Yep, the old Microsoft was great. The new Microsoft is just plain retarded.
Any tard can slap new eyecandy on a tired old app, especially when you're selling it to even bigger tards.
Windows Calc is quite possibly the most abused utility in my arsenal, even more than Notepad.
Laptop-illiterate power freak here
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 1
Please, for the love of Zod, educate me as to why someone would want a lapdesk ? Maybe I have tunnel vision, but it seems to me like most people use their laptops on a conventional office desk, or at least some sort of table. It's hard to find a chair without a nearby table, unless you're waiting in the emergency lobby or watching life trickle away at the bus stop. I know some unenlightened souls like compute in bed, spraying awful music all over their MySpace profile while being anally violated by 50 Cent's ego, but frankly I don't care about those tards and I certainly don't want to market a computing accessory to people who blow every last penny of their fry-cook wage on rap albums and Febreze.
What would be nice, perhaps as an evolution of mini-laptops like the EEeeeeeee PC, is a laptop that's ergonomically designed for one-handed typing (wanker jokes aside!) Something that you can comfortably hold in one hand and type with the other, like a supersized PDA on steroids. At least some sort of convenient step-up until wearable computing goes mainstream in a decade or two.
I don't even carry a laptop anymore, but that's because I'm a power freak and nobody makes a quad-core 8gb-Ram SCSI Raid laptop. *blinks* I guess I could strap it to my back along with a car battery:P
I hate to crush your optimism with the harsh reality of modern bureaucracy, but this seems like an administrative snafu by the RIAA.
Some new guy probably went chasing after these colleges, not knowing that these particular districts had not yet been successfully bribed. Beginner's mistake, won't happen again. The only time the RIAA uses any sort of intellect is when choosing targets. The states/districts where they have the greatest success is where they will concentrate their efforts, because on the 6 o'clock news and on/. it doesn't matter whether the victim is in Iowa, Florida or New Mexico - the buzz, the sensationalism is the same.
Aside from the trendy corporate bashing that happens when any billion dollar crackpot-led company is on the menu, I lost all faith in Oracle the day they deprecated the term "database" in favor of "application platform", and added a couple zeros to the price.
Oracle, much like Microsoft, has lost its purpose. They absorb, invade and cheapen every single area of computing with their predatory acquisitions. It used to be that Microsoft was an OS company, and Oracle was a DB company. Oh, and Google was a search engine company. The lines have since been blurred and they're all trying to take over whatever's profitable.
Eventually we might see Oracle Burgers and Microsoft Shawarma. Anybody up for some IBM Pizza ?
That's just a side-effect of living in the USA for too damned long.
Everyone thinks they can sue at random, because the legal system is so very broken that it often rewards its abuses more than legitimate applications of the law.
Time to start flooding whitehouse.gov with spam. Overload their storage system, and they will eventually give up on email storage. It's a pipe dream, but if the white house won't log their mail, maybe we'll see a tiny bit less push on big-brother bills.
That's possibly because security staff are usually agency people, they come and go. The kid who's walking you out today, was but an itch in his father's nether when you joined the company. You can't expect him to respect you, because to his careless gaze you're a nobody, just like everyone else.
I can understand escorting the person if they're being fired for misconduct (or plain ol' incompetence, though we don't see enough of that in this mediocre age). You just don't want to give them the chance to retaliate. 2 weeks severance pay is a whole lot cheaper than the PR damage of a confidentiality leak and resultant lawsuit.
Someone who is peacefully leaving, that's a whole different game. You DON'T want to piss them off, because they're trying to leave on good terms and you're effectively taking a dump all over that honesty. Chances are, they have friends in there who won't think highly of your theatrics and lose a little faith in the company; after all, they could be next! They might even help set the company up for a big fall, I know I would.
Treat your employees like family, and your company will prosper, even if you're in the business of selling a detestable piece of software everyone's forced to use.
In the many years since I've been writing code (and I started on an Atari 400!), I've always sided with caution when dealing with outside-interfacing code. CRC-16 was easy to smash, then CRC-32 lasted just a teeny bit longer, then MD5 collisions, and now SHA-1/2. The one thing about computing power is that it is constantly growing; the hash that protects you today will be a script kiddie's joke tomorrow.
