Whether you believe animal testing is right or wrong, that is not the way to go about protesting it
I agree with you on that front, though I am impartial to either side of the issue. The problem I see with "activism" in general is you'll find plenty of people on each side, but they get caught up in their methods and lose sight of the goal. It doesn't help that the powers that be are constantly trying to shut them out, rathan than addressing the issues publicly and responsibly.
Sure, we can write a zillion letters to a zillion elected officials, but once all peaceful techniques have been tried and failed, sometimes you just have to shake the shit out of someone to get a response. I'm not saying I side with the SHAC protesters, but I'm just saying there is probably more to this story than what we're reading today.
If a company bases its recruiting practices on health instead of aptitude, person A should be thankful they don't have to work for such imbeciles. There will always be work to be done, and people to do the work, thus there will always be employers willing to hire the right person for the job.
1. check for malware - you've already done this. 2. check for a failing hard disk, by running the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool or Spinrite 3. if there's no failure, try clearing out your temp folders and run a defrag 4. if it's still chugging, it just might be time to start over with a fresh OS install. Sure, you could troubleshoot for days or even weeks, but a reinstall takes a few hours to a day at most. Remember to back up your data, or better yet install to a new hard drive and copy your documents over.
All you Linux troll-wannabes about to bash the defrag, shut the fuck up! Run a few torrents, watch your disk I/O drop to a tenth of its nominal performance within a week, and you'll see that ext3 is not immune to fragmentation, no better or worse than NTFS. *ANY* I/O-intensive machine benefits from a defrag once in a while, there's no filesystem in the world that can avoid it, not unless it uses multi-gigabyte write cache to sort sectors in-flight, because some loads just aren't filesystem-friendly.
If a motherboard maker is going to waste effort on an onboard Ramdisk, I'd rather just have them put two dozen memory slots and let me install a couple hundred GB of DDR2/3 for a 64-bit OS to use.
What you have described is an old sloppy hack. It's something guys like me used to do before 64-bit PCs became affordable. 4gb Ram + 4gb swapfile on a Ramdisk = ghetto 8gb heap.
The real solution to the disk/Ram problem is to rethink how we use these devices. We can't keep on growing our operating systems to fill all available memory, that won't be sustainable for much longer as performance levels are worse than they were ten years ago, despite the hardware being 10 times faster across the board. Eventually we will hit a wall, and all those sloppy coders will have to shape up or start driving buses.
Okay, as a system builder and all-around hardware nut, allow me to translate your bullet points into plain english.
* Most tasks are not disk IO-bound
Define "most". Consumer systems are very IO-bound. Office apps load a gazillion files, games read and write large data lumps with miserably inadequate buffers (causing massive seeking and cache inefficiency), media apps read and write large video files and usually have massive intermediate files while encoding/rendering. Web and database servers are almost always IO-bound under heavy loads.
* Despite the fact that this device uses DDR2 RAM running at more than 6 GB/sec, it can not saturate 2 SATA interfaces
That's because this interface is cheap and made by a Taiwanese gadget company, known for cheap knockoff products, not high-performance equipment. The whole idea of using SATA is kludgey at best, when you could be using the full potential of the PCI-Express bus.
* Why bother?
Because cheap Taiwanese knockoff companies need money too, and their not-quite-useful products always appeal to the techno-suckers. If this product were a serious Ram-disk, it would cost ten times more and wouldn't be hung from a hook on a pegboard at your local computer scamshop.
If you're that concerned about dicking around with your DTV receiver, then why bother at all ? Grab your shows via BitTorrent and do whatever the hell you want with the files. You can build yourself a MythTV box or some random Korean pirate-friendly media center box.
The longer you play the networks' game, the more restrictive their offerings will become. DTV will be harder to hack, and the next iteration will be even tighter, because these cartels are obsessed with one thing: controlling their market, leading to heightened profits. Having a receiver that lets you do what you, as a hacker, want to do, is directly against their goals.
The system you describe makes far too much sense, which is precisely why the record companies want no part of it. They do everything they can to suck money up, and everything they can to avoid paying money out. Whether your definition of "everything" includes legal abuse, tax fraud, racketeering, murder and extortion, well that's up to you.
You're close, but bricked really just means "you can't fix it, nor can the average layperson". There is such a think as "unbricking".
For example, you might brick a motherboard by flashing it with some hacked BIOS you found on a tweak forum. If you're as dumb as the average forum troll, you're probably not clever, resourceful or brave enough to hotflash your socketed chip on a different board, but an experienced techie could do it.
