Could someone please beat Jeff Bezos over his fat head with a festivus pole already ? It's a dumb patent, for a dumb "invention" that doesn't confer any business advantage. People don't care about one-click anything, they care about finding what they want at a price they can stomach, which Amazon tends to do fairly well. Most people don't even read what they click anyway.
RIAA artist, or any other "famous" people for that matter, are no different than anyone else. They work a job, they have phones and email, and they actually enjoy social contact from time to time.
The only thing they have that we don't is ravenous bipolar fans. Oh wait, we do have those, they're called users.
BIND's crime is of being yet another piece of open-source software trying to become its own operating system with extremely verbose, anal-retentive configs.
It's nice to have extensive configurability for those unique situations, but sometimes you just want a frickin' DNS lookup. "somename.com = a.b.c.d" and be done with it. The problem is most open-source apps aren't designed to be usable, they're designed to be "geek cool" and to somehow distance us sysadmins from the 'inferior' power users with unnecessary complexity.
Strictly speaking, if I got fed up enough with BIND, I could probably replace it with a single-page PERL script, because most people use DNS for only two things: resolve hostnames for local users/processes, and resolve their own hostnames for everyone else. Done. I don't need all the other features; in fact I'm quite happy with the defaults, and simple apps are simple to debug.
The other 90% of BIND is used by maybe 10% of users. It also causes about 90% of the security breaches because the new breed of sysadmins these days are simply copy/paste experts. They Google something, copy the proposed (and often amateurish) configs, then flame the forums if it doesn't work. As much as these guys are dumb/lazy, if the thing were simple in the first place they might be able to figure it out on their own, instead of copying some guy's half-understood configs.
Ahh but it hasn't stayed "on" all this time, it automatically goes to sleep and resumes when there's activity. I'd estimate it only spends 4-5 hours powered up per day, the rest in S3 sleep. I remote in from work when I need to, and I play a game or two in the evening.
Besides, I'm agnostic. I don't believe in sin, I just believe in FUN!:)
Property taxes aren't always a problem. Many areas still calculate the tax based on a combination of the length of the street-facing side and the total square-footage, plus a base cost for utilities. In such a scenario, the tax is almost directly tied to the land, not the property you build on it.
Unfortunately, common sense is not a healthy part of most municipal governments.
That's hardly a rebuttal, and actually just spam. I don't want to read what your manufactured religion wants me to read, I want a real Catholic or Christian to give me a piece of their mind.
Explain to me why homosexuality is so bad. Explain to me why the preacher dude wears a dress. Explain to me why I should care about the whole Jesus thing. Explain to me why God matters in today's and tomorrow's society. Most importantly, do it all in a pertinent and rational manner.
Succeed, and I might actually have several good reasons to join. So far all of the answers I've heard, have made absolutely no sense to me. All I see is a bunch of dumb people repeating words that aren't theirs, breaking their own rules, and cowering in a sea of pretty lies that somehow make their empty lives easier to bear. Prove me wrong, and I'll listen.
If it weren't for debt, you wouldn't need 30 years worth of money to buy a home.
The debt environment artificially inflates real estate pricing because people can "afford" more. They don't end up with a bigger home, they just pay more for the same old pile of dirt. How many people would own homes if it weren't for mortages ? More than you think, because everyone needs a home. What ? You think the land owners and banks would sit idly, waiting for that one wealthy buyer per thousand ? No, they would adapt, or else we would mob them!
Seriously, it's a low-tech box made of concrete and wood, supposed to protect people from the elements and from other people. How such a basic device could come to be worth half a million or more is beyond logic.
Ditto. XP has reached maturity and is very stable. I'm actually a bit of a freak in that I run Windows 2003 Server as a workstation. It requires a bit of tweaking, but I've found it to be the smoothest XP experience available. Everything runs great, including all the latest games. Uptime is flawless, as I've gone for 100+ days between reboots, usually because I was upgrading hardware or physically moving the PC.
The other big reason why I prefer 2003 is that it actually knows what to do with 4gb+ of Ram. Not 3.25gb like XP and Vista. I get some of the benefits of 64-bit operation, but in a 32-bit environment (with 32-bit driver compatibility). Now I know this is just trickery using PAE, but it's trickery that Microsoft is too cheap to implement in consumer releases.
I have Vista on a second partition, but I haven't booted it in a few weeks. My only intent is to run a few DX10 games, because quite frankly I don't like anything about it. It's sluggish, confusing (to an old-schooler), and I've already run into problems with many favorite apps and tools. It doesn't do anything better for me than the old incarnation, and if I could reliably add DX10 game functionality to XP/2003, I'd trash Vista in a heartbeat. At least they could have thrown in a modernized version of Solitaire, but even that was disappointing.
