OK, this is kinda OT and probably not PC, but anyway...
Back in my tech support days, I was working at a client's house, showing her some darn thing about Windows. While poring though the Control Panel, she noticed the wheelchair icon.
Client (pointing to the wheelchair): What's that for?
Me: Oh, that's the Accessibility Options. That's used by computer users who have a disability. For instance, that's where you would load the Braille drivers if you were blind.
Client (excitedly, and while stroking the monitor): OH, so you could feel the characters on the monitor!
She figured it out in a couple of seconds, but not before I started busting a gut.
Parent was modded funny, but there's an odd truth to this. Consider Burt Rutan's comment
that porn will be the driving force behind eliminating business travel. Read it and you'll understand:).
KB article 189126, two clicks away from the article referenced in the parent, offers this nugget of wisdom:
The password-protection systems built into Microsoft programs are designed to be unbreakable; there would be no point in including a password-protection system that could be broken.
Well, then, Microsoft, why is there a breakable password system in your product?!
Exactly. If they want Google to rank them higher, they can pony up the money for a paid result. Of course, I don't know that there are that many people that pay attention to the paid results, because they're obviously about as reliable as a paid testimony. If these retailers are having problems with their rankings, they can either create an actually relevant site, or sit and spin.
I took a Unix course at the University of Colorado in Fall 2001, I think. We had a guest lecture from Evi Nemeth, who is a professor emeritus at CU.
She had done some work on a couple of the DNS root servers, G and H if memory serves. She showed a rate of query graphs for those servers. There was a huge jump in the middle of the graphs that corresponded neatly with the release of Windows 2000.
Turns out Win2000 had it hard-coded to consult the DNS root servers every time it wanted to run a nslookup!
That's not really the point. They're not trying to make sure you're part of their target audience. If you're a male dumb enough to buy birth control pills or a female dumb enough to buy penis enlargement pills, so be it. More money for them.
Their concern is only to avoid lawsuits. They don't want a malformed baby or an STD blamed on them. And if you're male, then the pills are guaranteed to keep you from getting pregnant!
Parent was modded Funny, but this could actually be really cool! Imagine seeing the cockpit in real-time, letting you track the flight progress and seeing the landscape that you would see if there wasn't a 4000' overcast deck.
Or hop in a companion plane next to the 'real' one and jet around to nearby airports as the trip goes on.
Just make sure to chmod o-w/dev/flightcontrols on the server.
Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm." Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad." Homer: "Thank you, dear." Lisa: "By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away." Homer: "Oh, how does it work?" Lisa: "It doesn't work." Homer: "Uh-huh." Lisa: "It's just a stupid rock." Homer: "Uh-huh." Lisa: "But I don't see any tigers around, do you?" Homer: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."
Did you even look at the text inside the graphs? The scale of the graphs is in minutes, not minutes.seconds. 1.5 minutes is one and a half minutes, which is about where the 1:25 bar extends to.
Damn, if this is what gets modded Insightful, no wonder nobody takes/. seriously.
Don't get me wrong, I use sudo every day, and it's a great tool. But you have the following problems anyway:
sudo passwd. Yes, you can lock down sudo so that's not directly possible. But what about sudo vi? Or anything that allows a shell?
Shell-required operations. Sometimes you need to be root. Many software installations don't work when you use sudo because they see you as the (non-super)user instead of root.
Filesystem check encountered errors. Enter root password to continue. Sudo won't help here either.
These occasions occur on a regular basis. If I had to track down a frickin' envelope and get an Act of Congress to let me open it each time, I'd just quit.
This would be a great thing to install in your dashboard. You could have a self-contained computer that works as a GPS moving map (connect the GPS antenna to the USB port), CD/DVD player, MP3 player, game system, wireless internet, and so forth. You'd just need to pick up an LCD screen to go with it.
Not that I'm advocating people typing email messages or playing UT while driving -- they're distracted enough as it is. But this would be great for the passengers, especially on road trips!
What I'd like to see, and this is probably the point the parent was trying to make, is less reinvention of the wheel and more collaboration. Don't get me started on the number of types of VNC available, each with their pros and cons. If everybody would work together on common projects, we'd have more pros and fewer cons.
