Not to spark another GPL/BSD debate (though there hasn't been a good one here on these pages in some time), but:
I don't code anything worthwhile, but I do create some stuff. I generally do give it away for free, with "source" wherever applicable, under terms that let people/companies/penguins do whatever they want with it.
I don't care if anyone uses modifies it for their own gain. I don't feel that people should owe anyone/everyone the modifications that allowed them to earn that gain, at least from the stuff I make.
I don't consider them robber barons at all: I'm not deprived of my thing when they release it under more restrictive terms. Nothing was stolen from me, and I've lost nothing.
And frankly, if their modification or use of my stuff has enabled them to make money in ways that I could not conceive of, then that's my problem for not thinking of it first.
TrueCrypt+Dropbox is handy, but doesn't work with my Droid.
The whole point, for me, of storing passwords remotely to begin with is so I can easily get to them remotely. If I were no longer interested in that, I think I'd just go back to using local storage for such things.
Hmm, i thought people could do bath things, in the bath. You know, like clean themselves, masturbate.
Hmm.
If I want to clean myself, masturbate, I just take a shower.
If I want to clean myself, masturbate, and read a book, I use the tub.
Sometimes, I read books on my phone. Sometimes, I read books on my phone in the tub.
But I still don't see the point in this new nose-stylus, since I can operate my Droid just fine with one hand, leaving the other one free to clean myself, masturbate.
In my experience as a pet owner, the animals that appear to "kiss" are actually fighting with, or merely preening eachother. Your pictures certainly top the scale on cute animal behavior, but I doubt the reality is anything close.
Kissing gouramis, for example, are definitely not kissing because they're feeling frisky, but because it is how that particular species both attacks and defends w.r.t. territorial disputes.
Male birds will often both attack and defend with their mouths, as well. It's not because they're being friendly, but because they're trying to kill (or at least drive away) eachother -- no matter how cute it might appear to be.
Human kissing, I think, is unique in the animal kingdom: I, for one, have never "kissed" someone due to anger or some perceived threat. (If I had, I'd probably be in jail right now.)
I'm on CM 7, too: I could be happier (the camera is still broken on Droid, even more weirdly than before), but I'm not complaining. (Not much, anyway. It's minor to me.)
2.3 (ala CM 7) offers the fastest response I've ever seen from this device, and I frankly expected the opposite. Too bad that VZW is completely unlikely to ever send out an OTA update for others to enjoy it, as that would cut into their sales of new phones......:-/
I just wish it was called something other than "rooting," as that's a misnomer at best.
My math says it's not so different from paying for a new PC with a credit card at not-very-favorable rates.
And, in both cases, there is the opportunity to buy/pay off the thing at any time. Aaron's retail prices tend to be on the high side of things, but not outlandishly so (in my observation).
And for some folks, renting is a distinct advantage: Why buy a thing, just to replace it a year or two later (and fuss with selling the old one), when you can just rent the current thing and have it replaced when it is deemed old?
These aren't leases. They're just month-to-month (sometimes, week-to-week) rentals. Need a fast laptop for a project, with no foreseeable need for one after that? Just rent one.
Want an additional comfy couch for the house and a big TV to watch "the game" on with your pals, and a dedicated fridge to keep the keg cold until it runs out, but have no desire for these things to take up long-term space? Rent 'em. They even drop them off and pick them up. (Hell, with the deposit for them, even the keg+tap might be considered to be a rental...)
Of course, there's the dark side, as well: Want a new computer, long-term, but can't afford one? Rent-to-own might not be the most practical choice.
All that said: I, myself, don't rent anything. I buy my houses and have my own name on the deed, I buy my cars, and I buy my electronics and furniture. I have rented apartments before, but got out of that game as quickly as possible. The closest thing I do to renting things, these days, is Netflix.
Or is it a simple invasion of privacy, since they're using their equipment to take pictures of people (or anything else) inside of their own home, (presumably) without consent?
In terms of property rights, AFAIK, even landlords have to provide some notice before entering property they've rented out without permission.
