I always thought that the "GW" in "GW-Basic" came from "Gates William", so I always assumed it was a genuine Microsoft product. When did they buy it and from whom?
I type this on my primary laptop. It's a P-III 600MHz. I bought it for 100€ from the company that I left a year ago. It came with a 6Gig harddisk and 256Meg RAM. Since it lacked a network card, I added a wireless network card for 25€.
I had 256Meg RAM for laptops lying around (from my iBook times) and I was bold enough to try if Mac RAM would work. It did. Now I have 512Meg total. The 6Gig became to small last fall and I bought a 80Gig laptop harddisk for 117€.
So for a mere 242€, I now have a nice laptop that does everything I need. Okay, battery life is only 30 minutes, but I don't care.
I know one can get laptops for about 800€ these days, but I paid significantly less and don't need much more power. (Actually, the new harddisk really made a noticeable difference)
Still, the basic configuration of P-III 600MHz, 256Meg RAM and 6Gig harddisk would be more than enough for basic needs. Especially for someone casually surfing the internet and writing the occasional letter.
Well, sure, but how many are really going to boycott the music industries. You, see, my sister is a big pirate in the sense she has copied a lot of CDs. Not your average teeny bopper music, no, she's serious about music. Why? Well, she was a student and she had not enough disposable money.
She finished her studies as a sound engineer and tomorrow she starts at a (non-music) job. She already said that she's going to blow her first salary on music CDs: replacing (as much as possible) copied CDs with originals.
Don't underestimate the priorities of people. Personally, I've been in CD shops and found music I'd like (non mainstream!) and I always check for the "Audio CD" logo. None of them had it anymore and all of them indicated some kind of DRM. I put them back, but I'm not passionate about music.
My sister *is* going to buy these kind of CDs, and I can be sure she'll need me to defeat the DRM and put it on her computer (she loves the fact that iTunes is able to share over network, and with multiple computers on the network she does).
I know this is anecdotical evidence, so you can file my ideas in the bit bucket if you want to.
The music industries are not going to go broke anytime soon because most people have other priorities than DRM in their lives. As long as there is a loss in revenues (or only a perceived loss) they will push DRM, more and more draconian DRM. To the point that you will have a live internet connection on your CD player to play a simple "Audio CD" (and probably linked to one single player) It's only at that point that people will revolt, but then it will be too late.
I don't see a way out as long as only people posting on slashdot know about DRM.
Sure, that's nice in theory... Problem is: if their revenues fall, they will blame it on piracy. If the revenues soar, they will say that their copy protection schemes (and other measures like the logging of ISP) work and that those should thus be mandatory.
Of course that is nothing highly secret. The problem is that if the programmers use it, then the ports are open. Anyone in the company could then use the IM client and if managers start to use it, important information might get out. Don't underestimate that...
Well, often getting a country tld is discouraged in a financial way: I have a couple of domain names in the generic range because they only cost me about 15€ per year. If I wanted a.lu (my country), I have to pay 40€ per year. Now, my dad has one and he had to pay over 100€ initialisation fee!!! (For friggen two lines in a database!) They seems to have scrapped that, but I still don't have a.lu, just because for a bit more than that price I can sustain a.com, org and.net.
If they were competitive, I'd take a.lu... They just aren't...
For me.com,.org and.net are for the citizens of the net and I disagree completely with the poster that said that they are "for the US". Besides, I agree that the.us is underutilised. I agree with your defense of the.co.us that could be used. Oh, well... can't change such mindsets.
Since it's commonly accepted that.com,.org, etc are for US based websites that shouldn't that shouldn't cause much of a problem.
Sorry, that is not commonly accepted..com means commercial,.org means organisational and.net means Network. Commercial, organisational and networking institutions exist around the world. I have a.com, a.net and a.org and I can assure you that I am not North American and will *never* be North American. Besides, I'm neither commercial, nor have a organisation nor run a network (except my home network), so the TLDs usage are not even enforced.