First let me correct your typo: "Vista is a fairly big shit"... there, much better!
It's great that you like Vista, I know quite a few people who do. I personally don't, for the simple reason that Vista is another step in the wrong direction in my opinion.
Maybe I'm missing something, despite the fact that I'm a system developer and hardware nut, but it seems to me like Windows is a GUI with a bunch of garbage tacked on. The GUI itself is alright, it's all the other junk that gets in the way while accomplishing very little. All I ever see is a lackluster file manager glued onto a very basic, featureless icon-based desktop, with the very stiff Start Menu and task bar. Aside from a few APIs for sound, graphics, networking and various other hardware interfaces, everything else seems extraneous. I don't mind the IE browser, because it's a convenient way for me to download Firefox on the first boot.
What is it that eats up 7gb of disk space and 2 minutes of boot time in Vista ? Old DOS games from a decade ago had flashy graphics not unlike the Aero Glass effects, so what's the big deal ? What's going on under that hood that I can't see or use, yet requires so much power and hardware ?
I'm going to stick my neck out, and say that Windows hasn't evolved since 95. Sure, they changed the underlying architecture, got rid of DOS and a whole bunch of other things most people never noticed (except us techies), but the interface has stayed 99% the same. It works the same, does pretty much the same job, so what true reason does anyone have to upgrade ?
Until someone comes up with a revolutionary interface that actually helps me work more efficiently, I'm going to resist these forced upgrades. I don't build monster PCs for the "privilege" of running Vista, I build them because help me get my work done quicker. Right now, Vista just wastes my time. I don't even run a regular XP install, I strip all the crap out beforehand using NLite. If I could run just the naked NT kernel with my own file manager and desktop, I'd be quite content, because I hardly use any of the bundled apps, save for Calc.exe! Not even notepad!
It is indeed a PITA, but one that can be minimized if you're the kind of fella that installs XP all the time. I keep a RW disc handy with a customized XP build (using NLite). Every once in a while I take a few minutes to integrate the latest hotfixes, so I end up with an always-current disc ready to install.
It's a huge time saver when you consider the 100+ installs I do in a year (no, not on the same machine!)
My friend was raised conservative Christian, and his parents wouldn't let him read or see science fiction or fantasy.
That's because they didn't want to be pressed with the hard questions that come up when science and religion collide. Someone who truly adheres to their faith would not be scared by competing views and would openly welcome the critique and discussion, confident in their beliefs. Unfortunately, when it comes to Catholicism there isn't much of a leg to stand on.
Okay, fine, I'm a low-wage tech worker (from my own career mismanagement). I make that much per day, which is real cute but I still find the cost of Microsoft's operating systems prohibitive given what little they actually do for me. Care to explain how Microsoft can profit from a nation that can't afford their product ? It's not like Nigerians are lining up at Best Buy for some Aero Glass lovin' on their shiny quad-core gaming rig.
I'd love it if Ferrari bribed me to promote their vehicles, but it wouldn't earn them a penny because all the idiots in my town drive Audis and BMW 3-series and other cheap snobmobiles. There just isn't much of a market for rock stars in Ottawa (our coke is shitty anyway!).
It almost feels like Microsoft has run out of viable markets to invade, so they're going after scraps to complete their bingo card. I'm still waiting for my Microsoft Refrigerator (that requires monthly patches to support new foods), Microsoft Car (that forces me to call some offshore activation center every time I rotate the tires), Microsoft Lightbulb (that only comes in brown and has to be removed and reinserted into the fixture every few months), and of course the Microsoft Chair, which reserves the right to get pulled out from under you and thrown at any moment. *rimshot*
True, but since I run a dedicated server in a DC, I'm largely unaffected by The Netherlands' implementation of this directive. Technically nobody is "dialing into" my server, I'm not assigning anyone an IP address, so I have no connection logs to keep. I still perform very defensive logging, but its intended purpose is simply to help me in my tasks as a system administrator (like dropping every single packet from Korea and China).
The day the government comes asking for my logs, will be the day I close up shop. The gov't doesn't get a log of all the people who commerce with me in person, my online visitors are entitled to the same level of privacy and anonymity that they would enjoy in my physical establishment.
There used to be a time, long long ago, when government was created by people. Technically, we own this big broken machine, every one of us. We pay its upkeep, we share its infrequent benefits, we own this bitch. I think it's high time the people were reminded of this fact and told the appointed proxies we call Presidents, Senators and Ministers who's boss.
