3.5" disk drives, CD drives, mice and keyboards and are pretty much disposable.
What you're not using off color 80s skin tone beige teac floppy? I'm still using mine that I bought from 1988. My other systems needed floppy drives which I got from the friendly neighborhood PC recyclers as they carried Teac and office depot carries well, one which doesn't last 3 months. Don't have to be a rabid leftwing treehugger to respect the fact that new floppy drives suck, and 15 year old Teac ones work.
Mice, well before optical ones I tended to burn mine out, even the classic MS intelimouse after 1 year or so. Optical ones I've had great luck with save one off brand that just burnt out.
Keyboards... Usually nothing a little cleaning won't solve unless you have warn through the pads or the contacts totally rubbed off. Keyboard quality seemed poor in the late 1990s, where the past 5 years I had less of a problem.
We live in an era where somepeople consider £30 ($60) CD drives "disposable". The least of our worries is testing something. Because hey to these people whats the difference between 6 months and 12 years? After all it's just "throw away".
£30 CD drives? Wow! I can buy a Sony or a Samsung DVD-rom locally in the States for for half that, but i'd rather mail order a LiteON or LG for about the same money. I paid £40 for my dvd burner and I could get a faster one for £30.
What's truly sad is... I spent a good $100 on a DVD drive that didn't last a year, but the one I spent $30 on lasted 3 years and is still going strong. I hear that old get what you pay for statement but lately I've had better luck with disposable rom drives than ones three times the price.
What do you get with the brand name? Lifetime warranty, assurance of compatibility, known reliability. Good resale value, esp with odd chip types no longer made.
What do you get with the lowest bid? Half the price, might carry a lifetime warranty but then again they are labeled poorly so you have no clue who would even honor it. But who cares it's half the price. Grab bag buying, don't know what it is till you get it, and might not work in your board, but you can also sell it local for what you paid for it.
I have one system with crucial, one with generic.
Worth the headache? Depends on whether you can deal mucking about. But hardly a few pound difference, it's a 100% difference.
I'm curious why Linux has issues with this... I had bad RAM for a while and didn't even know it running windows. It installed, and ran just fine for weeks. Installed Linux, and Redhat wouldn't even finish the install.. suse installed but then crashed at random times... etc.
Was windows just getting lucky, or what?
Are you sure it's a RAM issue. I found Redhat, and other distros hard to install when I had my old HP 2x burner. But when I upgraded to my DVD burner, the problems for the most part disappeared. It was as if the drives I was using didn't like the discs I burned, yet windows had no problem what so ever. I could install from my backup discs, never as much as an error making images, the evidence would suggest it made solid discs. To this day it remains a mystery to me, the fact that those discs still had the same problem, but if I copy those files to a HD from the very same discs, no problem.
Another example, I thought I had a bad batch of ram. Tested bad, random reboots after being on for a while, crashing with CPU / memory intensive tasks. Drive me absolutely batty till I swapped out motherboard and the problems disappeared, and when I put in a lower speed chip in the same board, the problems also disappeared. I can only assume based on this evidence that the board in question didn't like running at 166mhz despite the fact that both are based on the same chipset, save the smaller north bridge heat sync.
In theory, yes, it can be a good idea in a 'socialist' type society like Canada's, where everybody pays tax to make things more affordable. This tax is supposed to re-imburse the artists for losses due to people copying materials loaned from other people, or recorded from radio.
Is this actually designed to be a socialist system? I've heard that radio stations, hotels, an other businesses get a tax break for supporting Canadian artists. I'm not sure if this is true. But given the fact that there is a system in place to tax media would it be possible, for example, musician to release their material via the net (website, bitorrent, or other trackable system), and use that as evidence of entitlement?
I've asked many Canadians the same question as you, and no one had a clear cut answer for accounting Internet downloads. Radio at least has play lists, which if they are getting a tax break for playing Canadian bands I'd imagine those records are kept.
Quite frankly, since I pay the copyright tax, I really haven't bought that many CD's. However, the movie industry still makes a killing off my kids
As a Canadian, do you know who gets money from the media tax? I don't mean this as a flame but rather a legit question. In principal it's seems like a very good idea to tax the medium in order to support media to put on it. But do copyright holders actually get compensated, and if so is it limited to Canadian copyright holders? What is the purpose of this tax and where does it go?
That was their official version. They just shut it down (and made it pay-only) because they wanted to make some money off of it and didn't want to "give away" something for free.