There is one thing that can throw them for a loop: combinations. It's a heck of a lot harder to reverse three interlocked hashes... you might be able to fudge one, but the other one (or two, three, ten) will trip. It also spreads the risk of weaknesses in the individual algorithms.
Now I'm not negating the need for a better hash, but there are very functional things we can do in the meantime to cover our asses.
As much as I hate (russian|chinese|korean|nigerian) spammers/botnets, I don't see how the FBI could possibly help. I know it's draconian, but I simply block off all access to my servers from a number of IP ranges I deem unfit, and that includes the aforementioned countries. Frankly, that's all the help I need.
Digital racism ? Maybe. It's not that I don't like chinese people, I just like them better when they don't harbor heinous criminals. Heck, I like white folk better when they don't harbor heinous criminals too, and I'm just as quick to ban them if they give me trouble.
It's a free internet, if people don't play nice, I have no obligation to play with them.
It's times like this I'm so glad my server is in Amsterdam. Germany was actually my 2nd choice, because of the freedoms accorded (until now). A high ping is a small price to pay to dodge all these trigger-happy legislators, at least for the time being.
Forget Skynet, the government is becoming self-conscious. At least the robots only wanted to kill us quickly.
That's funny, I lost trust in them as a teenager when I realized every Sony product I owned would stupidly die less then 2-3 years after purchase, as a result of cheap manufacturing and bizarre design decisions. The few products that lasted turned out to be proprietary locked-in junk like Minidisc and SACD.
The only reason Sony survives with their stupid products, is the even stupider people who continue to buy them despite overwhelming negative reviews and PR. I guess marketing does work after all!
If I were manufacturing the cheapest junk ever build, I'd want to coax my suckers into buying big too, because the same client won't be coming back, ever!
Seriously, we need to turn this garbage culture back around. Things are being designed to the very limit of human tolerance. I don't need gadgets that break every six months, I already own a f**king car.
Maybe I've been an elitist geek for too long, but I clearly remember "real" SSDs being a heck of a lot faster than 100mb/sec. Of course, they used actual DRAM instead of flash, and they'd lose everything if your battery ran out. It was essentially a hardware Ramdisk, with the (then-tremendous) benefit that it doesn't depend on the PC's memory controller, so back when the average PC had 16mb ram, you could have a 640mb SSD that pwned everything without breaking a sweat.
A few years ago there was this bizarre Gigabyte i-Ram gadget that took four DDR dimms of any size and connected by SATA, it was relatively cheap too at ~$125 (sans Ram). If they had made a larger model, say 8 or 16gb, I'd be all over it! There's also this FusionIO company that's kind of spinning its wheels right now, in true dot-com style, but they're at least trying to bring the concept of DRAM-based storage back into the spotlight.
Even with 15k drives and RAID, there are some things that just take forever on my workstation (random access stuff). Consumer equipment is getting really fast, but the high-end has been stagnating for years. With more and more people taking advantage of quad-core processors, dabbling with audio/video editing and hi-def content, not only do we need larger capacity, but we need massively increased transfer rates to match. What good is a terabyte disk if it takes 10 hours to read/write the whole thing ? Where are my 150mb/sec transfer rates ? Why design high-speed SATA interfaces if the actual drives can't even use a third of its juice ?
These flash drives serve a purpose, yes, but I think it's safe to say their target market is less concerned about transfer rate and more about battery life and shock-resistance. For the other 98% of the world, we want more speed dammit!
It's not just Australia. The school systems in North America are just as guilty of silencing dissident speech. The reality is that the system is horribly broken and distorted pretty much everywhere, but just like a used car salesman they're quick to hide the flaws instead of solving the problems at the root.
The problem is the education system and its not-so-subtle agendas. Normally I'd be quick to advocate private schooling, but there's an upsetting lack of skilled freelance teachers in the world. Home-schooled kids just end up even more useless than their retarded parents.
Seriously though, we have maple syrup. That's like a peace pipe to the umpteenth power. You just can't stay angry at someone when they're pouring liquid sugar in your mouth:)
I probably spend at least a third of my gear budget on "dumb" hardware, i.e. stuff that does not compute like the chassis, enclosures, brackets/rails and other accessories. If my only care were CPU or disk density, I'd just mount everything to pegboards and stick a big household fan in front.