Yep the discrepancies between states make up a significant part of the problem. Nevermind Jack Thompson, just look at the RIAA's tactics - they specifically target people in "weak" states where people are either easily bought out, or the judges are too drunk to care.
Technological evolution is yet again foiled by financial obsession. I can think of many applications where this technology could help stimulate a dramatic growth in performance/efficiency... just the benefit of not having a platter die every few weeks means a lot less downtime/recovery/junior staff!
Ok, this has gone on for far too long. In traditional Billco fashion, I'm pulling out all stops!
Gene Simmons is a joke. He hasn't sung or spoken anything worth hearing in three decades. He claims to be the biggest dog in the world (whores are cheap!). He's not even from here, he immigrated to the USA as a child yet stomps around like he's America's golden boy.
The man's a has-been's has-been, and the only way he can get anyone to even look at him is to behave like a ravenous ape. He will say and do anything to get attention, and this is a prime example.
The man has nothing to gain from combating piracy. His best years are long gone. He just wants to go around the talk show circuit for a while, make a last buck then die doing speedballs off a dozen underage hookers' asses. FUCK HIM!
Your superior logic is no match for our puny greed.
If anyone anywhere ever gave a damn about the big picture, we wouldn't have class action lawsuits. We wouldn't have many lawyers either, because we would find better things to do than bicker in court over pieces of paper with random numbers printed on them.
Actually, it's been a very long time since I last saw a commercial WiFi router that didn't come with big bold instructions in the box on top of the device, or sometimes even taped over the plugs/sockets, that says "Install the software to secure your network - BEFORE PLUGGING IT IN!". If a user chooses to ignore these big bold warnings, then I say it's their fault. If the device didn't come with such a warning, then it's the manufacturer's fault.
Don't go blaming the wifi "eavesdroppers" when it's the router that's broadcasting its availability over the air. If the user is too lazy/stupid to read the simple instructions to set it up, then they deserve no pity nor protection from any law.
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Could someone please beat Jeff Bezos over his fat head with a festivus pole already ? It's a dumb patent, for a dumb "invention" that doesn't confer any business advantage. People don't care about one-click anything, they care about finding what they want at a price they can stomach, which Amazon tends to do fairly well. Most people don't even read what they click anyway.
RIAA artist, or any other "famous" people for that matter, are no different than anyone else. They work a job, they have phones and email, and they actually enjoy social contact from time to time.
The only thing they have that we don't is ravenous bipolar fans. Oh wait, we do have those, they're called users.
Dude have you ever even used BIND ?
BIND's crime is of being yet another piece of open-source software trying to become its own operating system with extremely verbose, anal-retentive configs.
It's nice to have extensive configurability for those unique situations, but sometimes you just want a frickin' DNS lookup. "somename.com = a.b.c.d" and be done with it. The problem is most open-source apps aren't designed to be usable, they're designed to be "geek cool" and to somehow distance us sysadmins from the 'inferior' power users with unnecessary complexity.
Strictly speaking, if I got fed up enough with BIND, I could probably replace it with a single-page PERL script, because most people use DNS for only two things: resolve hostnames for local users/processes, and resolve their own hostnames for everyone else. Done. I don't need all the other features; in fact I'm quite happy with the defaults, and simple apps are simple to debug.
The other 90% of BIND is used by maybe 10% of users. It also causes about 90% of the security breaches because the new breed of sysadmins these days are simply copy/paste experts. They Google something, copy the proposed (and often amateurish) configs, then flame the forums if it doesn't work. As much as these guys are dumb/lazy, if the thing were simple in the first place they might be able to figure it out on their own, instead of copying some guy's half-understood configs.
Ahh but it hasn't stayed "on" all this time, it automatically goes to sleep and resumes when there's activity. I'd estimate it only spends 4-5 hours powered up per day, the rest in S3 sleep. I remote in from work when I need to, and I play a game or two in the evening.
:)
Besides, I'm agnostic. I don't believe in sin, I just believe in FUN!
Property taxes aren't always a problem. Many areas still calculate the tax based on a combination of the length of the street-facing side and the total square-footage, plus a base cost for utilities. In such a scenario, the tax is almost directly tied to the land, not the property you build on it.
Unfortunately, common sense is not a healthy part of most municipal governments.
Hello from China. I am your friend. Buy some of my Viagra.
P.S. Good luck suing me in small claims court
-Your personal spammer
If you've ever owned a car in the last two decades, you should know that sensors always fail. Always.
That's hardly a rebuttal, and actually just spam. I don't want to read what your manufactured religion wants me to read, I want a real Catholic or Christian to give me a piece of their mind.