I get around this problem by saving the.xpi file (from mozdev or elsewhere) to disk, instead of allowing it to install immediately. I keep all my.xpi files in a separate directory. Then, when I get a new Mozilla installation, I open them (File -> Open) and install them at that point.
The reason I still use Windows (XP) on my main machine at home is the amount of software readily available for it, or rather, the lack of software for Linux.
Before everybody screams that there are a ton of open source software projects and throw links to freshmeat.net at me, let me say that yes, you're right. However:
Games. No matter what happens, you need DirectX/Direct3D for most games on the market. Games don't take up the majority of my computer time, but when I want them, I don't want to have to wrestle with Wine to try to get them to work with my video card/sound card/joystick/whatever.
Office. It would be nice if OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/etc. would be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with MS Office, but they're not. I can't even display my MS Word-written resume in OpenOffice.org because it uses Word's version of tables. That's not an uncommonly-used feature, folks.
Multimedia. I have a large video and MP3 library that I want to be able to pull up at a moment's notice. I have yet to see a truly decent MPG/AVI/WMV player for Linux. MP3 support is great; I love xmms. But I gotta have my Family Guy episodes. Oh yeah, and I want to convert between those file formats, too.
I've wanted to switch my main machine over to Linux for over a year now, but I need those features described above. When I can do all that, I'll switch. Until then, I'll be keeping Windows around.
Good God, man, are you still using mechanical computers? How is 100% vs. 1% CPU utilization harmful to a solid-state processor? A nop instruction is just as stressful on a CPU as a add instruction.
As for the hard drive, unless there's something strange about Folding@Home that requires it to constantly stream data off the hard drive (on the order of MBs per second), that's no more stressful than leaving any modern operating system running on it.
And as for the memory, you are "using" the memory all the time the machine is on, anyway! You have to refresh all the little 1's and 0's constantly.
Better turn your machine off when you step away from your desk, if such "activity" is so harmful.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, this is kinda OT and probably not PC, but anyway...
Back in my tech support days, I was working at a client's house, showing her some darn thing about Windows. While poring though the Control Panel, she noticed the wheelchair icon.
She figured it out in a couple of seconds, but not before I started busting a gut.
Parent was modded funny, but there's an odd truth to this. Consider Burt Rutan's comment that porn will be the driving force behind eliminating business travel. Read it and you'll understand :).
KB article 189126, two clicks away from the article referenced in the parent, offers this nugget of wisdom:
The password-protection systems built into Microsoft programs are designed to be unbreakable; there would be no point in including a password-protection system that could be broken.
Well, then, Microsoft, why is there a breakable password system in your product?!
Exactly. If they want Google to rank them higher, they can pony up the money for a paid result. Of course, I don't know that there are that many people that pay attention to the paid results, because they're obviously about as reliable as a paid testimony. If these retailers are having problems with their rankings, they can either create an actually relevant site, or sit and spin.
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!
No, not until God clicks Actions -> Disasters -> Microwave Oops.
see also: DRM (n.)
Seriously, though, I was thinking about this last night. Mozilla needs an ad campaign. Imagine the following commercial:
Man standing in a grocery store, contemplating which brand of tomato soup to purchase. From nowhere, an annoying ad man springs into existence.
Annoying ad man: Buy Kambell's Tomato Soup (C), it's the soupiest!
Another ad man beams in.
Annoying ad man 2: No, buy Pargeso's Redy2Eeet Tomato Soup (C), it's creamier!
Customer: AAAAAAHHHHH!
Narrator, sardonic voice: Tired of pop-ups?
Cut to yellow background with Mozilla dragon and the word "Mozilla". Fade to black.
I'm tellin' ya, it'll work!
It looks like you're trying to land an airplane!
Would you like to find out...
I took a Unix course at the University of Colorado in Fall 2001, I think. We had a guest lecture from Evi Nemeth, who is a professor emeritus at CU.
