis' (sp?) blog has some great tips.
VMWare Player is free, but doesn't make it easy to create VMs. Sunbarrow.com has lots of tips.
Virtual machines are a great way to run stuff where performance isn't critical. It's a useful sandbox that you can easily restore to a known state just by copy some files from your backups.
What's to stop application developers saying that all of their data is critical and putting in that call everywhere? Surely that will bugger up the whole idea of delaying the writes?
Which Linux distro does it in a standardised manner so that any Linux admin hired from anywhere else will be able to come in and just understand without having to figure it out?
Why would you want to have all of IE's files removed? That would break so many applications. Many many applications rely on the IE ActiveX controls, so it would be stupid to remove them. Microsoft could make it easier to plug in different rendering engines, but I wonder if Safari/Mozilla/Opera/etc would be interested in implementing all of the interfaces and objects (you know, like IWebBrowser2).
Get down off your high and mighty FOSS horse. Where do people get of spouting this BS? I guess you also have enough time and interest in building your own cars, your own houses, and grow all your own food too. Or are you just independently wealthy and so can spend inordinate amounts of time doing pointless things like this? These software projects often have hundreds of man years behind them, so to suggest an individual forks it is plain retarded.
Oh how I fondly remember the Netscape and Mozilla Suites. A crash in the browser would lose that email I was researching for and been editting for the last two hours. Are the Seamonkey people still ignorantly working with a single process, or have they finally figured out that tight integration doesn't require a monolithic app? As for the composer... there would be a common standalone to bundle with Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird, but I guess there just isn't enough demand for it. I used Netscape and Mozilla suites for years, and only used the composer a handful of times, mostly in the mid- to late-90s when white personal pages with black text and blue anchors were all the rage. There are far better tools out there for HTML development than anything Netscape/Mozilla ever produced - even Visual Studio is a better starting place!
But they do have a production server that's printing detailed error messages on the HTTP response. That's a misconfiguration, and an active choice at some point. Presumably debugging system - maybe they don't have test or staging servers.
I have perfectly good Dell M6300, why would I want another machine?
So you can legally run OS X and do your dev work, was my assumption.
Well, I have access to OS install DVD through an ADC subscription. Perhaps running under VMWare is another issue though.
Also, BootCamp partitions are 32GB...
I don't use Bootcamp, but I thought 32Gb was the maximum size for old versions of Windows XP to install on a FAT partition. As far as I know, bootcamp partitions can be any size you want and can fit a Windows install in.
Maybe they've removed the limitation now, but I seem to remember a year ago that the Boot Camp Assistant wouldn't let me create a partition greater than 32GB, even though I wanted to format it with NTFS. 32GB is too small for Vista too.
Finally, I'm on the road a lot (I currently don't even have an apartment back home) and am already hauling around three laptops...
I hauled around multiple laptops and messed with dual booting for a while. Now I just carry a MacBook and run Windows, Linux, and Solaris in VMs on top of OS X. Saves me a lot of hassle and migrating them all to a new system is stupid easy.
If only. None of the BD player software I work with is any good in a VM.
Actually, that's just least of the issues, and probably shouldn't have mentioned it. I have perfectly good Dell M6300, why would I want another machine? Especially as the Mac stuff is only part-time for me. I do Blu-ray work, and that machine has a built-in BD drive, and is more suited to playing back HD movies with BD-J applications. Using a Mac would require hauling around a BD drive in an enclosure (which I used to do a couple of years ago, and that was a pain). Also, BootCamp partitions are 32GB, although presumably I could do all the Windows work in Fusion, but I'd rather not. Finally, I'm on the road a lot (I currently don't even have an apartment back home) and am already hauling around three laptops - I've got enough crap, I don't want any more, especially as my back-breaking carry-on luggage is overweight and it's probably only the Star Alliance Gold card thats saved me from some over-officious airline staff saying no. A Mac mini would definitely not be sufficient for the job, so your point is moot.
