Bingo. It's also worth pointing out that the $40 prize offered isn't even close to the normal fees that such companies charge to do data recovery. The cheapest fee I've *ever* seen quoted for a post-format recovery was $1700, and that was a special offer being made to our customer care because of a tech. support fuckup. (they didn't tell the customer that reinstalling the OS would delete all their pictures, and the customer raised a stink).
Such a "title" as the one offered by this so-called "challenge" is hardly worth the effort expended. Especially considering that this article is the first I've heard of it... How is this Slashdot-worthy?
Good luck with that, Dell, because your computers have never been renowned (or purchased) for their design. You're not Apple.
So... the semi-frequent sell-outs of certain colours of laptops, like pink, spring green, and some of the other designs are figments of my imagination?
When your product relies on something like Windows Vista because MS won't let you keep selling XP, which is what customers actually want... you have to start doing something to set your products apart from the rest of the market. And one of the things that Dell is trying to do is go for people who want a personalized laptop. That's why Dell has formed an alliance with SkinIt, and why Dell is offering custom colours/designs for their laptops. And they're doing a *really* good job of it, too. Look at the Studio series laptops and desktops, and the XPS One... they're just small examples of things to come.
You're right... Apple is where it is because it has always focused on design. That doesn't mean that Dell can't start worrying about making a product that looks good as well as offering functionality.
Their French-language support is currently done by an outsource in Montreal, but they're expecting to have a call centre in Morocco online by March. At that point, they could very well start selling Linux products with French support. For now, though, it doesn't make good economic sense to train up a bunch of contractors who won't be working for the company 6 months down the road.
You're right, though. They don't speak French in India... that didn't stop Carly Fiorina from moving my job there back when I worked for Compaq, though.:P
Like normal its not on the Canadian site. Usually launches in the Us of product is on the same day in Canada but Dell dose not give us Canadians as many options for pc/laptops as they do to the US. HP also has a limited website for product configuration/product compared to the US. Considering how closely tied we are and how most company release Canada/us same time this would be in Canada to.
Historically, the reason that Dell hasn't released products in Canada at the same time as the US is because they need to sell it in French as well as English. That means they have to translate the manuals, and that they need to provide French-language technical support. Doing otherwise would open themselves to a lawsuit for discrimination. They don't have French tech. support for *any* of their Linux offerings, which is what explains this one. That's what prevented the Insprion N-series Linux-based systems, as well as the XPS One from being released in Canada.
You forget the patent strings attached. Nobody would complain otherwise.
Not exactly... the patents are annoying, but the 2nd word in OOXML is "Open", and MS does seem intent to see it adopted as an open standard across all platforms. They are trying to appear as though they're encouraging its adoption even in free/open software, and don't really have a history of litigating for patent infringement... more annoying is that the spec is many many many pages long... like, you'd need to kill a small forest to print a copy... and it's so obfuscated that even Microsoft's software doesn't fully support all of the features it claims.
If it does get adopted as a standard, then it's likely that the only people who'd be able to fully and properly implement a working version of it are huge companies with armies of programmers. That doesn't exactly describe most of the open source movement.
That does actually depend on the nature of your MSDN subscription... MSDN-AA (Academic Alliance), for example, allows you to use the software for everyday use, but requires you to stop using it 1 year after you finish university. The MSDN subscription I have is a Microsoft Partner agreement, which I get for free as part of the benefits package for working for a major OEM. It allows me to keep using the software as long as I still work for the company. The idea being I need to be familiar with the software in order to properly support and/or sell their product.
It really depends on what you want from your laptop. If you want tons of storage and a good performance-to-price ratio, then you'll be going for a more traditional drive with moving platters/heads. If you want something like, say, battery life, then you'll be going for an SSD. There's a reason those new Dells which boast 19h of battery life have SSD's instead of traditional storage. No moving parts = much lower energy consumption.
Modded troll or not, I have to agree. Smart users don't even have WGA installed on their legal copies of XP (yes, I like to think I'm one of those). I don't want a background process eating my machine's resources just so Microsoft can do the electronic equivalent of a strip-search every 10 minutes. If it doesn't actually benefit me it gets the hell off of my computer, fast.
It doesn't actually run in the background. It does the authenticity check at startup, and it vets your computer when you try to install an update which requires authentication, and that's it. And there are actual, honest-to-goddess important updates that won't install without such authentication.
