The problem with QoS is that it can be faked, trivially. Unless there's actual packet sniffing being done to identify traffic, which is rarely done (costly), you can simply hide your traffic on a "privileged" port. A certain nameless cable ISP throttles p2p traffic down to near-nothing, but users in-the-know just set their clients to use the VoIP ports, which are unrestricted. The result is a beautiful screw up where the lowest priority data eats up the highest priority band. I don't know if the cable phone users encounter any issues as a result of this workaround, but that's just what the cable company deserves for their antics. Had they let p2p traffic flow normally, managed through proper traffic shaping and prioritizing, there would be little incentive to piggyback on the VoIP ports and everyone would be happy. Well, everyone that matters anyway.
Voice control is fine, but having the computer react to its own output is ludicrous! You'd think Vista would be smart enough to recognize feedback... It's like having a retard talking into a mic that's hooked up to his own headphones.
Bob: "Bob go jump off a bridge" Bob: "Who said that ?" Bob: "I said that. Now jump!" Bob: "Ok.. Aaaaaaaagh!"
Having worked there, I really don't see what you're talking about. Most Dell parts are perfectly normal, a lot of the custom stuff involves mounting brackets for screwless access. The one thing I agree is a pain, is their power supplies. Any tech knows they're the part that most often dies on any PC, so it's a drag that Dell PSUs are usually non-standard. For anything else though, CPU, hard drive, ram.. you can use 3rd party replacements just fine.
Worst case, if the machine's out of warranty, you can rip out the guts and put them in a new ATX chassis, they will fit just fine. Hell I've got an old Precision workstation here, I plopped its naughty bits into an Antec chassis and the 7 year old clunker is happy as a clam, not to mention whisper-quiet:)
Having worked there in the past, I've seen issues like yours. The problem with any call center job is that we're not physically there to fix the machine, and of course there are tremendous variances in technical proficiency between agents. Sometimes you get a great tech who can pull divine answers out of thin air, like me:) sometimes you get a lousy tech who will talk your ear off for 2 hours over a blown power supply.
The one thing that frustrated me the most at Dell, and I'm sure it's the same everywhere else, is that the on-site technicians are utterly useless, partly because they are subcontractors. Dell pays them some godly sum of cash, and they go and fuck things up even worse. They don't care, because they get paid more money to go back and fix it again. They are not qualified to troubleshoot, they're just certified screwdriver operators... which is pretty sad considering that most Dells require no tools to swap everything but the motherboard itself. They drop in the new part, maybe power it on to see if anything changed, and then run off. How hard would it be for a qualified tech to take 2 minutes to study the problem, worst case they could call Dell and have a tech-to-tech discussion instead of having the customer jump through more hoops. Now granted I never heard of the cases where everything goes smoothly, but many times the tech would show up late, or make an ass of himself (and the company), hell one time I heard of a tech showing up drunk and verbally abusing the customer. I can't know for sure, I wasn't there, but they're such idiots that I wouldn't put it past them.
I really wish Dell's next-day service meant "next-day FIXED service", meaning that if and when they send a tech on-site, the guy doesn't leave until the machine is back up and running. The way they have it right now, they bring a part, swap it, and if it didn't fix, they have to call back in to tech support and get another part for the next day. Why don't they just show up with a complete change of parts... if they find out the power supply took out the board, they just go back to the car and pull out a board!
There are loony cases where there is no obviously fix for the problem... You might swap every single piece of hardware, one by one, then reimage the OS, and the problem will persist. I've had it happen to me in person back when I was running my own repair shop, I call it "the voltage virus". Imagine a bug that infects anything that touches the motherboard, and the only way to purge it is to get a whole new machine and toss the old one in the garbage. I've only seen it happen with Intel machines so far. I remember a particularly nasty case where I had gotten so frustrated, I just took apart the whole system and tested each part individually in test rigs. By the end of the day, I had fried 4 test rigs and just gave the customer a new system.
The price war is over. You can't make money selling cheap computers on a large scale, because you can't cheat the way the small guys do. So very many computer stores these days pull scams to make a profit, whether it's tax evasion, bankruptcy hopping or moving in the middle of the night. The term "cutthroat" would be an understatement. I didn't bother to play that game, for various reasons. People paid a premium at my store, but they were getting top-quality systems and my peerless level of service. To give you an example, take the typical $299 budget PC of a few years past, which was an AMD Sempron, all-in-one board, 256mb ram and 40gb hard drive. That same spec machine cost an extra 30% from my store, but it came with an Antec power supply, Asus board and a real ATI graphics card. It may have had the same Mhz, ram and disk space on paper, but somehow it ran faster and smoother than the other guy's. Far more importantly, it never crashed, and very rarely did a power supply go poof. Not everyone is willing to pay for it, a lot of chumps just want the cheapest hackjob that can burn DVDs.. those idiots can go to Wal-Mart, I don't want their business. Indeed, I was catering to a niche market of discerning computer users. Apple does the same. Maybe Dell should do it too. Market share don't mean squat if you're losing money.
This is much like the problems plaguing copy protection used for PC games, where you need to leave the CD in the drive to play. It's annoying and inconvenient, so a lot of people just use a cracked patch and do away with the CD requirement. Microsoft here is alienating a legitimate customer because of zealous restrictions. Problem is, computer repairs are an inevitable fact of life. They're made in frickin' taiwan by a bunch of coked-out engineers and they're built so cheap I wonder how the gear even survives shipping. For Microsoft to design their copy protection scheme in a way that amplifies computer failures is so brutally ignorant, but most people have no alternative, they're going to put up with whatever Microsoft puts out, good or bad. The shame in all this is that a lot of people have probably been in the same situation and, lacking better knowledge, they ended up buying another copy of the OS they already own.
What I'm saying is screw the DMCA. You've bought the software with your computer, you own it. Go ahead and get an activation crack or whatever works for you. You may be breaking some frivolous law by doing so, but you're morally right. Laws are supposed to protect people, not profits.
Canadian footbal... oh you mean those stupid micro-neons ? Yeah they suck too.