AFAICT, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act precludes manufacturers from refusing warranty service for a hardware defect due to the nature of the software that happens to be installed, unless that software can be shown to have caused the hardware defect.
IANAL, but it's a fight I'd be willing to take up if I were unfortunate enough to have an opportunity to do so.
It's possible to have a rather modified Android device without, at any time, having root available.
Just because most ROMs include root access (via a modified su binary) does not mean that all of them must. Furthermore, installing such ROMs does not require root to begin with -- it's generally a recovery mode function, wherein the concept of "root" is foreign.
So. Just because the common term with Android is to "root" it, does not mean that it is the correct term.
That said: For what it's worth, I definitely have "rooted" my Droid: It was one of the first things I did when I got the phone, and doing so (way back then) simply required using adb to replace su, with no other changes. And I'd also have root on my IOS device (a lowly first-gen iPod Touch) if the little fucker had survived battery replacement surgery.:-/
I use Blu-Ray. But I'm old-fashioned; I like to buy my media and keep it on a shelf like a trophy. And I've got an eye (and an ear) for quality, which Blu-Ray currently delivers best. These things are important to me, and worth my money. (Your values may differ.)
I can enjoy a movie on DVD, or streamed with Netflix, but sometimes I find myself distracted by compression artifacts on my reasonably-well-calibrated, not-so-small TV, and the occasional grit from low-bandwidth Dolby Digital. (I am not interested in DTS for other reasons.)
And, besides, I have very little faith in cloud storage, and even less faith in my own storage. So when I buy a film, I want it on a tangible disk: My Blu-Ray titles should be playable many years from now, they're easy to loan to a friend, and they're insured for replacement value if my house burns down.
That said: I do not have any plans to buy a reader for Blu-Ray for my PC. I very seldom find myself wanting to watch a film while sitting at my desk (though, ostensibly, the A/V stuff tied to my desktop is certainly more than adequate for the job, and the chair is mighty comfortable, but I digress).
I find, generally, that the small, hot convection-cooled devices that I've used have been reduced in temperature considerably by just standing them on their side (ideally with whatever end winds up facing up being the one deemed to be most heat-tolerant).
I don't have any specific problems with Linksys gear (I still have a perfectly-ancient WRT54GS that I have, from time to time, even overclocked the piss out of) overheating. But if I did, this would be the first thing I'd try.
In some cases, it's a little more work: I had a 1TB WD external networked drive at one point which ran stupidly hot whether laying down or standing up by itself. But shimming up the front edge of the thing with a CD case or a bottle cap (thus better exposing the vents on the bottom, and allowing more cool air to enter) brought things back to sanity.
No measurements, strictly anecdotal, but it's in-keeping with the chimney effect.
I had an extended warranty on a Dell laptop. It's gained me a number of new parts to replace broken parts, including the top half of the machine (including LCD), a hard drive, and a power supply.
The screen itself (a not-shabby 1920x1200 15.4" model) costs more than the warranty.
That said: I'm generally very shy around warranties. I can fix my own dishwasher, or my own range, or my own furnace. I can also fix my own car.
I can fix my own laptop, too, but I knew going into it that I'd be dragging that machine around with me literally everywhere, and using it in all manner of environments, and that even though I'd try to be gentle to it, something expensive would break before the warranty has expired. And it did.
I missed a/blockquote in there somewhere, but meh.
I'd also like to add a complaint of my own: AT&T's DNS servers are complete shit. They are the slowest part of my web-browsing experience. They perform DNS lookups so slowly that it was sometimes easier for me to remember IP addresses instead, before I looked into something different.
It made me want to run a local copy of BIND, and just do my own DNS.
Instead, I switched to Google's DNS on a whim some time ago, and things have been fine.
The gateway they give you is the only thing that works with the service (you can't use your own hardware, or at least nobody has found a way to). It won't do any kind of bridge mode. It won't talk to more than one IP per MAC address, so you can't put a router behind it (unless that router is doing NAT for *everything*).