*shrugs* but I guess I'm not what you'd consider a "smart" user, in that I choose to let it do its rigamorole on the 4 computers I have running Windows... my laptop, which dual boots with XP MCE, my HTPC which is running Vista Ultimate (both came from MSDN), and my parents' laptops, running XP Home and Vista Home Premium respectively.
Incidentally... none of those systems have ever had issues, performance or otherwise, with WGA. I'm not saying that it doesn't screw over legitimate users. But I am saying that I've never seen an issue with it, and that the ability to install security and stability updates that you couldn't otherwise install outweighs the marginal increase in boot time, which is about the only thing you actually notice when you install/activate WGA.
The reason I never used the XP theme (I stuck with the Win2k look while I still used Windows enough to care) is that the window chrome is huge. I don't give a stuff about looks, but I do give a stuff about my screen real-estate being eaten up by "cute" windows. It's not as bad as huge transparent chrome, but it's bad enough.
You'll find, as you get to higher resolutions, that your annoyance at wasted real estate for things like window decorations goes down. I haven't had a second thought about using something like the Windows XP candy themes since I went over 1024x768 resolution. Actually... at really high resolutions, you're better off using a theme with more "wasted" real estate, because with smaller themes the buttons are easier to miss. I dual boot XP MCE on my laptop (1680x1050 resolution, XP for gaming, Linux for actually using it), and use the default Electric Blue theme in XP.
I did that to somebody at work when she forgot to lock her desktop for a meeting.... she almost had IT reimage her desktop to fix it before noticing that the rest of us were sitting around snickering at her.
Aliant (Bell) double billed me 11 months in a row. And they cut off my service, every month, for 'non-payment'. So at the end I had built up a credit of $950 on my account, and yet each month they still debited my account and then disconnected for non payment. When I said cancel the contract they argued over the cancellation fee. They finally relented though. I don't think they are stupid though, just pure incarnate evil.
I had to take Bell to court to get that cancellation fee back... they only agreed to settle out of court when I filed a motion asking for class action status. After they told me to bugger off when I went through the better business bureau, I basically resigned myself to the conclusion that even if I ultimately had to fork over the cancellation fee, it would cost them far more than the $200 it was worth. They were bad enough that I went back to Rogers, after having left them 10 years earlier over being screwed over by shitty customer service.... I still feel like I'm nothing more than a number to them, but they have improved significantly.
But what I really wanted to point out is that, back in the day, the service was really good. I have no experience with Bell Mobility in the early days, but my first cell provider was Cantel AT&T, nearly 15 years ago. Their service was amazing. Really good customer service. It didn't really go downhill until after Rogers bought them out... it became Rogers AT&T, and sorta went downhill, then it became Rogers Wireless, and it became shit. Pure unadulterated shit. So far, not so bad, though. I'm relieved.
That is why I said Moon and Mars (i.e., landers). They will be found in due course.
Yes. They will. But they still have to be retrieved to be useful. By the time a post-collapse terrestrial civilization is able to retrieve such an object, it's not likely to be worth more than an "oh, that's nice." As the parent said, the goal of this organization isn't to provide an archaeological record for peoples of the future, it's to preserve what we know today, in the event that there's a catastrophic collapse.
Because the bible is already translated, and because the bible is more likely to survive 2000 years.
Assume that none of the 1500 languages used still exist 2,000 years from now. It's a fairly safe bet that if there's still humans, there's still going to be religion. And as annoying as it is to admit for some people, Christianity is likely to be one of those religions that survives. That'll give them a translation key for 1,500 languages, which can in turn be used to translate the rest of the information contained on the plates.
A far more likely situation, though, is that several of the languages used will still be in use. Or at least, still readable. That's why the Rosetta stone was so useful: the other two languages on the stone were still known, allowing scholars to realize that they said the same thing and that it was likely that the third, Heiroglyphs, said the same thing. The larger the sample size you have, the better the chance that it'll be useful. Again, however, having the biblical passages present serves as a translation key for the rest of the information contained on the plates. 1,500 pages out of 15,000 isn't that much.
BS. They knew how much was being pumped in the the sending coil. As far as distribution, it's just a matter of finding a way to allocate the costs. People didn't give up on radio because you can't meter it....they found a different business model to accomodate it.
It's kind of hard to insert an ad into your electricity. The GP speaketh correctly... he *was* shot down on his idea because it's not possible to meter/bill for usage.
