The driver of a car is the one least concerned with what its functional interface looks like. That's left for the passengers to gawk at.
The same holds true for computers.
The aesthetics of a car are strictly marketing driven. If a dashboard is particularly attractive, it's only because a marketing goon did his job correctly. And it will, on average, make people more willing to buy the car.
[switch contexts]
Now that I've bought my new car, I'm way more concerned with how it all works in operation than what it looks like. I don't have time to see how pretty it all is when I'm charging down an ill-maintained Detroit highway at 95MPH, while surrounded by stupid Michigan drivers with the audacity to pass me on the right at more than 100. Nor do I have time to gaze at its multifaceted prismatic analog clock while avoiding kids at 25MPH in a quiet neighborhood. The efficiency hit of having too much to look at and process could kill someone, and it often does.
So, my attention is on driving. Even if I land at a red light and get a chance to gloat to myself over my wise new-car purchase, the light always turns green and horns start honking before I ever get a chance to really enjoy groping the carbon fiber gearshift knob.
I just don't have time to get into it, and I shouldn't have to make time, either. If I have to look, even for a second, to change radio stations or operate the windshield wipers or find the one of the two 1x2" horn buttons located strangely at the outside edge of the steering wheel, the functional interface is all fucked up. If it were done right, I'd never have to see it at all.
Thus, damning the marketers, automotive engineers try to keep their interfaces as simple and intuitive as possible. Concordantly, about the most I get out of the marketer's aesthetic influence on a car's interior while I'm driving it is a rough notion of the color of the dashboard.
The same holds true for computers.
Nobody dies from a computer accident caused by someone being distracted by the awe of transparent windows zooming into and out of focus with trilinear filtering (unless that awestruck individual is a police dispatcher), but it does take its toll on efficiency, just the same.
Every moment I spend watching repetitive UI eyecandy happen is a moment I waste. Every moment I spend waiting for the computer to process its eyecandy is a moment I waste. I don't have time for that shit. And besides, there's only so many times I can say "Wow, that's so cool" before that coolness wears off.
I use computers to Get Stuff Done, just like I use cars to get from A to B. The less time I spend interacting with the computer, the more time I can spend interacting with whatever that stuff it is that needs done.
Re: the slurping effect, why would you want to minimize anything, anyway? The taskbar is yet more eyecandy, as demonstrated by the fact that you need even more extra visual cues just to make use of the damned thing. When I'm done using a program for awhile, I leave it open. When I need to go back to it, I know it's going to be just where I left it. To use a term, try "spacial organization."
My view of the computer really does consist of a bunch of transparent aterms on one desktop and a multitabbed Mozilla window on another, using Blackbox. Small GUI apps get tossed into purposeful gaps on the terminal desktop, things that want to use most of the monitor go to their own desktop. If I need overlapping applications for some reason (which I sometimes do, but not more than once every few days) it just takes two clicks to make it happen.
And if I'm really done with a program, I exit it. When I need it again, I run it again. (Modern memory management algorithms virtually guarentee that the program will be swapped out in exchange for disk cache by the time I need it again hours or days later, negating the start-up time.) I don't minimize anything. Ever.
No needless bullshit here, thanks. I'm busy getting stuff done.
Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce the real reason why this is all possible in the first place:
Meaningful Caller ID for DID PBX systems.[1]
[1]: You might have a Direct Inward Dial number assigned to your extension at work, right now. Or at least, you know someone who does (the whole "let me give you my direct number..." bit.)
The way they work is thus:
Joe Random calls your DID number (666-666-6666). The telco switch sees that it's supposed to route calls to that number across Acme Electioneering's PRI line, so it finds an available B channel on that PRI and does just that. At the same time, it sends to Acme's PBX the number that Joe dialed to get where he's going. Mr. PBX is then able to route the call directly to your desk.
Now, to call out, here's what happens. You pick up your DID-equipped phone at Acme Electioneering and dial Joe Random. Since your phone guy is on the ball and complied with your request to make Caller ID actually work, Mr. PBX finds an available B channel on the PRI, and tells the telco that You@666-666-6666 is making a call to Joe Random.
Joe's phone rings, and is sent You@666-666-6666.
If Betty, whose DID at Acme is 6667, decides to call Mr. Random, Joe sees Betty@666-666-6667 on his CID, even though the call came through the same PRI.
All of this is of course optional, and many PBXs are configured to always supply the main system number instead of DIDs as a business decision.
But that's not always a good idea. Think large leased office complex, multiple tenants, shared phone system and infrastructure. Or Vonage and friends, for that matter. You -do- want Caller ID to work on your new Vonage VOIP kit, don't you? [2]
To eliminate this functionality altogether would cause huge headaches, cost thousands of businesses a small fortune in hardware and new circuits (which may or may not even be available in the neighborhood), and vastly decrease the efficiency of how the phone system as a whole actually fucking works.
[2]: For a technical crowd, you people sure are thick sometimes.
It's not even very valuable as a blacklisting tool.
All a spammer has to do to side-step your domain-based blacklist is register a new domain.
And with new domain registrations are currently selling for less than $5, that's just a trivial cost of business (and it -is- a business - many of these fuckers actually make money).
New domains, thrice daily, all with valid SPF, for $15? Were I a spammer, I'd be jumping all over it. Expect software, soon, to automate the process.
SPF is just an simple authentication mechanism to verify the sender's domain. It, in no way, means that the domain means anything.
What it -will- help with is killing things like Bagle and Netsky which systematically forge the sender addresses in email. With any bloody luck, this will reduce the number of times I have to hear "Hey, I got this message that says I sent a virus to a guy in Canada that I don't even know!" from people who actually do have up-to-date virus protection.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
You're playing the "what if" game. It's a lazy game, and there's no need for it when the answers are all right in front of you.
The entire cost of retooling, manufacturing, and manufacturing waste disposal is all factored into the retail price of the unit, as is usually the case in a competitive and free market. The manufacture of CFL lighting is, AFAIK, not government-subsidized - all of the costs are displayed right up-front in the form of a shelf tag at Wal-Mart.
So, they're definately not giving the things away. Money is being made here, else the things would not be feasible to sell, and we'd only have incandescent lights on store shelves.
Thus, it is just so simple:
I recently spent about $8 on a set of four Feit Electric 13-Watt compact fluorescent bulbs. Each is fitted with a standard American screw-in base, thus requiring no modifications to my fixtures. These are about equivilent in light output to a convential 60W incandescent bulb. Feit says these guys are good for 8000 hours, which is near the low end for a CFL.
