What people forget is that labor isn't free. How much time (at $50 an hour or more) are you going to waste doing research, ordering the parts, assembling the hardware, testing the hardware, installing, configuring and testing the software? Assuming everything works and you don't waste a lot of time troubleshooting and repairing the system. When you are done, you have a system with little documentation, no warranty and no support. What a bargain.
The problem is that the MS Office file formats are tightly tied to OLE, which is tightly tied to the operating system. You can't clone Microsoft Word without replicating OLE. It's a mess.
It's as if you robbed a bank, and the punishment if you were caught was only to return that money.
The current situation is worse. It's as if you were convicted of bank robbery and the judge lets you keep the money and makes you promise not to rob any more banks.
I would like to see an economist calculate the total amount of "ill-gotten gains", triple it and fine Microsoft that amount. The problem is, how do you quantify the damage Microsoft has done to consumers and competitors?
Only an incredible dork would buy a $70 NIC for a home machine - nice Netgear 10/100 cards are at any office supply store for $25.
I must be an incredible dork. I've had nothing but bad luck with no-name and off-brand Ethernet cards. The last one I bought, a LinkSys PCI card, produced random system lockups and went deaf on a regular basis. I've never had any problems with 3COM cards. They just work and they are well supported with drivers. Your mileage may vary.
As an experiment, I looked for a low-end consumer PC from a known company. Something that could be found at a local store, included some software and that had a warranty and some semblance of support. I found this, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 6635, for $619. No monitor or Ethernet card included. Add $249 for the HP 15" monitor and $70 for a 3COM 3C905B-TX 100Base-T Ethernet card. That ups the price to $938. Rebates cut the price by $100, to $838.
So for fairly comparable systems, the iMac is $999 (MSRP of iMac/350) and the PC is $838. The PC is $161 cheaper, but the user has to install and configure the Ethernet card.
The Mac OS is a legitimate alternative to Windows. For most people, at some point in time, an Intel PC is so old, slow, flakey and incompatible with current software and hardware that it needs to be replaced, not upgraded. At that point, replacing the Intel PC with a Mac is a reasonable course of action.
You can get an iMac for $999 (iMac/350) to $1299 (iMac DV). PC hardware can be cheaper, but beware of price comparisons that ignore the differences in features between the two. The iMac includes 100Base-T Ethernet, 56K modem, a nice CRT, sound and microphone, speakers, USB, and Firewire and DVD on DV models.
The really nice thing about the iMac is that everything is integrated into a single, simple package. You take the main unit out of the box, plug in the AC cord, keyboard, mouse, and telephone and/or Ethernet cable. Installation complete.
I have several Intel boxes for running Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. I also have an iMac. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. The iMac is nice when you just want to use the computer as an appliance, for email, web browsing, word processing, etc. It is easy to use and consistent. The problem is stability, it freezes too often, just like Windows 9X. My Linux box has never crashed but the GUI really sucks in comparison to Windows or Mac OS.
Well, since it OK to stick it to a politically incorrect group like smokers, and distribute the cash to every popular government program, except of course, health care for smokers, why don't we find some other groups we can rob "for the children".
Good example. Lawyers got richer, state legislatures have a new pot of money to spend on anything they wish, tobacco prices immediately increased by substantial amounts, which means that the settlement is being paid for by smokers, who are disproportionately members of minority groups and in lower than average income brackets. That seems very progressive to me, steal from the poor and give to the rich.
But what, really, was the government's motive for putting soldiers in a ditch only 1 or 2 miles (I think) from the impact? I imagine that almost all of these men must have eventually contracted radiation sickness, and this provides a good sample for the government's tests of the effect of radiation on humans.
It isn't necessarily dangerous. A deep slit trench will protect you from prompt radiation, thermal and blast effects. Next step, be upwind or evacuate to avoid the fallout footprint. I've seen films of troops advancing to "ground zero" shortly after a test, that is really stupid.
I'v heard that IBM used to use fixed head disks for virtual memory on their mainframes. That wasn't fast enough so they replaced the fixed head disk drives with RAM disks. You can install 32 GB in an IBM mainframe and some Alpha servers.
Inflation is good for the masses? Can I have some of whatever you are smoking?
I've lived through inflationary periods in the USA. They hurt the poor and working classes more than the wealthy. Prices always go up faster, and more often, than wages. Interest rates make mortgages unaffordable. Anyone on a fixed income is truly screwed.
Re:For those not invested, crash is good time to b
on
Irrational Exuberance
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· Score: 1
Nothing like a market crash to do some serious bottom feeding, then dump the stock after the market recovers.
That sounds nice, but what if you get a market like the early 1930s, which just goes down, down, down, for years.