I hate how they're spun as economical energy savers. All the CFLs I've tried not only cost at least 10x more than a standard bulb, they're also dimmer and well, they're neons so they inherently flicker. Some people don't mind, others like my spouse and I get massive headaches. We're also the kind of people who run our monitors at 100hz because even 85 is a little flickery to our eyes. The worst about CFLs though, is that they don't even last as long as a standard incandescent bulb. Ok let me get this straight: this thing is saving me money by costing more upfront and dying younger ? Gee that makes sense. Maybe if electricity cost 10 bucks per kwh, but where I live it's all of 5 cents.
My view is that if these CFL lamps were really that great, we'd all be using them by now. They've only been around for what, 20 years ? I think in 20 years just about every lightbulb has needed to be changed at least once, so why didn't those old tungsten-glowing energy hogs get upgraded to CFL ? Maybe because CFL is shite, hyped up by people who are trying to cash in on the whole "environmentally friendly" craze... that's my theory! Besides, I'd much rather see an LED lamp than a neon. At least LEDs don't give me migraines!
"University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it."
Tired of maintaining it ? Who gives a crap whether a domain ends in.com,.net,.xyzzy it doesn't change a damned thing, they all go into a database. Humans don't process domain registrations, computers do. Hell we could just as easily open up the domain system to any TLD... do away with the concept of TLD altogether. Why couldn't someone register "foobar.ilikebananas" ? It may be ugly but there's nothing technically difficult about matching a string to an IP address, yet ICANN deals with domain names as slowly and anally as governments deal with wars and budgets. Heck I wish we didn't even have TLD's to begin with, then we wouldn't have had to deal with things like whitehouse.gov vs.com, or me receiving a C&D about my website fnarg.com, regarding MP3 files illegally hosted on fnarg.net owned by a complete stranger on the other side of the globe. Sure, that's a fucking ignorant attorney, but the mixup happens all the time for no good reason.
The problem I have with this line of thinking is that, since they're already listening in on a suspected criminal, they might as well scope out everyone on the pipe. How likely is it that there is at least one suspected criminal for each ISP ? Pay attention to the word "suspected". There "might" be a bad guy on the network, and as networks grow larger and larger, the probability of it harboring a criminal stretches toward certainty.
I'm usually not one to jump on conspiracy theories, but this opens one door that makes me very uneasy. Right now, they will use it properly, but as time goes by and the novelty wears off, the officials will request more and more power in the name of justics... eventually we will be monitored 24/7. This ain't Orwell or Clarke, this is human nature at its finest. We are disgusting, self-fearing power mongers; nothing more, nothing less.
I don't know what kind of plumbers you have in your area, but I certainly don't praise mine for what he does in his living room. If you take offense to the term "hobbyist" then you need to come back down to earth. A hobbyist is someone who has a hobby, aka something you do on your own time, to fulfill your personal interests. You're probably upset because your "enterprise class" endeavors get lumped in with your half-brained neighbor who keeps bragging about how he put 3 DVD burners in his K6-350mhz to keep up with demand. He's a hobbyist too, just like you. He's also a worthless imbecile, but that's a separate topic.
I have a funky home setup, probably even crazier than yours, with a compile cluster, bigass file server (8tb), and an 8-way opteron rig hosting a couple dozen virtual machines. I live in a small downtown apartment, I work a normal job that doesn't involve server administration nor programming. I do this crazy stuff for my own enjoyment, as a hobby. I am a hobbyist, and I'm certainly not the least bit insulted by the word.
If anything, I wish there were more like me, because having all that fast modern technology at my fingertips just makes me realize how utterly insignificant the OS is. On the virtual server, I've got Windows 95, 98, 2000, 2003, XP; a few Linuxes, FreeBSD, CentOS, and an old Netware. They all do more or less the same thing: run applications. The only reason I need all of them is because they've each got their quirks so that an app that was fine in 95 won't fly on XP, or a server that runs fast on CentOS will drag FreeBSD to its knees. Netware is in there for completeness, just so I can keep my skills current. Do any of these operating systems matter when surfing the net, or writing a letter, crunching a spreadsheet or burning a CD ? Not at all, all those tasks are performed by software like Firefox, MS Word, Lotus 123 or Nero. I don't give a crap about Vista, because it is yet another upgrade hurdle that breaks more than it fixes. Does it come with a word processor, spreadsheet and full-featured burning suite ? Nope. It does have a web browser though, the same one as XP, the same one as 2000. What can it do better than a Win 2000 machine from eight years ago ? Absolutely nothing. It's what you make of it that truly matters. Is it really that difficult to have a filesystem, graphical display and network stack ? Does it warrant 5 gb of disk space just for those basic features ? Are they worth the hundreds of dollars MS is charging considering you can hardly do a thing without spending yet more money on 3rd party applications ? I think not.
Sorry Microsoft, I may have all the CPU power, RAM, disk space and graphics horsepower to make your new OS scream, but if you're only going to piss away all that expensive hardware on security popups and rounded rectangles, I'll pass.
But really all this means is you can file a tiny tax report for your auction/poker/porn business and get away with it, as long as you file something. How will this spider tell them whether I made 20'000 or half a million from online business ? It won't. If their method of finding tax evaders depends on published HTML, I think they're screwed from the get-go. What if the address isn't in text form, but rendered to an image, overlaid on fancy graphics ? They should be obtaining records from whatever payment intermediary is involved whether it's a bank, Paypal, or a 3rd-party credit card processor. Just having any tax report from a given address is not proof that all income was truthfully disclosed.
At the end of the day, it's still a wasted fight. States argue over where taxes should be levied. Sender or receiver ? Or maybe it should be in the state where the web site is hosted. It's all just a bunch of bureaucrats trying to claim something they had no part in. My logic is that if there is no physical involvement, there should be no taxation. Playing poker online doesn't incur any costs to the city where I live; it doesn't make use of its roads and municipal services, it doesn't burden the healthcare system with injuries or violence (e.g. bars). In fact, whether I play for fun, or wager real money has no effect on anyone but the players and the "house". This obsession with taxing everything is a fallacious concept that underscores the root issue: government is sloppy with its resources. They make up these schemes to swindle always more money from the citizens, only to piss it away. Government is supposed to act on BEHALF of the citizens, in their best interests. If government were run like a regular business, with real risks, goals and accountability, it would fail overnight. It is failing right as we speak, as we witness more and more people moving away to lower-taxed nations. When the cost of government exceeds the value of its services, those who can, leave.
