My point was that users would actually like that sort of security vulnerability, because to their untrained eyes, the vulnerability is invisible...
If you buy a car, whose locks can be opened by every key issued by that auto maker, you won't know until someone drives off with your car; and even then, you might assume they just used the good ol' slim jim then shorted your starter. You won't realize your car is vulnerable until an "expert" finds out and tells you, in simple terms, why your car sucks.
Same thing with software and users. They're just not qualified to perform that kind of analysis. You can give them quick tips like "don't share your entire hard drive", but that won't stop a malicious app from sharing their C:\Documents and Settings... the user doesn't know their personal registry trunk is stored in there, right where an intruder could snap it up and find all sorts of fun things like passwords and URL histories.
So we tell car owners to not leave their doors unlocked, but can we really expect them to tell a good lock from a bad one ?
Who cares about McAfee anyway ? They haven't produced a functional virus scanner since DOS was king. Symantec may be a monumental joke with all its holes, but McAfee takes the dunce cap for producing several generations of idle-looping resource hogs.
These are the same imbeciles who were touting dual-core CPUs as the greatest thing since sliced bread, largely because now their idle-loops could only max out ONE core, leaving you with the second core free to open up a task list and conveniently kill the scanner.
Politics would make a lot more sense if people actually put a little thought into their choices, rather than spinning a wheel to choose who they hate this week.
An entry-level dual-core CPU 2.0 GHz or higher (the target for most video playback applications) can typically process a minimum of 14 billion instructions per second
Please correct me if my 22 years of machine code programming have me in the wrong, but if a CPU runs at 2.0ghz, doesn't that set the upper limit at uhm (counts on fingers) 2 billion instructions per second ? Double it for dual-core. That would be the maximum, and not all instructions complete in a single cycle. Throw in some fetch latency and memory delays, with a healthy dose of I/O spinlocks and pathetic high-level interpreted code, and those 2 billion ops whittle down to maybe 500-700 million actual operations assuming a typical home-user mix of applications.
See the thing with computers, they're reeeeally fast in their own mind. It's in dealing with the outside world (hardware) that things slow down to a crawl. Polling a graphics or sound device 30 times per second, over an already-congested system bus, might not take your system down, but that doesn't mean it's not a huge waste of performance, effort and mindshare.
Heck, remember a while back when people had 200-300mhz systems, and they added a crappy WinModem to the mix which chewed up every last cycle to process a puny little 16khz signal. Just the same, a small polling loop running at 30hz, times every piece of "trusted" hardware in your system, might not add up to much on paper, but in practice it is an undesirable blip in the timing loop, serving only to appease the dirty bastards whose business model has long been obsolete.
The modding community "expects it" because you own the goddamned hardware, it should be yours to tinker in whichever way you like.
When you buy a car, does the dealership forcefully prevent you from using "unapproved" gasoline ? Do they tell you which bumper stickers you're allowed to stick, and where ? Do they come and smash your car with a crowbar if you disobey ?
Analog took a nosedive because they needed to make elbow room (bandwidth) for the digital channels. The problem is that in many cases the digital video is encoded with a low bitrate so you see some artifacting. The common justification for this poor quality video is that "it's TV, not BluRay", because if they were to broadcast TV in crystal-clear high-bitrate digital, people would be able to copy the stream and make their own uber-high quality DVDs and HD-DVDs, and we all know the entertainment industry doesn't want that! It also creates an opportunity to scale quality for each individual channel (or time slot!). Just like ISPs throttle "undesirable" packets down to 1200 baud, cable companies can lower the bitrate on a competitor's channel to free up more bandwidth for the football game, or Nip/Tuck, or whatever garbage their parent company wants to push. Or they could just squeeze everything and throw another 50 shit channels onto the pile at $2.99 apiece. They could have multi-angle channel clusters of Whoopi Goldberg's nose for all I care.