I wouldn't consider this a troll... I may disagree but I can see how someone would reach this conclusion.
Near as I can tell, MSN doesn't make money off Chat. It in it self doesn't cost money but is given away when you buy other services. I would be inclined to agree that it was a PR move as a direct result of negative press they got regarding pedos. In normal IRC rooms you could at the very least get an IP address of a problem user. You couldn't on the current version of MSN chat without software that no one wanted to release to the public. You were totally dependent on MSN to help law enforcement to track down wackos. I can say as a direct result of MSN chat going subscription only that they lost the vast majority of their users, from hundreds of thousands down to thousands.
Think about it... going subscription only means you can tell subscribers that they are doing something to track users which could lead to online safety, assuming the billing information is accurate. They also lost most of their user base, which makes the system much more manageable. And they can advertise that their service comes with free chat, not like you couldn't go onto IRC from any old service, but most people wouldn't know an IRC if it bit them on the arse. But most importantly since they require credit card subscriptions they limit their subscribers to adults only, and any kids happen to be using the service are doing so with the consent of an adult. MSN is no longer accountable.
I don't actually know what MSN's reasons were for going subscription only, but this is my theory and I'm sticking to it.
And MS Comic Chat was also annoying to all non-MSCC users since it added freaking numbers at the end of every line. Not to mention it just sucked even without its annoying features.
IIRC it only added that info when you were in comic mode. So non-comic users could kindly ask the comic user to shut off that option. Franky I found the extra text added to be less annoying than bozos who use lots and lots of color on irc, or run scripts that say which mp3 they happen to be listening to. The impact on other users who choose not to use it was minimal.
I dealt with a good many people after MSN closed their doors, and the only means I could get anyone into IRC was with MSN comic chat. While I agree in many ways it sucked as an IRC client it was easy to use and most closely resembled the environment from where they came. Looking at the current trend of SMS and IM emoticons are hip, and the comic chat was very much before it's time.
No its because MSN chat sucked an no one used it. They just shut it down saying it was to stop pedophiles for good PR value.
I seem to remember a 60 Minutes episode on how a young girl, not sure how young, was convienced to leave home, and caught a flight from America to Greece. Most notable hearing the MSN chat / messenger sounds in the background which made me wonder if this did happen on MSN chat or if they just used that as a generic example. You could be correct that this was a PR move, as well as a move to lower their user base to a more manageable level.
MSN chat far from sucked, and many people used it, from hundrads of thousands to millions depending on the hour. It was for the most part identical to IRC except the client by default had full Unicode support. Fonts and colors where supported, as well as each user's name linked to a profile. And the software was far more likely to work on a user's machine than those Java chat programs.
The only reason it sucked was the fact that the people, for the most part, were so freaking paranoid. You couldn't join a chat, visit the loo, and come back without being kicked/banned 24hr for fear you were some evil program trying to get at their bank account. When you point out their mistake, no one knew how to unban as the default client didn't support it. Any speaking of software other than the official MSN client, even a trivial Trivia game would label you a hacker and get you permibanned.
More funny, the default client banned you based on info that was stored in your registry, which you could change at will either with regedit or editing the source of the room you were in, change the numbers, and poof. Worse yet, they went though much bother and effort associating names with accounts, yet allowed you to change your name once logged in. And when you create a room, you are given a key that is stored in your registry somewhere. There were two levels, gold owner and red operator (msn had a different term). Unless you saved this key, it might change and poof no one can get admin access in a room anymore.
What MSN chat needed was to limit the ability to change your name to a registered one. Also, different software for managing chat rooms that would allow you to define a owner password, define a operator password, and store ban lists. There were 3rd party programs to do this, and there was always a plugin for mirc, but every few months MSN would change something that didn't allow 3rd party clients to connect. But as far as design and layout I considered MSN to be far more useable than most IRC solutions.
MSN chat is still around. You have to subscribe to a Microsoft service in order to gain access to MSN chat, or join up one of the free channels if they are still around. I seem to remember CA, usually Canada or Centra Australia depending on the hour, was free. If you pay for hotmail, have an dialup/dsl account, or use webtv (if that's even still supported), you could access MSN chat. Prior subscribers, and those who created a @MSN.com hotmail account also seemed to have access to the chat rooms freely.
MSN Chat in communities is as always free.