It happens with my BootCamp/Vista partition, as well as WinXP and Win Server 2003 VMs. I noticed it first last year with VMWare Fusion 1, but didn't do anything about it because I was living in China (didn't really have time to think about it) and didn't really need Fusion too much at the time. A couple of months ago I upgraded to Fusion 2 and also started to need to use it more seriously, but found the problems still exist and that it's all but unusable. Customer support is beginning to drive me nuts.
I just wish I could get OS X Leopard running in VMWare PLayer on XP. I installed OS X Server 10.5 using VMWare Fusion, and got it booting under VMWare Player, but it's running in to problems before logon (looping with mds and ATSServer crashing). Would much rather have the desktop OS working though as we develop cross platform software for Mac and Windows, but we're a Windows shop first and foremost. I just need somewhere to compile, debug and unit test the Mac code, and don't currently have budget for a Mac to do this with using BootCamp.
Not for me. VMWare Fusion crashes all the time. If I boot Windows and leave it, it's fine. If I boot it and open a web page in IE and leave it, it will freeze in under 10 minutes. I've had a support incident open for six weeks, and I'm getting frustrated with them asking to send the logs again, asking me to try things repeatedly as if they've forgotten they'd already asked me. Now they've gone silent on me. The worst bit is I have to reboot the Mac or I can't restart the VM that froze, only the Mac hangs on shut down after the VM froze and I have to hit and hold the power button.
Interesting blog on this here, with subsequent follow-up.
As for the audio comparison you mentioned - are you sure it's not just the change your audio equipment or music preferences over the years? I can't tell the difference between my OGGs/AACs on headphones or computer speakers, but when going through my receiver in the living room, any of the lossy encodings I have just sound a bit wrong. That's a technical description. I've noticed the loss of audio dynamics and clipping mentioned in the blog, but on better audio equipment, all of my CDs still sound better.
Indeed, and at Trafalgar with the light winds, they were exposed to long range fire for a long time. In fact some of the other ships tried to race Victory in to the battle in order to protect it. Nelson's tactic there was to create two lines to cross the Spanish/French fleets, dividing them in two places and using his ships-of-the-line to rake the Spanish/French ships with their massive and overwhelming broadsides.
There was quite a bounty for capturing ships. And in fact, some of Nelson's ships at Trafalgar had been captured from the enemy (IIRC correctly - it's a couple of years since I read that book). Unfortunately many of the captured ships were lost on the rocks in the storm after the battle as they were too heavily damaged to control or there wasn't sufficient crew left to manage them
They did have elevated cannons and cannonades, but the impression I got was they were more about immobilising the ship (damaging sails and rigging), and killing or maiming the crew prior to boarding.
This book describes Nelson's tactics in full gory detail. No ramming. His aim was to bring the broadside of his ships-of-the-line against the bow or stern of the enemy ships. It exposed them to fire as they approached, but put them in a short-range position where all of his guns on one side (52 cannons?) could be brought to bear, with the enemy unable to fight back effectively. The book I mentioned relishes in describing the tactic of "raking", where cannon balls from broadsides are sent from one end of the enemy ship out the other end, destroying everything in it's path: splintering wood and shattering humans. The decks of the French and Spanish ships were flooded with blood, with some crews almost completely wiped out. The shots that were "making two holes" were actually problematic at times, specifically when an enemy ship had a British ship along both sides - at that point the British gunners would have to reduce the amount of gunpowder lest their shots passed right through the enemy ship and into a friend.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it is 1st April, here in Melbourne. Catch up already!
The BS has got to stop, definitely. Every year /. runs stories purporting to be funny "April Fools" jokes, but are actually incredibly dumb, unimaginative and far from funny. Thanks for reminding me not to visit this site tomorrow.
Why did you talk to an account manager about online security and passwords? Unless they're a really small organisation, that would seem to be really daft.
I've noticed a drop in quality going from the Canon S3 to Canon S5. It's compensated for by the S5 being a better camera in other areas. Having a higher pixel count doesn't allow me to blow the pictures up larger, as that just emphasises the underlying issues in the image.