I'm a U-Verse subscriber, and yes, you do have to use their gateway. Boo-hoo, waah -- I must say that my ATT-supplied 2wire box is about the most stable chunk of networking gear I've ever used.
I do wish it had a proper bridge mode, but alas, it doesn't...but this is reasonable, in that the gateway itself also provides VoIP and some IPTV multicast magic -- all behind one address. My experience with the "DMZ Plus" feature is that it works fine, and is perfectly reliable with a WRT54 running Tomato USB. (Yes, IPV6 would be a better answer to the problem, but that's a different discussion.)
It randomly drops connections, especially long lived ones -- I can't make local backups of my server in a remote datacenter anymore, because the connection will almost never stay alive long enough to transfer the whole ~400MB. Sometimes it starts blocking random incoming connections, even to static, un-natted, unfirewalled addresses -- one day I can't get to my webserver from the outside world for a few hours... the next I can't ssh into my home server ("unknown inbound session stopped"... of course it's unknown, it's the first packet of a new connection, you piece of garbage). It supports logging to syslog, but outputs a constant stream of useless messages so thick that it's almost useless.
I had an issue once that I thought was related to the gateway dropping connections, but that wasn't it at all. It was me: I'd done a piss-poor job configuring my own router, and it was flaky all by itself.
I frequently beat the snot out of my connection with torrents and Netflix. I download DVD ISO images with simple HTTP. I backup my Droid with Dropbox. I run my own servers. I have port 25 open. Ever since I fixed my own gear, it hasn't been a problem. I have SSH sessions open to boxes at work which last for weeks.
I don't look at the logging much, because it -is- very verbose, and I just don't have any problems that can be solved with it. But I'd rather it be too verbose than too concise: At least with the too-verbose condition, I can grep what I need.
The support sucks massively. If you call with basically any problem beyond "my internet is down" they will forward you on to their "advanced" support department, who has a fee of $39 (might be $29... don't remember)... which they'll charge you even if all they do is tell you that they can't help you and you need to call regular support.
Perhaps you're just no good at navigating a support structure. I've got a direct-dial number for ATT that lands me with American folks who have a clue, and who are able to actually understand and correct issues on the network. I actually had this conversation with them:
Me: My connection is up and the levels are good, but it won't grab an IP address. Them: Strange. Oh. It looks like our radius server is down for that area. Me: Ah, ok. That makes sense. Them: To be honest, I have no idea when it will be fixed, but we're working on it. Do you want me to give you a call when it's back online? Me: Sure!
No reboots, no cable-swapping, no nothing. Just a short and straight-forward conversation between two folks that have their wits about them.
It seems reasonable to charge folks to troubleshoot PC problems, though. I know that I would. A flat rate of $39 sounds cheap for tech support. But if you got shuffled into that category somehow for a problem on their end, then that should never have happened.
Never have I been charged for support, at all. It's never even been mentioned. (And I used to call, a LOT, because of s
Wrecks don't involve warranty coverage, unless (perhaps) the wreck was caused by a warranted mechanical failure, so your question doesn't make much sense.
And the comprehensive policies on my cars don't cover off-road use, so the insurance company would be honoring their contract with me if I smashed things up on the track ("closed course") and they refused to pay for it.
I'll be the first to say that I do not fully understand any of this -- all I have are anecdotal observations, educated conjecture, and wit.
That said: As others have mentioned, I think you're swapping, not experiencing a video issue.
Who knows why -- maybe you've got a memory leak in some program or other, or are just shy on RAM for what you're asking of the system. More investigation is needed on your part (Resource Manager in Vista/7 does an OK job of this). I've had some leaky programs, and they made things horribly unresponsive.
Now, on with the anecdotes:
First, I'd like to say that your experience does not sound at all typical.
Second, I know that my system is RAM-starved. I keep a bunch of stuff open all the time, and with "only" 3.5 gigs of RAM, it swaps a lot.
My own system has a 2GB ReadyBoost drive. It's just a cheap no-name USB thumb drive that happens to be "fast enough" (by MSFT's standards) to work. It was (in this case) free. Adding it helped a bit.