The big problem is that cable is now competing with digital satellite, which also has fixed bandwidth so the playing field is a bit more level. The difference is that cable is easy, anyone can get it hooked up (except for clueless cable installers). With satellite, you have to be facing a clear southern sky, you have to drill holes for the wiring, yadda yadda... for the majority of people living in apartment buildings, satellite is a no-go, so cable wins by default, which means cable has a bit more leverage. They can screw us harder because most people don't have a valid alternative... it's cable or nothing, and while I'd be happy to see more people downloading their TV shows through P2P and giving the media cartels the big ol' finger, that's just not happening right now.
Seriously, why the hell would they need such a thing ? Wars were last millenium! If Russia wants to play god and blow stuff up, I'm just going to start calling them USA 2.0 and see if they like it.
More likely they will be able to correlate several anonymous posts from the same author, then focus their attention as needed. If you already know what you're looking for, it only takes one weak site to reveal your IP or some other breadcrumb that traces it all back to the source.
Meanwhile, I've been known to write every other post in l33t and/or "txt msg spk" just to throw off this potentially impressive yet patently ridiculous system. The solution to terrorism isn't "anti-terrorism", it's anti-whatever-the-hell-the-terrorists-are-pissed-off-about. If you don't solve the problem at the source, there will just be more and more so-called terrorists coming back, no matter how many of them get arrested/murdered, new ones will take their place until they get what they want.
I hemmed and hawed the first time I had to deal with CentOS, mainly because I hate RedHat with a passion. Now I'm not "in love" with CentOS, but all I can say is that it works, it's rather easy and comfy to maintain, and there's a wealth of 3rd party repositories out there to fill in gaps in the software collection.
And "yum update" breaks a lot less than "apt-get dist-upgrade" or "emerge -uavDN world". A LOT less.
If you patent that, I'm going to patent the singing dancing fat-nerd-in-tron-suit delivery system and order a complete "3rd party investigation" of your uniforms to make sure they're not infringingly similar to my tron suit.
Fuck NTP... This is a one-time thing but I'm rooting for the Telecoms this time around. I hope they squash that puny little patent abuser like a grape!
Sad as it may be, I've been grossly disappointed with Matrox since 1999 or so. I don't even understand why they're still in business today. The only product of theirs that I consider noteworthy is the TripleHead2Go, and they can shove their PCI and AGP cards where the sun don't shine. Their drivers are flaky, the hardware is temperamental, and the performance just isn't there anymore. I get more mileage out of a low-end ATI or NVidia product at a third of the cost.
Too little, too late
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Intel has had quad-core processors since November 2006, 10 months ago! Why would AMD need to keep Barcelona's release details a secret, when every single AMD fan has been waiting over a year for this damned thing ? It's hardly a secret, as they've already told almost everything to the press in August, when they were desperately trying to counter the mass exodus that resulted from Intel's staggering July price drop.
As a former AMD "fanboy", I'm not impressed. Quad-FX is embarrassing, and Barcelona is lackluster. Meanwhile Intel has been scaling their Core 2 Extreme to 3 ghz and still has good headroom on existing designs. Barcelona needs to start way higher than 2.0ghz to turn any heads, as people will just stick with the cheaper Opteron until the cost-per-GFLOP becomes more competitive.
The vulnerability is between the keyboard and chair. Norms get lured onto these sketchy p2p networks to get "free" music and movies, but they haven't a clue what they're actually doing and the implications of various configuration options.
I'm sure that if someone released a Napster-style P2P app that defaults to sharing the entire contents of your hard drive, many people would praise it for having so many files available. People don't bother, they just install the program and within seconds they're playing a 50-cent tune... Next, Next, Finish, Download! They don't even read the big red bold flashing messages... heck, they don't read the buttons they're clicking! So many times I've had people say "This program won't install" because the Next button turns into a "Cancel" button until you read the EULA or similar... that's how dumb the average computer user truly is.
I really like this idea. It may not be much, but it's one step toward "true" telecommuting... god what an ugly word.
Let's face it: most of the work done in an office doesn't require human contact. That means less land and real estate wasted on office space, a LOT less fuel wasted on the daily commute, a ton of time saved by not being jammed up in traffic two hours per day, and a few efficiency perks that naturally occur in the home, like not going out for lunch and working in a relaxed, more productive rhythm.