I'll be delighted if Hollywood decides to delay Canadian releases, utterly ecstatic!
1. The canadian pirates will let their american buddies do the dirty work, which means no more finger-pointing by Hollywood.
2. The canadian viewers will happily download even more movies because they don't feel like waiting for them. Keep in mind we canadians have far better broadband penetration and average bandwidth than the USA, so it's ridiculously fast and easy. As a bonus side-effect, less people will go to the cinemas to pay for movies they got off bittorrent weeks prior.
3. We will stop being so "nice" to american filmmakers who love to shoot their films in Vancouver and Toronto, and they'll have to start paying taxes like everyone else.
4. We'll send our legions of kamikaze squirrels to feast on the diminutive testes of MPAA execs. Fear the squirrel!
I can't agree with you more. Schools already trample outside their boundaries all the time because they get emotional and zealous over issues that are none of their goddamned business. Bullying is not a school problem, school is about reading-writing-'rithmetic. Bullying is an education problem, and education happens at home. Bullying can happen when parental support is lacking, or if the kid's dad is a depressed loser, or any other unhealthy environment for a child to imitate. How often do you see parents who openly encourage their child to act violently and prey on weaker/smarter kids ? Just trot down to most little league games and see for yourself.
The problem with any problem child is the parent, not the child. Society's frustration with these issues is that it's morally wrong to punish a child, but it is also considered politically incorrect to punish the parent. Let's play my favorite game, devil's advocate.
Solution 1: Beat up the bullies - Doesn't solve a thing, only creates more tension and fuels its own fire.
Solution 2: Beat up the parents - Would make for a fun reality show, but see #1
Solution 3: Legal reprimand, where the parent gets slapped with a fine as if they had committed the crime themselves, or even jail time if the offense is particularly heinous or it is a repeat offense - We're getting further than the previous 2 "solutions", but jail never solves anything.
Solution 4: Legal reprimand, toss the kid in juvey - No better than jail, really. It just encourages the child to associate with other ill-raised youths and further their distaste for order and diplomacy.
Solution 5: Re-education for parent and child - force them both to sit in a classroom and get educated by a social worker on how to behave in society, and offer parental counseling. Boring ? Yes, But it's the only positive solution so far. What do you do when you accidentally cut yourself in the kitchen ? You put on a bandage, maybe some polysporin.. right ? That fixes the problem, so what do you do to fix ignorance ? You provide information. Parents of problem kids are often just as frustrated as you and I, only they feel powerless in controlling their child. Maybe a bit of friendly advice, shoved down their throat with a court order, can help improve the situation for everyone.
Well I'm out of ideas. Really I wish we could quietly exterminate them all and go on with our lives, but clearly the world isn't ready to distill the gene pool just yet, which is a good thing, because it means we're still trying to find a solution that helps everyone, rather than culling the bad apples.
I guess that would make them an INsignificant other. sorry, had to be done:)
The problem is that computers do offer a form of limited, "safe" social interaction, plus you don't have to worry about your hair, your breath, or what you're wearing (or not wearing). Some people use computers the way others use phones.. if I added up the time my S.O. spends on the phone every day, the number would come close to my non-work computer time. While she entertains her friends and family with the day's joys and woes, I post flame-worthy banter on/. to push peoples' buttons and stimulate intellectual debate. Really it's the same thing, only she uses her voice whereas I use my keyboard.
Innovation doesn't drive the economy, sadly. Innovation is EXPENSIVE, and oh so difficult. IT Companies aren't in it to change the world, cure disease and abolish hunger, they're in it to make money. You make money by offering a product or service to a large audience, not by spending a ton of resources on innovation that will only cater to a tiny niche. Besides, have IT companies ever been innovative at all ?
Back when I was doing homebrew on the GBA, we ran legacy GBC roms through an emulator since it would then appear as a GBA executable. Alternately there was the GB-Bridge device which is kind of like the Slot-1 passcard system, but the added cost and weight of this bridge device resulted in most people just going the emulated route.
I would expect it to be just as easy to run a DS-native emulator for GBA roms. That gives you the benefit of a DS-native launcher app allowing for all sorts of tricks. You could even zip the roms and have the emu decompress them on-the-fly.
Problem is, people won't realize the High-Def either doesn't show, or doesn't matter. Even worse: they won't care. Most people get all glazy-eyed with technology, they just accept that not all movies are created equal. Others just want the fanciest, most expensive toy to show off to their sexually dominant peers.
It used to be, when someone bought a fancy overpriced stereo, came back the next day and said it sounded cheap, you'd tell them they need fancy overpriced cables to "bring out the quality" and off they go with $400 of cheap copper and plastic. Then when they come back you tell them "you need bi-amped speakers!" and off they go with $600 of cheap paper and wood. Then when they come back, THEY tell you "my stereo is shite, here's even more money, sell me the best you got".
With High-Def it's going to be the same song and dance. "My HD-DVD looks uglier than VHS", you need a new TV. "My HD-DVD still looks like shite", you need new cables. "My HD-DVD looks like Whoopi Goldberg's boobs", you need a power conditioner... the crappier something is, the more opportunity there is for upsale. That's why nothing ever works "just right", there's always some stupid feature that's glitched or backwards, just to make room for future improvement$. It sucks for discerning enthusiasts like you and I, because we're a minority. For every videophile that returns a crippled player on principle, there are 99 norms that will do the exact opposite and spend more money to "fix" the problem. High-Def is marketed as a luxury after all, and luxuries are supposed to cost lots of money for minimal functionality. At least that's what the retail world has been telling us all this time.
Hrm.. as much as I want to root for my own city of Ottawa, I have to say that seriously jeopardizes the credibility of this popularity contest. Ottawa is hardly an intelligent city. I find most people here are mock-intelligent... aka full of shit! They don't run around screwing their cousins and building gun racks out of duck tape, but they're not going to change the world eitehr. Most people here just spend their time maximizing their federal gov't income and job security (a.k.a. moving up the ladder without doing any work), then making asses of themselves in rush hour traffic day after day.
As for broadband penetration, well yes there is a high number of people with broadband, but I'd like to think many european countries have higher speeds and less crippled ISPs than Rogers Cable and its merry band of imbeciles.