What is the right thing? You seem to be implying that shaping isn't and letting customers go at it. Maybe the business model doesn't support that, or gives more customers a poor internet experience than would be affected by shaping.
That's still expensive. I was paying CAD$25/mo (currently about AUD$30) for a 6Mb/s down 800Kb/s up on a DSL connection in Canada, 100GB limit. I could have had no limits if I didn't care about latency (they used lower quality peers/transits or something).
ADSL2+ 20Mb/s by 1Mb/s with 15GB usage seems to about AUD$80-90 (at least here in Victoria). If you don't qualify for ADSL2+, you might get 8Mb/s by 384Kb/s and 15GB for AUD$80. 384Kb/s upstream is pathetic, and the first time I'd seen that for a decade. I've seen numerous people with 64Kb/s upstream, which is mind-boggling - you don't know how much affect upstream has, until you lose it.
I can check off most of those. Obviously not the malware. I still don't get it.
Why?
My work laptop is five years old, never reinstalled XP. It's fine. Until I replaced it with a MacBook Pro, my home computer hadn't been reinstalled for years either. Why would I want to do so?
Sunbarrow.com? I meant: Sanbarrow.com
Best thing you can do on XP is logon as a normal user (not admin, nor power user), and learn how to deal with the occasional problems caused by having insufficient privs. Aaron Margosis' (sp?) blog has some great tips.
VMWare Player is free, but doesn't make it easy to create VMs. Sunbarrow.com has lots of tips.
Virtual machines are a great way to run stuff where performance isn't critical. It's a useful sandbox that you can easily restore to a known state just by copy some files from your backups.
What's to stop application developers saying that all of their data is critical and putting in that call everywhere? Surely that will bugger up the whole idea of delaying the writes?
Which Linux distro does it in a standardised manner so that any Linux admin hired from anywhere else will be able to come in and just understand without having to figure it out?
Why would you want to have all of IE's files removed? That would break so many applications. Many many applications rely on the IE ActiveX controls, so it would be stupid to remove them. Microsoft could make it easier to plug in different rendering engines, but I wonder if Safari/Mozilla/Opera/etc would be interested in implementing all of the interfaces and objects (you know, like IWebBrowser2).
Get down off your high and mighty FOSS horse. Where do people get of spouting this BS? I guess you also have enough time and interest in building your own cars, your own houses, and grow all your own food too. Or are you just independently wealthy and so can spend inordinate amounts of time doing pointless things like this? These software projects often have hundreds of man years behind them, so to suggest an individual forks it is plain retarded.
Oh how I fondly remember the Netscape and Mozilla Suites. A crash in the browser would lose that email I was researching for and been editting for the last two hours. Are the Seamonkey people still ignorantly working with a single process, or have they finally figured out that tight integration doesn't require a monolithic app? As for the composer... there would be a common standalone to bundle with Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird, but I guess there just isn't enough demand for it. I used Netscape and Mozilla suites for years, and only used the composer a handful of times, mostly in the mid- to late-90s when white personal pages with black text and blue anchors were all the rage. There are far better tools out there for HTML development than anything Netscape/Mozilla ever produced - even Visual Studio is a better starting place!
But they do have a production server that's printing detailed error messages on the HTTP response. That's a misconfiguration, and an active choice at some point. Presumably debugging system - maybe they don't have test or staging servers.
Well, I have access to OS install DVD through an ADC subscription. Perhaps running under VMWare is another issue though.
Maybe they've removed the limitation now, but I seem to remember a year ago that the Boot Camp Assistant wouldn't let me create a partition greater than 32GB, even though I wanted to format it with NTFS. 32GB is too small for Vista too.
If only. None of the BD player software I work with is any good in a VM.