Let's be logical here: What's the sense in having an office if you're only using it a third of the time ? The cost of an employee is significant greater than their salary, and most of the extra is going into a black hole, with high rent, utility and infrastructure costs. Trim off some of that fat and pay your staff better wages instead, the employer can still save money in the end.
I don't care if you have kids, teach them to respect your busy time. Drop them off at a daycare center if you must. Is it going to work for everyone ? No, of course not, but it can make a huge difference when it works.
Err... maybe it's different up here in Canada, but I thought parking lots were considered private property and most definitely off-limits to squirrelly traffic cops. Stop signs and speed limits in parking lots are supposed to be unenforceable, with the exception of fire-truck areas and other emergency vehicles.
if you look at it in terms of not revenue out of your pocket, but revenue out of the carriers pocket then it is a different story
Really ? What kind of wonderful broken economy do you exist in, where costs are not passed down to the customers ? If Apple is getting a cut, that means a bunch of accountants and lawyers sat down and figured out how to maintain their profit margin. 10% going to Apple probably costs the end-user 20% or more, to cover all the middlemen. It will be a cold day in hell before a telecom willfully gives anything away. This is from the industry that takes a huge crap on loyal customers, in favor of fickle teenagers.
Education won't stop angst-ridden teens from acting out. Kids don't give a flying fuck about the meaning of their actions, they just want the attention. Che Guevara, socialism, punk rock... these kids don't know what any of it really means, they just choose it as a conduit for their hormonally-charged frustration.
I'm all for counter-culture, but there are intelligent and effective ways to apply these tools, and valid strategies and goals to pursue. I don't expect the average 16 year old to even have an explicit goal or purpose, which is why most people pay no mind.
You know, I'd really like to get a Mac, but I wouldn't ever replace my desktop with one, simply because I'm a PC freak and I always get the latest peripherals... you just don't hear about tricked out Macs with quad-SLI and a massive RAID-0 suicide stripe.
So I wouldn't use it for tweaking, but I might enjoy it quite much for getting work done (while gaming on the other box:)
False. The typical computer user runs Windows. Windows SP1 brought new features and increased stability. Windows SP2 did even more.
Love them or hate them, Microsoft supports their OS for five years, you only pay once.
Apple, with their cult-like following, get away with charging for upgrades every 15 months. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade, but you'd think a company with no other leg to stand on, would be a little nicer about the software that drives the sales of their overpriced hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very tempted to get a Mac, but I really hate their pricing scheme. Those who argue that Mac hardware is magically better than high-end PC gear are just full of it. They're assembled in the same factories, with the same components, and the same failure rates. Same as Dell, HP, and the OEMs like Asus and Tyan. All that crap comes out of Flextronics.
It's underdeveloped because it's not the infrastructure of the USA, it's the infrastructure of a corporation.
If the communications infrastructure of a country were the responsibility of the government, you'd actually have somewhere to file your complaint. Corporations don't give a damn. From the user's perspective, we think they're throwing money away by not serving clients. From the business' perspective, the rural users aren't worth the effort, considering support costs, infrastructure and maintenance, and the much lower concentration of top-dollar business clients. You pay $50 for cable internet, but a business account costs at least twice as much for the exact same service; the main difference is your sales and support contacts are in Hyderabad, while the corporate support guys are sitting in a posh metro office suite (but they're probably FROM Hyderabad anyway!).
Just remember to take my rants with a grain of salt, I'm Canadian, and I'm a supporter of socialized infrastructure. My government may be inefficient and lazy, but I'd be happy to put up with their incompetence in exchange for cheap plentiful bandwidth ! =)
That reason alone is why I've given up on RAID controllers entirely. Now I just get dumb disk controllers and use software RAID, which allows me to take my array just about anywhere, should something fail.
Performance can be tricky in such a scenario, as you're abusing the system bus a bit harder, but I'd rather have a slightly slower array than a sudden-death array.