Those TLDs are for everyone, not only for those born under the stars 'n stripes.
I'll try to use a more corporate example for you to understand: take BASF. A well known company, which was founded in Germany. According to your ideas, BASF would *not* qualify for a.com, simply because it isn't from the United States. No,.com,.net and.org are not for US-only. You've got.us for that, just like we got.de,.fr,.lu,.nl,.de for our usages.
Is it a pay-membership site or an amateur site, that has loads of images and/or videos for titilation or sexual gratification of the viewer.
Sexual gratification? LOL! Go back to Victorian times: showing the ankle of a woman was considered indecent. I'm pretty sure that in Afghanistan showing just the face of a woman would be considered highly pornographic. You morals are not those of the rest of the world. Look at this and ask yourself if this is pr0n. To you and me probably not, but perhaps it's already too much for people in the bible-belt, and most certainly for many Arabic countries.
So you know what people are doing to solve the problem of high demand on Palm Oil?
They are cutting down rain forests to put up Palm Tree groves to produce Palm Oil so that can add Bio-Diesel into the fuels in Europe to save the environment. I shit you not.
Proof, please? One points of BioDiesel is to keep production local. In Europe, most BioDiesel is produced by using Rapeseed. The yield may be lower, but local farmers are supported. Much better than giving our cash to rain-forest-cutters.
Finally: Gasoline and Bio-Diesel . There is no reason to compare Gasoline with BioDiesel. Those are two very different beasts. You'll never be able to use BioDiesel in a Gasoline engine. Ethanol, yes, but Diesel... No way!
I know a lot of people that have 100+km commutes. The reason is simple: I live in a place with high salaries and a lot of job opportuninties. From about 100km in radius the salaries are much lower, but so are the housing costs. Hence many people live far away to profit from the lower housing costs, but come to work here for the higher salaries.
Europe calling in here: In my country I have to pay about 4.65€ per gallon for premium gas (Converted using google and xe.com) My country actually has one of the lowest gas prices in Europe. Compare to the UK: it would be about 6.48€ per gallon. Now, I cannot talk for the UK, but I can talk for my country: most people do take the car for their commutes. Some have a choice, many have not. I, for example, have no choice: my workplace is 35km from home and there is no direct way to get there. I could take, 1 bus and then a train, resulting in about 2 to 3 hours commute. With the car it's 35 minutes if there is no traffic, 1 hour when the traffic is dense. The main reason for this is that I work in a smaller city and not in the capital.
I can't change my job: I didn't choose the place where I work, it has been imposed by my employer (the state). My wife is in a very similar situation, except she has to drive 50km to her job! We're thinking of relocating close to her job, but then my commute will certainly exceed 100km.
I'm not complaining, I just want to point out that even with high gas prices people will continue to use their cars if the alternatives are sub-par. Yeah, if we both worked in the capital we could take the bus! Oh, and about bus usage: read my latest journal and weep...
Don't kid yourself: high gas prices do not equate lower car usage. Sure, if gas prices were 50€ per litre, I couldn't use the car to get my to by job. The thing is: I wouldn't need to go to my job anymore because the transportation cost would exceed significantly what I earn. I'd simply be out of a job in such a case. Note that nobody who doesn't work in the capital would be out of a job: you would essentially kill economically all smaller cities that cannot connect to the rest of the country without huge investments.
Of course, I made the mistake five years ago to buy a sports car. Dumb decision now, but back then it was cool. Selling my car is not an option: nobody is going to buy it and I can't get a new one for what I would get for my current car. My wife has a small Diesel car, but she has also noticed the extra cost in her commuting.
You hope? Then you go on bashing the performace of Linux (better said: KDE and GNOME. As for the burning: I never managed myself, I blame it on K3B and I was to lazy to learn the command line tools)... Anyways: of course it's a joke!
According to the running joke (excuse my pun) the French always surrender. You know, they "run away" from danger. "running faster is better".