If "government/private sector digital integration" means paying gov't consultants by email so they can "work" from "home" on the 14th hole, then yes we're definitely a leader.
Hey don't get me wrong, I moved here for a reason... I like the place, but if Ottawa is on the top list, that means everyone that didn't make the list is very fucking lame!
Hey don't get me wrong, I've seen worse. After all, I moved here for a reason, but I've seen better elsewhere.
I wouldn't be so quick about getting the smallest NAS possible, since hard drives spew heat, and heat kills a drive real quick. Just because they don't come with a bigass heatsink and fan doesn't mean they don't need one. The cheapest solution I've seen so far is an Aspire X-QPack (stupid taiwanese product name). It's a cube-style chassis with a rather quiet power supply and a temperature readout on the front. You can squeeze 6 hard drives in there with an extra 120mm fan. If you go with decently priced 500gb drives you could have yourself 2.5gb of Raid-5 goodness in less than a cubic foot. The temp display is a nice extra too. It's no Petabox, but for something you can build in a few minutes using cheap off-the-shelf components, can't complain too much.
Ultimately, if noise is an issue, just hide the thing far away from your ears. You're going to run ethernet or wifi anyway, so who cares where the actual hardware is. Shove that NAS in a closet!
The bigger the machine, the greater its efficiency losses. A one-man company can't steal from itself (well, not successfully anyways). A ten thousand man company could have 9999 thieves and a single victim... then when that one guy gets too nosey, you just get rid of him. That's the corporate "landscape".
Errr.. so you're saying that I can't display advertising or propaganda in my home unless I have you agree to be exposed to it, at the door before you step in ?
You make the choice to visit a web site, much in the same way you choose to turn on your TV or radio. Now if I were invading your home and doing sales pitches against your will, that's different... that's like malware randomly throwing popups while you're doing something else, but this is not the case here. Your argument is invalid.
How appropriate that you are an anonymous coward.
Re:Performance, anyone?
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Exactly, it's human nature (especially in unhappy humans) to put in the least effort. If you're paid a salary for a 40 hour week, you're going to do what it takes to make your work fit in that 40 hour frame and avoid overtime, because let's face it nobody likes to work for free, that's why it's called "work". Like you said, when it comes to software development there is so much room for interpretation that you can deliver a great product with extra time and effort (for free), or you can earn the same money by delivering a mediocre but contractually sufficient product that fit within your schedule. There is the incentive to not work beyond your 40 hours, but there isn't much to encourage you to get it done in less, unless you're self-employed.
What if your boss said: here's your list of assignments for the week, if you get them done before the 40 hour mark you can go home. Don't you think you would try to find the most efficient way to do it, and maximize your free time ? Sure.. but then business factors dictate that the boss will give you a heavier work load the following week, and now you're having to do more work for the same money. Corporate greed has been serviced yet again, and you're the bitch. This attitude has led to people doing the strict minimum required to get paid, as well as that neat concept called "job security" where you make yourself look busier and more important than you really are, just so you don't get replaced with the newer, faster, more conformant model.
It's an ugly balance but that's just what it is: balance. No matter what you try to improve it, an equal and opposing force will come to push back.
The problem with capitalism is the fact that it's only somewhat limited by the law. It's the reality that you can kill someone with a little money, and with a fair chunk more you can even get away with it. Either you shoot them dead and hire a crack team of lawyers, or you start a pharmaceutical company and basically hold sick people at virtual gunpoint until they cough up enough cash to "earn" their antidote. What happens when people are no longer "sick enough" to sustain a company's growth forecast ? Are they going to "create a need" ? How about a new strain of diabetes that is resistant to all but Company X's products ? It may sound like a bad old sci-fi flick but you have to remember that a corporate has no soul, no conscience. It is a simple machine that creates profit, nothing more. When that machine grows big enough, its collective power is stronger than the individual voices that make it up. In a board room of top execs looking at a chart that shows them no longer being rich execs 5 years from now, I'd venture that maybe 10-15% of them will flirt with the idea of creating a disease if it will revive corporate (and personal) profitability. That percentage will only grow as time passes and the world becomes a more crowded, angry place to live.
Me, I just wish Darwinism would gain fame and kill two birds with one stone: 1. sickly people die young as they should, to ease the burden on everyone else and 2. less sick people means less power to the pharmaceutical companies... oh and 3. I'm just not a nice person to begin with:)
Ahh but interest rates are things banking customers shop around for... ATM fees usually aren't, since they've already got you captive by then, and it's just another incentive to sell you a flat-rate monthly plan. Banks are businesses, like any other. They exist to generate profit, and everything they do eventually comes back to that prime goal. They are seen as "heroes" for bailing their foolish clients out of their mistakes, while if they had said "tough luck", they would have lost at least a few of those clients and missed a great PR opportunity. I'm willing to bet that the signup rate has increased noticeably since this event, just because people see them as a "good bank", which is on the same level as "military intelligence" as far as oxymorons go.
The problem with Windows isn't more RAM, it's the fact that there's something fishy going on in the kernel and it will swap out no matter what. Even if you nuke the swap file, the stupid thing will evict code from RAM and reload it from the EXE file later.
Case in point: I have 16gb in this machine (just because I can). At least once a day while switching between a browser and a couple spreadsheets, Office 2007 will sit stupid for a few seconds with a half-drawn screen while reloading from disk. I don't run many background processes, and my system disks are dedicated to the OS and apps. All data files are on a separate disk array... the choke point is the kernel itself! It's just kinda sorta really dumb.
The thing to remember here is that AmigaOS, like BeOS, is a real-time operating system, at least in spirit. Windows is a "when I feel like it"-time system. If Microsoft could get their act together and realize that User Interface means ME ME ME, maybe they could release a product that is as adored and worshipped as AmigaOS and Mac OS. We have these ridiculously fast machines that feel slower than the 486'es of a decade past, and it's all about UI philosophy. Make a UI that gives immediate feedback to my commands, not 100ms later.. 1ms later!! It's okay if the actual process takes a bit longer, as long as it "feels" fast the user will be happy. We're not sitting at our workstations with stopwatches to measure performance, we just want to do our work without the frequent eye-rolling pauses of the Microsoft regime.
