When I was on dialup(14 years ago), I didn't have such problems. Although at that point the WWW was really underdeveloped and I was still using gopher and just starting to telnet into BBS's instead of calling them.
As I recall, the internet accelerators of the time were pretty much all BS and just having compression turned on in the PPP driver was all that was needed to speed up web access.
I'd prefer to see min and max times. Max being light productivity app usage and min being playing a game that utilizes the GPU heavily.
Consumers will see the 2 numbers and can quickly decide if the performance meets their needs based on how they intend to use the laptop. Consumers are smarter than the average monkey. If they see a laptop advertised as "Battery Life: 45 Minutes - 2.5 Hours", they can guess what might affect battery consumption.
If you recall, AMD's performance rating was an important step forward for the CPU manufacturer industry at that time. Intel was pushing for higher and higher clock frequencies with longer and longer pipelines - something that made little sense.
Performance ratings allowed consumers to effectively compare AMD and Intel chips side by side in ways that are useful.
Can I get a car analogy here? MPG ratings, anyone? Bueller?
On another note, careful customization of my power profile has allowed my shiny new HP dv4 to be useful for 2+ hours on a single charge. This is with the cheapest 6 cell battery. If I opted for a 12 cell, it would be much longer.
Maybe you didn't notice the part where I said: "The wizards in Windows don't make it more or less insecure, its the OS and the admins doing that."
Emphasis added. Windows traditionally by default has a lot of services and ports open and running that are unnecessary for a server. Windows admins often don't shut down the services they don't need or close the ports they don't use. Those same admins coming to Linux will likely result in a less secure Linux box because they probably won't know enough about it to configure the services they need correctly.
I.e. Having PGAdmin doesn't make you a qualified database administrator. Having Gnome network tools doesn't make you a network admin. No amount of GUI tools can supplant the need for a firm foundation of knowledge upon which to build administration skills. Where they could fake it on Windows, they will fail miserably on Linux.
It's possible for a bad admin to make any system insecure, regardless of the operating system. The wizards in Windows don't make it more or less insecure, its the OS and the admins doing that.
Wizards merely encourage laziness and do not force the admin to have a clear understanding of what it is they're doing. More widespread adoption simply widens the field for admins who really know what they're doing.
The national security claim is on par for the tone of the feds since Bush Sr. The theory is that our financial security is coupled to our physical security, thus everything the feds choose is within their scope of authority based on the commerce clause of the constitution.
It has been shown repeatedly the commerce clause is the most often abused facet of our constitution and the courts have been more than happy to let it be.
At a previous job in a customer call center for a large multinational company, I had poor average call times. Very poor. In fact, there wasn't a category they could put me in.
I wasn't logged in when I was supposed to be. My call times sucked. I was late almost every day.
But you know what? I got mad raises. My boss justified my low performance indicator numbers to upper management using the "last tier" argument. That is, I'm useful because I'm diligent and will always find the solution, regardless of the complexity of the problem. If no one else can solve the customers issue, I am the solution and despite the seeming wastefulness of keeping someone around who takes 10 calls a day, every call ended with a solution and a happy(er) customer.
You can't mathematically quantify a lot of the intangible reasons employees are good employees. They're called intangible for a reason.
Something many people fail to take notice of is that the feds were notified of inconsistencies in Madoff's funds repeatedly during the late 90's. The feds declined to investigate.
The regulators are as much to blame as Madoff himself, but that isn't talked about much and should be. Sadly, the people hurt the worst are the people with the least to lose(retirees, pension funds).
Your analogy would have been written more accurately like this:
A - Peer B - Comcast, A's ISP C - Peer
A and C are communicating through B. B doesn't like the traffic, so Comcast tells A it is C and to kindly please STFU we're done talking to each other.
And you're right, if an individual did this, they'd be in prison by now. It's only ok because it is Comcast doing it to their own customers and this isn't misrepresentation, it's creative traffic management.
Sure, find a way to fill a 1 TB drive with Natalie Portman and email me for payment. In case 1 TB of Natalie Portman actually exists, I jest. I have big pipes and lots of drives, I can fill them myself. I don't have $1,000 to blow right now!
Don't be dense. From your choice of signature and posting history, I postulate you work for a multinational corporation as an analyst or engineer and are intelligent, but inexperienced with most technical matters and bullshit your way through things you don't understand.
countries that have no orbital launch capability (which would include most "rogue states", although not Iran since recently)
Aside from being even an incomplete sentence fragment, the implication is counter to that which you state in your next sentence fragment:
after all, you don't even need a satellite to hit it; you just need a missile that's equivalent to ICBM (or less).