There's also a pretty large market of "unbricking services", usually just some half-breed with a special cable he bought off of some other wannabe-crook on eBay. He'll reflash your PSP, cell phone or hacked FTA receiver for ten bucks, right from his ornate Honda Civic office.
There are very few cases where a "bricked" device is truly beyond repair by a skilled and equipped technician. If a gadget sells for $100, and your staff tech costs $50/hour, then as long as he can fix more than one unit every two hours (minus S&H and markdown), you fix the gadget. In practice, you end up seeing the same problems over and over, most of them very simple, so your tech might be able to fix 5+ per hour, and I'm being conservative here.
Throwing it in the trash is not a good idea, because if you don't try to fix the broken ones, someone else will buy your trash and do it behind your back. Then you have a bunch of poorly-repaired devices bearing your brand name, floating around generating forum posts and hate mail all over the web. The cost of junking returns can be greater than the cost of repairing them.
I've had a much different experience over the years.
(DISCLAIMER: I used to install 100+ drives per week)
Seagates I've come to know as reliable, but dog-slow drives. I loved them for a time, but they quickly squandered that loyalty. I just plain despise their warranty process and customer service reps, as I have had nothing but problems "trying" to get a drive exchanged under warranty. It's a good thing their drives didn't fail so often, but when they did, it was a nightmare.
It was not at all uncommon for them to argue I was giving them invalid serial numbers, for both Seagate and Maxtor branded drives. A few times I took photos of the actual drive label to shut them up, and after that I just started verbally abusing them until they got someone marginally more competent on the line. Then the RMA process usually got messed up, an L2 would approve the exchange, but I guess they did it wrong (because they don't do it often), so someone else goes in and cancels the RMA the next day. Even as a retailer, I had all kinds of problems dealing with them.
Maxtor, well I've honestly not touched them since the merger. Are they different from Seagate-branded drives ? Are they the same hardware with a shorter warranty ? I don't know, and I don't plan to find out anytime soon. Now the old Maxtor, as flaky as they were, I absolutely loved the support. It was usually a 10-minute phone call to get one or more drives replaced. Their reps always seemed to acknowledge my ability, as a tech and dealer, to properly troubleshoot and diagnose a product BEFORE calling it in. If I said "The drive doesn't spin anymore", they didn't tell me to "try to run MaxDiags on it" or "turn it off for 5 minutes then try again", instead they started taking my shipping address right away. That kind of respect is golden!
WD had some rough times in the 90s, but I can say I've been using nothing but WD ever since dumping Seagate, and I haven't had to replace one in many years (have a dozen). They're quiet, they're fast, and they're priced to sell. If they keep that up, they will quickly win me over.
I wonder if the school administrator who turned them in realized the damage that would be done to these kids.
Most certainly. There are two types of employees in the typical high school:
1. young, eager profs who still hold onto their idealistic views and desires to make the world a better place
2. old, bitter management who have no saleable skills beyond bureucratic masturbation, projecting their own failures upon the vulnerable youth
The public school system, like all systems, is fucked up beyond repair. It is no longer about training to be a successful member of society, and more about learning to obey and stand in line. Problem is, I don't have any solutions to offer.
I wouldn't expect Cisco's CTO to tell a keyboard apart from their own asshole. They are an ugly company with a very messed up business and distribution model. The only thing they will end up doing is make the government buy a ton of useless Cisco gear, just like every other "ex"-CxO.
I personally think the best person for the role would be a non-partisan, non-corporate figure. Whether that's a highly respected professor or one of our familiar FOSS figureheads, that's something I can't decide because I don't know them well enough. It takes an ideas-person, not a money-person. Let the finance folks worry about the money, not the CTO.
Yep I heard that one too, but I must ask: how often do kids get trapped in refrigerators ? Seems like you wouldn't need that much strength to overcome the rubber seal. Sure, you don't benefit from the handle's leverage but I would expect practically any child to start kicking at the door to get out.
Maybe we need to stop protecting the dumb kids from themselves.
So easy to dig around STD/Pregnancy tests, or when little daughter sought the pill.
And why is privacy such a big deal in this situation ? What's so embarrassing about a person being mindful of diseases and/or unwanted demon spawn ?
The more secrets a person has, the more stress they carry with them. That's quite directly how you've wound up with so much crime and violence - the more you repress, the uglier it is when it finally comes out, and it ALWAYS comes out.
You're right, googling for just about anything will yield links to torrent "search" engines, but there is a large number of fake sites like this, where you could type any random gibberish and the site will say Oh yeah, we have 7312 seeds for "amoeba playing mozart in space on Condoleeza Rice's chin".