I can't believe that I'm even trying to explain this because I'm a European (though not French) and I absolutely hate that joke...
The kid wants (needs, see how you take it) network connectivity. So, what am I'm going to say to him? Take the 500MHz P-III/256Meg RAM to surf and only use your P4 2.6GHz/512Meg RAM for games. Come one, would you "swallow" that as a kid? It's easier to teach him that being always admin is bad. I'm not in charge of his education and his mom knows next to nothing about computers. If he were my kid I could watch what he does: he is not my kid... I see him twice a month, max! It's a very different situation from you with your "your 16 year old".
Right now, he understood that he should stay in his account for everything he does, with the exception of a very few uncommon tasks (like Pinnacle Studio). Guess, what: he actually respects that! Many slashdotters would cheer for me just because I saved them many (future) workhours because I *educated* a future computer user. He's actually happy that his PC runs faster than the (newer) PC's of his friends. Guess it's a win-win situation for everyone!
What I didn't say is that my brother in law is a 13 year old. (I case you think I am a perv: my wife just has a 10 year younger brother) There is no way in hell that I'm going to give him Power User privs. I have seen what happened to his PC when he was Admin. *Never Again*
Those are on top of my head. Yes, halflife 1 was from the 98/W2k days and one could excuse the programmers, but under XP it's a bitch to setup. Palm Desktop software: I can set it up to work under limited accounts... A normal user can't: it's pretty hard. Pinnacle Studio 9... Hehe, I still didn't find how to. Not that I use it, but my brother in law uses it and I set him up on a limited XP account. Also keep in mind that Nero needs Administrative access unless you install BurnRights. BurnRights isn't installed by default... Catch my drift? (May have changed, I never went beyond Nero 5.5)
Oh, yes, my sister has this game called "Children of the Nile". Doesn't work on a non-admin account either. The Sims 2 didn't work as non-admin either and it says so right on the box: they luckily patched it because enough people complained.
Need I go on?
Can you name any that REQUIRE you to be admin?
I think I named enough, and all those programs are things normal users want to run. Luckily I have savvy users than can use "Run As" responsibly. I admit that most programs can be run non-admin (again: Pinnacle Studio 9 and Children Of the Nile have resisted all my attempts) with a litte of work: Setting Registry and file rights... in XP Home, file rights only go with cacls... No easy graphical interface! This is beyond the normal home user... Heck many don't even understand the "All User"/"Current User" start menu concept!
Not really: there are hardware keyloggers that can be built into the keyboard. Nobody is going to see that one. Of course, everybody here knows that once you've got access to the hardware, you've essentially have access to the machine.
At least that's what the article seems to imply. So the lesson here is: protect your computer, use Firefox, Ad-Aware and Spybot.
For the moment it's fairly easy to find out when a machine has spyware. What would scare me is when a decent programmer will start to write such programs so that it is completely stealth and doesn't bring the machine to a grinding halt. After all, basically all spyware seems to be badly written and performance not an issue at all. A decent programmer, using all his skills could write a stealth spyware/keylogger that doesn't bog down the computer and goes undetected for a very long time. It shouldn't do popups, but just log the keys... A small background prcess could do this, and store locally, detect when a big download is started to camouflage its own traffic to the server by sending it while the big file gets downloaded. The day that that happens: we'll be all screwed.
You OS seeing only 3.2 to 3.5 gigs makes no sense to me. Maybe you bought the RAM from a harddrive manufacturer? Dunno.
He already explained why this is so, I quote: "in part due to the PCI devices mapping resources, etc". This is 100% hardware related, and has nothing to do with the operating system or the memory he used. He really has 4Gig of RAM in his machine, but the motherboard doesn't allow more. I know this because I own a machine that does exactly this and because I read the manual (I only have 1Gig in it, and I see exactly 1Gig) I have this motherboard . Go and download the manual, go to page 12 and read the footnote.