Explain to me why homosexuality is so bad. Explain to me why the preacher dude wears a dress. Explain to me why I should care about the whole Jesus thing. Explain to me why God matters in today's and tomorrow's society. Most importantly, do it all in a pertinent and rational manner.
Succeed, and I might actually have several good reasons to join. So far all of the answers I've heard, have made absolutely no sense to me. All I see is a bunch of dumb people repeating words that aren't theirs, breaking their own rules, and cowering in a sea of pretty lies that somehow make their empty lives easier to bear. Prove me wrong, and I'll listen.
If it weren't for debt, you wouldn't need 30 years worth of money to buy a home.
The debt environment artificially inflates real estate pricing because people can "afford" more. They don't end up with a bigger home, they just pay more for the same old pile of dirt. How many people would own homes if it weren't for mortages ? More than you think, because everyone needs a home. What ? You think the land owners and banks would sit idly, waiting for that one wealthy buyer per thousand ? No, they would adapt, or else we would mob them!
Seriously, it's a low-tech box made of concrete and wood, supposed to protect people from the elements and from other people. How such a basic device could come to be worth half a million or more is beyond logic.
Ditto. XP has reached maturity and is very stable. I'm actually a bit of a freak in that I run Windows 2003 Server as a workstation. It requires a bit of tweaking, but I've found it to be the smoothest XP experience available. Everything runs great, including all the latest games. Uptime is flawless, as I've gone for 100+ days between reboots, usually because I was upgrading hardware or physically moving the PC.
The other big reason why I prefer 2003 is that it actually knows what to do with 4gb+ of Ram. Not 3.25gb like XP and Vista. I get some of the benefits of 64-bit operation, but in a 32-bit environment (with 32-bit driver compatibility). Now I know this is just trickery using PAE, but it's trickery that Microsoft is too cheap to implement in consumer releases.
I have Vista on a second partition, but I haven't booted it in a few weeks. My only intent is to run a few DX10 games, because quite frankly I don't like anything about it. It's sluggish, confusing (to an old-schooler), and I've already run into problems with many favorite apps and tools. It doesn't do anything better for me than the old incarnation, and if I could reliably add DX10 game functionality to XP/2003, I'd trash Vista in a heartbeat. At least they could have thrown in a modernized version of Solitaire, but even that was disappointing.
First let me correct your typo: "Vista is a fairly big shit" ... there, much better!
It's great that you like Vista, I know quite a few people who do. I personally don't, for the simple reason that Vista is another step in the wrong direction in my opinion.
Maybe I'm missing something, despite the fact that I'm a system developer and hardware nut, but it seems to me like Windows is a GUI with a bunch of garbage tacked on. The GUI itself is alright, it's all the other junk that gets in the way while accomplishing very little. All I ever see is a lackluster file manager glued onto a very basic, featureless icon-based desktop, with the very stiff Start Menu and task bar. Aside from a few APIs for sound, graphics, networking and various other hardware interfaces, everything else seems extraneous. I don't mind the IE browser, because it's a convenient way for me to download Firefox on the first boot.
What is it that eats up 7gb of disk space and 2 minutes of boot time in Vista ? Old DOS games from a decade ago had flashy graphics not unlike the Aero Glass effects, so what's the big deal ? What's going on under that hood that I can't see or use, yet requires so much power and hardware ?
I'm going to stick my neck out, and say that Windows hasn't evolved since 95. Sure, they changed the underlying architecture, got rid of DOS and a whole bunch of other things most people never noticed (except us techies), but the interface has stayed 99% the same. It works the same, does pretty much the same job, so what true reason does anyone have to upgrade ?
Until someone comes up with a revolutionary interface that actually helps me work more efficiently, I'm going to resist these forced upgrades. I don't build monster PCs for the "privilege" of running Vista, I build them because help me get my work done quicker. Right now, Vista just wastes my time. I don't even run a regular XP install, I strip all the crap out beforehand using NLite. If I could run just the naked NT kernel with my own file manager and desktop, I'd be quite content, because I hardly use any of the bundled apps, save for Calc.exe! Not even notepad!
It is indeed a PITA, but one that can be minimized if you're the kind of fella that installs XP all the time. I keep a RW disc handy with a customized XP build (using NLite). Every once in a while I take a few minutes to integrate the latest hotfixes, so I end up with an always-current disc ready to install.
It's a huge time saver when you consider the 100+ installs I do in a year (no, not on the same machine!)