But I also care about esthetics, and I would love to use something like a Mac Mini or Apple TV as a file server... small, quiet, and doesn't look out-of-place in the living room. Problem is, the first thing I'd do is add a ton of Ram and install FreeNAS... not worth paying the Apple "tax" if the only thing I want is the form factor.
Unfortunately, the chinese knockoffs don't even come close, though some Asus slivers are starting to look good.
That's precisely where the budget dedicated servers shine. Your app may crawl on a shared server with a hundred other clients, but it would probably run smoothly even on a little 1ghz dedi box.
I guess the deciding factor is whether you're doing it as a hobby, or as a potential business. $10 for a hobby site is peanuts. $40-50 is a bit much IMO.
I'd be happier if they stopped advertising those ridiculous bandwidth and disk quotas, particularly the gimmick about growing it weekly. If they can't handle the load they've sold TODAY, how the hell can they handle load + 5% next week ?
I know I'm a purist, I just have no tolerance for sensationalism. If I sell someone a 5mbit slice, they get exactly 5mbit; they pay the full price for that pipe, and they can peg it 24/7 for all I care because I don't oversell. Likewise, if they buy 500gb monthly and they run out, it's because they ignored my "top-up" warnings and used up their quota, I throttle them down to peanuts until the phone rings. My clients know exactly what they're getting, there's nothing fuzzy about it. In my contracts there is no "up to 2TB" cop-out clause, I commit to it, and if I need to, I'll jump through hoops to honor my part of the contract.
The biggest difference between my services and DH, is that I go for larger clients in smaller numbers, which allows me to run the whole business on my own. Sales, admin, support is all just one guy. Sure, if I crammed a couple hundred $10 users on the same box, I could probably afford outsourced tech support, but why the hell would I want that in the first place ? It would be like herding cattle!
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Yep, the old Microsoft was great. The new Microsoft is just plain retarded.
Any tard can slap new eyecandy on a tired old app, especially when you're selling it to even bigger tards.
Windows Calc is quite possibly the most abused utility in my arsenal, even more than Notepad.
Please, for the love of Zod, educate me as to why someone would want a lapdesk ? Maybe I have tunnel vision, but it seems to me like most people use their laptops on a conventional office desk, or at least some sort of table. It's hard to find a chair without a nearby table, unless you're waiting in the emergency lobby or watching life trickle away at the bus stop. I know some unenlightened souls like compute in bed, spraying awful music all over their MySpace profile while being anally violated by 50 Cent's ego, but frankly I don't care about those tards and I certainly don't want to market a computing accessory to people who blow every last penny of their fry-cook wage on rap albums and Febreze.
:P
What would be nice, perhaps as an evolution of mini-laptops like the EEeeeeeee PC, is a laptop that's ergonomically designed for one-handed typing (wanker jokes aside!) Something that you can comfortably hold in one hand and type with the other, like a supersized PDA on steroids. At least some sort of convenient step-up until wearable computing goes mainstream in a decade or two.
I don't even carry a laptop anymore, but that's because I'm a power freak and nobody makes a quad-core 8gb-Ram SCSI Raid laptop. *blinks* I guess I could strap it to my back along with a car battery
I hate to crush your optimism with the harsh reality of modern bureaucracy, but this seems like an administrative snafu by the RIAA.
/. it doesn't matter whether the victim is in Iowa, Florida or New Mexico - the buzz, the sensationalism is the same.
Some new guy probably went chasing after these colleges, not knowing that these particular districts had not yet been successfully bribed. Beginner's mistake, won't happen again. The only time the RIAA uses any sort of intellect is when choosing targets. The states/districts where they have the greatest success is where they will concentrate their efforts, because on the 6 o'clock news and on
Aside from the trendy corporate bashing that happens when any billion dollar crackpot-led company is on the menu, I lost all faith in Oracle the day they deprecated the term "database" in favor of "application platform", and added a couple zeros to the price.
Oracle, much like Microsoft, has lost its purpose. They absorb, invade and cheapen every single area of computing with their predatory acquisitions. It used to be that Microsoft was an OS company, and Oracle was a DB company. Oh, and Google was a search engine company. The lines have since been blurred and they're all trying to take over whatever's profitable.
Eventually we might see Oracle Burgers and Microsoft Shawarma. Anybody up for some IBM Pizza ?
That's just a side-effect of living in the USA for too damned long.
Everyone thinks they can sue at random, because the legal system is so very broken that it often rewards its abuses more than legitimate applications of the law.