Well shit, this doesn't make any sense. The satellite part is true, but the implication of the second sentence is that you would need an ICBM or something close to it. Maybe what you really meant was just that you haven't the foggiest idea of the complexity of a rocket including whether 7,000 miles is anything close to 70,000 feet.
There's several orders of magnitude difference in complexity between amateur rocketry and building atomic weapons(even the simplest, so-called 'gun style' like Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima). Anyone trying to create a modern implosion type bomb is looking at either buying one from Russia(is this even possible anymore?) or hoping they get it right on the first try, since there is no longer any place on the surface of the earth a nuclear weapon can be detonated without the US or the UK observing it with satellites. Regardless of the complexity of the design, the materials themselves are very difficult to obtain.
Terrorists have repeatedly shown their ability to obtain financing even for complex attacks such as Mumbai, USS Cole, WTC attacks, etc. Shelling out a couple thousand bucks for some parts to be turned & milled at a machine shop would be the least of their worries. Propellant is only marginally more difficult to obtain. There are many types of readily available liquid propellants as well as off-the-shelf solid rocket motors. I read the other day that thanks in part to video games, accurate accelerometers are fantastically cheap now - something that is needed for a budget guidance system.
And oh yeah, in case you didn't know... the US HAS acted against its own citizens with lethal force unjustifiably, many times. Several civil rights protesters were gunned down in cold blood by police in the 60's, the majority of which were never brought to justice. One good counter example would be Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose killer was only recently brought up on charges of murder 40 years later.
Need more examples? Look around. I know a lot about the Portland Oregon metro area because I used to live there. Lethal police action is a way of life there. The worst example that comes to mind is the shooting death of Kendra James - shot down at point blank range for trying to drive away from the police. A grand jury declined to indict the officer.
I could go on for hours finding examples of unjustified lethal action by local, state and federal officials against US citizens going unpunished, but what's the point? I think you're looking more for systemic violence towards riots.
If you're looking for something bigger, the LA riots in the early 90's('94?) something like 50 people were killed, mostly by police trying to suppress looters. The US has so far done a great job at spending massive amounts of taxpayer money to safely keep taxpaying protesters away from national political conventions.
Many ICBM's have a range of 7,000 miles or more. That's 36,000,000 feet, or ~550 times farther than the purported floating height of a spy blimp.
You don't even need anything close to an ICBM. An amateur rocket lover with a few thousand dollars and access to a machine shop could strike one of these blimps. Your sentence is in fact pretty much bullshit. Every rogue state would be able to shoot these down with ease. In fact, you wouldn't even need a government to shoot these down.
I think people should open their eyes and come to the realization that a blimp such as this would be most useful for spying on your OWN citizens. Despite the ease with which these could be shot down, citizens are far less likely to attack them than the enemies.
Yes, my comments were very US centric. We subsidize the corn growers heavily here, leaving to prolific HFCS use.
Probably the biggest HFCS consuming industry is soda pop, which commonly use cane sugar outside the United States. Personally, the cane sugar soda tastes better.
Oddly at the local grocery store, knowing where to look has allowed me to drink HFCS free juice(for some juices like pomegranate, they're completely free of added sugars). The HFCS juice is usually about the same price as the cheap stuff, or when on sale it's cheaper.
It's possible to avoid HFCS almost entirely. You just have to be an intelligent discerning shopper.
Probably with respect to Javascript performance. A lot of people notice slow performance in javascript heavy websites like Facebook, Yahoo! Mail's beta AJAX interface, etc. If they see a dramatic speedup, they will notice even if they do not know why.
The reason its different is that a couple dollars on a $50 purchase isn't much money in absolute or relative dollars. It's around 5% of the purchase price.
I don't know about Office Depot, but at Best Buy the extended warranty for my laptop was like $70, over 10% of the purchase price. Higher, by far in absolute and relative terms.
Another key difference is that computers are already covered by manufacturer warranty. If my laptop dies today, HP will repair or replace it and I didn't purchase any extended warranty.
I got a HP dv4 at Best Buy for $639 on sale with a 250 GB hard drive, 4 GB ram and Vista 64 Home Premium. The key is to do your research before you enter ANY store, so that you can make a rational purchasing decision. Know exactly what you want and don't take any substitutes, because if you have the patience, anything you want can be had online. I got exactly the right amount of computer for me at a great price. Sure, they tried to push an extended warranty, geek squad bullshit, etc. but I said no. If I had taken the warranty, MS Office, geek squad bullshit I would have paid over $900. Screw that. In comparison, I found a similar HP dv4 at Office Depot for $899, which was almost identical but had a thumbprint reader. If I had not done research and blindly accepted what the Office Depot rep called a "great buy", I would have royally screwed myself.