I also recently spent about $2.00 on four 60-Watt Phillips incandescent bulbs, which I have to use on some wasteful electronically-dimmed fixtures that I own and enjoy. Standard base, no modifications required, etc. Phillips says these particular bulbs are good for 1500 hours, which is a good bit longer than what most other manufacturers say about their incandescants.
So, all said, the compact fluorescents currently cost four times more to design, produce, package, market, sell, and profit from (including the energy to required for each of these steps), or an extra $1.50 per bulb, over a comparable conventional unit.
All we have to determine, then, is whether or not the CFL bulb will save $1.50 in electric energy cost over the course of its life. (We're going to, quite conveniently, ignore disposal costs of the bulbs and their packaging. I throw everything away, as a rule, and I pay a flat rate for trash removal at my house. But you'll soon see that it just doesn't fucking matter.[1])
Using some grade-school math, and the average cost of electricity at $0.086/KWh (according to the Federal Register) we can deduce the following:
My 1500-hour 60-Watt bulb will cost $7.74 over the course of its life, or about 86 cents per week of continuous operation.
My 8000-hour 13-Watt bulb will cost $8.944 over the course of its much longer life, or about 19 cents per week of continuous operation.
Or, we can break this down another way:
8000 hours worth of 60-Watt incandescent lighting, including bulbs and energy for all steps of generating this light, costs $43.94.
8000 hours worth of 13-Watt CFL lighting, including bulbs and energy for all steps of generating this light, costs $10.94.
Over 8000 hours, that is a savings of $33 just by using a different light bulb. Put another way, that's 1,650.00% ROI in less than a year.
A wise investment, indeed.
[1]: At $33/year in savings, who gives a fuck if they might cost a few cents more for someone to dispose of?
Since nobody else seems interested in actually helping the original poster...
The RAM warning is just a BIOS switch set wrong. You've got your RAM set as X, while the BIOS code thinks it should be Y for whatever reason. So, it yells at you on bootup to fix your mistake.
So change the RAM speed in BIOS to whatever it actually is. Turn ECC on or off, that sort of thing. The worst that can happen is that the machine turns unstable, or fails to boot - but since you've got a manual, defaulting the CMOS should be easy. (In fact, resetting CMOS might even be a reasonable first step in solving that problem.)
It does seem odd that manufacturers would remove old information. Supra used to manufacture high-end modems, back when such things seemed important. Supra had an amazingly complete archive of firmware, manuals, and the like on their BBS, and online. Diamong bought Supra, and most of that information disappeared. S3 bought Diamong, and most of the rest of it disappeared. Now that SonicBlue owns S3, well, it seems that even the notion of Supra has disappeared.
And I understand that SonicBlue itself changed hands recently. It's all gone.
STB used to manufacture add-in cards for PCs, primarily video cards. For awhile, they also made a nice 2-port serial adapter, of which I own one. 3dfx bought STB, but kept the STB web site online. 3dfx assured me, personally, that they'd keep the STB information available indefinately because it cost them essentially nothing to do so.
And then nVidia purchased 3dfx. As any Voodoo-equipped gamer of the time knows, the -first thing- nVidia did after consuming the company was to trash 3dfx's web page in its entirety, along with all of the old STB material.
Following my own instructions, I struck out on ASUS's web page and asked Google. I found that it's exactly the same board as the P3B-1394, but minus FSB dipswitches and with a different model number.
Multicasting is very cool. I think that you underestimate the usefulness of it.
It's (supposedly) easy for, say, AOL/TW to start a large-scale chat system with millions of users.
Is it easy for you and me? Of course not. My cable modem's upstream tops out at 384kbps. Multicast would alleviate that bottleneck.
Streaming audio and video is hideously expensive to operate currently. Multicast eliminates that problem.
Even distributing programs or other data is more efficient. BitTorrent is cool, but horribly inefficient on every link involved except for the last mile. It's not smart enough to know that it's cheaper to get its data from Jimmy, next door, than it is from Thom in Brazil[1]. Multicast solves that problem.
It's Way More Funner(tm) to do any sort of point-to-multipoint communication with multicast, and it will even help you play Quake (by eliminating the need for the server to issue the same data multiple times to multiple clients, thus saving the operater's bandwidth, thus increasing the likelihood that they'll keep the server running and reducing ping for everyone).
The reason it hasn't happened yet is financial, not because of any particular technical difficulty or irrational "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.
All of this cheaper-and-easier that multicast (and IPV6, for that matter) provides will affect, quite dramatically, the revenue models currently employed by ISPs.
In the end, there will be less bandwidth consumed and fewer dollars floating around, and they'll all be flowing from different directions. ISPs will be downsized, or at least slow in growth, much like is happening with traditional telcos right now as people and companies begin using the networks more efficiently (ala VoIP and cellular phones).
[1]: Someone's paying Real Money to maintain that transcontinental link, and that person is, ultimately, you and I. We pay for it monthly, as part of our ISP service fee. We pay for it in the cost of the products we buy, to sustain the advertising-supported Web. We pay for it by having salaries which are lower than they might potentially be, were it not for the fucking T1 line at the office. Using the network more efficiently directly equates to more available bandwidth, and/or money in everyone's pocket.
VA never -made- computers - they just assembled them into boxes and loaded Linux.
So just treat it like you would a Dell, or a Gateway, an E-Machine, or anything from any number of other assembly-line vendors - treat it like there's no name -at all- on front of the box.
And then begin a bit of research.
Look for a model number on the motherboard, and a manufacturer name. If you can't find a manufacturer, look up the FCC ID (it's always printed on there somewhere, if sold in the US) to find out the particulars of who made the board.
Then dig on their website. It doesn't take very much browsing ("Gee, MSI only ever made one dual-370 board with U160 SCSI - that must be the one") and picture-comparison to find the one you posess.
After that, load up the manual in Acrobat, and print yourself a set of jumper settings, dip switches, and header labels.
Who cares if VA assembled the box?
If you really, really strike out, get on the phone and start talking to the people who originally designed the stuff. This involves people skills, but engineers usually aren't hard to find.
(If anyone really has any further specific troubles with this topic after following these concise instructions, please just ask Google. Really.)
According to TFA, the system uses about one third of the power that a typical car's air conditioner would.
Considering that an automotive AC compressor consumes between 3 and 5 horsepower. Doing the math, that equates to something around an extra 1 to 1.6 horsepower being required to operate this system.