Time to start flooding whitehouse.gov with spam. Overload their storage system, and they will eventually give up on email storage. It's a pipe dream, but if the white house won't log their mail, maybe we'll see a tiny bit less push on big-brother bills.
How about they decode the music, then find that "RADIUM" warezed license for Sound Forge in there ?
Dig that painter up and watch the RIAA sue his decomposed ass.
That's possibly because security staff are usually agency people, they come and go. The kid who's walking you out today, was but an itch in his father's nether when you joined the company. You can't expect him to respect you, because to his careless gaze you're a nobody, just like everyone else.
I can understand escorting the person if they're being fired for misconduct (or plain ol' incompetence, though we don't see enough of that in this mediocre age). You just don't want to give them the chance to retaliate. 2 weeks severance pay is a whole lot cheaper than the PR damage of a confidentiality leak and resultant lawsuit.
Someone who is peacefully leaving, that's a whole different game. You DON'T want to piss them off, because they're trying to leave on good terms and you're effectively taking a dump all over that honesty. Chances are, they have friends in there who won't think highly of your theatrics and lose a little faith in the company; after all, they could be next! They might even help set the company up for a big fall, I know I would.
Treat your employees like family, and your company will prosper, even if you're in the business of selling a detestable piece of software everyone's forced to use.
Is it just me, or should they move the Dvorak column to BBSpot ?
Seriously, squelch this tard.
How about we just add more bits ? :P
(no, I'm not serious!)
In the many years since I've been writing code (and I started on an Atari 400!), I've always sided with caution when dealing with outside-interfacing code. CRC-16 was easy to smash, then CRC-32 lasted just a teeny bit longer, then MD5 collisions, and now SHA-1/2. The one thing about computing power is that it is constantly growing; the hash that protects you today will be a script kiddie's joke tomorrow.
There is one thing that can throw them for a loop: combinations. It's a heck of a lot harder to reverse three interlocked hashes... you might be able to fudge one, but the other one (or two, three, ten) will trip. It also spreads the risk of weaknesses in the individual algorithms.
Now I'm not negating the need for a better hash, but there are very functional things we can do in the meantime to cover our asses.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it's time New York split off from the USA and either became a sovereign nation, or came up to party with us up in Canada.
I hate America, but I love New York! =)
And what the hell kind of government sues its own constituents over petty laws ? The crooked kind, obviously.
As much as I hate (russian|chinese|korean|nigerian) spammers/botnets, I don't see how the FBI could possibly help. I know it's draconian, but I simply block off all access to my servers from a number of IP ranges I deem unfit, and that includes the aforementioned countries. Frankly, that's all the help I need.
Digital racism ? Maybe. It's not that I don't like chinese people, I just like them better when they don't harbor heinous criminals. Heck, I like white folk better when they don't harbor heinous criminals too, and I'm just as quick to ban them if they give me trouble.
It's a free internet, if people don't play nice, I have no obligation to play with them.
It's times like this I'm so glad my server is in Amsterdam. Germany was actually my 2nd choice, because of the freedoms accorded (until now). A high ping is a small price to pay to dodge all these trigger-happy legislators, at least for the time being.
Forget Skynet, the government is becoming self-conscious. At least the robots only wanted to kill us quickly.
Obscure! green dot for you!
Short form: fuck shit fuck sony fuck ass fuck DVD fuck ps3 fuckity fuck fuck
I love you!
That's funny, I lost trust in them as a teenager when I realized every Sony product I owned would stupidly die less then 2-3 years after purchase, as a result of cheap manufacturing and bizarre design decisions. The few products that lasted turned out to be proprietary locked-in junk like Minidisc and SACD.
The only reason Sony survives with their stupid products, is the even stupider people who continue to buy them despite overwhelming negative reviews and PR. I guess marketing does work after all!
MY question is this:
How many Kalashnikovs can $400k buy ?
Seems like a tiny amount for an outright bribe. Third world or not, it's peanuts!
If I were manufacturing the cheapest junk ever build, I'd want to coax my suckers into buying big too, because the same client won't be coming back, ever!
Seriously, we need to turn this garbage culture back around. Things are being designed to the very limit of human tolerance. I don't need gadgets that break every six months, I already own a f**king car.