I noticed a huge improvement, though, by adding a second hard drive (which I needed to do anyway because my 250GB Seagate was stuffed full, mostly with programs). I moved the biggest software packages to the second drive, leaving (for the most part) Windows, some media, and swap on the first.
I can't fully explain why it makes such a big a difference, and I certainly didn't expect it (I just shuffled programs over to the second drive to free up space, mostly), but it feels like a new/different machine.
The drive I added is a 320GB Seagate, allegedly of the same series as the 250, and neither one is particularly special (in fact, the 320 is a few years older and a bit slower...).
I can conject that keeping the 250GB for mostly Windows and swap does the trick as such: Since the parts of Windows that I'm already using are already loaded into the VM, and media (MP3s, some video) isn't really important in the equation, that leaves just swap. I believe, at this point, that I've damn-near got myself a dedicated swap device (in practice).
Which, of course, means that the heads on that 250GB (which only can be in one place at one time) are permitted to do a much better job of handling the swapfile than it was before, by virtue of offloading the program data that used to compete with it.
But I just don't know if that's how it really plays out, because I've never looked into the modern Windows VM to try to understand it -- I don't even know if I am allowed to look into it. And frankly, I don't care: My system is working pretty well these days...
So, for suggestions:
1. Investigate. Remove/upgrade/fix leaky programs -- these will trash any system's responsiveness, with any OS. 2. ReadyBoost. You've probably already got a disused thumbdrive kicking around which will work fine -- plug it into the back of the box and forget about it. (this is only #2 because it is likely free) 3. More RAM. Buy as much as you can afford. Might be expensive, but if swapping is the issue, this is the best solution. 4. Spread out the mechanical load, as in my saga above. (Might be cheaper than RAM, and you might be looking for more space anyway...)
My eyesight is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20/300 on that scale. Corrective lenses (disposable contacts, in my case) work fine: I can see pixels on an iPhone 4 pretty plainly, despite what Steve Jobs might say about that. My vision has, pretty much, always been shit: I got glasses at around age 8, and contacts at 10. Perhaps I'm just lucky that my vision is usefully-correctable, but I digress:
I run my PC displays at absurdly-high resolutions (1920x1200 on a 15.4" laptop at the most extreme), and always have. I've even spent my share of time tweaking Modelines in XFree86 to get a few more lines out of a good CRT while maintaining a reasonable refresh rate and video quality, often to the extent that I found myself banging against the abilities of the RAMDAC in the video card to produce a good, clean waveform at such frequencies.
I wish I could afford a modern desktop display with higher DPI than the 20.3" 1600x1200 NEC IPS LCD before me, just so I could fit more pixels (and therefore more well-formed words) onto the screen.
These days, I often find myself making things smaller, instead of bigger, in web browsers. And, frankly, I haven't found much desire to make things bigger in many, many years -- ever since Windows XP started doing a reasonable job of configuring display resolution out of the box, Web designers have tended to use more reasonable layouts.
It used to be pretty bad, when Windows 98 would come up at 640x480 or 800x600 at default font size by default, even on a (then) big 17" monitor: Well-meaning designers/authors would shrink their font sizes on their pages to make the text and layout appear reasonable from the visual standpoint, just for themselves and without ever considering how it might look on a properly-configured display.
I believe this is about the time that browsers grew zoom functions.:)
But, as I said, that's been a lot better for a long time. Absurdly-small fonts still happen, to be sure, but so infrequently these days that I don't think about it much.
No offense, but: Is there something wrong with your eyes?
And meanwhile: Please check out Readability. I've got no relation to them, except that I've kept it on my Firefox toolbar for ages. AFAICT, it also works fine in Chrome. It turns horribly-designed web pages (hopefully with good information!) into completely-legible texts. I mostly use it to convert (the more modern trend of) pages that have light-grey text on a slightly-darker grey background into something other than mostly-invisible, but it also sanitizes font sizes/styles and (usually!) retains the important images in a page at a reasonable size.