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The problem with QoS is that it can be faked, trivially. Unless there's actual packet sniffing being done to identify traffic, which is rarely done (costly), you can simply hide your traffic on a "privileged" port. A certain nameless cable ISP throttles p2p traffic down to near-nothing, but users in-the-know just set their clients to use the VoIP ports, which are unrestricted. The result is a beautiful screw up where the lowest priority data eats up the highest priority band. I don't know if the cable phone users encounter any issues as a result of this workaround, but that's just what the cable company deserves for their antics. Had they let p2p traffic flow normally, managed through proper traffic shaping and prioritizing, there would be little incentive to piggyback on the VoIP ports and everyone would be happy. Well, everyone that matters anyway.
Voice control is fine, but having the computer react to its own output is ludicrous! You'd think Vista would be smart enough to recognize feedback... It's like having a retard talking into a mic that's hooked up to his own headphones.
Bob: "Bob go jump off a bridge"
Bob: "Who said that ?"
Bob: "I said that. Now jump!"
Bob: "Ok.. Aaaaaaaagh!"
Stupid.
Having worked there, I really don't see what you're talking about. Most Dell parts are perfectly normal, a lot of the custom stuff involves mounting brackets for screwless access. The one thing I agree is a pain, is their power supplies. Any tech knows they're the part that most often dies on any PC, so it's a drag that Dell PSUs are usually non-standard. For anything else though, CPU, hard drive, ram.. you can use 3rd party replacements just fine.
:)
Worst case, if the machine's out of warranty, you can rip out the guts and put them in a new ATX chassis, they will fit just fine. Hell I've got an old Precision workstation here, I plopped its naughty bits into an Antec chassis and the 7 year old clunker is happy as a clam, not to mention whisper-quiet
Having worked there in the past, I've seen issues like yours. The problem with any call center job is that we're not physically there to fix the machine, and of course there are tremendous variances in technical proficiency between agents. Sometimes you get a great tech who can pull divine answers out of thin air, like me :) sometimes you get a lousy tech who will talk your ear off for 2 hours over a blown power supply.
The one thing that frustrated me the most at Dell, and I'm sure it's the same everywhere else, is that the on-site technicians are utterly useless, partly because they are subcontractors. Dell pays them some godly sum of cash, and they go and fuck things up even worse. They don't care, because they get paid more money to go back and fix it again. They are not qualified to troubleshoot, they're just certified screwdriver operators... which is pretty sad considering that most Dells require no tools to swap everything but the motherboard itself. They drop in the new part, maybe power it on to see if anything changed, and then run off. How hard would it be for a qualified tech to take 2 minutes to study the problem, worst case they could call Dell and have a tech-to-tech discussion instead of having the customer jump through more hoops. Now granted I never heard of the cases where everything goes smoothly, but many times the tech would show up late, or make an ass of himself (and the company), hell one time I heard of a tech showing up drunk and verbally abusing the customer. I can't know for sure, I wasn't there, but they're such idiots that I wouldn't put it past them.
I really wish Dell's next-day service meant "next-day FIXED service", meaning that if and when they send a tech on-site, the guy doesn't leave until the machine is back up and running. The way they have it right now, they bring a part, swap it, and if it didn't fix, they have to call back in to tech support and get another part for the next day. Why don't they just show up with a complete change of parts... if they find out the power supply took out the board, they just go back to the car and pull out a board!
There are loony cases where there is no obviously fix for the problem... You might swap every single piece of hardware, one by one, then reimage the OS, and the problem will persist. I've had it happen to me in person back when I was running my own repair shop, I call it "the voltage virus". Imagine a bug that infects anything that touches the motherboard, and the only way to purge it is to get a whole new machine and toss the old one in the garbage. I've only seen it happen with Intel machines so far. I remember a particularly nasty case where I had gotten so frustrated, I just took apart the whole system and tested each part individually in test rigs. By the end of the day, I had fried 4 test rigs and just gave the customer a new system.
The price war is over. You can't make money selling cheap computers on a large scale, because you can't cheat the way the small guys do. So very many computer stores these days pull scams to make a profit, whether it's tax evasion, bankruptcy hopping or moving in the middle of the night. The term "cutthroat" would be an understatement. I didn't bother to play that game, for various reasons. People paid a premium at my store, but they were getting top-quality systems and my peerless level of service. To give you an example, take the typical $299 budget PC of a few years past, which was an AMD Sempron, all-in-one board, 256mb ram and 40gb hard drive. That same spec machine cost an extra 30% from my store, but it came with an Antec power supply, Asus board and a real ATI graphics card. It may have had the same Mhz, ram and disk space on paper, but somehow it ran faster and smoother than the other guy's. Far more importantly, it never crashed, and very rarely did a power supply go poof. Not everyone is willing to pay for it, a lot of chumps just want the cheapest hackjob that can burn DVDs.. those idiots can go to Wal-Mart, I don't want their business. Indeed, I was catering to a niche market of discerning computer users. Apple does the same. Maybe Dell should do it too. Market share don't mean squat if you're losing money.
This is much like the problems plaguing copy protection used for PC games, where you need to leave the CD in the drive to play. It's annoying and inconvenient, so a lot of people just use a cracked patch and do away with the CD requirement. Microsoft here is alienating a legitimate customer because of zealous restrictions. Problem is, computer repairs are an inevitable fact of life. They're made in frickin' taiwan by a bunch of coked-out engineers and they're built so cheap I wonder how the gear even survives shipping. For Microsoft to design their copy protection scheme in a way that amplifies computer failures is so brutally ignorant, but most people have no alternative, they're going to put up with whatever Microsoft puts out, good or bad. The shame in all this is that a lot of people have probably been in the same situation and, lacking better knowledge, they ended up buying another copy of the OS they already own.
What I'm saying is screw the DMCA. You've bought the software with your computer, you own it. Go ahead and get an activation crack or whatever works for you. You may be breaking some frivolous law by doing so, but you're morally right. Laws are supposed to protect people, not profits.
Canadian footbal... oh you mean those stupid micro-neons ? Yeah they suck too.
I hate how they're spun as economical energy savers. All the CFLs I've tried not only cost at least 10x more than a standard bulb, they're also dimmer and well, they're neons so they inherently flicker. Some people don't mind, others like my spouse and I get massive headaches. We're also the kind of people who run our monitors at 100hz because even 85 is a little flickery to our eyes. The worst about CFLs though, is that they don't even last as long as a standard incandescent bulb. Ok let me get this straight: this thing is saving me money by costing more upfront and dying younger ? Gee that makes sense. Maybe if electricity cost 10 bucks per kwh, but where I live it's all of 5 cents.