The first three results from your search are such fake sites, a few others down the page are blogs by people who saw a screener. No where is it currently possible, as far as I can tell, to download this movie, and I run torrent sites for fun and profit, so I can usually find sources for everything.
The Dutch get a positive economic effect because that's where all the gray-area seedboxes are leased! And since there is likely far more U.S. content being shared than Dutch content, the net result for the Dutch is a positive.
They will most likely liquidate their stock to a competitor, which will of course hock those goods at full price so the customer gets no deal whatsoever.
It is shocking, because Jobs' health has less to do with Apple's sales output, and more to do with the stock market's paranoia. The fact that people are making such a huge deal of these events is solid proof that the great majority of stock traders are sensationalist imbeciles.
That's all nice in the western world, but the whole "blame the parents" system fails miserably in less-fortunate (read: terminally fucked) regions of the world where the parents come from a long line of ethically bankrupt generations, largely the product of their dysfunctional war-mongering governments. How can you teach a child the "right way", when you've never known it yourself ?
You can however have faith in the fact that if your children are young enough, they may be as stupid as the chain of idiots who have wasted your tax money on this crap. This entails that, like lemmings, they will most likely find an enriching career within the U.S. senate
What they're doing is attempting to create a Fisher Price dev environment where you don't have to think anymore because they've done it all for you.
They don't have much of a choice, since about (rand[100]) 97% of all computer schools are absolute garbage, we end up with a bunch of Fisher Price developers who can type out Java bullshit at a steady 120wpm, but the resultant app makes zero sense as they fall into the trap of "checklist development". The app does "this, and that, and that too" but does them all sloppily and unreliably. Then we have managers who review the checklist line by line then sign off because it "passes spec". They completely miss the true purpose of the app in the first place: to fulfill a human need.
If an app is unusable because of bugs or a nonsensical interface, then I don't care what the checklist says, it is a failure!
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Whether you believe animal testing is right or wrong, that is not the way to go about protesting it
I agree with you on that front, though I am impartial to either side of the issue. The problem I see with "activism" in general is you'll find plenty of people on each side, but they get caught up in their methods and lose sight of the goal. It doesn't help that the powers that be are constantly trying to shut them out, rathan than addressing the issues publicly and responsibly.
Sure, we can write a zillion letters to a zillion elected officials, but once all peaceful techniques have been tried and failed, sometimes you just have to shake the shit out of someone to get a response. I'm not saying I side with the SHAC protesters, but I'm just saying there is probably more to this story than what we're reading today.
If a company bases its recruiting practices on health instead of aptitude, person A should be thankful they don't have to work for such imbeciles. There will always be work to be done, and people to do the work, thus there will always be employers willing to hire the right person for the job.
For everything else, there's labour laws.
Okay, the usual checklist goes like this:
1. check for malware - you've already done this.
2. check for a failing hard disk, by running the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool or Spinrite
3. if there's no failure, try clearing out your temp folders and run a defrag
4. if it's still chugging, it just might be time to start over with a fresh OS install. Sure, you could troubleshoot for days or even weeks, but a reinstall takes a few hours to a day at most. Remember to back up your data, or better yet install to a new hard drive and copy your documents over.
All you Linux troll-wannabes about to bash the defrag, shut the fuck up! Run a few torrents, watch your disk I/O drop to a tenth of its nominal performance within a week, and you'll see that ext3 is not immune to fragmentation, no better or worse than NTFS. *ANY* I/O-intensive machine benefits from a defrag once in a while, there's no filesystem in the world that can avoid it, not unless it uses multi-gigabyte write cache to sort sectors in-flight, because some loads just aren't filesystem-friendly.
If a motherboard maker is going to waste effort on an onboard Ramdisk, I'd rather just have them put two dozen memory slots and let me install a couple hundred GB of DDR2/3 for a 64-bit OS to use.
What you have described is an old sloppy hack. It's something guys like me used to do before 64-bit PCs became affordable. 4gb Ram + 4gb swapfile on a Ramdisk = ghetto 8gb heap.
The real solution to the disk/Ram problem is to rethink how we use these devices. We can't keep on growing our operating systems to fill all available memory, that won't be sustainable for much longer as performance levels are worse than they were ten years ago, despite the hardware being 10 times faster across the board. Eventually we will hit a wall, and all those sloppy coders will have to shape up or start driving buses.
Okay, as a system builder and all-around hardware nut, allow me to translate your bullet points into plain english.