Which doesn't sound like much, until you do the rest of the math:
1.6 horsepower = 82.84 amps at 14.4 volts. 82.84 amps is a fuckload of current to move around in a car for anything, let alone just to keep the car on the road.
Wake me up when the thing doesn't require fatter cabling than the starter motor, and ceases to present a real safety hazard in the event of (increasingly likely) alternator failure.
For starters, phone lines are not your responsibility, they are the responsibility of the phone company, including all security and problems arising from tapping a phone line.
Cool! So the next time someone else borrows my phone line and does Horrible, Bad, Un-American Things with it, and the police wake me up to ask me about it, all I gots to do is dial "0" and hand the phone to the cop with the most brass stapled to his collar before going back to my nap?
Passing the buck isn't just a figurative saying, it's the American Dream!
Right? Suuurre.
"No, you're Honour. I let that man tie into that phone line on my house. Watched him do it. Even had a talk with him about the weather before he split. I figure, what the hell, right? I mean, this dude on Slashdot said it wasn't my gig to care, anyway, so I'm all NOT MY PROBLEM about it. And then the cops arrested ME for pandering! OMGWTF!"
1. Fairplay isn't a codec. It's better described for as a restrictive wrapper for AAC. If Apple did their job correctly in designing this wrapper, it ought to be general enough to be able to be applied to any data. (Fairplay MP3s? AVIs? JPGs? PDFs? Sure!)
2. AFAIK, nobody is licensing Fairplay from Apple. Therefore, it's not a profit-center. And, thus far, there's no evidence to show that it ever will be.
3. Nobody knows where the compressed music market will be in 2010. That's six years from now. Generally speaking, this entire industry is younger than that.
4. Remember, Apple is already competing with the likes of KaZaA, Gnutella, eDonkey, Usenet and IRC, where everything is free, while iTunes wants 99 cents per track. Losing exclusivity for Fairplay is the least of their problems.
5. Never assume that just because the item seems inexpensive, that there's no profit involved. Just because you can't buy a big hard drive, quasi-touchpanel, LCD, DSP, lithium battery, and a slick plastic box cheaper as individual parts than you can in the form of an assembled iPod means nothing. Apple gets better pricing on its parts than you or I, as individuals, ever will.
This allows them to sell to us finished, working units cheaper than we can build them ourselves. If the price of an iPod appears to be so cheap that one can't imagine how they manage to make any money selling them, that just means that their marketing and procurement departments are doing their job
And they're not alone in this game, either. GM builds cars cheaper than I can, too. But they're plenty profitable, and have been for a really long time. GE sells appliances cheaper than I can build 'em, also at a profit. My Uniden cordless phone would cost me a fortune to implement myself, so I bought one instead. Same with my laser printer, my monitors, and my stereo components.
Somehow, I have a hard time believing that any of this is news to you, but I've gotta ask anyway:
Are you really so naive to think that just because you can't concieve of how they might profit from iPod sales, that they must not be profitable at all? If so, then that is exactly the reason that they're the ones selling 'em by the boatload, and you're not.
It's funny that people claim this is a strength of Open Source, but when someone forks a spec, flames reign supreme. Can anyone explain why this is?
Probably for the same reason that people are up in arms about the transition from XFree86 to X.Org. Or, maybe it's the same reason people are really upset about forking Ghostscript. Or CDDB/FreeDB. Or OpenOffice/OpenOffice.org. Or Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. Or rxvt/aterm, even.
(Oh yeah, that's right. People seem to like these forks.)
If PHP development heads in a direction that a majority of those who give a shit think is wrong, forks will happen, and be embraced.
If people end up not liking a fork, it's likely to die.
I've always installed Gentoo using Knoppix, which I feel is easily the finest installation system in the world.
I just boot it up off of CD, mkfs the partition(s), and mount the new filesystem somewhere. I download the appropriate stage tarball (they just take a few minutes) right into the soon-to-be / using ftp, and unpack it. From there Gentoo is just a chroot away, along with all of Portage's slow goodness.
It's great being able play games, read Slashdot, listen to music, or just goof around with the box while waiting for the initial compiles to finish.
I have no idea why anyone would bother downloading a Gentoo LiveCD, let alone boot one, unless you've got (say) a network-disconnected machine. (And in that case, you're probably better off with something other than gentoo, anyway.)
Suppose you've got a print server or firewall box which has been working maintenance-free for years. It spools faster than lickety-split, and/or saturates its connected interfaces with a load average of just 0.01. Of course, it's never had a moment of downtime.
For its application it is, in a word, perfect. Then one day hard drive starts logging errors (yay for SMART).
Do you:
a) Spend $x to replace its already way-too-big 30 gig drive with a proposterously-monstrous and unproven 300 gig unit, and then proceed to fight out BIOS bugs and filesystem issues? Of course, this new replacement drive is probably SATA, so it's suddenly time to start adding PCI cards, and/or swapping motherboards. Random upgrades are a great way to fuck up a perfectly functional system.
or
b) Get an advance replacement for free from Seagate, plug it in, move the data, and send back the failing drive for a few dollars in postage?
It's not like there's much effort involved in RMA'ing a hard drive, anyway. It takes but a few minutes. And since you're paying for the warranty up-front, whether you realize it or not, you might as well use it if the time comes (if for no other reason than to dump the refurbished replacement on Ebay).
I've had warranty replacements on hard drives now and then, mostly with Seagate and Maxtor.
I always just hit their web page, and follow the instructions. The process generally consists of running a special diagnostic utility, and filling out a form. An RMA# is then issued.
I have no idea how they determine warranty status, but I strongly suspect that they just take the drive's date of birth, add a few weeks, and use that as the date of sale.
If there is a dispute over whether or not the drive is warranted, a receipt might help. I've never had to show anything except that the drive is fucked, however.
In addition to not requiring a receipt, I've found that at least half of the time, the replacement drive is larger than that which failed. I recently RMA'd a 30 gig Maxtor and got back a 40 gig drive. Some years ago, I sent in a 2.5 gig Seagate, which they replaced with a 6.3 gig unit.
So, how nice of Seagate to increase their free upgrade period to 5 years.
Re:Just an advertising ploy (shock sometimes works
on
Just Add, Umm, Water
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· Score: 1
It's not stupid - it's what you gotta do to stay alive.
