"It's better to have 2-4 cards with high credit limits then 7-10 with average limits, and will give you a better score."
If you like to do online shopping, it's also a good idea to keep a card with a lower (i.e. less than $1K) limit so that if your information does get stolen, the crooks can maximally do $1K damage as opposed to the credit limit on a higher valued account.
" Or keep an eye on the old ones. You don't want to cancel older accounts, especially if they had a good history b/c that in effect shortens your credit history and lowers your credit score. Be careful not to screw your own credit record while trying to prevent other from doing the same."
I have worked for a major Mastercard-issuing bank and I can tell you that you do not have the right idea. When you apply for a loan/mortgage/creditcard/etc the credit reporting agency assumes that every existing loan/line of credit/creditcard is withdrawn to its maximum limit, even if you are not using them. So you might be denied a mortgage because they assume you've maximally used your mastercard with a $10K limit when in fact you haven't used it for 20 months. This is a bad thing (TM).
Even if you have cancelled it, your useage of the credit will still be considered in your credit score. If you leave those old accounts open, that is what screws up your credit rating (as well as not paying them on time, going over limit, etc.)
"How does one do this research? [on CD-R manufacturers]
Where does one go?
(I have a [users.glo.be] couple [nasa.gov] of links to pages of test data, but they no longer work.)
And anyway, how can one be sure that the results on a particular web site are unbiased?"
That is the matter of much debate and frankly I don't have a straight answer for you. Part of the problems is that CD-Rs are a relatively new technology and no disc has been around for 100 years so we don't know for sure how long they will last.
Just a side note: The F-Prot Antivirus program produced by Skulason's company is among the best I have seen. It handily puts Norton and McAfee in their places. It's what I put on my mother's computer. If you are looking for a good antivirus program for windows that's non-bloated and simply does its job with as little fluff as possible, check out F-prot. There are also linux and BSD versions.
I am a satisfied customer, although sadly their business licenses have become a lot more $expensive lately.
"The email bounce is nearly dead now. Between spam and viruses faking the from and reply-to headers, it's become almost a menace. I got nearly as many bounces as I did sobig messages."
On my main account, I got exactly 0 sobig bounces and 0 actual sobig messages. This applies for all versions of sobig. (Only the competent get access to my real address.)
On my main 'spam address' however, it got about a 10:1 ratio of bounces to sobig messages. I guess a lot of spammers got infected and since they have a lot of e-mail addresses for spam purposes on their systems, a number of sobig messages went out with my address on them.
"It would be nice to know how medium-scale brands (e.g., Phillips, Imation, etc.) fare.
I have heard some bad things about Memorex CD-RWs (and have experienced some problems with them myself), so it seems that name-brand does not necessarily imply good quality."
The idea that name brand does not imply quality in the CD-R market is quite correct. There are only something like 14 companies in the world that make CD-Rs but there are hundreds of brands out there that buy and then resell them under their own name.
So therefore it's important to know which company manufactured the disc as opposed to which is selling it. It's also important to know that some name brands buy from more than one manufacturer. For example, my 'archival' burning is done on FujiFilm discs made by Taiyo-Yuden, one of the best manufacturers. But I have to be careful because Fuji also sells Ricoh media. Typically the "Made in Japan" mark identifies Fujis that are from Taiyo-Yuden. This is how I find the quality.
So how do you tell if some disc on the shelf is good or not? Buy a single disc, bring it home and use an ATIP-reader utility to find the manufacturer name. If it's a good manufacturer (i.e. a manufacturer you have carefully researched and is known to make very good CD-Rs) then go back and buy a truckload. Otherwise keep searching.
"This recent article in The Register refers to a test by a Dutch magazine called PC Active.
They tested 30 different brands of CD that had been recorded only 20 months earlier.... It looks like it will become necessary to copy everything to new media every year or so, lest it become lost, forever lost, never to be seen again by the eys of mortal man."
Not necessarily true. There were some horribly manufactured brands out there that did fail badly on this test. But that's about poor materials and poor quality control. Read the very end of the register article:
"Unfortunately, the article seems to focus on white label CD-Rs, and doesn't mention any premium brands that performed well."
So there is no indication where those higher end MAM-E, Mitsui, Taiyo-Yuden and Kodak Gold discs will fail like that. So keep in mind: you get what you pay for. Don't store anything you want to keep around for a long time on bargain basement media.
"And an even better reason:
Apple is a hardware company more than a software company. They make software to help themselves sell more hardware. Why, then, *SHOULD* they make it easy for PC users to access it?"
Because the PC users will buy iPods of course. That's where the real money for Apple is with the iTMS.
"Now if only us PC users could use it. [the iTunes music store] (I know, I know, coming soon to a PC near you, but why the hell didn't Apple just make it web-based to begin with?)"