It is also useful to me, even with my corrected vision, when I am either very tired, very drunk, or both, even on well-designed layouts.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to spark another GPL/BSD debate (though there hasn't been a good one here on these pages in some time), but:
I don't code anything worthwhile, but I do create some stuff. I generally do give it away for free, with "source" wherever applicable, under terms that let people/companies/penguins do whatever they want with it.
I don't care if anyone uses modifies it for their own gain. I don't feel that people should owe anyone/everyone the modifications that allowed them to earn that gain, at least from the stuff I make.
I don't consider them robber barons at all: I'm not deprived of my thing when they release it under more restrictive terms. Nothing was stolen from me, and I've lost nothing.
And frankly, if their modification or use of my stuff has enabled them to make money in ways that I could not conceive of, then that's my problem for not thinking of it first.
*shrug*
TrueCrypt+Dropbox is handy, but doesn't work with my Droid.
The whole point, for me, of storing passwords remotely to begin with is so I can easily get to them remotely. If I were no longer interested in that, I think I'd just go back to using local storage for such things.
Hmm.
If I want to clean myself, masturbate, I just take a shower.
If I want to clean myself, masturbate, and read a book, I use the tub.
Sometimes, I read books on my phone. Sometimes, I read books on my phone in the tub.
But I still don't see the point in this new nose-stylus, since I can operate my Droid just fine with one hand, leaving the other one free to clean myself, masturbate.
Next time, just push the "I don't wan to bag this item" button, and presto -- it no longer expects the item to register on the scale.
You're welcome.
Yes, that clears it up nicely.
Thanks.
Suppose that you are right:
Please explain to me the following: How does "in the wrong" differ in meaning, in this particular context, from "wrong"?
Context, friend.
Scroll up a few comments, and you'll see what I mean here.
s/in the wrong/wrong/
Brevity, FFS.
HTH.
In my experience as a pet owner, the animals that appear to "kiss" are actually fighting with, or merely preening eachother. Your pictures certainly top the scale on cute animal behavior, but I doubt the reality is anything close.
Kissing gouramis, for example, are definitely not kissing because they're feeling frisky, but because it is how that particular species both attacks and defends w.r.t. territorial disputes.
Male birds will often both attack and defend with their mouths, as well. It's not because they're being friendly, but because they're trying to kill (or at least drive away) eachother -- no matter how cute it might appear to be.
Human kissing, I think, is unique in the animal kingdom: I, for one, have never "kissed" someone due to anger or some perceived threat. (If I had, I'd probably be in jail right now.)
There's always room for a reference to the Ultra-Heavy Beat.
I'm on CM 7, too: I could be happier (the camera is still broken on Droid, even more weirdly than before), but I'm not complaining. (Not much, anyway. It's minor to me.)
2.3 (ala CM 7) offers the fastest response I've ever seen from this device, and I frankly expected the opposite. Too bad that VZW is completely unlikely to ever send out an OTA update for others to enjoy it, as that would cut into their sales of new phones...... :-/
I just wish it was called something other than "rooting," as that's a misnomer at best.
My math says it's not so different from paying for a new PC with a credit card at not-very-favorable rates.
And, in both cases, there is the opportunity to buy/pay off the thing at any time. Aaron's retail prices tend to be on the high side of things, but not outlandishly so (in my observation).
And for some folks, renting is a distinct advantage: Why buy a thing, just to replace it a year or two later (and fuss with selling the old one), when you can just rent the current thing and have it replaced when it is deemed old?
These aren't leases. They're just month-to-month (sometimes, week-to-week) rentals. Need a fast laptop for a project, with no foreseeable need for one after that? Just rent one.
Want an additional comfy couch for the house and a big TV to watch "the game" on with your pals, and a dedicated fridge to keep the keg cold until it runs out, but have no desire for these things to take up long-term space? Rent 'em. They even drop them off and pick them up. (Hell, with the deposit for them, even the keg+tap might be considered to be a rental...)
Of course, there's the dark side, as well: Want a new computer, long-term, but can't afford one? Rent-to-own might not be the most practical choice.