My view is that if these CFL lamps were really that great, we'd all be using them by now. They've only been around for what, 20 years ? I think in 20 years just about every lightbulb has needed to be changed at least once, so why didn't those old tungsten-glowing energy hogs get upgraded to CFL ? Maybe because CFL is shite, hyped up by people who are trying to cash in on the whole "environmentally friendly" craze... that's my theory! Besides, I'd much rather see an LED lamp than a neon. At least LEDs don't give me migraines!
"University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it."
.com, .net, .xyzzy it doesn't change a damned thing, they all go into a database. Humans don't process domain registrations, computers do. Hell we could just as easily open up the domain system to any TLD... do away with the concept of TLD altogether. Why couldn't someone register "foobar.ilikebananas" ? It may be ugly but there's nothing technically difficult about matching a string to an IP address, yet ICANN deals with domain names as slowly and anally as governments deal with wars and budgets. Heck I wish we didn't even have TLD's to begin with, then we wouldn't have had to deal with things like whitehouse.gov vs .com, or me receiving a C&D about my website fnarg.com, regarding MP3 files illegally hosted on fnarg.net owned by a complete stranger on the other side of the globe. Sure, that's a fucking ignorant attorney, but the mixup happens all the time for no good reason.
Tired of maintaining it ? Who gives a crap whether a domain ends in
The problem I have with this line of thinking is that, since they're already listening in on a suspected criminal, they might as well scope out everyone on the pipe. How likely is it that there is at least one suspected criminal for each ISP ? Pay attention to the word "suspected". There "might" be a bad guy on the network, and as networks grow larger and larger, the probability of it harboring a criminal stretches toward certainty.
I'm usually not one to jump on conspiracy theories, but this opens one door that makes me very uneasy. Right now, they will use it properly, but as time goes by and the novelty wears off, the officials will request more and more power in the name of justics... eventually we will be monitored 24/7. This ain't Orwell or Clarke, this is human nature at its finest. We are disgusting, self-fearing power mongers; nothing more, nothing less.
I don't know what kind of plumbers you have in your area, but I certainly don't praise mine for what he does in his living room. If you take offense to the term "hobbyist" then you need to come back down to earth. A hobbyist is someone who has a hobby, aka something you do on your own time, to fulfill your personal interests. You're probably upset because your "enterprise class" endeavors get lumped in with your half-brained neighbor who keeps bragging about how he put 3 DVD burners in his K6-350mhz to keep up with demand. He's a hobbyist too, just like you. He's also a worthless imbecile, but that's a separate topic.
I have a funky home setup, probably even crazier than yours, with a compile cluster, bigass file server (8tb), and an 8-way opteron rig hosting a couple dozen virtual machines. I live in a small downtown apartment, I work a normal job that doesn't involve server administration nor programming. I do this crazy stuff for my own enjoyment, as a hobby. I am a hobbyist, and I'm certainly not the least bit insulted by the word.
If anything, I wish there were more like me, because having all that fast modern technology at my fingertips just makes me realize how utterly insignificant the OS is. On the virtual server, I've got Windows 95, 98, 2000, 2003, XP; a few Linuxes, FreeBSD, CentOS, and an old Netware. They all do more or less the same thing: run applications. The only reason I need all of them is because they've each got their quirks so that an app that was fine in 95 won't fly on XP, or a server that runs fast on CentOS will drag FreeBSD to its knees. Netware is in there for completeness, just so I can keep my skills current. Do any of these operating systems matter when surfing the net, or writing a letter, crunching a spreadsheet or burning a CD ? Not at all, all those tasks are performed by software like Firefox, MS Word, Lotus 123 or Nero. I don't give a crap about Vista, because it is yet another upgrade hurdle that breaks more than it fixes. Does it come with a word processor, spreadsheet and full-featured burning suite ? Nope. It does have a web browser though, the same one as XP, the same one as 2000. What can it do better than a Win 2000 machine from eight years ago ? Absolutely nothing. It's what you make of it that truly matters. Is it really that difficult to have a filesystem, graphical display and network stack ? Does it warrant 5 gb of disk space just for those basic features ? Are they worth the hundreds of dollars MS is charging considering you can hardly do a thing without spending yet more money on 3rd party applications ? I think not.
Sorry Microsoft, I may have all the CPU power, RAM, disk space and graphics horsepower to make your new OS scream, but if you're only going to piss away all that expensive hardware on security popups and rounded rectangles, I'll pass.
Now then, shall they honor robots.txt ?
User-agent: TaxSpider
Disallow: /
But really all this means is you can file a tiny tax report for your auction/poker/porn business and get away with it, as long as you file something. How will this spider tell them whether I made 20'000 or half a million from online business ? It won't. If their method of finding tax evaders depends on published HTML, I think they're screwed from the get-go. What if the address isn't in text form, but rendered to an image, overlaid on fancy graphics ? They should be obtaining records from whatever payment intermediary is involved whether it's a bank, Paypal, or a 3rd-party credit card processor. Just having any tax report from a given address is not proof that all income was truthfully disclosed.
At the end of the day, it's still a wasted fight. States argue over where taxes should be levied. Sender or receiver ? Or maybe it should be in the state where the web site is hosted. It's all just a bunch of bureaucrats trying to claim something they had no part in. My logic is that if there is no physical involvement, there should be no taxation. Playing poker online doesn't incur any costs to the city where I live; it doesn't make use of its roads and municipal services, it doesn't burden the healthcare system with injuries or violence (e.g. bars). In fact, whether I play for fun, or wager real money has no effect on anyone but the players and the "house". This obsession with taxing everything is a fallacious concept that underscores the root issue: government is sloppy with its resources. They make up these schemes to swindle always more money from the citizens, only to piss it away. Government is supposed to act on BEHALF of the citizens, in their best interests. If government were run like a regular business, with real risks, goals and accountability, it would fail overnight. It is failing right as we speak, as we witness more and more people moving away to lower-taxed nations. When the cost of government exceeds the value of its services, those who can, leave.