* Most tasks are not disk IO-bound
Define "most". Consumer systems are very IO-bound. Office apps load a gazillion files, games read and write large data lumps with miserably inadequate buffers (causing massive seeking and cache inefficiency), media apps read and write large video files and usually have massive intermediate files while encoding/rendering. Web and database servers are almost always IO-bound under heavy loads.
* Despite the fact that this device uses DDR2 RAM running at more than 6 GB/sec, it can not saturate 2 SATA interfaces
That's because this interface is cheap and made by a Taiwanese gadget company, known for cheap knockoff products, not high-performance equipment. The whole idea of using SATA is kludgey at best, when you could be using the full potential of the PCI-Express bus.
* Why bother?
Because cheap Taiwanese knockoff companies need money too, and their not-quite-useful products always appeal to the techno-suckers. If this product were a serious Ram-disk, it would cost ten times more and wouldn't be hung from a hook on a pegboard at your local computer scamshop.
If you're that concerned about dicking around with your DTV receiver, then why bother at all ? Grab your shows via BitTorrent and do whatever the hell you want with the files. You can build yourself a MythTV box or some random Korean pirate-friendly media center box.
The longer you play the networks' game, the more restrictive their offerings will become. DTV will be harder to hack, and the next iteration will be even tighter, because these cartels are obsessed with one thing: controlling their market, leading to heightened profits. Having a receiver that lets you do what you, as a hacker, want to do, is directly against their goals.
The system you describe makes far too much sense, which is precisely why the record companies want no part of it. They do everything they can to suck money up, and everything they can to avoid paying money out. Whether your definition of "everything" includes legal abuse, tax fraud, racketeering, murder and extortion, well that's up to you.
You're close, but bricked really just means "you can't fix it, nor can the average layperson". There is such a think as "unbricking".
For example, you might brick a motherboard by flashing it with some hacked BIOS you found on a tweak forum. If you're as dumb as the average forum troll, you're probably not clever, resourceful or brave enough to hotflash your socketed chip on a different board, but an experienced techie could do it.
There's also a pretty large market of "unbricking services", usually just some half-breed with a special cable he bought off of some other wannabe-crook on eBay. He'll reflash your PSP, cell phone or hacked FTA receiver for ten bucks, right from his ornate Honda Civic office.
There are very few cases where a "bricked" device is truly beyond repair by a skilled and equipped technician. If a gadget sells for $100, and your staff tech costs $50/hour, then as long as he can fix more than one unit every two hours (minus S&H and markdown), you fix the gadget. In practice, you end up seeing the same problems over and over, most of them very simple, so your tech might be able to fix 5+ per hour, and I'm being conservative here.
Throwing it in the trash is not a good idea, because if you don't try to fix the broken ones, someone else will buy your trash and do it behind your back. Then you have a bunch of poorly-repaired devices bearing your brand name, floating around generating forum posts and hate mail all over the web. The cost of junking returns can be greater than the cost of repairing them.
I've had a much different experience over the years.
(DISCLAIMER: I used to install 100+ drives per week)
Seagates I've come to know as reliable, but dog-slow drives. I loved them for a time, but they quickly squandered that loyalty. I just plain despise their warranty process and customer service reps, as I have had nothing but problems "trying" to get a drive exchanged under warranty. It's a good thing their drives didn't fail so often, but when they did, it was a nightmare.
It was not at all uncommon for them to argue I was giving them invalid serial numbers, for both Seagate and Maxtor branded drives. A few times I took photos of the actual drive label to shut them up, and after that I just started verbally abusing them until they got someone marginally more competent on the line. Then the RMA process usually got messed up, an L2 would approve the exchange, but I guess they did it wrong (because they don't do it often), so someone else goes in and cancels the RMA the next day. Even as a retailer, I had all kinds of problems dealing with them.
Maxtor, well I've honestly not touched them since the merger. Are they different from Seagate-branded drives ? Are they the same hardware with a shorter warranty ? I don't know, and I don't plan to find out anytime soon. Now the old Maxtor, as flaky as they were, I absolutely loved the support. It was usually a 10-minute phone call to get one or more drives replaced. Their reps always seemed to acknowledge my ability, as a tech and dealer, to properly troubleshoot and diagnose a product BEFORE calling it in. If I said "The drive doesn't spin anymore", they didn't tell me to "try to run MaxDiags on it" or "turn it off for 5 minutes then try again", instead they started taking my shipping address right away. That kind of respect is golden!