Weeks without food? Yeah, sure - you'll live, as long as you're in a vacuum. But will you be strong enough to keep up in a fight and stay alive? Fighting takes a lot of energy. Travelling on foot (to find clean water, perhaps) with a shit-ton of gear strapped to your body takes a lot of energy.
If you want to stay alive and keep going, you must replace this energy. Hence, eating food made from piss. It's Better This Way, and plainly a last resort.
Of course, the filter is not quite good enough to get rid of urea, but TFA (did you read it?) states that it's not immediately toxic.
According to this other article, the device is readily able to process seawater into a usable form. I've not been able to find any references, but I do suspect that seawater is saltier than piss.
At any rate, a couple of paragraphs from the above-linked article should clear up the whole salt issue:
One drawback to the bags is that they don't work without the electrolyte powder, which has to be added fresh every time the bag is used. That means the liquid they produce can't be used for cooking, or to rehydrate freeze-dried rations, Darsch said.
The good news is that the sugars in the electrolyte solution can provide energy, while the salts can replace essential salts lost to sweating and dehydration, Darsch said.
At this point, the salt-intake thing should be obvious:
The forward-osmosis filter provides salt, as a matter of course. The body requires salt to function properly. Normally, the body gets most of its required salt from everyday food.
So, you just remove salt from the food, before packaging, to balance the amount of salt added in filtration.
In the end, you end up with a meal which will help you get from wherever you desolate place you're in to somewhere that has better water, or which will at least increase your energy, alertness, and comfort to help keep you from getting killed before your job is finished.
I contacted the police in LA but since I didn't fall for it, there was no case to be opened. [...] I contacted the police in LA but since I didn't fall for it, there was no case to be opened.
So. How do you catch a "fraudulent seller" "red handed" when the seller never touched your money?
The word is not even sort of in common usage. It's a slashdot nerdism.
I've been seeing the word "virii" since about 1992, but that was on a BBS, and is of course gone. However, Google has references to computer virii going back as far as 1988. The word therefore predates Slashdot by a number of years.
The 'latin mumbo-jumbo' you refer to is constantly referenced as an authorative source because 'virii' is an attempt by the less than classically literate to latinize a noun that essentially oughtn't to be. Again, a nerdism.
Mumbo-jumbo, indeed. Is a solid understanding of Latin a prerequisite for the forming of new English words?
This attempt to latinize the plural arguably comes from the intelligent, geeky desire to be correct about things. The truth is that the vast majority of english speakers do not grok latin endings; they are dying out. Less and less people use them, just in general.
Of course. However, the populace's generally shrinking vocabulary has little to do with a language's ability to absorb new words. I use terms every day in my line of work which are inarguably correct, but completely unknown to people outside of my trade. Next.
Given the above, there's a certain rebelious desire on the part of geeks to do it the right way, except that in this case, the geek who thinks latin is mumbo jumbo and yet still tries to construct latinate plurals is wrong, and the unwashed, uneducated masses who naively pluralize the word just like the vast majority of english words are pluralized is right.
Ok. Show me the rule that says a pluralized noun may not have synonyms. I'm not arguing that "viruses" is in any way incorrect. I'm arguing that both are correct.
Frustrated by this, the geek in question starts talking about language evolving, even though only Slashdot reading script-kiddies actually say virii. Absurd.
*sigh* You've failed to research the topic before bantering on about it.
A quick bit of research, using Google (of course) shows that there is about a 1:7 ratio of "virii" to "viruses" on Usenet, which sure seems like common usage to me, at least amongst the computer literate. (The computer illiterate have yet to create an easily-searched lexicon of their every utterance, and so their habits are rather difficult to study.)
But you do raise an interesting point: Suppose that the only people using the term "computer virii" are the same people who are occupied with them in at least the capacity of a hobby, and the various-and-sundry computer professionals who are charged with cleaning up the mess.
These are the people who make such things as virii a primary concern in their daily lives.
Yet, you insist that they're all wrong, and that "virii" is improper. So, who is more qualified to name the things than that group of geeks? Should the scholars name them? The Bush administration? The pope? Rob Malda?
If I were a woodworker who made building blocks for children, and I called my blocks "woodenblochten," would you be irate at my completely improper use of pseudo-German to contract and pluralize an English noun? Probably not. But what if it caught on? Even a little? What if 1 in 7 people started saying "woodenblochten" instead of "wood blocks"?
If the people who create them, and the people who are employed by them want them called "virii," so be it. Latin be damned, English is moving along just fine, thank you very much.
And driving within legal constraints on a public road is not the main use of disabling the rev limiter (or, more pointedly, a speed limiter) on a Focus.
So what?
IP theft is already punishable by its own set of seldom-enforced laws. It sure isn't my fault nobody feels like enforcing them. But now legitimate use is hampered, too.
(In the US, at least, new cars are generally restrained to some speed which is just under the speed rating rating of the original tires. This speed is always at least 86 miles per hour for DOT-approved tires, which is already in excess of every single posted speed limit in the US.
There is no legitimate reason to remove or modify the speed limiter, if all you're doing is driving on public roads. A few people, however, use their daily driver for racing on private tracks. These people generally remove or disable the speed limit, and have justification for the mod.
But the majority of folks disable it because they want to be able to drive Really Fucking Fast on the highway. So why not outlaw speed limiter mods and tell all those legit SCCA racers (read: legit import gamers) to get bent?)
The page you link to refers, at length, to a bunch of Latin mumbo-jumbo.
Not only do I not speak Latin, but I have no intention of ever attempting to try. I'm an American, and I speak American English.
While Latin is dead and stagnant and firm, English (in any of its dialects) is extremely nonsensical, and still under very active development. English presents itself as a mere collection of ever-changing common words, and a set of very loose rules to confine their use. The reason that English dictionaries are under constant revision is for the inclusion of new words.
New words? That's right. People use new words all the time. Eventually, some of them end up being defined by a dictionary.
Since "virii" is, plainly, a very common word, it therefore is. Perhaps it might be categorized as slang, but that doesn't make it nonexistant, nor does it make it somehow not a word, no matter what your Oxford tongue believes.
'Sides, I reckon that ya'll know where an argument about slang words might lead. And this just ain't the place for all that.
"Virii" is an English word. It is a fun word. It's fun to say, fun to write, and fun to look at. It is simply defined as a plural of the word "virus". (And you knew this already, since you're obviously able to grok its meaning.)
It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature." -Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo."
Learn to adapt. Your language is leaving you behind.