A shame that a few bad apples have spoiled it for the rest of us
Was that the actual reason they closed their door to everyone who wasn't willing to give out their credit card? You could be right. A CC would help track down real pedos, well except those who steal them from overseas. But I doubt MSN chat had the monopoly on bad apples.
But it is somewhat sad the fact that they put so much in the way of resources tward IRC style chat to all but abandon it. MS Comic Chat 2.5 for example was ultra spiffy in the fact that you could choose a persona and expressions and have your chats in a comic strip style. This software was standard on win98se boxes IIRC. They also had a Virtual Chat where you could construct 3d worlds and interact with the environment. This wasn't as practical as MS Comic Chat. All of these were abandoned when they switched to passport logins, but with some tweaking one could get standard IRC software into MSN chat, very useful as the whole MSN Chat universe was filled with spam.
I'm trying to remember the full paged adverts TCI and ATnT took out in the local papers back in the late 1990s when the city of Tacoma (just south of Seattlesta) was planning on laying their own fiber optic network for telivision and network access. I believe they called them selves "Citizens for Fair Cable" and explained how monopolies were good and how competition would result in lower rates but quality of service would suffer. Those who actually took the time to visit other cities knew full well that their present cable provider was crap, from static to ghosting you name it. It's a wonder they didn't take the money they spent educating the public why the cable monopoly was good and actually used it to upgrade the network which they had to do anyway as the city did put in their fiberoptic network.
DVD is a mess. Between incompatible formats and cheap and nasty players, I've stopped trying to use DVD at all.
I've found the cheaper the player, the less incompatible it is with different disc formats. I bought a cheepo Yamakawa last year sometime as sort of a secondary DVD player. It is typicaly sold for $50 or so, but it was on sale for $20. But there as not been one disc I've tossed at it that it couldn't play, including KVCD, and XVCD. It plays DVD-R and +R well and unlike some players will play.mp3 from DVD, though the user interface leaves much to be desired. And if i'm not mistaken, I can swap out the drive with a DVD-Rom.
There are female timelords, in fact the Doctor worked with one, or rather two of the same one, named Romana during the Tom Baker era for the Keys of time series. After the Keys of Time story arc ended {Destiny of the Daleks - 9/1/79}, Romana decides to regenerate, and tries on a number of bodies before she decides on the image of someone they met in the prior episode.
This may explain why we met so few female timelords, as they are only given 12 regenerations all that time trying on different bodies would lead to a lower life expectancy. But if a male timelord could regenerate into a female one, well this would explain why their population hasn't died out.
Sure you buy new lamps every once in a while, but a real breakthrough will come when you can get LED 'bulbs' that fit in a normal 220/110V socket on a normal lamp.
The technique is simple. Use a rectifier to convert AC to DC, and use enough LEDs in series and glue them all together. Sure if one LED burns out you loose a whole series, but don't expect that for a few years.
Whether you'd actually want to own one is a different story.
I guess we are going to start having "illumiphiles" who will try to tell us that the incandescent lightbulbs of yesteryear are somehow "warmer" and that humans can tell the difference between LEDs and vacuum tubes.
But vacuum tubes are warmer. The first time I put my hand into a HAM radio set I got a blister. I'm telling ya a blind man could tell the difference.
Please... everyone backing this... this.... just can't go on! It's... insane!
Why not. I have to admit, I too question the sanity of these people who are digging deep in their pockets and spending so much time in order to rescue something from the rubbish bin, but I for one encourage them. We all, for the most part, have disposable income which we spend on entertainment, even those who only spend money on blank media.
I for one don't see this as being a bunch of zelots trying to save their TV show, but rather people who have accepted the fact that they live in a capitilist republic and are using hard core cash in order to get their voices heard rather than simply accepting the arbitrary decision of some executive. After all, we the people are the consumer, it's because of our labor they have jobs in the first place. Albeit trivial, working in common cause is something that we need to be reminded we can do. Sure in the end, it's for a TV show, but it's TV that we pay for in the products we buy. It's our TV show.
Are we REALLY just a bunch of people who would rather lose our freedoms just so that we can watch a TV show? (Bear in mind that there are plenty of religious fundies who would just LOVE to cancel Star Trek and any SciFi that questions the existance of their god.)
Hey, if they want to get together and place newspaper ads how SciFi is inspired by the saten to convience people not to believe in God then more power too them. I would think it would be a petty trivial waste of time but we need pepole like this to exercise free speech. Just because I think they are freaking luddite lunitics doesn't mean they have any less rights then I do. Just because I believe what they are doing is a form of censorship doesn't mean I or anyone else has the right to censor them for being idiots.