I don't understand the reason for this memory eating part either, especially that it doesn't occur when having less than 4Gig... The problem does exist, and this motherboard cannot be the only one having this issue. As far as I can say it's AMD chipset related.
Well... I might be mistaken, but doesn't the A8 share it's platform with the Volkswagen Phaeton? I think it does... A8's are damn fine cars, but I can't ever in my life afford such a car. At most a low-end A6, but an A8 (especially the nicer models) are way out of my league. (You see them much more often in the US, than in Europe... Perhaps Americans have more money?)
I know... Read my comment again, I said: "Skoda and Seat also use those platforms". I own an Audi TT, which shares its platform with the Audi A3, VW Golf, VW Jetta/Bora (same thing), Seat Leon, Seat Toledo and the Skoda Octavia (IIRC). Never regretted my choice though, well except gas prices are a bit painful these days;-)
Another example would be VW versus Audi. They basically use the same platforms to build the cars. (Or if you know the European market: Skoda and Seat also use those platforms)
The difference is mostly finish... and the pricetag;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought that the "GW" in "GW-Basic" came from "Gates William", so I always assumed it was a genuine Microsoft product. When did they buy it and from whom?
I had 256Meg RAM for laptops lying around (from my iBook times) and I was bold enough to try if Mac RAM would work. It did. Now I have 512Meg total. The 6Gig became to small last fall and I bought a 80Gig laptop harddisk for 117€.
So for a mere 242€, I now have a nice laptop that does everything I need. Okay, battery life is only 30 minutes, but I don't care.
I know one can get laptops for about 800€ these days, but I paid significantly less and don't need much more power. (Actually, the new harddisk really made a noticeable difference)
Still, the basic configuration of P-III 600MHz, 256Meg RAM and 6Gig harddisk would be more than enough for basic needs. Especially for someone casually surfing the internet and writing the occasional letter.
Änd that is truly sad, but you're 100% right. (Pink Floyd fan here...)
She finished her studies as a sound engineer and tomorrow she starts at a (non-music) job. She already said that she's going to blow her first salary on music CDs: replacing (as much as possible) copied CDs with originals.
Don't underestimate the priorities of people. Personally, I've been in CD shops and found music I'd like (non mainstream!) and I always check for the "Audio CD" logo. None of them had it anymore and all of them indicated some kind of DRM. I put them back, but I'm not passionate about music.
My sister *is* going to buy these kind of CDs, and I can be sure she'll need me to defeat the DRM and put it on her computer (she loves the fact that iTunes is able to share over network, and with multiple computers on the network she does).
I know this is anecdotical evidence, so you can file my ideas in the bit bucket if you want to.
The music industries are not going to go broke anytime soon because most people have other priorities than DRM in their lives. As long as there is a loss in revenues (or only a perceived loss) they will push DRM, more and more draconian DRM. To the point that you will have a live internet connection on your CD player to play a simple "Audio CD" (and probably linked to one single player) It's only at that point that people will revolt, but then it will be too late.
I don't see a way out as long as only people posting on slashdot know about DRM.
Either way, the customer is screwed.
Of course that is nothing highly secret. The problem is that if the programmers use it, then the ports are open. Anyone in the company could then use the IM client and if managers start to use it, important information might get out. Don't underestimate that...
For such situations you set up a jabber server. Treating company information over an *external* IM system is not acceptable.
If they were competitive, I'd take a .lu... They just aren't...
For me .com, .org and .net are for the citizens of the net and I disagree completely with the poster that said that they are "for the US". Besides, I agree that the .us is underutilised. I agree with your defense of the .co.us that could be used. Oh, well... can't change such mindsets.
Sorry, that is not commonly accepted. .com means commercial, .org means organisational and .net means Network. Commercial, organisational and networking institutions exist around the world. I have a .com, a .net and a .org and I can assure you that I am not North American and will *never* be North American. Besides, I'm neither commercial, nor have a organisation nor run a network (except my home network), so the TLDs usage are not even enforced.