The night an activist calls me at 2 am to discuss their view on abortion, is the night I kill a bunch of goddamned nosey activists. Delayed abortion!
Maybe I've been an elitist geek for too long, but I clearly remember "real" SSDs being a heck of a lot faster than 100mb/sec. Of course, they used actual DRAM instead of flash, and they'd lose everything if your battery ran out. It was essentially a hardware Ramdisk, with the (then-tremendous) benefit that it doesn't depend on the PC's memory controller, so back when the average PC had 16mb ram, you could have a 640mb SSD that pwned everything without breaking a sweat.
A few years ago there was this bizarre Gigabyte i-Ram gadget that took four DDR dimms of any size and connected by SATA, it was relatively cheap too at ~$125 (sans Ram). If they had made a larger model, say 8 or 16gb, I'd be all over it! There's also this FusionIO company that's kind of spinning its wheels right now, in true dot-com style, but they're at least trying to bring the concept of DRAM-based storage back into the spotlight.
Even with 15k drives and RAID, there are some things that just take forever on my workstation (random access stuff). Consumer equipment is getting really fast, but the high-end has been stagnating for years. With more and more people taking advantage of quad-core processors, dabbling with audio/video editing and hi-def content, not only do we need larger capacity, but we need massively increased transfer rates to match. What good is a terabyte disk if it takes 10 hours to read/write the whole thing ? Where are my 150mb/sec transfer rates ? Why design high-speed SATA interfaces if the actual drives can't even use a third of its juice ?
These flash drives serve a purpose, yes, but I think it's safe to say their target market is less concerned about transfer rate and more about battery life and shock-resistance. For the other 98% of the world, we want more speed dammit!
It's not just Australia. The school systems in North America are just as guilty of silencing dissident speech. The reality is that the system is horribly broken and distorted pretty much everywhere, but just like a used car salesman they're quick to hide the flaws instead of solving the problems at the root.
The problem is the education system and its not-so-subtle agendas. Normally I'd be quick to advocate private schooling, but there's an upsetting lack of skilled freelance teachers in the world. Home-schooled kids just end up even more useless than their retarded parents.
Mmmmm... Butterscotch! I smell envy!
:)
Seriously though, we have maple syrup. That's like a peace pipe to the umpteenth power. You just can't stay angry at someone when they're pouring liquid sugar in your mouth
I probably spend at least a third of my gear budget on "dumb" hardware, i.e. stuff that does not compute like the chassis, enclosures, brackets/rails and other accessories. If my only care were CPU or disk density, I'd just mount everything to pegboards and stick a big household fan in front.
But I also care about esthetics, and I would love to use something like a Mac Mini or Apple TV as a file server... small, quiet, and doesn't look out-of-place in the living room. Problem is, the first thing I'd do is add a ton of Ram and install FreeNAS... not worth paying the Apple "tax" if the only thing I want is the form factor.
Unfortunately, the chinese knockoffs don't even come close, though some Asus slivers are starting to look good.
That's precisely where the budget dedicated servers shine. Your app may crawl on a shared server with a hundred other clients, but it would probably run smoothly even on a little 1ghz dedi box.
I guess the deciding factor is whether you're doing it as a hobby, or as a potential business. $10 for a hobby site is peanuts. $40-50 is a bit much IMO.
I'd be happier if they stopped advertising those ridiculous bandwidth and disk quotas, particularly the gimmick about growing it weekly. If they can't handle the load they've sold TODAY, how the hell can they handle load + 5% next week ?
I know I'm a purist, I just have no tolerance for sensationalism. If I sell someone a 5mbit slice, they get exactly 5mbit; they pay the full price for that pipe, and they can peg it 24/7 for all I care because I don't oversell. Likewise, if they buy 500gb monthly and they run out, it's because they ignored my "top-up" warnings and used up their quota, I throttle them down to peanuts until the phone rings. My clients know exactly what they're getting, there's nothing fuzzy about it. In my contracts there is no "up to 2TB" cop-out clause, I commit to it, and if I need to, I'll jump through hoops to honor my part of the contract.
The biggest difference between my services and DH, is that I go for larger clients in smaller numbers, which allows me to run the whole business on my own. Sales, admin, support is all just one guy. Sure, if I crammed a couple hundred $10 users on the same box, I could probably afford outsourced tech support, but why the hell would I want that in the first place ? It would be like herding cattle!