I'll be delighted if Hollywood decides to delay Canadian releases, utterly ecstatic!
1. The canadian pirates will let their american buddies do the dirty work, which means no more finger-pointing by Hollywood.
2. The canadian viewers will happily download even more movies because they don't feel like waiting for them. Keep in mind we canadians have far better broadband penetration and average bandwidth than the USA, so it's ridiculously fast and easy. As a bonus side-effect, less people will go to the cinemas to pay for movies they got off bittorrent weeks prior.
3. We will stop being so "nice" to american filmmakers who love to shoot their films in Vancouver and Toronto, and they'll have to start paying taxes like everyone else.
4. We'll send our legions of kamikaze squirrels to feast on the diminutive testes of MPAA execs. Fear the squirrel!
I can't agree with you more. Schools already trample outside their boundaries all the time because they get emotional and zealous over issues that are none of their goddamned business. Bullying is not a school problem, school is about reading-writing-'rithmetic. Bullying is an education problem, and education happens at home. Bullying can happen when parental support is lacking, or if the kid's dad is a depressed loser, or any other unhealthy environment for a child to imitate. How often do you see parents who openly encourage their child to act violently and prey on weaker/smarter kids ? Just trot down to most little league games and see for yourself.
The problem with any problem child is the parent, not the child. Society's frustration with these issues is that it's morally wrong to punish a child, but it is also considered politically incorrect to punish the parent. Let's play my favorite game, devil's advocate.
Solution 1: Beat up the bullies - Doesn't solve a thing, only creates more tension and fuels its own fire.
Solution 2: Beat up the parents - Would make for a fun reality show, but see #1
Solution 3: Legal reprimand, where the parent gets slapped with a fine as if they had committed the crime themselves, or even jail time if the offense is particularly heinous or it is a repeat offense - We're getting further than the previous 2 "solutions", but jail never solves anything.
Solution 4: Legal reprimand, toss the kid in juvey - No better than jail, really. It just encourages the child to associate with other ill-raised youths and further their distaste for order and diplomacy.
Solution 5: Re-education for parent and child - force them both to sit in a classroom and get educated by a social worker on how to behave in society, and offer parental counseling. Boring ? Yes, But it's the only positive solution so far. What do you do when you accidentally cut yourself in the kitchen ? You put on a bandage, maybe some polysporin.. right ? That fixes the problem, so what do you do to fix ignorance ? You provide information. Parents of problem kids are often just as frustrated as you and I, only they feel powerless in controlling their child. Maybe a bit of friendly advice, shoved down their throat with a court order, can help improve the situation for everyone.
Well I'm out of ideas. Really I wish we could quietly exterminate them all and go on with our lives, but clearly the world isn't ready to distill the gene pool just yet, which is a good thing, because it means we're still trying to find a solution that helps everyone, rather than culling the bad apples.
I guess that would make them an INsignificant other. sorry, had to be done :)
/. to push peoples' buttons and stimulate intellectual debate. Really it's the same thing, only she uses her voice whereas I use my keyboard.
The problem is that computers do offer a form of limited, "safe" social interaction, plus you don't have to worry about your hair, your breath, or what you're wearing (or not wearing). Some people use computers the way others use phones.. if I added up the time my S.O. spends on the phone every day, the number would come close to my non-work computer time. While she entertains her friends and family with the day's joys and woes, I post flame-worthy banter on
Innovation doesn't drive the economy, sadly. Innovation is EXPENSIVE, and oh so difficult. IT Companies aren't in it to change the world, cure disease and abolish hunger, they're in it to make money. You make money by offering a product or service to a large audience, not by spending a ton of resources on innovation that will only cater to a tiny niche. Besides, have IT companies ever been innovative at all ?
Back when I was doing homebrew on the GBA, we ran legacy GBC roms through an emulator since it would then appear as a GBA executable. Alternately there was the GB-Bridge device which is kind of like the Slot-1 passcard system, but the added cost and weight of this bridge device resulted in most people just going the emulated route.
I would expect it to be just as easy to run a DS-native emulator for GBA roms. That gives you the benefit of a DS-native launcher app allowing for all sorts of tricks. You could even zip the roms and have the emu decompress them on-the-fly.
Problem is, people won't realize the High-Def either doesn't show, or doesn't matter. Even worse: they won't care. Most people get all glazy-eyed with technology, they just accept that not all movies are created equal. Others just want the fanciest, most expensive toy to show off to their sexually dominant peers.
It used to be, when someone bought a fancy overpriced stereo, came back the next day and said it sounded cheap, you'd tell them they need fancy overpriced cables to "bring out the quality" and off they go with $400 of cheap copper and plastic. Then when they come back you tell them "you need bi-amped speakers!" and off they go with $600 of cheap paper and wood. Then when they come back, THEY tell you "my stereo is shite, here's even more money, sell me the best you got".
With High-Def it's going to be the same song and dance. "My HD-DVD looks uglier than VHS", you need a new TV. "My HD-DVD still looks like shite", you need new cables. "My HD-DVD looks like Whoopi Goldberg's boobs", you need a power conditioner... the crappier something is, the more opportunity there is for upsale. That's why nothing ever works "just right", there's always some stupid feature that's glitched or backwards, just to make room for future improvement$. It sucks for discerning enthusiasts like you and I, because we're a minority. For every videophile that returns a crippled player on principle, there are 99 norms that will do the exact opposite and spend more money to "fix" the problem. High-Def is marketed as a luxury after all, and luxuries are supposed to cost lots of money for minimal functionality. At least that's what the retail world has been telling us all this time.
Hrm.. as much as I want to root for my own city of Ottawa, I have to say that seriously jeopardizes the credibility of this popularity contest. Ottawa is hardly an intelligent city. I find most people here are mock-intelligent... aka full of shit! They don't run around screwing their cousins and building gun racks out of duck tape, but they're not going to change the world eitehr. Most people here just spend their time maximizing their federal gov't income and job security (a.k.a. moving up the ladder without doing any work), then making asses of themselves in rush hour traffic day after day.
As for broadband penetration, well yes there is a high number of people with broadband, but I'd like to think many european countries have higher speeds and less crippled ISPs than Rogers Cable and its merry band of imbeciles.