Actually, that's just least of the issues, and probably shouldn't have mentioned it. I have perfectly good Dell M6300, why would I want another machine? Especially as the Mac stuff is only part-time for me. I do Blu-ray work, and that machine has a built-in BD drive, and is more suited to playing back HD movies with BD-J applications. Using a Mac would require hauling around a BD drive in an enclosure (which I used to do a couple of years ago, and that was a pain). Also, BootCamp partitions are 32GB, although presumably I could do all the Windows work in Fusion, but I'd rather not. Finally, I'm on the road a lot (I currently don't even have an apartment back home) and am already hauling around three laptops - I've got enough crap, I don't want any more, especially as my back-breaking carry-on luggage is overweight and it's probably only the Star Alliance Gold card thats saved me from some over-officious airline staff saying no. A Mac mini would definitely not be sufficient for the job, so your point is moot.
It happens with my BootCamp/Vista partition, as well as WinXP and Win Server 2003 VMs. I noticed it first last year with VMWare Fusion 1, but didn't do anything about it because I was living in China (didn't really have time to think about it) and didn't really need Fusion too much at the time. A couple of months ago I upgraded to Fusion 2 and also started to need to use it more seriously, but found the problems still exist and that it's all but unusable. Customer support is beginning to drive me nuts.
I just wish I could get OS X Leopard running in VMWare PLayer on XP. I installed OS X Server 10.5 using VMWare Fusion, and got it booting under VMWare Player, but it's running in to problems before logon (looping with mds and ATSServer crashing). Would much rather have the desktop OS working though as we develop cross platform software for Mac and Windows, but we're a Windows shop first and foremost. I just need somewhere to compile, debug and unit test the Mac code, and don't currently have budget for a Mac to do this with using BootCamp.
Makes you wonder why Apple doesn't insist on proper uninstallers, like Windows apps.
Not for me. VMWare Fusion crashes all the time. If I boot Windows and leave it, it's fine. If I boot it and open a web page in IE and leave it, it will freeze in under 10 minutes. I've had a support incident open for six weeks, and I'm getting frustrated with them asking to send the logs again, asking me to try things repeatedly as if they've forgotten they'd already asked me. Now they've gone silent on me. The worst bit is I have to reboot the Mac or I can't restart the VM that froze, only the Mac hangs on shut down after the VM froze and I have to hit and hold the power button.
Interesting blog on this here, with subsequent follow-up.
As for the audio comparison you mentioned - are you sure it's not just the change your audio equipment or music preferences over the years? I can't tell the difference between my OGGs/AACs on headphones or computer speakers, but when going through my receiver in the living room, any of the lossy encodings I have just sound a bit wrong. That's a technical description. I've noticed the loss of audio dynamics and clipping mentioned in the blog, but on better audio equipment, all of my CDs still sound better.
Indeed, and at Trafalgar with the light winds, they were exposed to long range fire for a long time. In fact some of the other ships tried to race Victory in to the battle in order to protect it. Nelson's tactic there was to create two lines to cross the Spanish/French fleets, dividing them in two places and using his ships-of-the-line to rake the Spanish/French ships with their massive and overwhelming broadsides.
There was quite a bounty for capturing ships. And in fact, some of Nelson's ships at Trafalgar had been captured from the enemy (IIRC correctly - it's a couple of years since I read that book). Unfortunately many of the captured ships were lost on the rocks in the storm after the battle as they were too heavily damaged to control or there wasn't sufficient crew left to manage them
They did have elevated cannons and cannonades, but the impression I got was they were more about immobilising the ship (damaging sails and rigging), and killing or maiming the crew prior to boarding.
This book describes Nelson's tactics in full gory detail. No ramming. His aim was to bring the broadside of his ships-of-the-line against the bow or stern of the enemy ships. It exposed them to fire as they approached, but put them in a short-range position where all of his guns on one side (52 cannons?) could be brought to bear, with the enemy unable to fight back effectively. The book I mentioned relishes in describing the tactic of "raking", where cannon balls from broadsides are sent from one end of the enemy ship out the other end, destroying everything in it's path: splintering wood and shattering humans. The decks of the French and Spanish ships were flooded with blood, with some crews almost completely wiped out. The shots that were "making two holes" were actually problematic at times, specifically when an enemy ship had a British ship along both sides - at that point the British gunners would have to reduce the amount of gunpowder lest their shots passed right through the enemy ship and into a friend.