I promptly removed the minimal amount of trialware that was installed and have really enjoyed my nice shiny new laptop.
I used to build my own desktops but quickly realized 1) it's not financially rational, upgrading an OEM box makes a lot more sense and 2) really, I just don't have the time. I have an old Athlon 64 box I did put together in my girlfriend's sons room running Ubuntu. It's got my mailserver and SSH running, so I can access Linux any time I need.
I believe that decision was made to make interactive PDF's possible. There was a serious case of feature creep in the PDF specification. This stems from Adobe really being out of touch with what users expected PDF to be(just a universal page layout format) and what they wanted to make it.
PDF now supports buttons, Javascript and a whole slew of other features that for the most part are not typically used. In fact, anyone who wants to use those features probably shouldn't be using PDF at all since only the Adobe reader supports them! There isn't even a good open source PDF program that supports forms. Some readers display them properly, but none that I can find allow you to complete them and save the completed form.
I saw a coupon for 2 gallons of milk for $2.98. Now, normally I purchase milk relatively rarely because of it's high cost.
However, in this case, it was $1.49 per gallon. This comes out to about 6 pounds per dollar, or roughly 15 cents per pound. This is approximately the same cost as the wholesaler rate for milk in my area, which seems to imply to me that either the store is selling milk with coupons nearly at a loss to encourage buyers to come in, OR the store is screwing the dairies on wholesale prices.
Regardless, my perception that I'm getting a deal matches reality. I could close my eyes and pretend I never saw it so as to avoid making the smart purchase, but that seems foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was on dialup(14 years ago), I didn't have such problems. Although at that point the WWW was really underdeveloped and I was still using gopher and just starting to telnet into BBS's instead of calling them.
As I recall, the internet accelerators of the time were pretty much all BS and just having compression turned on in the PPP driver was all that was needed to speed up web access.
That's the paradox. Nobody reads the articles, but the slashdot effect is still in full force.
Crazy eh?
FYI, I already read this a few days ago. That's why my comment was funny!
It was just a joke. A goddamned joke. Mother help me.
I'd prefer to see min and max times. Max being light productivity app usage and min being playing a game that utilizes the GPU heavily.
Consumers will see the 2 numbers and can quickly decide if the performance meets their needs based on how they intend to use the laptop. Consumers are smarter than the average monkey. If they see a laptop advertised as "Battery Life: 45 Minutes - 2.5 Hours", they can guess what might affect battery consumption.
If you recall, AMD's performance rating was an important step forward for the CPU manufacturer industry at that time. Intel was pushing for higher and higher clock frequencies with longer and longer pipelines - something that made little sense.
Performance ratings allowed consumers to effectively compare AMD and Intel chips side by side in ways that are useful.
Can I get a car analogy here? MPG ratings, anyone?
Bueller?
On another note, careful customization of my power profile has allowed my shiny new HP dv4 to be useful for 2+ hours on a single charge. This is with the cheapest 6 cell battery. If I opted for a 12 cell, it would be much longer.
Maybe you didn't notice the part where I said:
"The wizards in Windows don't make it more or less insecure, its the OS and the admins doing that."
Emphasis added. Windows traditionally by default has a lot of services and ports open and running that are unnecessary for a server. Windows admins often don't shut down the services they don't need or close the ports they don't use. Those same admins coming to Linux will likely result in a less secure Linux box because they probably won't know enough about it to configure the services they need correctly.
I.e. Having PGAdmin doesn't make you a qualified database administrator. Having Gnome network tools doesn't make you a network admin. No amount of GUI tools can supplant the need for a firm foundation of knowledge upon which to build administration skills. Where they could fake it on Windows, they will fail miserably on Linux.
It's possible for a bad admin to make any system insecure, regardless of the operating system. The wizards in Windows don't make it more or less insecure, its the OS and the admins doing that.
Wizards merely encourage laziness and do not force the admin to have a clear understanding of what it is they're doing. More widespread adoption simply widens the field for admins who really know what they're doing.
The national security claim is on par for the tone of the feds since Bush Sr. The theory is that our financial security is coupled to our physical security, thus everything the feds choose is within their scope of authority based on the commerce clause of the constitution.
It has been shown repeatedly the commerce clause is the most often abused facet of our constitution and the courts have been more than happy to let it be.