I have a Panasonic A120 DVD player. I tried every button on the remote control and nothing worked. I had to sit through ten minutes of trailers, thinking very evil thoughts about what I would like to do to Michael Eisner and the marketing geniuses at Disney.
The satellite is moving at roughly 7700 meters per second, in orbit around the not-quite spherical Earth, with a non-uniform gravitational field. Very small errors in measuring the attitude and position of the spacecraft, or the time the image was captured, would produce large errors in the maps. Not to mention any distortions in the optics and imaging sensor or thermal effects on the spacecraft.
I'm curious how the military, or J. Random Badguy, gets lat/lon coordinates from a satellite picture that are accurate enough to target an ICBM or cruise missile. You can see the target in the picture, but how do you put an accurate grid on top of the picture? You can't exactly send out a survey team with a GPS receiver to most of these locations.
How about all the pension funds and the massive investment in Microsoft? The public has lost far more in the stock price debacle than they will ever gain from court proceedings designed to promote MS's non-existent competition.
What about them? Public policy should not be subservient to the interests of Wall Street and those investors who speculate in the stock market. Contrary to popular belief, the stock market is not your friend. It may go up, it may go down, whether or not that is "fair" is irrelevant.
I already mailed the author of the article on the biases in how sites were classified.
The Libertarian Party is not a "conservative" organization. Elimination of most of the government and its laws is hardly conservative.
The NRA has done more for gun safety than any of the so-called gun safety organizations listed. The NRA has extensive gun safety training programs for children and adults. The "gun safety" organizations are really gun prohibition and confiscation advocacy groups. That is not the same thing.
Re:ok this really pisses me off( trademarks)
on
UNIX.com On eBay?
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· Score: 2
You have to use a trademark for it to be valid, and even then, it is only applicable to the category of product that it is used for. There are also geographical concerns. Your trademark may not be valid in countries where you do not market and sell your product. Printing the name of a trademark is not infringement. Trademarks are not the same thing as copyrights.
The high definition and wide screen features are nice, but for me, the most important feature is the fact that it is digital video.
I've seen how good NTSC can look when displayed on a studio monitor in a TV station. Unfortunately, that bears no resemblance to the noisy, ghost ridden, ugly NTSC signals delivered by the idiots who run the local cable system or available over-the-air in my area. A end-to-end digital signal, even if it is only SDTV, would be a major improvement over the current situation.
I think the original plan was to reclaim the VHF channels (2-13), but many broadcasters have been lobbying to keep their VHF channel assignments, saying that they can't replicate their current coverage on a UHF channel.
The FCC and Congress did not force HDTV on the television broadcasters. The FCC was looking into the reallocation of unused UHF TV channels to the land mobile radio service. When the NAB heard about it, they went ballistic. Looking for an excuse to hold on to their valuable frequency allocations, they found high definition television. Not only did it make use of unused TV channels, the original proposals used more spectrum than the 6 MHz needed for an NTSC channel. It boiled down to "Let us keep our huge, poorly utilized, frequency allocations and in return we will deliver HDTV to the American public in years."
Slashdot Mirror
What people forget is that labor isn't free. How much time (at $50 an hour or more) are you going to waste doing research, ordering the parts, assembling the hardware, testing the hardware, installing, configuring and testing the software? Assuming everything works and you don't waste a lot of time troubleshooting and repairing the system. When you are done, you have a system with little documentation, no warranty and no support. What a bargain.
The problem is that the MS Office file formats are tightly tied to OLE, which is tightly tied to the operating system. You can't clone Microsoft Word without replicating OLE. It's a mess.
The current situation is worse. It's as if you were convicted of bank robbery and the judge lets you keep the money and makes you promise not to rob any more banks.
I would like to see an economist calculate the total amount of "ill-gotten gains", triple it and fine Microsoft that amount. The problem is, how do you quantify the damage Microsoft has done to consumers and competitors?
I must be an incredible dork. I've had nothing but bad luck with no-name and off-brand Ethernet cards. The last one I bought, a LinkSys PCI card, produced random system lockups and went deaf on a regular basis. I've never had any problems with 3COM cards. They just work and they are well supported with drivers. Your mileage may vary.
As an experiment, I looked for a low-end consumer PC from a known company. Something that could be found at a local store, included some software and that had a warranty and some semblance of support. I found this, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 6635, for $619. No monitor or Ethernet card included. Add $249 for the HP 15" monitor and $70 for a 3COM 3C905B-TX 100Base-T Ethernet card. That ups the price to $938. Rebates cut the price by $100, to $838.
So for fairly comparable systems, the iMac is $999 (MSRP of iMac/350) and the PC is $838. The PC is $161 cheaper, but the user has to install and configure the Ethernet card.