All that said: I, myself, don't rent anything. I buy my houses and have my own name on the deed, I buy my cars, and I buy my electronics and furniture. I have rented apartments before, but got out of that game as quickly as possible. The closest thing I do to renting things, these days, is Netflix.
But I'm not allergic to the concept.
YMMV.
Or is it a simple invasion of privacy, since they're using their equipment to take pictures of people (or anything else) inside of their own home, (presumably) without consent?
In terms of property rights, AFAIK, even landlords have to provide some notice before entering property they've rented out without permission.
AFAICT, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act precludes manufacturers from refusing warranty service for a hardware defect due to the nature of the software that happens to be installed, unless that software can be shown to have caused the hardware defect.
IANAL, but it's a fight I'd be willing to take up if I were unfortunate enough to have an opportunity to do so.
It's possible to have a rather modified Android device without, at any time, having root available.
Just because most ROMs include root access (via a modified su binary) does not mean that all of them must. Furthermore, installing such ROMs does not require root to begin with -- it's generally a recovery mode function, wherein the concept of "root" is foreign.
So. Just because the common term with Android is to "root" it, does not mean that it is the correct term.
That said: For what it's worth, I definitely have "rooted" my Droid: It was one of the first things I did when I got the phone, and doing so (way back then) simply required using adb to replace su, with no other changes. And I'd also have root on my IOS device (a lowly first-gen iPod Touch) if the little fucker had survived battery replacement surgery. :-/
I use Blu-Ray. But I'm old-fashioned; I like to buy my media and keep it on a shelf like a trophy. And I've got an eye (and an ear) for quality, which Blu-Ray currently delivers best. These things are important to me, and worth my money. (Your values may differ.)
I can enjoy a movie on DVD, or streamed with Netflix, but sometimes I find myself distracted by compression artifacts on my reasonably-well-calibrated, not-so-small TV, and the occasional grit from low-bandwidth Dolby Digital. (I am not interested in DTS for other reasons.)
And, besides, I have very little faith in cloud storage, and even less faith in my own storage. So when I buy a film, I want it on a tangible disk: My Blu-Ray titles should be playable many years from now, they're easy to loan to a friend, and they're insured for replacement value if my house burns down.
That said: I do not have any plans to buy a reader for Blu-Ray for my PC. I very seldom find myself wanting to watch a film while sitting at my desk (though, ostensibly, the A/V stuff tied to my desktop is certainly more than adequate for the job, and the chair is mighty comfortable, but I digress).
I find, generally, that the small, hot convection-cooled devices that I've used have been reduced in temperature considerably by just standing them on their side (ideally with whatever end winds up facing up being the one deemed to be most heat-tolerant).
I don't have any specific problems with Linksys gear (I still have a perfectly-ancient WRT54GS that I have, from time to time, even overclocked the piss out of) overheating. But if I did, this would be the first thing I'd try.
In some cases, it's a little more work: I had a 1TB WD external networked drive at one point which ran stupidly hot whether laying down or standing up by itself. But shimming up the front edge of the thing with a CD case or a bottle cap (thus better exposing the vents on the bottom, and allowing more cool air to enter) brought things back to sanity.
No measurements, strictly anecdotal, but it's in-keeping with the chimney effect.
I had an extended warranty on a Dell laptop. It's gained me a number of new parts to replace broken parts, including the top half of the machine (including LCD), a hard drive, and a power supply.
The screen itself (a not-shabby 1920x1200 15.4" model) costs more than the warranty.
That said: I'm generally very shy around warranties. I can fix my own dishwasher, or my own range, or my own furnace. I can also fix my own car.
I can fix my own laptop, too, but I knew going into it that I'd be dragging that machine around with me literally everywhere, and using it in all manner of environments, and that even though I'd try to be gentle to it, something expensive would break before the warranty has expired. And it did.
*shrug*
I missed a /blockquote in there somewhere, but meh.
I'd also like to add a complaint of my own: AT&T's DNS servers are complete shit. They are the slowest part of my web-browsing experience. They perform DNS lookups so slowly that it was sometimes easier for me to remember IP addresses instead, before I looked into something different.