Well sir, when this continent finally goes to hell and this show gets greenlighted, I want to be the host! :)
That's because they didn't want to be pressed with the hard questions that come up when science and religion collide. Someone who truly adheres to their faith would not be scared by competing views and would openly welcome the critique and discussion, confident in their beliefs. Unfortunately, when it comes to Catholicism there isn't much of a leg to stand on.
Okay, fine, I'm a low-wage tech worker (from my own career mismanagement). I make that much per day, which is real cute but I still find the cost of Microsoft's operating systems prohibitive given what little they actually do for me. Care to explain how Microsoft can profit from a nation that can't afford their product ? It's not like Nigerians are lining up at Best Buy for some Aero Glass lovin' on their shiny quad-core gaming rig.
I'd love it if Ferrari bribed me to promote their vehicles, but it wouldn't earn them a penny because all the idiots in my town drive Audis and BMW 3-series and other cheap snobmobiles. There just isn't much of a market for rock stars in Ottawa (our coke is shitty anyway!).
It almost feels like Microsoft has run out of viable markets to invade, so they're going after scraps to complete their bingo card. I'm still waiting for my Microsoft Refrigerator (that requires monthly patches to support new foods), Microsoft Car (that forces me to call some offshore activation center every time I rotate the tires), Microsoft Lightbulb (that only comes in brown and has to be removed and reinserted into the fixture every few months), and of course the Microsoft Chair, which reserves the right to get pulled out from under you and thrown at any moment. *rimshot*
mine would go:
And then they came for my traffic, but got distracted by all the pr0n and I shot the bastards!
True, but since I run a dedicated server in a DC, I'm largely unaffected by The Netherlands' implementation of this directive. Technically nobody is "dialing into" my server, I'm not assigning anyone an IP address, so I have no connection logs to keep. I still perform very defensive logging, but its intended purpose is simply to help me in my tasks as a system administrator (like dropping every single packet from Korea and China).
The day the government comes asking for my logs, will be the day I close up shop. The gov't doesn't get a log of all the people who commerce with me in person, my online visitors are entitled to the same level of privacy and anonymity that they would enjoy in my physical establishment.
There used to be a time, long long ago, when government was created by people. Technically, we own this big broken machine, every one of us. We pay its upkeep, we share its infrequent benefits, we own this bitch. I think it's high time the people were reminded of this fact and told the appointed proxies we call Presidents, Senators and Ministers who's boss.
Yep the discrepancies between states make up a significant part of the problem. Nevermind Jack Thompson, just look at the RIAA's tactics - they specifically target people in "weak" states where people are either easily bought out, or the judges are too drunk to care.
And there lies the problem.
Technological evolution is yet again foiled by financial obsession. I can think of many applications where this technology could help stimulate a dramatic growth in performance/efficiency... just the benefit of not having a platter die every few weeks means a lot less downtime/recovery/junior staff!
It's not odd, it's called greed, a very common and well-understood mental illness most often found in people of low national fiber.
Maybe that's because whoever won the super bowl is only famous for running like an idiot with a ball.
Tesla didn't run much, but he's responsible for the electricity empire that powers almost every aspect of our lives.
Ok, this has gone on for far too long. In traditional Billco fashion, I'm pulling out all stops!
Gene Simmons is a joke. He hasn't sung or spoken anything worth hearing in three decades. He claims to be the biggest dog in the world (whores are cheap!). He's not even from here, he immigrated to the USA as a child yet stomps around like he's America's golden boy.
The man's a has-been's has-been, and the only way he can get anyone to even look at him is to behave like a ravenous ape. He will say and do anything to get attention, and this is a prime example.
The man has nothing to gain from combating piracy. His best years are long gone. He just wants to go around the talk show circuit for a while, make a last buck then die doing speedballs off a dozen underage hookers' asses.
FUCK HIM!
Your superior logic is no match for our puny greed.
If anyone anywhere ever gave a damn about the big picture, we wouldn't have class action lawsuits. We wouldn't have many lawyers either, because we would find better things to do than bicker in court over pieces of paper with random numbers printed on them.
How much?
This would be a whole lot nicer than my current stack of SCSI 15k drives, and I'll bet they put out a lot less heat too!
Actually, it's been a very long time since I last saw a commercial WiFi router that didn't come with big bold instructions in the box on top of the device, or sometimes even taped over the plugs/sockets, that says "Install the software to secure your network - BEFORE PLUGGING IT IN!". If a user chooses to ignore these big bold warnings, then I say it's their fault. If the device didn't come with such a warning, then it's the manufacturer's fault.
Don't go blaming the wifi "eavesdroppers" when it's the router that's broadcasting its availability over the air. If the user is too lazy/stupid to read the simple instructions to set it up, then they deserve no pity nor protection from any law.