Those TLDs are for everyone, not only for those born under the stars 'n stripes.
I'll try to use a more corporate example for you to understand: take BASF. A well known company, which was founded in Germany. According to your ideas, BASF would *not* qualify for a .com, simply because it isn't from the United States. No, .com, .net and .org are not for US-only. You've got .us for that, just like we got .de, .fr, .lu, .nl, .de for our usages.
Sexual gratification? LOL! Go back to Victorian times: showing the ankle of a woman was considered indecent. I'm pretty sure that in Afghanistan showing just the face of a woman would be considered highly pornographic. You morals are not those of the rest of the world. Look at this and ask yourself if this is pr0n. To you and me probably not, but perhaps it's already too much for people in the bible-belt, and most certainly for many Arabic countries.
They are cutting down rain forests to put up Palm Tree groves to produce Palm Oil so that can add Bio-Diesel into the fuels in Europe to save the environment. I shit you not.
Proof, please? One points of BioDiesel is to keep production local. In Europe, most BioDiesel is produced by using Rapeseed. The yield may be lower, but local farmers are supported. Much better than giving our cash to rain-forest-cutters.
Have fun reading about BioDiesel.
Finally: Gasoline and Bio-Diesel . There is no reason to compare Gasoline with BioDiesel. Those are two very different beasts. You'll never be able to use BioDiesel in a Gasoline engine. Ethanol, yes, but Diesel... No way!
All this in the middle of Europe...
Europe calling in here: In my country I have to pay about 4.65€ per gallon for premium gas (Converted using google and xe.com) My country actually has one of the lowest gas prices in Europe. Compare to the UK: it would be about 6.48€ per gallon. Now, I cannot talk for the UK, but I can talk for my country: most people do take the car for their commutes. Some have a choice, many have not. I, for example, have no choice: my workplace is 35km from home and there is no direct way to get there. I could take, 1 bus and then a train, resulting in about 2 to 3 hours commute. With the car it's 35 minutes if there is no traffic, 1 hour when the traffic is dense. The main reason for this is that I work in a smaller city and not in the capital.
I can't change my job: I didn't choose the place where I work, it has been imposed by my employer (the state). My wife is in a very similar situation, except she has to drive 50km to her job! We're thinking of relocating close to her job, but then my commute will certainly exceed 100km.
I'm not complaining, I just want to point out that even with high gas prices people will continue to use their cars if the alternatives are sub-par. Yeah, if we both worked in the capital we could take the bus! Oh, and about bus usage: read my latest journal and weep...
Don't kid yourself: high gas prices do not equate lower car usage. Sure, if gas prices were 50€ per litre, I couldn't use the car to get my to by job. The thing is: I wouldn't need to go to my job anymore because the transportation cost would exceed significantly what I earn. I'd simply be out of a job in such a case. Note that nobody who doesn't work in the capital would be out of a job: you would essentially kill economically all smaller cities that cannot connect to the rest of the country without huge investments.
Of course, I made the mistake five years ago to buy a sports car. Dumb decision now, but back then it was cool. Selling my car is not an option: nobody is going to buy it and I can't get a new one for what I would get for my current car. My wife has a small Diesel car, but she has also noticed the extra cost in her commuting.
You hope? Then you go on bashing the performace of Linux (better said: KDE and GNOME. As for the burning: I never managed myself, I blame it on K3B and I was to lazy to learn the command line tools)... Anyways: of course it's a joke!
According to the running joke (excuse my pun) the French always surrender. You know, they "run away" from danger. "running faster is better".
I can't believe that I'm even trying to explain this because I'm a European (though not French) and I absolutely hate that joke...
Right now, he understood that he should stay in his account for everything he does, with the exception of a very few uncommon tasks (like Pinnacle Studio). Guess, what: he actually respects that! Many slashdotters would cheer for me just because I saved them many (future) workhours because I *educated* a future computer user. He's actually happy that his PC runs faster than the (newer) PC's of his friends. Guess it's a win-win situation for everyone!