She had done some work on a couple of the DNS root servers, G and H if memory serves. She showed a rate of query graphs for those servers. There was a huge jump in the middle of the graphs that corresponded neatly with the release of Windows 2000.
Turns out Win2000 had it hard-coded to consult the DNS root servers every time it wanted to run a nslookup!
That's not really the point. They're not trying to make sure you're part of their target audience. If you're a male dumb enough to buy birth control pills or a female dumb enough to buy penis enlargement pills, so be it. More money for them.
Their concern is only to avoid lawsuits. They don't want a malformed baby or an STD blamed on them. And if you're male, then the pills are guaranteed to keep you from getting pregnant!
and all our systems have rouge linux installs. Its true! ;)
This must be that new Rouge Hat Linux distro I've been hearing about.
Let's just have one massive offtoipc flame-fest! Yay!
You must be new here. That's what we do anyway!
Of course, that won't protect against the Key Katcher.
Parent was modded Funny, but this could actually be really cool! Imagine seeing the cockpit in real-time, letting you track the flight progress and seeing the landscape that you would see if there wasn't a 4000' overcast deck.
Or hop in a companion plane next to the 'real' one and jet around to nearby airports as the trip goes on.
Just make sure to chmod o-w /dev/flightcontrols on the server.
Homer: "Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm."
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning, Dad."
Homer: "Thank you, dear."
Lisa: "By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away."
Homer: "Oh, how does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't work."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "It's just a stupid rock."
Homer: "Uh-huh."
Lisa: "But I don't see any tigers around, do you?"
Homer: "Lisa, I want to buy your rock."
</obSimpsonsReference>
Did you even look at the text inside the graphs? The scale of the graphs is in minutes, not minutes.seconds. 1.5 minutes is one and a half minutes, which is about where the 1:25 bar extends to.
Damn, if this is what gets modded Insightful, no wonder nobody takes /. seriously.
Don't get me wrong, I use sudo every day, and it's a great tool. But you have the following problems anyway:
These occasions occur on a regular basis. If I had to track down a frickin' envelope and get an Act of Congress to let me open it each time, I'd just quit.
Shit.
This would be a great thing to install in your dashboard. You could have a self-contained computer that works as a GPS moving map (connect the GPS antenna to the USB port), CD/DVD player, MP3 player, game system, wireless internet, and so forth. You'd just need to pick up an LCD screen to go with it.
Not that I'm advocating people typing email messages or playing UT while driving -- they're distracted enough as it is. But this would be great for the passengers, especially on road trips!
Maybe that's because Freevo can't record or time-shift yet.
What I'd like to see, and this is probably the point the parent was trying to make, is less reinvention of the wheel and more collaboration. Don't get me started on the number of types of VNC available, each with their pros and cons. If everybody would work together on common projects, we'd have more pros and fewer cons.
I get around this problem by saving the .xpi file (from mozdev or elsewhere) to disk, instead of allowing it to install immediately. I keep all my .xpi files in a separate directory. Then, when I get a new Mozilla installation, I open them (File -> Open) and install them at that point.
"Are you saying I can dodge spelling errors?
"No, Neo. I'm saying that when the time comes, you won't have to."
The reason I still use Windows (XP) on my main machine at home is the amount of software readily available for it, or rather, the lack of software for Linux.
Before everybody screams that there are a ton of open source software projects and throw links to freshmeat.net at me, let me say that yes, you're right. However:
I've wanted to switch my main machine over to Linux for over a year now, but I need those features described above. When I can do all that, I'll switch. Until then, I'll be keeping Windows around.
Good God, man, are you still using mechanical computers? How is 100% vs. 1% CPU utilization harmful to a solid-state processor? A nop instruction is just as stressful on a CPU as a add instruction.
As for the hard drive, unless there's something strange about Folding@Home that requires it to constantly stream data off the hard drive (on the order of MBs per second), that's no more stressful than leaving any modern operating system running on it.
And as for the memory, you are "using" the memory all the time the machine is on, anyway! You have to refresh all the little 1's and 0's constantly.
Better turn your machine off when you step away from your desk, if such "activity" is so harmful.