At least the cold war afforded us the opportunity to buy a nice underground bunker/missile silo in which to live (or do whatever), and gainfully employed a large number of people for a good number of years.
What does the patent-based corporate cold war that you describe give to anyone but the patent attorneys?
Slashdot Mirror
The car analogy is not so good for your point:
The driver of a car is the one least concerned with what its functional interface looks like. That's left for the passengers to gawk at.
The same holds true for computers.
The aesthetics of a car are strictly marketing driven. If a dashboard is particularly attractive, it's only because a marketing goon did his job correctly. And it will, on average, make people more willing to buy the car.
[switch contexts]
Now that I've bought my new car, I'm way more concerned with how it all works in operation than what it looks like. I don't have time to see how pretty it all is when I'm charging down an ill-maintained Detroit highway at 95MPH, while surrounded by stupid Michigan drivers with the audacity to pass me on the right at more than 100. Nor do I have time to gaze at its multifaceted prismatic analog clock while avoiding kids at 25MPH in a quiet neighborhood. The efficiency hit of having too much to look at and process could kill someone, and it often does.
So, my attention is on driving. Even if I land at a red light and get a chance to gloat to myself over my wise new-car purchase, the light always turns green and horns start honking before I ever get a chance to really enjoy groping the carbon fiber gearshift knob.
I just don't have time to get into it, and I shouldn't have to make time, either. If I have to look, even for a second, to change radio stations or operate the windshield wipers or find the one of the two 1x2" horn buttons located strangely at the outside edge of the steering wheel, the functional interface is all fucked up. If it were done right, I'd never have to see it at all.
Thus, damning the marketers, automotive engineers try to keep their interfaces as simple and intuitive as possible. Concordantly, about the most I get out of the marketer's aesthetic influence on a car's interior while I'm driving it is a rough notion of the color of the dashboard.
The same holds true for computers.
Nobody dies from a computer accident caused by someone being distracted by the awe of transparent windows zooming into and out of focus with trilinear filtering (unless that awestruck individual is a police dispatcher), but it does take its toll on efficiency, just the same.
Every moment I spend watching repetitive UI eyecandy happen is a moment I waste. Every moment I spend waiting for the computer to process its eyecandy is a moment I waste. I don't have time for that shit. And besides, there's only so many times I can say "Wow, that's so cool" before that coolness wears off.
I use computers to Get Stuff Done, just like I use cars to get from A to B. The less time I spend interacting with the computer, the more time I can spend interacting with whatever that stuff it is that needs done.
Re: the slurping effect, why would you want to minimize anything, anyway? The taskbar is yet more eyecandy, as demonstrated by the fact that you need even more extra visual cues just to make use of the damned thing. When I'm done using a program for awhile, I leave it open. When I need to go back to it, I know it's going to be just where I left it. To use a term, try "spacial organization."
My view of the computer really does consist of a bunch of transparent aterms on one desktop and a multitabbed Mozilla window on another, using Blackbox. Small GUI apps get tossed into purposeful gaps on the terminal desktop, things that want to use most of the monitor go to their own desktop. If I need overlapping applications for some reason (which I sometimes do, but not more than once every few days) it just takes two clicks to make it happen.
And if I'm really done with a program, I exit it. When I need it again, I run it again. (Modern memory management algorithms virtually guarentee that the program will be swapped out in exchange for disk cache by the time I need it again hours or days later, negating the start-up time.) I don't minimize anything. Ever.
No needless bullshit here, thanks. I'm busy getting stuff done.
Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce the real reason why this is all possible in the first place:
Meaningful Caller ID for DID PBX systems.[1]
[1]: You might have a Direct Inward Dial number assigned to your extension at work, right now. Or at least, you know someone who does (the whole "let me give you my direct number..." bit.)
The way they work is thus:
Joe Random calls your DID number (666-666-6666). The telco switch sees that it's supposed to route calls to that number across Acme Electioneering's PRI line, so it finds an available B channel on that PRI and does just that. At the same time, it sends to Acme's PBX the number that Joe dialed to get where he's going. Mr. PBX is then able to route the call directly to your desk.
Now, to call out, here's what happens. You pick up your DID-equipped phone at Acme Electioneering and dial Joe Random. Since your phone guy is on the ball and complied with your request to make Caller ID actually work, Mr. PBX finds an available B channel on the PRI, and tells the telco that You@666-666-6666 is making a call to Joe Random.
Joe's phone rings, and is sent You@666-666-6666.
If Betty, whose DID at Acme is 6667, decides to call Mr. Random, Joe sees Betty@666-666-6667 on his CID, even though the call came through the same PRI.
All of this is of course optional, and many PBXs are configured to always supply the main system number instead of DIDs as a business decision.
But that's not always a good idea. Think large leased office complex, multiple tenants, shared phone system and infrastructure. Or Vonage and friends, for that matter. You -do- want Caller ID to work on your new Vonage VOIP kit, don't you? [2]
To eliminate this functionality altogether would cause huge headaches, cost thousands of businesses a small fortune in hardware and new circuits (which may or may not even be available in the neighborhood), and vastly decrease the efficiency of how the phone system as a whole actually fucking works.
[2]: For a technical crowd, you people sure are thick sometimes.
It's not even very valuable as a blacklisting tool.
All a spammer has to do to side-step your domain-based blacklist is register a new domain.
And with new domain registrations are currently selling for less than $5, that's just a trivial cost of business (and it -is- a business - many of these fuckers actually make money).
New domains, thrice daily, all with valid SPF, for $15? Were I a spammer, I'd be jumping all over it. Expect software, soon, to automate the process.
SPF is just an simple authentication mechanism to verify the sender's domain. It, in no way, means that the domain means anything.
What it -will- help with is killing things like Bagle and Netsky which systematically forge the sender addresses in email. With any bloody luck, this will reduce the number of times I have to hear "Hey, I got this message that says I sent a virus to a guy in Canada that I don't even know!" from people who actually do have up-to-date virus protection.
You're playing the "what if" game. It's a lazy game, and there's no need for it when the answers are all right in front of you.
The entire cost of retooling, manufacturing, and manufacturing waste disposal is all factored into the retail price of the unit, as is usually the case in a competitive and free market. The manufacture of CFL lighting is, AFAIK, not government-subsidized - all of the costs are displayed right up-front in the form of a shelf tag at Wal-Mart.
So, they're definately not giving the things away. Money is being made here, else the things would not be feasible to sell, and we'd only have incandescent lights on store shelves.