You can get an iMac for $999 (iMac/350) to $1299 (iMac DV). PC hardware can be cheaper, but beware of price comparisons that ignore the differences in features between the two. The iMac includes 100Base-T Ethernet, 56K modem, a nice CRT, sound and microphone, speakers, USB, and Firewire and DVD on DV models.
The really nice thing about the iMac is that everything is integrated into a single, simple package. You take the main unit out of the box, plug in the AC cord, keyboard, mouse, and telephone and/or Ethernet cable. Installation complete.
I have several Intel boxes for running Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. I also have an iMac. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. The iMac is nice when you just want to use the computer as an appliance, for email, web browsing, word processing, etc. It is easy to use and consistent. The problem is stability, it freezes too often, just like Windows 9X. My Linux box has never crashed but the GUI really sucks in comparison to Windows or Mac OS.
MSB LSB
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32 1
If you are interested in the truth on this scam, read National Taxpayers Union Foundation Policy Paper 115.
Good example. Lawyers got richer, state legislatures have a new pot of money to spend on anything they wish, tobacco prices immediately increased by substantial amounts, which means that the settlement is being paid for by smokers, who are disproportionately members of minority groups and in lower than average income brackets. That seems very progressive to me, steal from the poor and give to the rich.
It isn't necessarily dangerous. A deep slit trench will protect you from prompt radiation, thermal and blast effects. Next step, be upwind or evacuate to avoid the fallout footprint. I've seen films of troops advancing to "ground zero" shortly after a test, that is really stupid.
I'v heard that IBM used to use fixed head disks for virtual memory on their mainframes. That wasn't fast enough so they replaced the fixed head disk drives with RAM disks. You can install 32 GB in an IBM mainframe and some Alpha servers.
Possession of a list of stolen credit cards numbers is not a crime, unless there is an intent to defraud. See U.S. Code Title 18, Section 1029.
I've lived through inflationary periods in the USA. They hurt the poor and working classes more than the wealthy. Prices always go up faster, and more often, than wages. Interest rates make mortgages unaffordable. Anyone on a fixed income is truly screwed.
That sounds nice, but what if you get a market like the early 1930s, which just goes down, down, down, for years.
I have a Panasonic A120 DVD player. I tried every button on the remote control and nothing worked. I had to sit through ten minutes of trailers, thinking very evil thoughts about what I would like to do to Michael Eisner and the marketing geniuses at Disney.
That doesn't work on Disney DVDs. They lock out the controls.
OS/2 is not dead. It's pining for the fjords.
The satellite is moving at roughly 7700 meters per second, in orbit around the not-quite spherical Earth, with a non-uniform gravitational field. Very small errors in measuring the attitude and position of the spacecraft, or the time the image was captured, would produce large errors in the maps. Not to mention any distortions in the optics and imaging sensor or thermal effects on the spacecraft.
I'm curious how the military, or J. Random Badguy, gets lat/lon coordinates from a satellite picture that are accurate enough to target an ICBM or cruise missile. You can see the target in the picture, but how do you put an accurate grid on top of the picture? You can't exactly send out a survey team with a GPS receiver to most of these locations.
What about them? Public policy should not be subservient to the interests of Wall Street and those investors who speculate in the stock market. Contrary to popular belief, the stock market is not your friend. It may go up, it may go down, whether or not that is "fair" is irrelevant.
The Libertarian Party is not a "conservative" organization. Elimination of most of the government and its laws is hardly conservative.
The NRA has done more for gun safety than any of the so-called gun safety organizations listed. The NRA has extensive gun safety training programs for children and adults. The "gun safety" organizations are really gun prohibition and confiscation advocacy groups. That is not the same thing.
You have to use a trademark for it to be valid, and even then, it is only applicable to the category of product that it is used for. There are also geographical concerns. Your trademark may not be valid in countries where you do not market and sell your product. Printing the name of a trademark is not infringement. Trademarks are not the same thing as copyrights.
I've seen how good NTSC can look when displayed on a studio monitor in a TV station. Unfortunately, that bears no resemblance to the noisy, ghost ridden, ugly NTSC signals delivered by the idiots who run the local cable system or available over-the-air in my area. A end-to-end digital signal, even if it is only SDTV, would be a major improvement over the current situation.
I think the original plan was to reclaim the VHF channels (2-13), but many broadcasters have been lobbying to keep their VHF channel assignments, saying that they can't replicate their current coverage on a UHF channel.
The FCC and Congress did not force HDTV on the television broadcasters. The FCC was looking into the reallocation of unused UHF TV channels to the land mobile radio service. When the NAB heard about it, they went ballistic. Looking for an excuse to hold on to their valuable frequency allocations, they found high definition television. Not only did it make use of unused TV channels, the original proposals used more spectrum than the 6 MHz needed for an NTSC channel. It boiled down to "Let us keep our huge, poorly utilized, frequency allocations and in return we will deliver HDTV to the American public in years."