You might also want to try Zenwalk... it's an XFCE desktop out of the box, but there's KDE packages in the repository... I don't actually have kdebase installed on my system (the only things from KDE that I actually use are Konqueror and Kopete, which are in the kdenetwork package, and work without kdebase), but it's actually a stock, unmodified, compiled from source package that, if it's anything like every other package on the system, is about as close to what the KDE devs want it to behave/look like that you'll find.
I'm not saying that other systems, like arch, Sabayon, or openSUSE aren't great systems. But if you're interested in tinkering and trying things out, you may want to give Zen a try.:)
Oddly, though, I've not had any problem running Flash on my laptop. Well... depending on browser. It's between your two computers in terms of power... a Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz w/ 2GB of RAM.
I'm using Zenwalk 5.2 as my base system, updated to current. I've got Firefox 2, and I'm using Flash from the packages. Youtube videos play fine, little flash games like Desktop Tower Defense, and others on Facebook (well, one of the Mindjolt games on FB doesn't work, but that just doesn't load at all, and has the same behaviour under FF3 on Windows XP... oddly, it *does* load on Konqueror), as well as sites like gamedesign.co.jp. They all work. No crash. No slowdowns. No obscenely high CPU usage. It's working as intended.
Oddly... the inbox on Facebook doesn't work properly under Firefox. Again, same behaviour under FF3 on Windows XP (my work computer). At work, I use Internet Exploder to access that. At home, I installed Konqueror (Which FB thinks is Safari 2 and suggests I should consider upgrading, but the inbox does work). There is a package for Flash for Konqueror under Zenwalk, but I instead allowed it to detect and use the Firefox plugin. On that browser, I see the problems you're describing... games crash the browser about half the time, CPU usage is far higher than it should be. Because it's working fine under Firefox, though, I haven't really felt any need to upgrade.
YMMV... but maybe it's got more to do with your distro than it does Linux as a whole.
Log the starting conditions so you can reconstruct data. Otherwise don't do much logging because it will hurt application performance, sometimes drastically.
It can hurt performance drastically, but you still need *some* logging. I agree about logging the start conditions. The other thing that I log while I'm debugging my code is every event which results in a function call, and a begin function & end function log entry. I don't find there's a lot of point in logging more than that while debugging my code. Not generally, at least... if something isn't working right, I can check the log to see what started and didn't complete, or what function isn't completing with expected results. I can then go to that function in my code, and if I can't figure out what's wrong with it I can add extra logging to the function to help figure it out. Once or twice, I've even had logging every line of code while debugging a particularly complex function.
Bottom line: Keep logging to a minimum. All you really need to know is what isn't working. But be prepared to go in and add more logging if it's needed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you cut the green wire, your computer will never turn on...
Hmm... that's exactly what they want, isn't it? Carry on.
Bingo. It's also worth pointing out that the $40 prize offered isn't even close to the normal fees that such companies charge to do data recovery. The cheapest fee I've *ever* seen quoted for a post-format recovery was $1700, and that was a special offer being made to our customer care because of a tech. support fuckup. (they didn't tell the customer that reinstalling the OS would delete all their pictures, and the customer raised a stink).
Such a "title" as the one offered by this so-called "challenge" is hardly worth the effort expended. Especially considering that this article is the first I've heard of it... How is this Slashdot-worthy?
So... the semi-frequent sell-outs of certain colours of laptops, like pink, spring green, and some of the other designs are figments of my imagination?
When your product relies on something like Windows Vista because MS won't let you keep selling XP, which is what customers actually want... you have to start doing something to set your products apart from the rest of the market. And one of the things that Dell is trying to do is go for people who want a personalized laptop. That's why Dell has formed an alliance with SkinIt, and why Dell is offering custom colours/designs for their laptops. And they're doing a *really* good job of it, too. Look at the Studio series laptops and desktops, and the XPS One... they're just small examples of things to come.
You're right... Apple is where it is because it has always focused on design. That doesn't mean that Dell can't start worrying about making a product that looks good as well as offering functionality.
Their French-language support is currently done by an outsource in Montreal, but they're expecting to have a call centre in Morocco online by March. At that point, they could very well start selling Linux products with French support. For now, though, it doesn't make good economic sense to train up a bunch of contractors who won't be working for the company 6 months down the road.