One thing is certain: RAID controller manufacturers are well aware that their devices are the point-of-failure and it suits them, because hardcore sysadmins will setup redundant controllers, which means more money for the vendor. It's not uncommon to keep a few spare RAID cards in a drawer, just in case, because you know damn well that when one of them fries, you won't be able to buy them from the vendor anymore and your data will be trapped in limbo.
That's why your teacher is working as a teacher, instead of practicing in the field she actually studied.
Yes, there are some people who teach because that's what they truly love to do. There are a lot more who teach because they failed at everything else. If you're a shitty engineer, you probably won't get many contracts, but if you're willing to put up with a bunch of irritating teenagers, you can get a teaching job fairly easily, no matter where you live.
It's like any field, really. Some people have what it takes to accomplish what they want, but most people have to settle for something less.
Yeah, I'm in that boat too... Videotron (in Quebec, Canada). I was a loyal customer of theirs for years, they used to not suck but they've recently implemented filtering/sniffing... anyways about a year ago I "officially" moved in with my girlfriend, so I called them up to get my service cancelled three months later. Well they terminated the service on the agreed date, sent me a final invoice, but kept on billing me month after month anyway. Calling their customer service resulted in an endless loop of accusations and threats. What's even sweeter is that their automated system mailed me a notice at my _new address_ (out of province), telling me the new tenant had signed up for service, basically flagging the duplicate account. I found it rather funny that an automated mailing service was more clueful than the half-dozen service reps I had spoken to, funny in a sad way.
I was calling them monthly, every time they sent me a new, erroneous bill, and getting ever more pissed off with each passing month. They told me they had no cancellation request on file, so I ordered a copy of my phone logs and faxed the list of outbound calls that specified the exact time and date I contacted the ISP. After that, I stopped receiving bills so I assumed one of the knuckleheads had fixed the glitch and zeroed my balance... until I received a letter from some low-grade lawyer (the envelope was pink!) indicating that my balance would be sent to collections.
I sent the mock-lawyer a long nasty letter with all the prior documentation, with copies sent to the service director at Videotron, and of course one last copy to the OPC (Office de Protection du Consommateur), which is like a government-funded BBB with teeth. Despite the copious documentation, they still mangled my credit and hound me to this day (15 months after I've moved).
So here's the facts: they have my new address (which is outside their service area), they even disconnected the service as agreed to during the phone call I supposedly never made (though the phone company thinks otherwise), and their database figured something was fishy about having two separate accounts with the same address and apartment number. So why the hell can't anyone figure out 2 + 2 and fix the billing issue ?
I refuse to pay them, but I'm not overly concerned about my credit rating (it wasn't too great to begin with). The fact that one incompetent service rep can cause so much trouble and so easily ruin someone's credit is a sign that the system is terribly broken. It's my word against theirs, and the system sides with whoever has more money. By now, I'm sure they've sold off the debt to some ignorant-ass collector, who then sold it to someone else, and again a few more times. I really don't care at all, it will either end up in bankruptcy or court, or they might just give up one day. The outcome is the same for me.
Ok, enough whining. Let's all pretend, for a moment, that the Wachowski brothers aren't completely retarded. Let's pretend they actually put at least some thought into how they spend their budget. Let's pretend these filming techniques aren't a complete waste of time.
And let's pretend that not everyone on Slashdot is a mind-reading, all-knowing, super-genius film expert. Can you suspend your disbelief enough for that ?
Now we know about the classic technique of "deep focus", which is a cheap (as in "free") camera trick that's been around for over 80 years. If that technique were sufficient to fulfill the artistic vision, and if it were applicable to the varied environments of a modern hollywood film, it is safe to assume that the Wachowski brothers would have saved themselves a lot of time and money and used that archaic technique, as many others have done before them to great effect.
In the end, they probably decided that "deep focus" wasn't enough. They want absolutely pristine shots that defy reality, to try and distinguish this film from the countless other cartoon adaptations that have all sucked in immeasurable ways. In brief, they're trying to do it different than everyone else, and hopefully better.
I mean really, what's the point in doing the same thing as everyone else ?