Thus, it is just so simple:
I recently spent about $8 on a set of four Feit Electric 13-Watt compact fluorescent bulbs. Each is fitted with a standard American screw-in base, thus requiring no modifications to my fixtures. These are about equivilent in light output to a convential 60W incandescent bulb. Feit says these guys are good for 8000 hours, which is near the low end for a CFL.
I also recently spent about $2.00 on four 60-Watt Phillips incandescent bulbs, which I have to use on some wasteful electronically-dimmed fixtures that I own and enjoy. Standard base, no modifications required, etc. Phillips says these particular bulbs are good for 1500 hours, which is a good bit longer than what most other manufacturers say about their incandescants.
So, all said, the compact fluorescents currently cost four times more to design, produce, package, market, sell, and profit from (including the energy to required for each of these steps), or an extra $1.50 per bulb, over a comparable conventional unit.
All we have to determine, then, is whether or not the CFL bulb will save $1.50 in electric energy cost over the course of its life. (We're going to, quite conveniently, ignore disposal costs of the bulbs and their packaging. I throw everything away, as a rule, and I pay a flat rate for trash removal at my house. But you'll soon see that it just doesn't fucking matter.[1])
Using some grade-school math, and the average cost of electricity at $0.086/KWh (according to the Federal Register) we can deduce the following:
My 1500-hour 60-Watt bulb will cost $7.74 over the course of its life, or about 86 cents per week of continuous operation.
My 8000-hour 13-Watt bulb will cost $8.944 over the course of its much longer life, or about 19 cents per week of continuous operation.
Or, we can break this down another way:
8000 hours worth of 60-Watt incandescent lighting, including bulbs and energy for all steps of generating this light, costs $43.94.
8000 hours worth of 13-Watt CFL lighting, including bulbs and energy for all steps of generating this light, costs $10.94.
Over 8000 hours, that is a savings of $33 just by using a different light bulb. Put another way, that's 1,650.00% ROI in less than a year.
A wise investment, indeed.
[1]: At $33/year in savings, who gives a fuck if they might cost a few cents more for someone to dispose of?
ps. pls stop lightbulb fud. thx.
Since nobody else seems interested in actually helping the original poster...
The RAM warning is just a BIOS switch set wrong. You've got your RAM set as X, while the BIOS code thinks it should be Y for whatever reason. So, it yells at you on bootup to fix your mistake.
So change the RAM speed in BIOS to whatever it actually is. Turn ECC on or off, that sort of thing. The worst that can happen is that the machine turns unstable, or fails to boot - but since you've got a manual, defaulting the CMOS should be easy. (In fact, resetting CMOS might even be a reasonable first step in solving that problem.)
It does seem odd that manufacturers would remove old information. Supra used to manufacture high-end modems, back when such things seemed important. Supra had an amazingly complete archive of firmware, manuals, and the like on their BBS, and online. Diamong bought Supra, and most of that information disappeared. S3 bought Diamong, and most of the rest of it disappeared. Now that SonicBlue owns S3, well, it seems that even the notion of Supra has disappeared.
And I understand that SonicBlue itself changed hands recently. It's all gone.
STB used to manufacture add-in cards for PCs, primarily video cards. For awhile, they also made a nice 2-port serial adapter, of which I own one. 3dfx bought STB, but kept the STB web site online. 3dfx assured me, personally, that they'd keep the STB information available indefinately because it cost them essentially nothing to do so.
And then nVidia purchased 3dfx. As any Voodoo-equipped gamer of the time knows, the -first thing- nVidia did after consuming the company was to trash 3dfx's web page in its entirety, along with all of the old STB material.
It hasn't resurfaced since.
You're new here, aren't you?
Compaq has always used their own hardware. So has HP. Dell, however, usually doesn't. I stand uncorrected.
It doesn't matter, though. If the board has Compaq written all over it, head to Compaq for information. If it says HP, hit up HP.
If the web pages don't include the data you're looking for, ask Google, or just pick up the fucking phone.
Please use your brain. Thank you.
Dare?
Following my own instructions, I struck out on ASUS's web page and asked Google. I found that it's exactly the same board as the P3B-1394, but minus FSB dipswitches and with a different model number.
Download the manual.
My instructions are thus provably clear.
Multicasting is very cool. I think that you underestimate the usefulness of it.
It's (supposedly) easy for, say, AOL/TW to start a large-scale chat system with millions of users.
Is it easy for you and me? Of course not. My cable modem's upstream tops out at 384kbps. Multicast would alleviate that bottleneck.
Streaming audio and video is hideously expensive to operate currently. Multicast eliminates that problem.
Even distributing programs or other data is more efficient. BitTorrent is cool, but horribly inefficient on every link involved except for the last mile. It's not smart enough to know that it's cheaper to get its data from Jimmy, next door, than it is from Thom in Brazil[1]. Multicast solves that problem.
It's Way More Funner(tm) to do any sort of point-to-multipoint communication with multicast, and it will even help you play Quake (by eliminating the need for the server to issue the same data multiple times to multiple clients, thus saving the operater's bandwidth, thus increasing the likelihood that they'll keep the server running and reducing ping for everyone).
The reason it hasn't happened yet is financial, not because of any particular technical difficulty or irrational "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.
All of this cheaper-and-easier that multicast (and IPV6, for that matter) provides will affect, quite dramatically, the revenue models currently employed by ISPs.
In the end, there will be less bandwidth consumed and fewer dollars floating around, and they'll all be flowing from different directions. ISPs will be downsized, or at least slow in growth, much like is happening with traditional telcos right now as people and companies begin using the networks more efficiently (ala VoIP and cellular phones).
[1]: Someone's paying Real Money to maintain that transcontinental link, and that person is, ultimately, you and I. We pay for it monthly, as part of our ISP service fee. We pay for it in the cost of the products we buy, to sustain the advertising-supported Web. We pay for it by having salaries which are lower than they might potentially be, were it not for the fucking T1 line at the office. Using the network more efficiently directly equates to more available bandwidth, and/or money in everyone's pocket.
Er.
It looks more like the following is the most absolutely true:
If the tape is grey/silver, it is duct tape.
If the tape is green/olive drab, it is duck tape.
Hope this clears up any confusion.
What a duplication of effort.
VA never -made- computers - they just assembled them into boxes and loaded Linux.
So just treat it like you would a Dell, or a Gateway, an E-Machine, or anything from any number of other assembly-line vendors - treat it like there's no name -at all- on front of the box.