This is one show... I wish the same effort was put into a cause that actually improves life in the here, now and future. I find it incredulous to witness people caring so little about our government and law and so much about something so trivial.
Perhaps people need a TV show that will focus on current issues, social injustice, rather than Paris Hilton milking cows and insulting country folks. While I don't think Enterprise has done the best job of doing this, others would disagree strongly. Good telivision can promote social awareness, and if someone wants to fight for this then more power too them.
But most importantly, people getting behind a TV show bring people like you out of the woodwork reminding us that we can change the world if we just give it a chance.
and had refused flat-out to help with her medical bills or even just shell out the measly cash to replace their ancient coffee makers with newer, cooler ones..
Actually, IIRC they had a policy of serving their coffee at above 180F, closer to 190F. Reality was they just set the thermostat as high as it could go before boiling. This allowed them to use cheaper beans and still get the flavor out so they say, and the coffee would still be hot after you took it to work. Reality was the coffee was burnt and you couldn't drink it for a good long hour without risking blisters in your mouth. It was in a way very thoughtful, but near as I'm aware, this was only documented in their operations manual and the customers were never told their coffee wasn't intended for drinking at the resturant. They would tell you after you burn your tounge, but not before. "Heh heh, someone else dumb enough to drink our coffee".
I wasn't a big soda fan, but after my experences with McDonalds coffee I never bought it again.
If it breaks your 5-year-old applications, replace them. If your internally-generated code isn't ready, fix it.
And if you need more ram, buy it. If you run out of disc space, buy a bigger HD. If it runs too slowly, get a faster cpu. And if it isn't broken in the first place, patch it and make it broken.
...but in my case it was a website that didn't work on anything later than IE 5.5.
You mean Microsoft's page to download SP4 for NT4.0? We're sorry, you need a newer web browser. To download this update which includes the brower you need to install this web browser already installed.
I friend told me this, that she observed that her p2p speeds went down after p2p. At first I didn't quite believe it, after all what could Microsoft do to make XP prejudice against P2P. Then I read this.
XP Sp2 limiting the number of connection/sec This feature/function can be handy from security point of view. Bink.Nu links to a functionality in Windows XP SP2 that limits conncurrent TCP/IP connections. I vaguely remember reading some relating when I was using Windows 2000 as well about a setting in registry where we can limit the number of TCP/IP Connections. On Googling I found the following link and on this forum . You can save your computer from P2P programs trying to make many connections at the same time and this can also apply to some of the viruses and worms.
To be honest this was the first I heard about it. I just naturally assumed that shareza didn't peform as well as other dedicated P2P software applications. That registery entry seems to be missing and according to what i've read is hard coded in tcpip.sys. I found software to change the number of connections permited in tcpip.sys here and it might be covered in XP-antispy though I've not tested it yet.
In all fairness I have had few problems with XP SP2. Unfortunatly any problem I've had has been hardware related.
As an aside, I don't look even remotely under 21, but I consider that nearly irrelevant to the bigger issue - The law doesn't say a store needs to ID me, just that I can't buy before turning 21.
Gawd, didn't you ever go to school with that kid who developed a full beard at age 15? I did, and he was totally dependent on clerks who didn't check ID. When I buy spirits, whether it be supermarket or state run liquor store they just glance at the sucker. Your region may be different, but mine this info is never recorded.
Second, using a credit card. It ALREADY has my picture on it! What the hell do they think they'll prove by seeing another very similar picture of me on a different small plastic card?
What's the problem here? You already are allowing your name to be entered into their database and stored on a little slip of paper. What's wrong with seeing another picture of you on another piece of plastic. If you don't feel comfortable giving a store this info by all means pay cash.
Personally, I think making clerks swipe their own ID seems like a VERY good idea
If you like. It is paranoid to think you need to keep this info, but I imagine there might be cause one time in your life where this info would be useful.
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3.5" disk drives, CD drives, mice and keyboards and are pretty much disposable.
What you're not using off color 80s skin tone beige teac floppy? I'm still using mine that I bought from 1988. My other systems needed floppy drives which I got from the friendly neighborhood PC recyclers as they carried Teac and office depot carries well, one which doesn't last 3 months. Don't have to be a rabid leftwing treehugger to respect the fact that new floppy drives suck, and 15 year old Teac ones work.