It made me want to run a local copy of BIND, and just do my own DNS.
Instead, I switched to Google's DNS on a whim some time ago, and things have been fine.
I'm a U-Verse subscriber, and yes, you do have to use their gateway. Boo-hoo, waah -- I must say that my ATT-supplied 2wire box is about the most stable chunk of networking gear I've ever used.
I do wish it had a proper bridge mode, but alas, it doesn't...but this is reasonable, in that the gateway itself also provides VoIP and some IPTV multicast magic -- all behind one address. My experience with the "DMZ Plus" feature is that it works fine, and is perfectly reliable with a WRT54 running Tomato USB. (Yes, IPV6 would be a better answer to the problem, but that's a different discussion.)
I had an issue once that I thought was related to the gateway dropping connections, but that wasn't it at all. It was me: I'd done a piss-poor job configuring my own router, and it was flaky all by itself.
I frequently beat the snot out of my connection with torrents and Netflix. I download DVD ISO images with simple HTTP. I backup my Droid with Dropbox. I run my own servers. I have port 25 open. Ever since I fixed my own gear, it hasn't been a problem. I have SSH sessions open to boxes at work which last for weeks.
I don't look at the logging much, because it -is- very verbose, and I just don't have any problems that can be solved with it. But I'd rather it be too verbose than too concise: At least with the too-verbose condition, I can grep what I need.
Perhaps you're just no good at navigating a support structure. I've got a direct-dial number for ATT that lands me with American folks who have a clue, and who are able to actually understand and correct issues on the network. I actually had this conversation with them:
Me: My connection is up and the levels are good, but it won't grab an IP address.
Them: Strange. Oh. It looks like our radius server is down for that area.
Me: Ah, ok. That makes sense.
Them: To be honest, I have no idea when it will be fixed, but we're working on it. Do you want me to give you a call when it's back online?
Me: Sure!
No reboots, no cable-swapping, no nothing. Just a short and straight-forward conversation between two folks that have their wits about them.
It seems reasonable to charge folks to troubleshoot PC problems, though. I know that I would. A flat rate of $39 sounds cheap for tech support. But if you got shuffled into that category somehow for a problem on their end, then that should never have happened.
Never have I been charged for support, at all. It's never even been mentioned. (And I used to call, a LOT, because of s
Wrecks don't involve warranty coverage, unless (perhaps) the wreck was caused by a warranted mechanical failure, so your question doesn't make much sense.
And the comprehensive policies on my cars don't cover off-road use, so the insurance company would be honoring their contract with me if I smashed things up on the track ("closed course") and they refused to pay for it.
Try again.
*shrug*
All of those things are often considered to be better than a for-profit corporation.
If calling the concept a "social business" helps sell the idea better than calling it a mutual company, co-op, or non-profit, then I'm all for it.
Quoth "blind biker", #1066130:
I can think of 3 reasons why this is a dumb idea for you:
1. You're blind.
2. You ride a bike. (Snipers don't ride bikes. They drive Aston Martins.)
3. You're blind.
Thanks for the additional information.
I'll be the first to say that I do not fully understand any of this -- all I have are anecdotal observations, educated conjecture, and wit.
That said: As others have mentioned, I think you're swapping, not experiencing a video issue.
Who knows why -- maybe you've got a memory leak in some program or other, or are just shy on RAM for what you're asking of the system. More investigation is needed on your part (Resource Manager in Vista/7 does an OK job of this). I've had some leaky programs, and they made things horribly unresponsive.
Now, on with the anecdotes:
First, I'd like to say that your experience does not sound at all typical.
Second, I know that my system is RAM-starved. I keep a bunch of stuff open all the time, and with "only" 3.5 gigs of RAM, it swaps a lot.
My own system has a 2GB ReadyBoost drive. It's just a cheap no-name USB thumb drive that happens to be "fast enough" (by MSFT's standards) to work. It was (in this case) free. Adding it helped a bit.