You're right, though. They don't speak French in India... that didn't stop Carly Fiorina from moving my job there back when I worked for Compaq, though. :P
Historically, the reason that Dell hasn't released products in Canada at the same time as the US is because they need to sell it in French as well as English. That means they have to translate the manuals, and that they need to provide French-language technical support. Doing otherwise would open themselves to a lawsuit for discrimination. They don't have French tech. support for *any* of their Linux offerings, which is what explains this one. That's what prevented the Insprion N-series Linux-based systems, as well as the XPS One from being released in Canada.
Not exactly... the patents are annoying, but the 2nd word in OOXML is "Open", and MS does seem intent to see it adopted as an open standard across all platforms. They are trying to appear as though they're encouraging its adoption even in free/open software, and don't really have a history of litigating for patent infringement... more annoying is that the spec is many many many pages long... like, you'd need to kill a small forest to print a copy... and it's so obfuscated that even Microsoft's software doesn't fully support all of the features it claims.
If it does get adopted as a standard, then it's likely that the only people who'd be able to fully and properly implement a working version of it are huge companies with armies of programmers. That doesn't exactly describe most of the open source movement.
You do realize that that very clip was in TFA? Not even linked, but embedded so all you had to do was click on play?
That does actually depend on the nature of your MSDN subscription... MSDN-AA (Academic Alliance), for example, allows you to use the software for everyday use, but requires you to stop using it 1 year after you finish university. The MSDN subscription I have is a Microsoft Partner agreement, which I get for free as part of the benefits package for working for a major OEM. It allows me to keep using the software as long as I still work for the company. The idea being I need to be familiar with the software in order to properly support and/or sell their product.
It really depends on what you want from your laptop. If you want tons of storage and a good performance-to-price ratio, then you'll be going for a more traditional drive with moving platters/heads. If you want something like, say, battery life, then you'll be going for an SSD. There's a reason those new Dells which boast 19h of battery life have SSD's instead of traditional storage. No moving parts = much lower energy consumption.
It doesn't actually run in the background. It does the authenticity check at startup, and it vets your computer when you try to install an update which requires authentication, and that's it. And there are actual, honest-to-goddess important updates that won't install without such authentication.
*shrugs* but I guess I'm not what you'd consider a "smart" user, in that I choose to let it do its rigamorole on the 4 computers I have running Windows... my laptop, which dual boots with XP MCE, my HTPC which is running Vista Ultimate (both came from MSDN), and my parents' laptops, running XP Home and Vista Home Premium respectively.
Incidentally... none of those systems have ever had issues, performance or otherwise, with WGA. I'm not saying that it doesn't screw over legitimate users. But I am saying that I've never seen an issue with it, and that the ability to install security and stability updates that you couldn't otherwise install outweighs the marginal increase in boot time, which is about the only thing you actually notice when you install/activate WGA.
You'll find, as you get to higher resolutions, that your annoyance at wasted real estate for things like window decorations goes down. I haven't had a second thought about using something like the Windows XP candy themes since I went over 1024x768 resolution. Actually... at really high resolutions, you're better off using a theme with more "wasted" real estate, because with smaller themes the buttons are easier to miss. I dual boot XP MCE on my laptop (1680x1050 resolution, XP for gaming, Linux for actually using it), and use the default Electric Blue theme in XP.
I did that to somebody at work when she forgot to lock her desktop for a meeting.... she almost had IT reimage her desktop to fix it before noticing that the rest of us were sitting around snickering at her.
I had to take Bell to court to get that cancellation fee back... they only agreed to settle out of court when I filed a motion asking for class action status. After they told me to bugger off when I went through the better business bureau, I basically resigned myself to the conclusion that even if I ultimately had to fork over the cancellation fee, it would cost them far more than the $200 it was worth. They were bad enough that I went back to Rogers, after having left them 10 years earlier over being screwed over by shitty customer service.... I still feel like I'm nothing more than a number to them, but they have improved significantly.
But what I really wanted to point out is that, back in the day, the service was really good. I have no experience with Bell Mobility in the early days, but my first cell provider was Cantel AT&T, nearly 15 years ago. Their service was amazing. Really good customer service. It didn't really go downhill until after Rogers bought them out... it became Rogers AT&T, and sorta went downhill, then it became Rogers Wireless, and it became shit. Pure unadulterated shit. So far, not so bad, though. I'm relieved.