If "government/private sector digital integration" means paying gov't consultants by email so they can "work" from "home" on the 14th hole, then yes we're definitely a leader.
Hey don't get me wrong, I moved here for a reason... I like the place, but if Ottawa is on the top list, that means everyone that didn't make the list is very fucking lame!
Hey don't get me wrong, I've seen worse. After all, I moved here for a reason, but I've seen better elsewhere.
If cousins aren't allowed to marry, there will just be a lot more illegitimate retarded kids. Those rednecks'll fuck anyway!
I wouldn't be so quick about getting the smallest NAS possible, since hard drives spew heat, and heat kills a drive real quick. Just because they don't come with a bigass heatsink and fan doesn't mean they don't need one. The cheapest solution I've seen so far is an Aspire X-QPack (stupid taiwanese product name). It's a cube-style chassis with a rather quiet power supply and a temperature readout on the front. You can squeeze 6 hard drives in there with an extra 120mm fan. If you go with decently priced 500gb drives you could have yourself 2.5gb of Raid-5 goodness in less than a cubic foot. The temp display is a nice extra too. It's no Petabox, but for something you can build in a few minutes using cheap off-the-shelf components, can't complain too much.
Ultimately, if noise is an issue, just hide the thing far away from your ears. You're going to run ethernet or wifi anyway, so who cares where the actual hardware is. Shove that NAS in a closet!
I am speechless, friend.. Amen brother!
The bigger the machine, the greater its efficiency losses. A one-man company can't steal from itself (well, not successfully anyways). A ten thousand man company could have 9999 thieves and a single victim... then when that one guy gets too nosey, you just get rid of him. That's the corporate "landscape".
Errr.. so you're saying that I can't display advertising or propaganda in my home unless I have you agree to be exposed to it, at the door before you step in ?
You make the choice to visit a web site, much in the same way you choose to turn on your TV or radio. Now if I were invading your home and doing sales pitches against your will, that's different... that's like malware randomly throwing popups while you're doing something else, but this is not the case here. Your argument is invalid.
How appropriate that you are an anonymous coward.
Exactly, it's human nature (especially in unhappy humans) to put in the least effort. If you're paid a salary for a 40 hour week, you're going to do what it takes to make your work fit in that 40 hour frame and avoid overtime, because let's face it nobody likes to work for free, that's why it's called "work". Like you said, when it comes to software development there is so much room for interpretation that you can deliver a great product with extra time and effort (for free), or you can earn the same money by delivering a mediocre but contractually sufficient product that fit within your schedule. There is the incentive to not work beyond your 40 hours, but there isn't much to encourage you to get it done in less, unless you're self-employed.
What if your boss said: here's your list of assignments for the week, if you get them done before the 40 hour mark you can go home. Don't you think you would try to find the most efficient way to do it, and maximize your free time ? Sure.. but then business factors dictate that the boss will give you a heavier work load the following week, and now you're having to do more work for the same money. Corporate greed has been serviced yet again, and you're the bitch. This attitude has led to people doing the strict minimum required to get paid, as well as that neat concept called "job security" where you make yourself look busier and more important than you really are, just so you don't get replaced with the newer, faster, more conformant model.
It's an ugly balance but that's just what it is: balance. No matter what you try to improve it, an equal and opposing force will come to push back.
The problem with capitalism is the fact that it's only somewhat limited by the law. It's the reality that you can kill someone with a little money, and with a fair chunk more you can even get away with it. Either you shoot them dead and hire a crack team of lawyers, or you start a pharmaceutical company and basically hold sick people at virtual gunpoint until they cough up enough cash to "earn" their antidote. What happens when people are no longer "sick enough" to sustain a company's growth forecast ? Are they going to "create a need" ? How about a new strain of diabetes that is resistant to all but Company X's products ? It may sound like a bad old sci-fi flick but you have to remember that a corporate has no soul, no conscience. It is a simple machine that creates profit, nothing more. When that machine grows big enough, its collective power is stronger than the individual voices that make it up. In a board room of top execs looking at a chart that shows them no longer being rich execs 5 years from now, I'd venture that maybe 10-15% of them will flirt with the idea of creating a disease if it will revive corporate (and personal) profitability. That percentage will only grow as time passes and the world becomes a more crowded, angry place to live.
:)
Me, I just wish Darwinism would gain fame and kill two birds with one stone: 1. sickly people die young as they should, to ease the burden on everyone else and 2. less sick people means less power to the pharmaceutical companies... oh and 3. I'm just not a nice person to begin with
Ahh but interest rates are things banking customers shop around for... ATM fees usually aren't, since they've already got you captive by then, and it's just another incentive to sell you a flat-rate monthly plan. Banks are businesses, like any other. They exist to generate profit, and everything they do eventually comes back to that prime goal. They are seen as "heroes" for bailing their foolish clients out of their mistakes, while if they had said "tough luck", they would have lost at least a few of those clients and missed a great PR opportunity. I'm willing to bet that the signup rate has increased noticeably since this event, just because people see them as a "good bank", which is on the same level as "military intelligence" as far as oxymorons go.
The problem with Windows isn't more RAM, it's the fact that there's something fishy going on in the kernel and it will swap out no matter what. Even if you nuke the swap file, the stupid thing will evict code from RAM and reload it from the EXE file later.
Case in point: I have 16gb in this machine (just because I can). At least once a day while switching between a browser and a couple spreadsheets, Office 2007 will sit stupid for a few seconds with a half-drawn screen while reloading from disk. I don't run many background processes, and my system disks are dedicated to the OS and apps. All data files are on a separate disk array... the choke point is the kernel itself! It's just kinda sorta really dumb.
The thing to remember here is that AmigaOS, like BeOS, is a real-time operating system, at least in spirit. Windows is a "when I feel like it"-time system. If Microsoft could get their act together and realize that User Interface means ME ME ME, maybe they could release a product that is as adored and worshipped as AmigaOS and Mac OS. We have these ridiculously fast machines that feel slower than the 486'es of a decade past, and it's all about UI philosophy. Make a UI that gives immediate feedback to my commands, not 100ms later.. 1ms later!! It's okay if the actual process takes a bit longer, as long as it "feels" fast the user will be happy. We're not sitting at our workstations with stopwatches to measure performance, we just want to do our work without the frequent eye-rolling pauses of the Microsoft regime.