Apple cares a lot about user experience. If they made it web based, you know that someone out there will try to access it using netscape 4 and complain about javascript problems or whatever. You'd get all these applications hijacking the browser helper associations and all that. And people would never know where they downloaded their files.
Using iTunes to access the iTMS gives a very consistent way of finding, searching for, downloading and playing the music. It avoids all browser problems, user-incompetence-in-file-management problems, etc. This is one of the reasons why Apple 'got it right.'
And sadly, even though I do have a mac, I can't buy anything at the iTMS because I don't have a billing address in the USA. I hope they expand it to Canada. And soon.
Yes, this is good. It means I can pay for my next semester's university textbooks by installing spyboy seek & destroy on a few peoples' computers, cleaning the spyware, and then change $50 a pop.
One job like that per week and I can buy a new set of textbooks in winter semester.
"I'd be REALLY impressed if he could give us directions on destroying an IBM Model M keyboard. I've had mine for a decade and still haven't managed to even dent it."
The only time I've seen a non-working model-M was one that got constant 10h/day use in the lab since it was manufactured in 1984. The keys were simply pressed so often that the connections wore out and some keys just didn't work anymore.
But still, the model M has got to be one of the most indestructable PC peripherals in existence. The one I am typing on right now has always served me well. And I can use it to make fun of my brother since it's older than he is;-)
"..Thinking In Java IS a great book, but I also think Ivor Horton's "Beginning Java" is another perfectly suited book. There is a 1.4 edition out now. I simply cannot praise "Beginning Java" highly enough, it is the book I used to teach myself. Sometimes he is very verbose, but he certaintly gets the points across."
I used this book in my own first year CS java course. I think that it does quite a good job of teaching exactly how to program in Java and how to use its object oriented techniques and other tools like overloaded constructors and polymorphic programming to your advantage. It would probably be appropriate to the submitter's needs.
The thing to remember about Horton's book is that it is very specifically about how to program IN JAVA. It is not so great if you want to learn the things that CS is really about. It does not spend much time on algorithms or or the ever-important discrete structures. If you want to teach about those in java, I suggest you look up is Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Goodrich and Tamassia. It assumes you know some java beforehand, and jumps right into some very good explanations of those things that CS really is about. I've used it and found it very informative and easy to understand.
Me: "My friends 15 minutes away can get 3M/640K broadband and I'm stuck on dialup."
You: "I only keep my ADSL line because that ISP provides a static IP, but with a measy 2.5Mbit bandwidth and 768Kbit upload. My real pipe is a 10BaseT socket, connected to a switch in the basement, and fiber optics from there."
Yes, I do wonder where the broadband is. My friends 15 minutes away can get 3M/640K broadband and I'm stuck on dialup. Living in rural canada is not fun. (And yes, I am are that that article is talking particularly about the slow pace of broadband deployment in the USA.)
"Windows 3.1 was released in April 1992.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and 3.11 were MAJOR versions, they were released in Oct 1992 and Nov 1993, respectively. Where are the Windows NT entries? v3.51 and v4 certainly major versions (released during 1994).
Windows 98 and 98SE can be considered MAJOR versions (maybe not under the hood, but still...)."
I should have said that 1990 was Windows 3.0, not windows 3.1 - you are correct about that being wrong.
But Windows 3.11 and WFW 3.11, even though they introduced some significant new things, they did not introduce a major revision of the OS. It was still the same OS with some important new features, particularly in the networking department.
Even though some consider Win98/se to be major revisions, they were still updates to win95 and did not give a fundamental change in the OS's operation (except for IE integration) and basically built on what was already there. They were significant updates but I do not count them as major revisions.
As to NT, that does not apply here. I'm talking about desktop OSs. Notice that I mentioned that Win2k was the first 32 bit desktop windows. I do know that NT was out there long before win2k came out.
"Microsoft aren't regular 'deadline'-missers - opting to release sub-par software instead just to reach the deadline."
This 'delay' is no surprise for me. Every major version of windows has come out in 5 year intervals:
1985: Windows 1.0 (the first windows)
1990: Windows 3.1 (the first windows that had enough flare to get widespread useage)
1995: Win95 (the first windows for the desktop with 32 bit code and memory protection)
2000: Windows 2000 (the first 32 bit windows for the desktop)
2005: Longhorn
As a veteran of the textbook acquisition game, here are some rules by which any university or college student should live and die:
1. Don't buy new books right off the bat. This should be obvious. You can get it used later on, or you might find out that the textbook for the course has changed or it's gone to a new version. Profs won't expect you to have the texts on the first day, or not even the first week when you're in first year.
2. Don't put your trust in any heavily advertised "We'll buy your used textbooks" program. They'll pay you $15 for a $90 textbook and then sell it for $67.50.
3. Do find out who the professor of your course is. And then compare your knowledge with the knowledge of the people who took it last year. If it's the same professor then you can probably dive into the used book market. If not, wait until you get the course outline or other official piece of information and get the actual title and volume, and then you'll know if the people with the used books have what you want.