At a previous job in a customer call center for a large multinational company, I had poor average call times. Very poor. In fact, there wasn't a category they could put me in.
I wasn't logged in when I was supposed to be. My call times sucked. I was late almost every day.
But you know what? I got mad raises. My boss justified my low performance indicator numbers to upper management using the "last tier" argument. That is, I'm useful because I'm diligent and will always find the solution, regardless of the complexity of the problem. If no one else can solve the customers issue, I am the solution and despite the seeming wastefulness of keeping someone around who takes 10 calls a day, every call ended with a solution and a happy(er) customer.
You can't mathematically quantify a lot of the intangible reasons employees are good employees. They're called intangible for a reason.
Take his freedom AND his $860 million.
He deserves neither, and neither does his wife.
Something many people fail to take notice of is that the feds were notified of inconsistencies in Madoff's funds repeatedly during the late 90's. The feds declined to investigate.
The regulators are as much to blame as Madoff himself, but that isn't talked about much and should be. Sadly, the people hurt the worst are the people with the least to lose(retirees, pension funds).
Your analogy would have been written more accurately like this:
A - Peer
B - Comcast, A's ISP
C - Peer
A and C are communicating through B. B doesn't like the traffic, so Comcast tells A it is C and to kindly please STFU we're done talking to each other.
And you're right, if an individual did this, they'd be in prison by now. It's only ok because it is Comcast doing it to their own customers and this isn't misrepresentation, it's creative traffic management.
Sure, find a way to fill a 1 TB drive with Natalie Portman and email me for payment.
In case 1 TB of Natalie Portman actually exists, I jest. I have big pipes and lots of drives, I can fill them myself. I don't have $1,000 to blow right now!
Don't be dense. From your choice of signature and posting history, I postulate you work for a multinational corporation as an analyst or engineer and are intelligent, but inexperienced with most technical matters and bullshit your way through things you don't understand.
countries that have no orbital launch capability (which would include most "rogue states", although not Iran since recently)
Aside from being even an incomplete sentence fragment, the implication is counter to that which you state in your next sentence fragment:
after all, you don't even need a satellite to hit it; you just need a missile that's equivalent to ICBM (or less).
Well shit, this doesn't make any sense. The satellite part is true, but the implication of the second sentence is that you would need an ICBM or something close to it. Maybe what you really meant was just that you haven't the foggiest idea of the complexity of a rocket including whether 7,000 miles is anything close to 70,000 feet.
There's several orders of magnitude difference in complexity between amateur rocketry and building atomic weapons(even the simplest, so-called 'gun style' like Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima). Anyone trying to create a modern implosion type bomb is looking at either buying one from Russia(is this even possible anymore?) or hoping they get it right on the first try, since there is no longer any place on the surface of the earth a nuclear weapon can be detonated without the US or the UK observing it with satellites. Regardless of the complexity of the design, the materials themselves are very difficult to obtain.
Terrorists have repeatedly shown their ability to obtain financing even for complex attacks such as Mumbai, USS Cole, WTC attacks, etc. Shelling out a couple thousand bucks for some parts to be turned & milled at a machine shop would be the least of their worries. Propellant is only marginally more difficult to obtain. There are many types of readily available liquid propellants as well as off-the-shelf solid rocket motors. I read the other day that thanks in part to video games, accurate accelerometers are fantastically cheap now - something that is needed for a budget guidance system.
And oh yeah, in case you didn't know... the US HAS acted against its own citizens with lethal force unjustifiably, many times. Several civil rights protesters were gunned down in cold blood by police in the 60's, the majority of which were never brought to justice. One good counter example would be Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose killer was only recently brought up on charges of murder 40 years later.
Need more examples? Look around. I know a lot about the Portland Oregon metro area because I used to live there. Lethal police action is a way of life there. The worst example that comes to mind is the shooting death of Kendra James - shot down at point blank range for trying to drive away from the police. A grand jury declined to indict the officer.
http://www.portlandcopwatch.org/PPR36/shootings36.html
http://www.portlandcopwatch.org/PPR30/kjames30.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmie_Lee_Jackson
I could go on for hours finding examples of unjustified lethal action by local, state and federal officials against US citizens going unpunished, but what's the point? I think you're looking more for systemic violence towards riots.
If you're looking for something bigger, the LA riots in the early 90's('94?) something like 50 people were killed, mostly by police trying to suppress looters. The US has so far done a great job at spending massive amounts of taxpayer money to safely keep taxpaying protesters away from national political conventions.
I see here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1161021&ci
Many ICBM's have a range of 7,000 miles or more. That's 36,000,000 feet, or ~550 times farther than the purported floating height of a spy blimp.
