XP on 128MB RAM is useless. If you want basic web browsing 256 is the bare minimum but if you want Antivirus I would jump that right to 512. It often won't complain about running out of memory it will just be all slow and unstable.
Same thing with Vista btw.. I wouldn't even consider that on less than 1 GB ram.
Microsoft listed hardware requirements have always been a bad joke.
There are a lot of people who talk about piracy. The publishers because they need someone to blame things on and the pirates like to make noise about how what they do really benefits society. I suspect the real truth is that it doesn't really do much of either.
You need to know that in our society you have people who pay for things and people who steal things. People who pay for things generally pay for things and people who steal things generally refuse to pay for things.
Years ago a some people I know got into the warez scene. For some reason and to this day I still don't understand one guy I know had $50 000 worth of software on his PC. He had no use for most of it and didn't even bother installing the larger part of his collection and most of it was for industries he neither understood nor had any interest in. He simply grabbed it so he could have a huge value of stolen software on his computer and he been forced to actually pay for it he would have dumped 99% of it.
It's the same with people in the town I grew up in stealing shopping carts taking them to a secluded area and bashing them open to get the dollar coins out. (yes I'm Canadian) Best they could be doing? $2 to $3 an hour. They would make better money collecting tin cans or working at McDonalds' yet they continue.
Do you honestly think that most of the pirates have any interest in programming compression algorithms?
In the same way the most pirated songs are also the ones with the highest volume sales so you should keep in mind that these are not actually causing much if any lost sales. The internet just makes it much more noticeable.
The few real programmers with an interest in learning about compression algorithms will appreciate the work you put in and want to reward you because that's generally what decent people do.
My advice to you is to grow thicker skin. I'm certain it would bother me if I were in your shoes but idiots will be idiots and no amount of lawsuits, technological fixes or attempts at guilt will change that.
I solved that problem with flashblock. I whitelist the sites I want to use flash on and the rest can go screw themselves. It's actually more effective than adblock for keeping my browser responsive.
It's worse when there is a union. In the district I was in high school they had a teacher charged with having improper sexual contact with a minor and the union still wanted to keep him from being banned from teaching.
It's entirely possible that they weren't qualified but as a contractor I have no way to know who they were.
I've had intermittent cables, cables that work at 100mbps but not 1000mbps and all tested "good". I suspect that anything other than the $1000+ testers just do a continuity check. At least with female jacks I can take the plug apart and check for obvious problems. I can't tell you how many people in Montreal think I'm a genius for no other reason than the fact that I walked into their office and had them replace all their hand made cable.
I have had too many issues with hand made cables to allow them on any site I work at. My rule is: Long runs should have female ends since the connections on those are larger, harder to screw up and easier to verify. The last part of the run can be done with factory made patch cables.
I've discovered that even if the guy put the colors in the right order there's no guarantee that the crimper put in a solid connection and I've had marginal cables that tested "good" drop packets.
These tactics remind me of a trick on how to check out other girls with your significant other present: feigned outrage.
"Wow look at her shes wearing almost nothing at all. Will you look at that top? You can almost see right down her shirt. And look at those pants! They are so tight they show everything. Disgusting isn't it?"
The simple fact is, if you don't like something, the natural human tendency is to stop looking at it.
Meanwhile this guy has played enough GTA to find the lap dance clip and went browsing through the adult section of a gay website to find a picture to include in his legal filings?
Because the users/managers think they need it and in some cases the hardware won't work without it.
You seem to come from the perspective where Management checks with IT before buying things. I wish things actually worked like that for even some of the places I have worked at.
I'm constantly surprised by these frequent accounts of computers which take forever and a day to start up. It's not that I disbelieve them, but what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?
I haven't personally experienced this since the early-ish Pentium days when OEM PCs came loaded with huge amounts of junk. Just unbearable. They still have all that junk, but PCs have become so much faster it's less of a problem and more of an annoyance now. At least, it is until you wipe the thing and set it up properly.
And these machines are almost invariably Windows PCs. I've got non-bleeding edge Linux PCs acting as servers running all manner of daemons doing all manner of tasks and they all go from cold to useful in less than two minutes. My Linux desktop machine boots even faster, but the time to usability (TTU?) is slightly longer as I open/reposition various user apps, open documents, etc. But it's still just a few minutes before I can doing something useful.
Start a Symantec AV scanner (the corporate standard at least in Canada). Then add 20 stupid hardware specific widgets each company thinks they are clever for writing. All in one Printer/scanner/fax manager, Touchpad widget etc. Now that you have it loading in 5 - 8 minutes Throw in some badly written industry specific software that needs another 30 seconds to 5 minutes (depending on the software) to start.
If you really want to have some fun you can install this on some of the more interesting corporate edition PCs that take forever just to get though the BIOS.