And then begin a bit of research.
Look for a model number on the motherboard, and a manufacturer name. If you can't find a manufacturer, look up the FCC ID (it's always printed on there somewhere, if sold in the US) to find out the particulars of who made the board.
Then dig on their website. It doesn't take very much browsing ("Gee, MSI only ever made one dual-370 board with U160 SCSI - that must be the one") and picture-comparison to find the one you posess.
After that, load up the manual in Acrobat, and print yourself a set of jumper settings, dip switches, and header labels.
Who cares if VA assembled the box?
If you really, really strike out, get on the phone and start talking to the people who originally designed the stuff. This involves people skills, but engineers usually aren't hard to find.
(If anyone really has any further specific troubles with this topic after following these concise instructions, please just ask Google. Really.)
According to TFA, the system uses about one third of the power that a typical car's air conditioner would.
Considering that an automotive AC compressor consumes between 3 and 5 horsepower. Doing the math, that equates to something around an extra 1 to 1.6 horsepower being required to operate this system.
Which doesn't sound like much, until you do the rest of the math:
1.6 horsepower = 82.84 amps at 14.4 volts. 82.84 amps is a fuckload of current to move around in a car for anything, let alone just to keep the car on the road.
Wake me up when the thing doesn't require fatter cabling than the starter motor, and ceases to present a real safety hazard in the event of (increasingly likely) alternator failure.
Sure you can.
But who wants tens of megabytes of general-purpose Java cruft sitting around just for a glorified biff(1)?
Doesn't Windows start slow enough already?
Cool! So the next time someone else borrows my phone line and does Horrible, Bad, Un-American Things with it, and the police wake me up to ask me about it, all I gots to do is dial "0" and hand the phone to the cop with the most brass stapled to his collar before going back to my nap?
Passing the buck isn't just a figurative saying, it's the American Dream!
Right? Suuurre.
"No, you're Honour. I let that man tie into that phone line on my house. Watched him do it. Even had a talk with him about the weather before he split. I figure, what the hell, right? I mean, this dude on Slashdot said it wasn't my gig to care, anyway, so I'm all NOT MY PROBLEM about it. And then the cops arrested ME for pandering! OMGWTF!"
Oh. Ok.
A few points:
1. Fairplay isn't a codec. It's better described for as a restrictive wrapper for AAC. If Apple did their job correctly in designing this wrapper, it ought to be general enough to be able to be applied to any data. (Fairplay MP3s? AVIs? JPGs? PDFs? Sure!)
2. AFAIK, nobody is licensing Fairplay from Apple. Therefore, it's not a profit-center. And, thus far, there's no evidence to show that it ever will be.
3. Nobody knows where the compressed music market will be in 2010. That's six years from now. Generally speaking, this entire industry is younger than that.
4. Remember, Apple is already competing with the likes of KaZaA, Gnutella, eDonkey, Usenet and IRC, where everything is free, while iTunes wants 99 cents per track. Losing exclusivity for Fairplay is the least of their problems.
5. Never assume that just because the item seems inexpensive, that there's no profit involved. Just because you can't buy a big hard drive, quasi-touchpanel, LCD, DSP, lithium battery, and a slick plastic box cheaper as individual parts than you can in the form of an assembled iPod means nothing. Apple gets better pricing on its parts than you or I, as individuals, ever will.
This allows them to sell to us finished, working units cheaper than we can build them ourselves. If the price of an iPod appears to be so cheap that one can't imagine how they manage to make any money selling them, that just means that their marketing and procurement departments are doing their job
And they're not alone in this game, either. GM builds cars cheaper than I can, too. But they're plenty profitable, and have been for a really long time. GE sells appliances cheaper than I can build 'em, also at a profit. My Uniden cordless phone would cost me a fortune to implement myself, so I bought one instead. Same with my laser printer, my monitors, and my stereo components.
Somehow, I have a hard time believing that any of this is news to you, but I've gotta ask anyway:
Are you really so naive to think that just because you can't concieve of how they might profit from iPod sales, that they must not be profitable at all? If so, then that is exactly the reason that they're the ones selling 'em by the boatload, and you're not.
Probably for the same reason that people are up in arms about the transition from XFree86 to X.Org. Or, maybe it's the same reason people are really upset about forking Ghostscript. Or CDDB/FreeDB. Or OpenOffice/OpenOffice.org. Or Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. Or rxvt/aterm, even.
(Oh yeah, that's right. People seem to like these forks.)
If PHP development heads in a direction that a majority of those who give a shit think is wrong, forks will happen, and be embraced.
If people end up not liking a fork, it's likely to die.
I've always installed Gentoo using Knoppix, which I feel is easily the finest installation system in the world.
I just boot it up off of CD, mkfs the partition(s), and mount the new filesystem somewhere. I download the appropriate stage tarball (they just take a few minutes) right into the soon-to-be / using ftp, and unpack it. From there Gentoo is just a chroot away, along with all of Portage's slow goodness.
It's great being able play games, read Slashdot, listen to music, or just goof around with the box while waiting for the initial compiles to finish.
I have no idea why anyone would bother downloading a Gentoo LiveCD, let alone boot one, unless you've got (say) a network-disconnected machine. (And in that case, you're probably better off with something other than gentoo, anyway.)
Depends on the application.
Suppose you've got a print server or firewall box which has been working maintenance-free for years. It spools faster than lickety-split, and/or saturates its connected interfaces with a load average of just 0.01. Of course, it's never had a moment of downtime.
For its application it is, in a word, perfect. Then one day hard drive starts logging errors (yay for SMART).
Do you:
a) Spend $x to replace its already way-too-big 30 gig drive with a proposterously-monstrous and unproven 300 gig unit, and then proceed to fight out BIOS bugs and filesystem issues? Of course, this new replacement drive is probably SATA, so it's suddenly time to start adding PCI cards, and/or swapping motherboards. Random upgrades are a great way to fuck up a perfectly functional system.
or
b) Get an advance replacement for free from Seagate, plug it in, move the data, and send back the failing drive for a few dollars in postage?
It's not like there's much effort involved in RMA'ing a hard drive, anyway. It takes but a few minutes. And since you're paying for the warranty up-front, whether you realize it or not, you might as well use it if the time comes (if for no other reason than to dump the refurbished replacement on Ebay).
Receipt? Huh?
I've had warranty replacements on hard drives now and then, mostly with Seagate and Maxtor.