Yes. They will. But they still have to be retrieved to be useful. By the time a post-collapse terrestrial civilization is able to retrieve such an object, it's not likely to be worth more than an "oh, that's nice." As the parent said, the goal of this organization isn't to provide an archaeological record for peoples of the future, it's to preserve what we know today, in the event that there's a catastrophic collapse.
Because the bible is already translated, and because the bible is more likely to survive 2000 years.
Assume that none of the 1500 languages used still exist 2,000 years from now. It's a fairly safe bet that if there's still humans, there's still going to be religion. And as annoying as it is to admit for some people, Christianity is likely to be one of those religions that survives. That'll give them a translation key for 1,500 languages, which can in turn be used to translate the rest of the information contained on the plates.
A far more likely situation, though, is that several of the languages used will still be in use. Or at least, still readable. That's why the Rosetta stone was so useful: the other two languages on the stone were still known, allowing scholars to realize that they said the same thing and that it was likely that the third, Heiroglyphs, said the same thing. The larger the sample size you have, the better the chance that it'll be useful. Again, however, having the biblical passages present serves as a translation key for the rest of the information contained on the plates. 1,500 pages out of 15,000 isn't that much.
Optimist... :P
I'd like to introduce you to Tabbed Browsing.
You're welcome to, but I never really found either of them particularly attractive. And I suspect my girlfriend would have a serious objection, too.
It's kind of hard to insert an ad into your electricity. The GP speaketh correctly... he *was* shot down on his idea because it's not possible to meter/bill for usage.
That assumes that the days/years remaining until release are finite. Infinite - 11 is still infinite.
We both know that's unpossibilical in intelligent debate....
Yah... and as I said to a girlfriend who once bemoaned the fact that my cat was good at catching birds.... when was the last time you saw a cat fly?
You might also want to try Zenwalk... it's an XFCE desktop out of the box, but there's KDE packages in the repository... I don't actually have kdebase installed on my system (the only things from KDE that I actually use are Konqueror and Kopete, which are in the kdenetwork package, and work without kdebase), but it's actually a stock, unmodified, compiled from source package that, if it's anything like every other package on the system, is about as close to what the KDE devs want it to behave/look like that you'll find.
I'm not saying that other systems, like arch, Sabayon, or openSUSE aren't great systems. But if you're interested in tinkering and trying things out, you may want to give Zen a try. :)
Oddly, though, I've not had any problem running Flash on my laptop. Well... depending on browser. It's between your two computers in terms of power... a Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz w/ 2GB of RAM.
I'm using Zenwalk 5.2 as my base system, updated to current. I've got Firefox 2, and I'm using Flash from the packages. Youtube videos play fine, little flash games like Desktop Tower Defense, and others on Facebook (well, one of the Mindjolt games on FB doesn't work, but that just doesn't load at all, and has the same behaviour under FF3 on Windows XP... oddly, it *does* load on Konqueror), as well as sites like gamedesign.co.jp. They all work. No crash. No slowdowns. No obscenely high CPU usage. It's working as intended.
Oddly... the inbox on Facebook doesn't work properly under Firefox. Again, same behaviour under FF3 on Windows XP (my work computer). At work, I use Internet Exploder to access that. At home, I installed Konqueror (Which FB thinks is Safari 2 and suggests I should consider upgrading, but the inbox does work). There is a package for Flash for Konqueror under Zenwalk, but I instead allowed it to detect and use the Firefox plugin. On that browser, I see the problems you're describing... games crash the browser about half the time, CPU usage is far higher than it should be. Because it's working fine under Firefox, though, I haven't really felt any need to upgrade.
YMMV... but maybe it's got more to do with your distro than it does Linux as a whole.
It can hurt performance drastically, but you still need *some* logging. I agree about logging the start conditions. The other thing that I log while I'm debugging my code is every event which results in a function call, and a begin function & end function log entry. I don't find there's a lot of point in logging more than that while debugging my code. Not generally, at least... if something isn't working right, I can check the log to see what started and didn't complete, or what function isn't completing with expected results. I can then go to that function in my code, and if I can't figure out what's wrong with it I can add extra logging to the function to help figure it out. Once or twice, I've even had logging every line of code while debugging a particularly complex function.
Bottom line: Keep logging to a minimum. All you really need to know is what isn't working. But be prepared to go in and add more logging if it's needed.
Unfair moderation much? I hope you get metamodded back into positive, because that post is definitely not a troll. :(