Mice, well before optical ones I tended to burn mine out, even the classic MS intelimouse after 1 year or so. Optical ones I've had great luck with save one off brand that just burnt out.
Keyboards... Usually nothing a little cleaning won't solve unless you have warn through the pads or the contacts totally rubbed off. Keyboard quality seemed poor in the late 1990s, where the past 5 years I had less of a problem.
We live in an era where somepeople consider £30 ($60) CD drives "disposable". The least of our worries is testing something. Because hey to these people whats the difference between 6 months and 12 years? After all it's just "throw away".
£30 CD drives? Wow! I can buy a Sony or a Samsung DVD-rom locally in the States for for half that, but i'd rather mail order a LiteON or LG for about the same money. I paid £40 for my dvd burner and I could get a faster one for £30.
What's truly sad is... I spent a good $100 on a DVD drive that didn't last a year, but the one I spent $30 on lasted 3 years and is still going strong. I hear that old get what you pay for statement but lately I've had better luck with disposable rom drives than ones three times the price.
Is it really worth saving the £3-£5 by getting cheap unbranded RAM? As the saying goes, you get what you paid for.
Pardon the US prices
Crucial CT6464Z40B 512meg pc3200 $60.00 shipped
Lowest bid 512meg PC3200 $30.00 shipped
Lowest bid 1024meg pc3200 $65 shipped
What do you get with the brand name? Lifetime warranty, assurance of compatibility, known reliability. Good resale value, esp with odd chip types no longer made.
What do you get with the lowest bid? Half the price, might carry a lifetime warranty but then again they are labeled poorly so you have no clue who would even honor it. But who cares it's half the price. Grab bag buying, don't know what it is till you get it, and might not work in your board, but you can also sell it local for what you paid for it.
I have one system with crucial, one with generic.
Worth the headache? Depends on whether you can deal mucking about. But hardly a few pound difference, it's a 100% difference.
I'm curious why Linux has issues with this... I had bad RAM for a while and didn't even know it running windows. It installed, and ran just fine for weeks. Installed Linux, and Redhat wouldn't even finish the install.. suse installed but then crashed at random times... etc.
Was windows just getting lucky, or what?
Are you sure it's a RAM issue. I found Redhat, and other distros hard to install when I had my old HP 2x burner. But when I upgraded to my DVD burner, the problems for the most part disappeared. It was as if the drives I was using didn't like the discs I burned, yet windows had no problem what so ever. I could install from my backup discs, never as much as an error making images, the evidence would suggest it made solid discs. To this day it remains a mystery to me, the fact that those discs still had the same problem, but if I copy those files to a HD from the very same discs, no problem.
Another example, I thought I had a bad batch of ram. Tested bad, random reboots after being on for a while, crashing with CPU / memory intensive tasks. Drive me absolutely batty till I swapped out motherboard and the problems disappeared, and when I put in a lower speed chip in the same board, the problems also disappeared. I can only assume based on this evidence that the board in question didn't like running at 166mhz despite the fact that both are based on the same chipset, save the smaller north bridge heat sync.
In theory, yes, it can be a good idea in a 'socialist' type society like Canada's, where everybody pays tax to make things more affordable. This tax is supposed to re-imburse the artists for losses due to people copying materials loaned from other people, or recorded from radio.
Is this actually designed to be a socialist system? I've heard that radio stations, hotels, an other businesses get a tax break for supporting Canadian artists. I'm not sure if this is true. But given the fact that there is a system in place to tax media would it be possible, for example, musician to release their material via the net (website, bitorrent, or other trackable system), and use that as evidence of entitlement?
I've asked many Canadians the same question as you, and no one had a clear cut answer for accounting Internet downloads. Radio at least has play lists, which if they are getting a tax break for playing Canadian bands I'd imagine those records are kept.
Quite frankly, since I pay the copyright tax, I really haven't bought that many CD's. However, the movie industry still makes a killing off my kids
As a Canadian, do you know who gets money from the media tax? I don't mean this as a flame but rather a legit question. In principal it's seems like a very good idea to tax the medium in order to support media to put on it. But do copyright holders actually get compensated, and if so is it limited to Canadian copyright holders? What is the purpose of this tax and where does it go?
That was their official version. They just shut it down (and made it pay-only) because they wanted to make some money off of it and didn't want to "give away" something for free.