I always just hit their web page, and follow the instructions. The process generally consists of running a special diagnostic utility, and filling out a form. An RMA# is then issued.
I have no idea how they determine warranty status, but I strongly suspect that they just take the drive's date of birth, add a few weeks, and use that as the date of sale.
If there is a dispute over whether or not the drive is warranted, a receipt might help. I've never had to show anything except that the drive is fucked, however.
In addition to not requiring a receipt, I've found that at least half of the time, the replacement drive is larger than that which failed. I recently RMA'd a 30 gig Maxtor and got back a 40 gig drive. Some years ago, I sent in a 2.5 gig Seagate, which they replaced with a 6.3 gig unit.
So, how nice of Seagate to increase their free upgrade period to 5 years.
It's not stupid - it's what you gotta do to stay alive.
Weeks without food? Yeah, sure - you'll live, as long as you're in a vacuum. But will you be strong enough to keep up in a fight and stay alive? Fighting takes a lot of energy. Travelling on foot (to find clean water, perhaps) with a shit-ton of gear strapped to your body takes a lot of energy.
If you want to stay alive and keep going, you must replace this energy. Hence, eating food made from piss. It's Better This Way, and plainly a last resort.
Of course, the filter is not quite good enough to get rid of urea, but TFA (did you read it?) states that it's not immediately toxic.
According to this other article, the device is readily able to process seawater into a usable form. I've not been able to find any references, but I do suspect that seawater is saltier than piss.
At any rate, a couple of paragraphs from the above-linked article should clear up the whole salt issue:
One drawback to the bags is that they don't work without the electrolyte powder, which has to be added fresh every time the bag is used. That means the liquid they produce can't be used for cooking, or to rehydrate freeze-dried rations, Darsch said.
The good news is that the sugars in the electrolyte solution can provide energy, while the salts can replace essential salts lost to sweating and dehydration, Darsch said.
At this point, the salt-intake thing should be obvious:
The forward-osmosis filter provides salt, as a matter of course. The body requires salt to function properly. Normally, the body gets most of its required salt from everyday food.
So, you just remove salt from the food, before packaging, to balance the amount of salt added in filtration.
In the end, you end up with a meal which will help you get from wherever you desolate place you're in to somewhere that has better water, or which will at least increase your energy, alertness, and comfort to help keep you from getting killed before your job is finished.
I contacted the police in LA but since I didn't fall for it, there was no case to be opened. [...] I contacted the police in LA but since I didn't fall for it, there was no case to be opened.
So. How do you catch a "fraudulent seller" "red handed" when the seller never touched your money?
Attempted fraud != fraud. Unsuccessful fraud != fraud.
Alternatively, someone else being defrauded != your problem.
Mumbo-jumbo, indeed. Is a solid understanding of Latin a prerequisite for the forming of new English words?
Of course. However, the populace's generally shrinking vocabulary has little to do with a language's ability to absorb new words. I use terms every day in my line of work which are inarguably correct, but completely unknown to people outside of my trade. Next.
Ok. Show me the rule that says a pluralized noun may not have synonyms. I'm not arguing that "viruses" is in any way incorrect. I'm arguing that both are correct.
*sigh* You've failed to research the topic before bantering on about it.
A quick bit of research, using Google (of course) shows that there is about a 1:7 ratio of "virii" to "viruses" on Usenet, which sure seems like common usage to me, at least amongst the computer literate. (The computer illiterate have yet to create an easily-searched lexicon of their every utterance, and so their habits are rather difficult to study.)
But you do raise an interesting point: Suppose that the only people using the term "computer virii" are the same people who are occupied with them in at least the capacity of a hobby, and the various-and-sundry computer professionals who are charged with cleaning up the mess.
These are the people who make such things as virii a primary concern in their daily lives.
Yet, you insist that they're all wrong, and that "virii" is improper. So, who is more qualified to name the things than that group of geeks? Should the scholars name them? The Bush administration? The pope? Rob Malda?
If I were a woodworker who made building blocks for children, and I called my blocks "woodenblochten," would you be irate at my completely improper use of pseudo-German to contract and pluralize an English noun? Probably not. But what if it caught on? Even a little? What if 1 in 7 people started saying "woodenblochten" instead of "wood blocks"?
If the people who create them, and the people who are employed by them want them called "virii," so be it. Latin be damned, English is moving along just fine, thank you very much.
And driving within legal constraints on a public road is not the main use of disabling the rev limiter (or, more pointedly, a speed limiter) on a Focus.
So what?
IP theft is already punishable by its own set of seldom-enforced laws. It sure isn't my fault nobody feels like enforcing them. But now legitimate use is hampered, too.
(In the US, at least, new cars are generally restrained to some speed which is just under the speed rating rating of the original tires. This speed is always at least 86 miles per hour for DOT-approved tires, which is already in excess of every single posted speed limit in the US.
There is no legitimate reason to remove or modify the speed limiter, if all you're doing is driving on public roads. A few people, however, use their daily driver for racing on private tracks. These people generally remove or disable the speed limit, and have justification for the mod.
But the majority of folks disable it because they want to be able to drive Really Fucking Fast on the highway. So why not outlaw speed limiter mods and tell all those legit SCCA racers (read: legit import gamers) to get bent?)
Not only do I not speak Latin, but I have no intention of ever attempting to try. I'm an American, and I speak American English.
While Latin is dead and stagnant and firm, English (in any of its dialects) is extremely nonsensical, and still under very active development. English presents itself as a mere collection of ever-changing common words, and a set of very loose rules to confine their use. The reason that English dictionaries are under constant revision is for the inclusion of new words.
New words? That's right. People use new words all the time. Eventually, some of them end up being defined by a dictionary.
Since "virii" is, plainly, a very common word, it therefore is. Perhaps it might be categorized as slang, but that doesn't make it nonexistant, nor does it make it somehow not a word, no matter what your Oxford tongue believes.
'Sides, I reckon that ya'll know where an argument about slang words might lead. And this just ain't the place for all that.
"Virii" is an English word. It is a fun word. It's fun to say, fun to write, and fun to look at. It is simply defined as a plural of the word "virus". (And you knew this already, since you're obviously able to grok its meaning.)
Learn to adapt. Your language is leaving you behind.
At least the cold war afforded us the opportunity to buy a nice underground bunker/missile silo in which to live (or do whatever), and gainfully employed a large number of people for a good number of years.
What does the patent-based corporate cold war that you describe give to anyone but the patent attorneys?