What I didn't say is that my brother in law is a 13 year old. (I case you think I am a perv: my wife just has a 10 year younger brother) There is no way in hell that I'm going to give him Power User privs. I have seen what happened to his PC when he was Admin. *Never Again*
Pinnacle Studio 9
Palm Desktop Software
Those are on top of my head. Yes, halflife 1 was from the 98/W2k days and one could excuse the programmers, but under XP it's a bitch to setup. Palm Desktop software: I can set it up to work under limited accounts... A normal user can't: it's pretty hard. Pinnacle Studio 9... Hehe, I still didn't find how to. Not that I use it, but my brother in law uses it and I set him up on a limited XP account. Also keep in mind that Nero needs Administrative access unless you install BurnRights. BurnRights isn't installed by default... Catch my drift? (May have changed, I never went beyond Nero 5.5)
Oh, yes, my sister has this game called "Children of the Nile". Doesn't work on a non-admin account either. The Sims 2 didn't work as non-admin either and it says so right on the box: they luckily patched it because enough people complained.
Need I go on?
Can you name any that REQUIRE you to be admin?
I think I named enough, and all those programs are things normal users want to run. Luckily I have savvy users than can use "Run As" responsibly. I admit that most programs can be run non-admin (again: Pinnacle Studio 9 and Children Of the Nile have resisted all my attempts) with a litte of work: Setting Registry and file rights... in XP Home, file rights only go with cacls... No easy graphical interface! This is beyond the normal home user... Heck many don't even understand the "All User"/"Current User" start menu concept!
Not really: there are hardware keyloggers that can be built into the keyboard. Nobody is going to see that one. Of course, everybody here knows that once you've got access to the hardware, you've essentially have access to the machine.
For the moment it's fairly easy to find out when a machine has spyware. What would scare me is when a decent programmer will start to write such programs so that it is completely stealth and doesn't bring the machine to a grinding halt. After all, basically all spyware seems to be badly written and performance not an issue at all. A decent programmer, using all his skills could write a stealth spyware/keylogger that doesn't bog down the computer and goes undetected for a very long time. It shouldn't do popups, but just log the keys... A small background prcess could do this, and store locally, detect when a big download is started to camouflage its own traffic to the server by sending it while the big file gets downloaded. The day that that happens: we'll be all screwed.
He already explained why this is so, I quote: "in part due to the PCI devices mapping resources, etc". This is 100% hardware related, and has nothing to do with the operating system or the memory he used. He really has 4Gig of RAM in his machine, but the motherboard doesn't allow more. I know this because I own a machine that does exactly this and because I read the manual (I only have 1Gig in it, and I see exactly 1Gig) I have this motherboard . Go and download the manual, go to page 12 and read the footnote.
I don't understand the reason for this memory eating part either, especially that it doesn't occur when having less than 4Gig... The problem does exist, and this motherboard cannot be the only one having this issue. As far as I can say it's AMD chipset related.
Well... I might be mistaken, but doesn't the A8 share it's platform with the Volkswagen Phaeton? I think it does... A8's are damn fine cars, but I can't ever in my life afford such a car. At most a low-end A6, but an A8 (especially the nicer models) are way out of my league. (You see them much more often in the US, than in Europe... Perhaps Americans have more money?)
I won't say it... Promised... The other posters already did...
I know... Read my comment again, I said: "Skoda and Seat also use those platforms". I own an Audi TT, which shares its platform with the Audi A3, VW Golf, VW Jetta/Bora (same thing), Seat Leon, Seat Toledo and the Skoda Octavia (IIRC). Never regretted my choice though, well except gas prices are a bit painful these days ;-)
The difference is mostly finish... and the pricetag ;-)
Yummy... Fish! :-) I'm hungry, can I eat some?