You don't even need anything close to an ICBM. An amateur rocket lover with a few thousand dollars and access to a machine shop could strike one of these blimps. Your sentence is in fact pretty much bullshit. Every rogue state would be able to shoot these down with ease. In fact, you wouldn't even need a government to shoot these down.
I think people should open their eyes and come to the realization that a blimp such as this would be most useful for spying on your OWN citizens. Despite the ease with which these could be shot down, citizens are far less likely to attack them than the enemies.
Idiot. You don't need an orbital launch capability to shoot down a baloon from 66k feet. Amateur rocketeers routinely hit 100k feet.
I guess the key here is that the subjects won't know it's there, so it might still have value against technologically stunted countries.
Another, more obvious use for spy blimps is against our own people. The military could start floating blimps over the US and who would complain?
Yes, my comments were very US centric. We subsidize the corn growers heavily here, leaving to prolific HFCS use.
Probably the biggest HFCS consuming industry is soda pop, which commonly use cane sugar outside the United States. Personally, the cane sugar soda tastes better.
Not all of them. Chess Titans on Vista really is a very good game, if a bit easy. The interface is better than most FOSS chess games that I've seen.
Oddly at the local grocery store, knowing where to look has allowed me to drink HFCS free juice(for some juices like pomegranate, they're completely free of added sugars). The HFCS juice is usually about the same price as the cheap stuff, or when on sale it's cheaper.
It's possible to avoid HFCS almost entirely. You just have to be an intelligent discerning shopper.
Yes, by default Ubuntu includes several more games than Windows. I'd consider them better games also.
Probably with respect to Javascript performance. A lot of people notice slow performance in javascript heavy websites like Facebook, Yahoo! Mail's beta AJAX interface, etc. If they see a dramatic speedup, they will notice even if they do not know why.
The reason its different is that a couple dollars on a $50 purchase isn't much money in absolute or relative dollars. It's around 5% of the purchase price.
I don't know about Office Depot, but at Best Buy the extended warranty for my laptop was like $70, over 10% of the purchase price. Higher, by far in absolute and relative terms.
Another key difference is that computers are already covered by manufacturer warranty. If my laptop dies today, HP will repair or replace it and I didn't purchase any extended warranty.
I got a HP dv4 at Best Buy for $639 on sale with a 250 GB hard drive, 4 GB ram and Vista 64 Home Premium. The key is to do your research before you enter ANY store, so that you can make a rational purchasing decision. Know exactly what you want and don't take any substitutes, because if you have the patience, anything you want can be had online. I got exactly the right amount of computer for me at a great price. Sure, they tried to push an extended warranty, geek squad bullshit, etc. but I said no. If I had taken the warranty, MS Office, geek squad bullshit I would have paid over $900. Screw that. In comparison, I found a similar HP dv4 at Office Depot for $899, which was almost identical but had a thumbprint reader. If I had not done research and blindly accepted what the Office Depot rep called a "great buy", I would have royally screwed myself.
I promptly removed the minimal amount of trialware that was installed and have really enjoyed my nice shiny new laptop.
I used to build my own desktops but quickly realized 1) it's not financially rational, upgrading an OEM box makes a lot more sense and 2) really, I just don't have the time. I have an old Athlon 64 box I did put together in my girlfriend's sons room running Ubuntu. It's got my mailserver and SSH running, so I can access Linux any time I need.
I believe that decision was made to make interactive PDF's possible. There was a serious case of feature creep in the PDF specification. This stems from Adobe really being out of touch with what users expected PDF to be(just a universal page layout format) and what they wanted to make it.
PDF now supports buttons, Javascript and a whole slew of other features that for the most part are not typically used. In fact, anyone who wants to use those features probably shouldn't be using PDF at all since only the Adobe reader supports them! There isn't even a good open source PDF program that supports forms. Some readers display them properly, but none that I can find allow you to complete them and save the completed form.
What if perception matches reality?
I saw a coupon for 2 gallons of milk for $2.98. Now, normally I purchase milk relatively rarely because of it's high cost.
However, in this case, it was $1.49 per gallon. This comes out to about 6 pounds per dollar, or roughly 15 cents per pound. This is approximately the same cost as the wholesaler rate for milk in my area, which seems to imply to me that either the store is selling milk with coupons nearly at a loss to encourage buyers to come in, OR the store is screwing the dairies on wholesale prices.
Regardless, my perception that I'm getting a deal matches reality. I could close my eyes and pretend I never saw it so as to avoid making the smart purchase, but that seems foolish.