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that users would actually like that sort of security vulnerability, because to their untrained eyes, the vulnerability is invisible...
If you buy a car, whose locks can be opened by every key issued by that auto maker, you won't know until someone drives off with your car; and even then, you might assume they just used the good ol' slim jim then shorted your starter. You won't realize your car is vulnerable until an "expert" finds out and tells you, in simple terms, why your car sucks.
Same thing with software and users. They're just not qualified to perform that kind of analysis. You can give them quick tips like "don't share your entire hard drive", but that won't stop a malicious app from sharing their C:\Documents and Settings... the user doesn't know their personal registry trunk is stored in there, right where an intruder could snap it up and find all sorts of fun things like passwords and URL histories.
So we tell car owners to not leave their doors unlocked, but can we really expect them to tell a good lock from a bad one ?
Who cares about McAfee anyway ? They haven't produced a functional virus scanner since DOS was king. Symantec may be a monumental joke with all its holes, but McAfee takes the dunce cap for producing several generations of idle-looping resource hogs.
These are the same imbeciles who were touting dual-core CPUs as the greatest thing since sliced bread, largely because now their idle-loops could only max out ONE core, leaving you with the second core free to open up a task list and conveniently kill the scanner.
What's so bad about liberals anyway ?
Last century it was communists, now liberals ?
Politics would make a lot more sense if people actually put a little thought into their choices, rather than spinning a wheel to choose who they hate this week.
Please correct me if my 22 years of machine code programming have me in the wrong, but if a CPU runs at 2.0ghz, doesn't that set the upper limit at uhm (counts on fingers) 2 billion instructions per second ? Double it for dual-core. That would be the maximum, and not all instructions complete in a single cycle. Throw in some fetch latency and memory delays, with a healthy dose of I/O spinlocks and pathetic high-level interpreted code, and those 2 billion ops whittle down to maybe 500-700 million actual operations assuming a typical home-user mix of applications.
See the thing with computers, they're reeeeally fast in their own mind. It's in dealing with the outside world (hardware) that things slow down to a crawl. Polling a graphics or sound device 30 times per second, over an already-congested system bus, might not take your system down, but that doesn't mean it's not a huge waste of performance, effort and mindshare.
Heck, remember a while back when people had 200-300mhz systems, and they added a crappy WinModem to the mix which chewed up every last cycle to process a puny little 16khz signal. Just the same, a small polling loop running at 30hz, times every piece of "trusted" hardware in your system, might not add up to much on paper, but in practice it is an undesirable blip in the timing loop, serving only to appease the dirty bastards whose business model has long been obsolete.
The modding community "expects it" because you own the goddamned hardware, it should be yours to tinker in whichever way you like.
When you buy a car, does the dealership forcefully prevent you from using "unapproved" gasoline ? Do they tell you which bumper stickers you're allowed to stick, and where ? Do they come and smash your car with a crowbar if you disobey ?
Analog took a nosedive because they needed to make elbow room (bandwidth) for the digital channels. The problem is that in many cases the digital video is encoded with a low bitrate so you see some artifacting. The common justification for this poor quality video is that "it's TV, not BluRay", because if they were to broadcast TV in crystal-clear high-bitrate digital, people would be able to copy the stream and make their own uber-high quality DVDs and HD-DVDs, and we all know the entertainment industry doesn't want that! It also creates an opportunity to scale quality for each individual channel (or time slot!). Just like ISPs throttle "undesirable" packets down to 1200 baud, cable companies can lower the bitrate on a competitor's channel to free up more bandwidth for the football game, or Nip/Tuck, or whatever garbage their parent company wants to push. Or they could just squeeze everything and throw another 50 shit channels onto the pile at $2.99 apiece. They could have multi-angle channel clusters of Whoopi Goldberg's nose for all I care.