Better yet wait for the next virus hits and then blame it on a lack of security updates caused by all of the pirated windows versions they are running.
You are forgetting that the processor is not what stops you from running that many things at once.
Your biggest bottleneck will be your Drive followed by the RAM. It doesn't matter how fast the chip goes or how many things it can do at once if it's always waiting for data.
But much easier for someone to simply make a copy of the details. I find that my credit card info is treated much more carelessly during card present transactions. Credit card is printed on a bill. Where does the business owner keep their copy? Who all can see it? I've even had my card number written on the top of my order. In some of the places I've done tech support I've seen sheets laying around with credit card numbers. It's nice to know that even the janitor can steal my credit card info.
Also larger retail stores feed your numbers into "complex automated software". Think TG max who was a huge source of stolen credit cards and guess what? As of last summer they still hadn't bothered to secure anything.
I make a ton of transactions online and only once have I had fraudulent transactions on my credit card. That once was the local pizza place
A few years ago I worked for a company that had one such person on the team. Everyone thought he was a genius and tolerated the fact that he couldn't even be bothered to bathe or wear clean clothing. He would come when he felt like it and he would leave when he felt like it
One day we had issues with his software and the boss went to find him only to find out he wasn't in the office. When the boss woke him up at 1:00 his only reply was "I didn't realize it's monday"
Needless to say he was replaced and, as the poor new guy quickly discovered, it turns out the reason no one could understand his code was that he was an alcoholic who couldn't organize his code any more than he could organize the rest of his life.
Being eccentric is not an excuse to be a selfish jerk.
They sucked for longer than that. I cut with them when they added extra charges and then refused to bill me in english.
I discovered they were charging me twice what their sales guy said when they consolidated my bills and then they charged me a disconnect fee when I left.
Slashdot Mirror
I had that problem once and I can tell you that the NT password remover bootable cd takes care of that problem nicely.
XP on 128MB RAM is useless. If you want basic web browsing 256 is the bare minimum but if you want Antivirus I would jump that right to 512. It often won't complain about running out of memory it will just be all slow and unstable.
Same thing with Vista btw.. I wouldn't even consider that on less than 1 GB ram.
Microsoft listed hardware requirements have always been a bad joke.
There are a lot of people who talk about piracy. The publishers because they need someone to blame things on and the pirates like to make noise about how what they do really benefits society. I suspect the real truth is that it doesn't really do much of either.
You need to know that in our society you have people who pay for things and people who steal things. People who pay for things generally pay for things and people who steal things generally refuse to pay for things.
Years ago a some people I know got into the warez scene. For some reason and to this day I still don't understand one guy I know had $50 000 worth of software on his PC. He had no use for most of it and didn't even bother installing the larger part of his collection and most of it was for industries he neither understood nor had any interest in. He simply grabbed it so he could have a huge value of stolen software on his computer and he been forced to actually pay for it he would have dumped 99% of it.
It's the same with people in the town I grew up in stealing shopping carts taking them to a secluded area and bashing them open to get the dollar coins out. (yes I'm Canadian) Best they could be doing? $2 to $3 an hour. They would make better money collecting tin cans or working at McDonalds' yet they continue.
Do you honestly think that most of the pirates have any interest in programming compression algorithms?
In the same way the most pirated songs are also the ones with the highest volume sales so you should keep in mind that these are not actually causing much if any lost sales. The internet just makes it much more noticeable.
The few real programmers with an interest in learning about compression algorithms will appreciate the work you put in and want to reward you because that's generally what decent people do.
My advice to you is to grow thicker skin. I'm certain it would bother me if I were in your shoes but idiots will be idiots and no amount of lawsuits, technological fixes or attempts at guilt will change that.
I solved that problem with flashblock. I whitelist the sites I want to use flash on and the rest can go screw themselves.
It's actually more effective than adblock for keeping my browser responsive.
It's worse when there is a union. In the district I was in high school they had a teacher charged with having improper sexual contact with a minor and the union still wanted to keep him from being banned from teaching.
This is what happens when people used to getting attention miss the attention when their 15 minutes is up.
No one has payed attention to Eric Raymond in years so now he has to start a flame war.
It's entirely possible that they weren't qualified but as a contractor I have no way to know who they were.
I've had intermittent cables, cables that work at 100mbps but not 1000mbps and all tested "good". I suspect that anything other than the $1000+ testers just do a continuity check. At least with female jacks I can take the plug apart and check for obvious problems. I can't tell you how many people in Montreal think I'm a genius for no other reason than the fact that I walked into their office and had them replace all their hand made cable.
I have had too many issues with hand made cables to allow them on any site I work at. My rule is: Long runs should have female ends since the connections on those are larger, harder to screw up and easier to verify. The last part of the run can be done with factory made patch cables.