I wouldn't consider this a troll... I may disagree but I can see how someone would reach this conclusion.
Near as I can tell, MSN doesn't make money off Chat. It in it self doesn't cost money but is given away when you buy other services. I would be inclined to agree that it was a PR move as a direct result of negative press they got regarding pedos. In normal IRC rooms you could at the very least get an IP address of a problem user. You couldn't on the current version of MSN chat without software that no one wanted to release to the public. You were totally dependent on MSN to help law enforcement to track down wackos. I can say as a direct result of MSN chat going subscription only that they lost the vast majority of their users, from hundreds of thousands down to thousands.
Think about it... going subscription only means you can tell subscribers that they are doing something to track users which could lead to online safety, assuming the billing information is accurate. They also lost most of their user base, which makes the system much more manageable. And they can advertise that their service comes with free chat, not like you couldn't go onto IRC from any old service, but most people wouldn't know an IRC if it bit them on the arse. But most importantly since they require credit card subscriptions they limit their subscribers to adults only, and any kids happen to be using the service are doing so with the consent of an adult. MSN is no longer accountable.
I don't actually know what MSN's reasons were for going subscription only, but this is my theory and I'm sticking to it.
And MS Comic Chat was also annoying to all non-MSCC users since it added freaking numbers at the end of every line. Not to mention it just sucked even without its annoying features.
IIRC it only added that info when you were in comic mode. So non-comic users could kindly ask the comic user to shut off that option. Franky I found the extra text added to be less annoying than bozos who use lots and lots of color on irc, or run scripts that say which mp3 they happen to be listening to. The impact on other users who choose not to use it was minimal.
I dealt with a good many people after MSN closed their doors, and the only means I could get anyone into IRC was with MSN comic chat. While I agree in many ways it sucked as an IRC client it was easy to use and most closely resembled the environment from where they came. Looking at the current trend of SMS and IM emoticons are hip, and the comic chat was very much before it's time.
No its because MSN chat sucked an no one used it. They just shut it down saying it was to stop pedophiles for good PR value.
I seem to remember a 60 Minutes episode on how a young girl, not sure how young, was convienced to leave home, and caught a flight from America to Greece. Most notable hearing the MSN chat / messenger sounds in the background which made me wonder if this did happen on MSN chat or if they just used that as a generic example. You could be correct that this was a PR move, as well as a move to lower their user base to a more manageable level.
MSN chat far from sucked, and many people used it, from hundrads of thousands to millions depending on the hour. It was for the most part identical to IRC except the client by default had full Unicode support. Fonts and colors where supported, as well as each user's name linked to a profile. And the software was far more likely to work on a user's machine than those Java chat programs.
The only reason it sucked was the fact that the people, for the most part, were so freaking paranoid. You couldn't join a chat, visit the loo, and come back without being kicked/banned 24hr for fear you were some evil program trying to get at their bank account. When you point out their mistake, no one knew how to unban as the default client didn't support it. Any speaking of software other than the official MSN client, even a trivial Trivia game would label you a hacker and get you permibanned.
More funny, the default client banned you based on info that was stored in your registry, which you could change at will either with regedit or editing the source of the room you were in, change the numbers, and poof. Worse yet, they went though much bother and effort associating names with accounts, yet allowed you to change your name once logged in. And when you create a room, you are given a key that is stored in your registry somewhere. There were two levels, gold owner and red operator (msn had a different term). Unless you saved this key, it might change and poof no one can get admin access in a room anymore.
What MSN chat needed was to limit the ability to change your name to a registered one. Also, different software for managing chat rooms that would allow you to define a owner password, define a operator password, and store ban lists. There were 3rd party programs to do this, and there was always a plugin for mirc, but every few months MSN would change something that didn't allow 3rd party clients to connect. But as far as design and layout I considered MSN to be far more useable than most IRC solutions.
Thats why MSN Chat is no longer available.
MSN chat is still around. You have to subscribe to a Microsoft service in order to gain access to MSN chat, or join up one of the free channels if they are still around. I seem to remember CA, usually Canada or Centra Australia depending on the hour, was free. If you pay for hotmail, have an dialup/dsl account, or use webtv (if that's even still supported), you could access MSN chat. Prior subscribers, and those who created a @MSN.com hotmail account also seemed to have access to the chat rooms freely.
MSN Chat in communities is as always free.