The big problem is that cable is now competing with digital satellite, which also has fixed bandwidth so the playing field is a bit more level. The difference is that cable is easy, anyone can get it hooked up (except for clueless cable installers). With satellite, you have to be facing a clear southern sky, you have to drill holes for the wiring, yadda yadda... for the majority of people living in apartment buildings, satellite is a no-go, so cable wins by default, which means cable has a bit more leverage. They can screw us harder because most people don't have a valid alternative... it's cable or nothing, and while I'd be happy to see more people downloading their TV shows through P2P and giving the media cartels the big ol' finger, that's just not happening right now.
Seriously, why the hell would they need such a thing ? Wars were last millenium! If Russia wants to play god and blow stuff up, I'm just going to start calling them USA 2.0 and see if they like it.
More likely they will be able to correlate several anonymous posts from the same author, then focus their attention as needed. If you already know what you're looking for, it only takes one weak site to reveal your IP or some other breadcrumb that traces it all back to the source.
Meanwhile, I've been known to write every other post in l33t and/or "txt msg spk" just to throw off this potentially impressive yet patently ridiculous system. The solution to terrorism isn't "anti-terrorism", it's anti-whatever-the-hell-the-terrorists-are-pissed-off-about. If you don't solve the problem at the source, there will just be more and more so-called terrorists coming back, no matter how many of them get arrested/murdered, new ones will take their place until they get what they want.
I hemmed and hawed the first time I had to deal with CentOS, mainly because I hate RedHat with a passion. Now I'm not "in love" with CentOS, but all I can say is that it works, it's rather easy and comfy to maintain, and there's a wealth of 3rd party repositories out there to fill in gaps in the software collection.
And "yum update" breaks a lot less than "apt-get dist-upgrade" or "emerge -uavDN world". A LOT less.
If you patent that, I'm going to patent the singing dancing fat-nerd-in-tron-suit delivery system and order a complete "3rd party investigation" of your uniforms to make sure they're not infringingly similar to my tron suit.
Fuck NTP... This is a one-time thing but I'm rooting for the Telecoms this time around. I hope they squash that puny little patent abuser like a grape!
Sad as it may be, I've been grossly disappointed with Matrox since 1999 or so. I don't even understand why they're still in business today. The only product of theirs that I consider noteworthy is the TripleHead2Go, and they can shove their PCI and AGP cards where the sun don't shine. Their drivers are flaky, the hardware is temperamental, and the performance just isn't there anymore. I get more mileage out of a low-end ATI or NVidia product at a third of the cost.
Intel has had quad-core processors since November 2006, 10 months ago! Why would AMD need to keep Barcelona's release details a secret, when every single AMD fan has been waiting over a year for this damned thing ? It's hardly a secret, as they've already told almost everything to the press in August, when they were desperately trying to counter the mass exodus that resulted from Intel's staggering July price drop.
As a former AMD "fanboy", I'm not impressed. Quad-FX is embarrassing, and Barcelona is lackluster. Meanwhile Intel has been scaling their Core 2 Extreme to 3 ghz and still has good headroom on existing designs. Barcelona needs to start way higher than 2.0ghz to turn any heads, as people will just stick with the cheaper Opteron until the cost-per-GFLOP becomes more competitive.
If I were Vietnamese, I'd probably have tortured Americans back then too!
You know, the common thing with all American wars is they're never fought on American soil. Just think about that one for a moment.
The vulnerability is between the keyboard and chair. Norms get lured onto these sketchy p2p networks to get "free" music and movies, but they haven't a clue what they're actually doing and the implications of various configuration options.
I'm sure that if someone released a Napster-style P2P app that defaults to sharing the entire contents of your hard drive, many people would praise it for having so many files available. People don't bother, they just install the program and within seconds they're playing a 50-cent tune... Next, Next, Finish, Download! They don't even read the big red bold flashing messages... heck, they don't read the buttons they're clicking! So many times I've had people say "This program won't install" because the Next button turns into a "Cancel" button until you read the EULA or similar... that's how dumb the average computer user truly is.
I really like this idea. It may not be much, but it's one step toward "true" telecommuting... god what an ugly word.