WD had some rough times in the 90s, but I can say I've been using nothing but WD ever since dumping Seagate, and I haven't had to replace one in many years (have a dozen). They're quiet, they're fast, and they're priced to sell. If they keep that up, they will quickly win me over.
it's not just the cream that floats to the top
You're right, shit also floats.
I wonder if the school administrator who turned them in realized the damage that would be done to these kids.
Most certainly. There are two types of employees in the typical high school:
1. young, eager profs who still hold onto their idealistic views and desires to make the world a better place
2. old, bitter management who have no saleable skills beyond bureucratic masturbation, projecting their own failures upon the vulnerable youth
The public school system, like all systems, is fucked up beyond repair. It is no longer about training to be a successful member of society, and more about learning to obey and stand in line. Problem is, I don't have any solutions to offer.
do you want teens kept in a sex free bubble or in the real world?
You mean they're not one and the same ?
We are! Because we men are violently bitter about not being able to use the vagina defense in court when we act foolishly.
Recordings are a lot more likely to cause trouble in their lives than just having sex.
That's interesting, because I've never caught herpes or had a child from watching porn. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.
It does suck, but it is sadly true.
I wouldn't expect Cisco's CTO to tell a keyboard apart from their own asshole. They are an ugly company with a very messed up business and distribution model. The only thing they will end up doing is make the government buy a ton of useless Cisco gear, just like every other "ex"-CxO.
I personally think the best person for the role would be a non-partisan, non-corporate figure. Whether that's a highly respected professor or one of our familiar FOSS figureheads, that's something I can't decide because I don't know them well enough. It takes an ideas-person, not a money-person. Let the finance folks worry about the money, not the CTO.
Yep I heard that one too, but I must ask: how often do kids get trapped in refrigerators ? Seems like you wouldn't need that much strength to overcome the rubber seal. Sure, you don't benefit from the handle's leverage but I would expect practically any child to start kicking at the door to get out.
Maybe we need to stop protecting the dumb kids from themselves.
Do we need special "time ships" to travel through space ? No.
Then you don't need "space ships" to travel through time.
So easy to dig around STD /Pregnancy tests, or when little daughter sought the pill.
And why is privacy such a big deal in this situation ? What's so embarrassing about a person being mindful of diseases and/or unwanted demon spawn ?
The more secrets a person has, the more stress they carry with them. That's quite directly how you've wound up with so much crime and violence - the more you repress, the uglier it is when it finally comes out, and it ALWAYS comes out.
You're right, googling for just about anything will yield links to torrent "search" engines, but there is a large number of fake sites like this, where you could type any random gibberish and the site will say Oh yeah, we have 7312 seeds for "amoeba playing mozart in space on Condoleeza Rice's chin".
The first three results from your search are such fake sites, a few others down the page are blogs by people who saw a screener. No where is it currently possible, as far as I can tell, to download this movie, and I run torrent sites for fun and profit, so I can usually find sources for everything.
The Dutch get a positive economic effect because that's where all the gray-area seedboxes are leased! And since there is likely far more U.S. content being shared than Dutch content, the net result for the Dutch is a positive.
They will most likely liquidate their stock to a competitor, which will of course hock those goods at full price so the customer gets no deal whatsoever.
the most shocking news, shocking I tell you
It is shocking, because Jobs' health has less to do with Apple's sales output, and more to do with the stock market's paranoia. The fact that people are making such a huge deal of these events is solid proof that the great majority of stock traders are sensationalist imbeciles.
That's all nice in the western world, but the whole "blame the parents" system fails miserably in less-fortunate (read: terminally fucked) regions of the world where the parents come from a long line of ethically bankrupt generations, largely the product of their dysfunctional war-mongering governments. How can you teach a child the "right way", when you've never known it yourself ?
You can however have faith in the fact that if your children are young enough, they may be as stupid as the chain of idiots who have wasted your tax money on this crap. This entails that, like lemmings, they will most likely find an enriching career within the U.S. senate
There, fixed it for you.
What they're doing is attempting to create a Fisher Price dev environment where you don't have to think anymore because they've done it all for you.
They don't have much of a choice, since about (rand[100]) 97% of all computer schools are absolute garbage, we end up with a bunch of Fisher Price developers who can type out Java bullshit at a steady 120wpm, but the resultant app makes zero sense as they fall into the trap of "checklist development". The app does "this, and that, and that too" but does them all sloppily and unreliably. Then we have managers who review the checklist line by line then sign off because it "passes spec". They completely miss the true purpose of the app in the first place: to fulfill a human need.
If an app is unusable because of bugs or a nonsensical interface, then I don't care what the checklist says, it is a failure!