A shame that a few bad apples have spoiled it for the rest of us
Was that the actual reason they closed their door to everyone who wasn't willing to give out their credit card? You could be right. A CC would help track down real pedos, well except those who steal them from overseas. But I doubt MSN chat had the monopoly on bad apples.
But it is somewhat sad the fact that they put so much in the way of resources tward IRC style chat to all but abandon it. MS Comic Chat 2.5 for example was ultra spiffy in the fact that you could choose a persona and expressions and have your chats in a comic strip style. This software was standard on win98se boxes IIRC. They also had a Virtual Chat where you could construct 3d worlds and interact with the environment. This wasn't as practical as MS Comic Chat. All of these were abandoned when they switched to passport logins, but with some tweaking one could get standard IRC software into MSN chat, very useful as the whole MSN Chat universe was filled with spam.
Europe uses GSM coding
T-mobile uses GSM
AT&T uses GSM
I'm trying to remember the full paged adverts TCI and ATnT took out in the local papers back in the late 1990s when the city of Tacoma (just south of Seattlesta) was planning on laying their own fiber optic network for telivision and network access. I believe they called them selves "Citizens for Fair Cable" and explained how monopolies were good and how competition would result in lower rates but quality of service would suffer. Those who actually took the time to visit other cities knew full well that their present cable provider was crap, from static to ghosting you name it. It's a wonder they didn't take the money they spent educating the public why the cable monopoly was good and actually used it to upgrade the network which they had to do anyway as the city did put in their fiberoptic network.
DVD is a mess. Between incompatible formats and cheap and nasty players, I've stopped trying to use DVD at all.
.mp3 from DVD, though the user interface leaves much to be desired. And if i'm not mistaken, I can swap out the drive with a DVD-Rom.
I've found the cheaper the player, the less incompatible it is with different disc formats. I bought a cheepo Yamakawa last year sometime as sort of a secondary DVD player. It is typicaly sold for $50 or so, but it was on sale for $20. But there as not been one disc I've tossed at it that it couldn't play, including KVCD, and XVCD. It plays DVD-R and +R well and unlike some players will play
A female doctor?
I'll be branded a true geek for this one.
There are female timelords, in fact the Doctor worked with one, or rather two of the same one, named Romana during the Tom Baker era for the Keys of time series. After the Keys of Time story arc ended {Destiny of the Daleks - 9/1/79}, Romana decides to regenerate, and tries on a number of bodies before she decides on the image of someone they met in the prior episode.
This may explain why we met so few female timelords, as they are only given 12 regenerations all that time trying on different bodies would lead to a lower life expectancy. But if a male timelord could regenerate into a female one, well this would explain why their population hasn't died out.
Sure you buy new lamps every once in a while, but a real breakthrough will come when you can get LED 'bulbs' that fit in a normal 220/110V socket on a normal lamp.
l w ww.ccrane.com/120-volt-led-light-bulb.aspx
They've been out for some time.
http://store.sundancesolar.com/ledlibu12acl.htm
http://www.smarthomepro.com/97314.html
http://
The technique is simple. Use a rectifier to convert AC to DC, and use enough LEDs in series and glue them all together. Sure if one LED burns out you loose a whole series, but don't expect that for a few years.
Whether you'd actually want to own one is a different story.
So which way am I better off? Just using lower wattage "classic" lightbulbs, or with dozens of 120V AC->5V DC converters wasting energy everywhere.
I would *think* that one would use a rectifier and hookup enough LEDs in series to accomidate 120V, or 240v for that matter.
I guess we are going to start having "illumiphiles" who will try to tell us that the incandescent lightbulbs of yesteryear are somehow "warmer" and that humans can tell the difference between LEDs and vacuum tubes.
But vacuum tubes are warmer. The first time I put my hand into a HAM radio set I got a blister. I'm telling ya a blind man could tell the difference.
The drag racing industry has moved from incadecant to LED lights for the starting "Christmas Tree"
Note to self... don't take interior design tips from people who spend good money putting off center stripes on cars.
Please... everyone backing this... this.... just can't go on! It's... insane!
Why not. I have to admit, I too question the sanity of these people who are digging deep in their pockets and spending so much time in order to rescue something from the rubbish bin, but I for one encourage them. We all, for the most part, have disposable income which we spend on entertainment, even those who only spend money on blank media.