Let's face it: most of the work done in an office doesn't require human contact. That means less land and real estate wasted on office space, a LOT less fuel wasted on the daily commute, a ton of time saved by not being jammed up in traffic two hours per day, and a few efficiency perks that naturally occur in the home, like not going out for lunch and working in a relaxed, more productive rhythm.
Let's be logical here: What's the sense in having an office if you're only using it a third of the time ? The cost of an employee is significant greater than their salary, and most of the extra is going into a black hole, with high rent, utility and infrastructure costs. Trim off some of that fat and pay your staff better wages instead, the employer can still save money in the end.
I don't care if you have kids, teach them to respect your busy time. Drop them off at a daycare center if you must. Is it going to work for everyone ? No, of course not, but it can make a huge difference when it works.
Err... maybe it's different up here in Canada, but I thought parking lots were considered private property and most definitely off-limits to squirrelly traffic cops. Stop signs and speed limits in parking lots are supposed to be unenforceable, with the exception of fire-truck areas and other emergency vehicles.
Really ? What kind of wonderful broken economy do you exist in, where costs are not passed down to the customers ? If Apple is getting a cut, that means a bunch of accountants and lawyers sat down and figured out how to maintain their profit margin. 10% going to Apple probably costs the end-user 20% or more, to cover all the middlemen. It will be a cold day in hell before a telecom willfully gives anything away. This is from the industry that takes a huge crap on loyal customers, in favor of fickle teenagers.
Education won't stop angst-ridden teens from acting out. Kids don't give a flying fuck about the meaning of their actions, they just want the attention. Che Guevara, socialism, punk rock... these kids don't know what any of it really means, they just choose it as a conduit for their hormonally-charged frustration.
I'm all for counter-culture, but there are intelligent and effective ways to apply these tools, and valid strategies and goals to pursue. I don't expect the average 16 year old to even have an explicit goal or purpose, which is why most people pay no mind.
You know, I'd really like to get a Mac, but I wouldn't ever replace my desktop with one, simply because I'm a PC freak and I always get the latest peripherals... you just don't hear about tricked out Macs with quad-SLI and a massive RAID-0 suicide stripe.
:)
So I wouldn't use it for tweaking, but I might enjoy it quite much for getting work done (while gaming on the other box
False. The typical computer user runs Windows. Windows SP1 brought new features and increased stability. Windows SP2 did even more.
Love them or hate them, Microsoft supports their OS for five years, you only pay once.
Apple, with their cult-like following, get away with charging for upgrades every 15 months. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade, but you'd think a company with no other leg to stand on, would be a little nicer about the software that drives the sales of their overpriced hardware.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very tempted to get a Mac, but I really hate their pricing scheme. Those who argue that Mac hardware is magically better than high-end PC gear are just full of it. They're assembled in the same factories, with the same components, and the same failure rates. Same as Dell, HP, and the OEMs like Asus and Tyan. All that crap comes out of Flextronics.
It's underdeveloped because it's not the infrastructure of the USA, it's the infrastructure of a corporation.
If the communications infrastructure of a country were the responsibility of the government, you'd actually have somewhere to file your complaint. Corporations don't give a damn. From the user's perspective, we think they're throwing money away by not serving clients. From the business' perspective, the rural users aren't worth the effort, considering support costs, infrastructure and maintenance, and the much lower concentration of top-dollar business clients. You pay $50 for cable internet, but a business account costs at least twice as much for the exact same service; the main difference is your sales and support contacts are in Hyderabad, while the corporate support guys are sitting in a posh metro office suite (but they're probably FROM Hyderabad anyway!).
Just remember to take my rants with a grain of salt, I'm Canadian, and I'm a supporter of socialized infrastructure. My government may be inefficient and lazy, but I'd be happy to put up with their incompetence in exchange for cheap plentiful bandwidth ! =)
That reason alone is why I've given up on RAID controllers entirely. Now I just get dumb disk controllers and use software RAID, which allows me to take my array just about anywhere, should something fail.
Performance can be tricky in such a scenario, as you're abusing the system bus a bit harder, but I'd rather have a slightly slower array than a sudden-death array.