I've discovered that even if the guy put the colors in the right order there's no guarantee that the crimper put in a solid connection and I've had marginal cables that tested "good" drop packets.
An opt out means you might try to opt out instead of complaining to their isp so the spam relays/websites stay up longer.
Not exactly true. SUN is a major contributor to both the Linux memory management and the Linux filesystem codebases.
Does it have replication yet?
These tactics remind me of a trick on how to check out other girls with your significant other present: feigned outrage.
"Wow look at her shes wearing almost nothing at all. Will you look at that top? You can almost see right down her shirt. And look at those pants! They are so tight they show everything. Disgusting isn't it?"
The simple fact is, if you don't like something, the natural human tendency is to stop looking at it.
Meanwhile this guy has played enough GTA to find the lap dance clip and went browsing through the adult section of a gay website to find a picture to include in his legal filings?
If only Microsoft didn't have a history of suing people who make working products that interoperate with theirs.
Mono is a trojan horse so MS can make licensing revenue after their VFAT patents expire.
Didn't RTFA did you? MLB is saying they get better quality picture from flash than they did with Silverlight.
Forks happen often but successful forks only happen if the new project is better than the one it replaced. XFree86 vs X.org etc.
Because the users/managers think they need it and in some cases the hardware won't work without it.
You seem to come from the perspective where Management checks with IT before buying things. I wish things actually worked like that for even some of the places I have worked at.
I'm constantly surprised by these frequent accounts of computers which take forever and a day to start up. It's not that I disbelieve them, but what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?
I haven't personally experienced this since the early-ish Pentium days when OEM PCs came loaded with huge amounts of junk. Just unbearable. They still have all that junk, but PCs have become so much faster it's less of a problem and more of an annoyance now. At least, it is until you wipe the thing and set it up properly.
And these machines are almost invariably Windows PCs. I've got non-bleeding edge Linux PCs acting as servers running all manner of daemons doing all manner of tasks and they all go from cold to useful in less than two minutes. My Linux desktop machine boots even faster, but the time to usability (TTU?) is slightly longer as I open/reposition various user apps, open documents, etc. But it's still just a few minutes before I can doing something useful.
Start a Symantec AV scanner (the corporate standard at least in Canada). Then add 20 stupid hardware specific widgets each company thinks they are clever for writing. All in one Printer/scanner/fax manager, Touchpad widget etc. Now that you have it loading in 5 - 8 minutes Throw in some badly written industry specific software that needs another 30 seconds to 5 minutes (depending on the software) to start.
If you really want to have some fun you can install this on some of the more interesting corporate edition PCs that take forever just to get though the BIOS.
well not really. Pirated versions of windows often have security updates turned off because sometimes an update will break the crack they used.
The result is that the two largest attack vectors into a windows system (IE and outlook) are not getting security updates.
Bad things happen in a room full of computer illiterates and no security patches.
Better yet wait for the next virus hits and then blame it on a lack of security updates caused by all of the pirated windows versions they are running.
You are forgetting that the processor is not what stops you from running that many things at once.
Your biggest bottleneck will be your Drive followed by the RAM. It doesn't matter how fast the chip goes or how many things it can do at once if it's always waiting for data.
But much easier for someone to simply make a copy of the details. I find that my credit card info is treated much more carelessly during card present transactions. Credit card is printed on a bill. Where does the business owner keep their copy? Who all can see it? I've even had my card number written on the top of my order. In some of the places I've done tech support I've seen sheets laying around with credit card numbers. It's nice to know that even the janitor can steal my credit card info.
Also larger retail stores feed your numbers into "complex automated software". Think TG max who was a huge source of stolen credit cards and guess what? As of last summer they still hadn't bothered to secure anything.
I make a ton of transactions online and only once have I had fraudulent transactions on my credit card. That once was the local pizza place
A few years ago I worked for a company that had one such person on the team. Everyone thought he was a genius and tolerated the fact that he couldn't even be bothered to bathe or wear clean clothing. He would come when he felt like it and he would leave when he felt like it
One day we had issues with his software and the boss went to find him only to find out he wasn't in the office. When the boss woke him up at 1:00 his only reply was "I didn't realize it's monday"
Needless to say he was replaced and, as the poor new guy quickly discovered, it turns out the reason no one could understand his code was that he was an alcoholic who couldn't organize his code any more than he could organize the rest of his life.
Being eccentric is not an excuse to be a selfish jerk.
I wonder how hard it would be to implement encrypted pppoe between the customer and the reseller.
That would lock bell out for good.
They sucked for longer than that. I cut with them when they added extra charges and then refused to bill me in english.
I discovered they were charging me twice what their sales guy said when they consolidated my bills and then they charged me a disconnect fee when I left.
Not everywhere.. Colba rents copper pairs in most of the downtown core.