I for one don't see this as being a bunch of zelots trying to save their TV show, but rather people who have accepted the fact that they live in a capitilist republic and are using hard core cash in order to get their voices heard rather than simply accepting the arbitrary decision of some executive. After all, we the people are the consumer, it's because of our labor they have jobs in the first place. Albeit trivial, working in common cause is something that we need to be reminded we can do. Sure in the end, it's for a TV show, but it's TV that we pay for in the products we buy. It's our TV show.
Are we REALLY just a bunch of people who would rather lose our freedoms just so that we can watch a TV show? (Bear in mind that there are plenty of religious fundies who would just LOVE to cancel Star Trek and any SciFi that questions the existance of their god.)
Hey, if they want to get together and place newspaper ads how SciFi is inspired by the saten to convience people not to believe in God then more power too them. I would think it would be a petty trivial waste of time but we need pepole like this to exercise free speech. Just because I think they are freaking luddite lunitics doesn't mean they have any less rights then I do. Just because I believe what they are doing is a form of censorship doesn't mean I or anyone else has the right to censor them for being idiots.
This is one show... I wish the same effort was put into a cause that actually improves life in the here, now and future. I find it incredulous to witness people caring so little about our government and law and so much about something so trivial.
Perhaps people need a TV show that will focus on current issues, social injustice, rather than Paris Hilton milking cows and insulting country folks. While I don't think Enterprise has done the best job of doing this, others would disagree strongly. Good telivision can promote social awareness, and if someone wants to fight for this then more power too them.
But most importantly, people getting behind a TV show bring people like you out of the woodwork reminding us that we can change the world if we just give it a chance.
and had refused flat-out to help with her medical bills or even just shell out the measly cash to replace their ancient coffee makers with newer, cooler ones..
Actually, IIRC they had a policy of serving their coffee at above 180F, closer to 190F. Reality was they just set the thermostat as high as it could go before boiling. This allowed them to use cheaper beans and still get the flavor out so they say, and the coffee would still be hot after you took it to work. Reality was the coffee was burnt and you couldn't drink it for a good long hour without risking blisters in your mouth. It was in a way very thoughtful, but near as I'm aware, this was only documented in their operations manual and the customers were never told their coffee wasn't intended for drinking at the resturant. They would tell you after you burn your tounge, but not before. "Heh heh, someone else dumb enough to drink our coffee".
I wasn't a big soda fan, but after my experences with McDonalds coffee I never bought it again.
If it breaks your 5-year-old applications, replace them. If your internally-generated code isn't ready, fix it.
And if you need more ram, buy it.
If you run out of disc space, buy a bigger HD.
If it runs too slowly, get a faster cpu.
And if it isn't broken in the first place, patch it and make it broken.
...but in my case it was a website that didn't work on anything later than IE 5.5.
You mean Microsoft's page to download SP4 for NT4.0? We're sorry, you need a newer web browser. To download this update which includes the brower you need to install this web browser already installed.
Microsoft - Now where did you want to go today?
To be honest this was the first I heard about it. I just naturally assumed that shareza didn't peform as well as other dedicated P2P software applications. That registery entry seems to be missing and according to what i've read is hard coded in tcpip.sys. I found software to change the number of connections permited in tcpip.sys here and it might be covered in XP-antispy though I've not tested it yet.
In all fairness I have had few problems with XP SP2. Unfortunatly any problem I've had has been hardware related.
In addition to the Cali. example. WA state law (I believe) requires id to be checked for anyone who looks under 35 (or some random age like that).
Is that law or is that just the silly sign stores put up to end arguments by people who are clearly older than 18/21?
As an aside, I don't look even remotely under 21, but I consider that nearly irrelevant to the bigger issue - The law doesn't say a store needs to ID me, just that I can't buy before turning 21.
Gawd, didn't you ever go to school with that kid who developed a full beard at age 15? I did, and he was totally dependent on clerks who didn't check ID. When I buy spirits, whether it be supermarket or state run liquor store they just glance at the sucker. Your region may be different, but mine this info is never recorded.
Second, using a credit card. It ALREADY has my picture on it! What the hell do they think they'll prove by seeing another very similar picture of me on a different small plastic card?
What's the problem here? You already are allowing your name to be entered into their database and stored on a little slip of paper. What's wrong with seeing another picture of you on another piece of plastic. If you don't feel comfortable giving a store this info by all means pay cash.
Personally, I think making clerks swipe their own ID seems like a VERY good idea
If you like. It is paranoid to think you need to keep this info, but I imagine there might be cause one time in your life where this info would be useful.