One thing is certain: RAID controller manufacturers are well aware that their devices are the point-of-failure and it suits them, because hardcore sysadmins will setup redundant controllers, which means more money for the vendor. It's not uncommon to keep a few spare RAID cards in a drawer, just in case, because you know damn well that when one of them fries, you won't be able to buy them from the vendor anymore and your data will be trapped in limbo.
That's why your teacher is working as a teacher, instead of practicing in the field she actually studied.
Yes, there are some people who teach because that's what they truly love to do. There are a lot more who teach because they failed at everything else. If you're a shitty engineer, you probably won't get many contracts, but if you're willing to put up with a bunch of irritating teenagers, you can get a teaching job fairly easily, no matter where you live.
It's like any field, really. Some people have what it takes to accomplish what they want, but most people have to settle for something less.
Yeah, I'm in that boat too... Videotron (in Quebec, Canada). I was a loyal customer of theirs for years, they used to not suck but they've recently implemented filtering/sniffing... anyways about a year ago I "officially" moved in with my girlfriend, so I called them up to get my service cancelled three months later. Well they terminated the service on the agreed date, sent me a final invoice, but kept on billing me month after month anyway. Calling their customer service resulted in an endless loop of accusations and threats. What's even sweeter is that their automated system mailed me a notice at my _new address_ (out of province), telling me the new tenant had signed up for service, basically flagging the duplicate account. I found it rather funny that an automated mailing service was more clueful than the half-dozen service reps I had spoken to, funny in a sad way.
I was calling them monthly, every time they sent me a new, erroneous bill, and getting ever more pissed off with each passing month. They told me they had no cancellation request on file, so I ordered a copy of my phone logs and faxed the list of outbound calls that specified the exact time and date I contacted the ISP. After that, I stopped receiving bills so I assumed one of the knuckleheads had fixed the glitch and zeroed my balance... until I received a letter from some low-grade lawyer (the envelope was pink!) indicating that my balance would be sent to collections.
I sent the mock-lawyer a long nasty letter with all the prior documentation, with copies sent to the service director at Videotron, and of course one last copy to the OPC (Office de Protection du Consommateur), which is like a government-funded BBB with teeth. Despite the copious documentation, they still mangled my credit and hound me to this day (15 months after I've moved).
So here's the facts: they have my new address (which is outside their service area), they even disconnected the service as agreed to during the phone call I supposedly never made (though the phone company thinks otherwise), and their database figured something was fishy about having two separate accounts with the same address and apartment number. So why the hell can't anyone figure out 2 + 2 and fix the billing issue ?
I refuse to pay them, but I'm not overly concerned about my credit rating (it wasn't too great to begin with). The fact that one incompetent service rep can cause so much trouble and so easily ruin someone's credit is a sign that the system is terribly broken. It's my word against theirs, and the system sides with whoever has more money. By now, I'm sure they've sold off the debt to some ignorant-ass collector, who then sold it to someone else, and again a few more times. I really don't care at all, it will either end up in bankruptcy or court, or they might just give up one day. The outcome is the same for me.
Ok, enough whining. Let's all pretend, for a moment, that the Wachowski brothers aren't completely retarded. Let's pretend they actually put at least some thought into how they spend their budget. Let's pretend these filming techniques aren't a complete waste of time.
And let's pretend that not everyone on Slashdot is a mind-reading, all-knowing, super-genius film expert. Can you suspend your disbelief enough for that ?
Now we know about the classic technique of "deep focus", which is a cheap (as in "free") camera trick that's been around for over 80 years. If that technique were sufficient to fulfill the artistic vision, and if it were applicable to the varied environments of a modern hollywood film, it is safe to assume that the Wachowski brothers would have saved themselves a lot of time and money and used that archaic technique, as many others have done before them to great effect.
In the end, they probably decided that "deep focus" wasn't enough. They want absolutely pristine shots that defy reality, to try and distinguish this film from the countless other cartoon adaptations that have all sucked in immeasurable ways. In brief, they're trying to do it different than everyone else, and hopefully better.
I mean really, what's the point in doing the same thing as everyone else ?