I noticed a huge improvement, though, by adding a second hard drive (which I needed to do anyway because my 250GB Seagate was stuffed full, mostly with programs). I moved the biggest software packages to the second drive, leaving (for the most part) Windows, some media, and swap on the first.
I can't fully explain why it makes such a big a difference, and I certainly didn't expect it (I just shuffled programs over to the second drive to free up space, mostly), but it feels like a new/different machine.
The drive I added is a 320GB Seagate, allegedly of the same series as the 250, and neither one is particularly special (in fact, the 320 is a few years older and a bit slower...).
I can conject that keeping the 250GB for mostly Windows and swap does the trick as such: Since the parts of Windows that I'm already using are already loaded into the VM, and media (MP3s, some video) isn't really important in the equation, that leaves just swap. I believe, at this point, that I've damn-near got myself a dedicated swap device (in practice).
Which, of course, means that the heads on that 250GB (which only can be in one place at one time) are permitted to do a much better job of handling the swapfile than it was before, by virtue of offloading the program data that used to compete with it.
But I just don't know if that's how it really plays out, because I've never looked into the modern Windows VM to try to understand it -- I don't even know if I am allowed to look into it. And frankly, I don't care: My system is working pretty well these days...
So, for suggestions:
1. Investigate. Remove/upgrade/fix leaky programs -- these will trash any system's responsiveness, with any OS.
2. ReadyBoost. You've probably already got a disused thumbdrive kicking around which will work fine -- plug it into the back of the box and forget about it. (this is only #2 because it is likely free)
3. More RAM. Buy as much as you can afford. Might be expensive, but if swapping is the issue, this is the best solution.
4. Spread out the mechanical load, as in my saga above. (Might be cheaper than RAM, and you might be looking for more space anyway...)
Best of luck.
My eyesight is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20/300 on that scale. Corrective lenses (disposable contacts, in my case) work fine: I can see pixels on an iPhone 4 pretty plainly, despite what Steve Jobs might say about that. My vision has, pretty much, always been shit: I got glasses at around age 8, and contacts at 10. Perhaps I'm just lucky that my vision is usefully-correctable, but I digress:
I run my PC displays at absurdly-high resolutions (1920x1200 on a 15.4" laptop at the most extreme), and always have. I've even spent my share of time tweaking Modelines in XFree86 to get a few more lines out of a good CRT while maintaining a reasonable refresh rate and video quality, often to the extent that I found myself banging against the abilities of the RAMDAC in the video card to produce a good, clean waveform at such frequencies.
I wish I could afford a modern desktop display with higher DPI than the 20.3" 1600x1200 NEC IPS LCD before me, just so I could fit more pixels (and therefore more well-formed words) onto the screen.
These days, I often find myself making things smaller, instead of bigger, in web browsers. And, frankly, I haven't found much desire to make things bigger in many, many years -- ever since Windows XP started doing a reasonable job of configuring display resolution out of the box, Web designers have tended to use more reasonable layouts.
It used to be pretty bad, when Windows 98 would come up at 640x480 or 800x600 at default font size by default, even on a (then) big 17" monitor: Well-meaning designers/authors would shrink their font sizes on their pages to make the text and layout appear reasonable from the visual standpoint, just for themselves and without ever considering how it might look on a properly-configured display.
I believe this is about the time that browsers grew zoom functions. :)
But, as I said, that's been a lot better for a long time. Absurdly-small fonts still happen, to be sure, but so infrequently these days that I don't think about it much.
No offense, but: Is there something wrong with your eyes?
And meanwhile: Please check out Readability. I've got no relation to them, except that I've kept it on my Firefox toolbar for ages. AFAICT, it also works fine in Chrome. It turns horribly-designed web pages (hopefully with good information!) into completely-legible texts. I mostly use it to convert (the more modern trend of) pages that have light-grey text on a slightly-darker grey background into something other than mostly-invisible, but it also sanitizes font sizes/styles and (usually!) retains the important images in a page at a reasonable size.
It is also useful to me, even with my corrected vision, when I am either very tired, very drunk, or both, even on well-designed layouts.