4. If you are trying to get your books early and can't get a course outline to find out what book will be used for a course, then try scouting the 'official' bookstores because they usually know well in advance and have everything labelled in their stock supplies on the shelves. I always go on a scouting trip in early september with a notepad and take notes on prices to make sure people selling used books aren't selling above the retail prices. (This does happen once in a while.) On this scouting trip, I usually end up explaining to some first year kid and their parents why they should put down that $500 stack of books and wait for used books.
5. One you are sure of what books you actually do need, then make it your religion to scour those used books boards (online or not) and if you see something you want, then phone them up instantly and pick it up.
6. When you have all your books, don't go writing in them or whatnot. You want to have them keep their value so you can sell then for $5 less in the next semester. Remember that you can sell a used book for almost exactly the same as you got it (or probably even more) but with new books, your profit ceiling is probably only 75% of the retail price since the 'official' store's supply of used books is generally priced at this level.
Another solution for expansion card storage is network card boxes. I have a big D-Link box under my bed that was used to ship something like 60 D-Link network cards. It has lovely little slots for every card. It came from when a local university was upgrading and they ordered a lot of cards.
If you can get your hands on one of these, it might help you out.
"3) ditch the amusing new mail sound. Silence is golden."
Ditch all OS sound effects. Whenever I set up a new machine for someone I always turn off the sound effects. This is especially important on laptops so they don't wake up all the people within a 10 foot radius on the train.
from the cubicle-farms?-how-dilbertesqe dept.
on
Cubicle Etiquette?
·
· Score: 1
"from the cubicle-farms?-how-dilbertesqe dept."
There is a dilbert book which has a specific section on cubicles. It's called "Dilbert Gives You The Business (ISBN 0740703382.)" It is essential reading for situations like this.
"If there is any justice in the world, they will be held accountable for all the crap they've said since the beginning."
All the shareholders who massively bought into them and then lost (or will lose) money will sue... eventually. The question is whether or not they will sue before McBride and cohorts make it to Cuba.
"Just because it has a unique ID labelled on it (whether it's a number or a barcode or a hologram or anything else!), doesn't mean you can recover it any easier"
True, but it does mean that if the item is recovered, the police have grounds to give it back to you. I think the police in my town still come around to the elementary schools and give a talk about bike safety, and how kids should have their parents take the bicycle down to the main police station to get an ID stamped on it and have that ID associated with the real owner. This way, if the bike is stolen and found, they can give it back to you.
On the other hand, if your bike did not have an ID, was stolen, and then found, the police can't just instantly give it to you even though it is yours.
So even though serials and IDs don't do anything to help recover lost properties, they do help you recover properties where were lost and then found by the authorities.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like to do online shopping, it's also a good idea to keep a card with a lower (i.e. less than $1K) limit so that if your information does get stolen, the crooks can maximally do $1K damage as opposed to the credit limit on a higher valued account.
I have worked for a major Mastercard-issuing bank and I can tell you that you do not have the right idea. When you apply for a loan/mortgage/creditcard/etc the credit reporting agency assumes that every existing loan/line of credit/creditcard is withdrawn to its maximum limit, even if you are not using them. So you might be denied a mortgage because they assume you've maximally used your mastercard with a $10K limit when in fact you haven't used it for 20 months. This is a bad thing (TM).
Even if you have cancelled it, your useage of the credit will still be considered in your credit score. If you leave those old accounts open, that is what screws up your credit rating (as well as not paying them on time, going over limit, etc.)
That is the matter of much debate and frankly I don't have a straight answer for you. Part of the problems is that CD-Rs are a relatively new technology and no disc has been around for 100 years so we don't know for sure how long they will last.
I am a satisfied customer, although sadly their business licenses have become a lot more $expensive lately.
On my main account, I got exactly 0 sobig bounces and 0 actual sobig messages. This applies for all versions of sobig. (Only the competent get access to my real address.)
On my main 'spam address' however, it got about a 10:1 ratio of bounces to sobig messages. I guess a lot of spammers got infected and since they have a lot of e-mail addresses for spam purposes on their systems, a number of sobig messages went out with my address on them.
The idea that name brand does not imply quality in the CD-R market is quite correct. There are only something like 14 companies in the world that make CD-Rs but there are hundreds of brands out there that buy and then resell them under their own name.
So therefore it's important to know which company manufactured the disc as opposed to which is selling it. It's also important to know that some name brands buy from more than one manufacturer. For example, my 'archival' burning is done on FujiFilm discs made by Taiyo-Yuden, one of the best manufacturers. But I have to be careful because Fuji also sells Ricoh media. Typically the "Made in Japan" mark identifies Fujis that are from Taiyo-Yuden. This is how I find the quality.
So how do you tell if some disc on the shelf is good or not? Buy a single disc, bring it home and use an ATIP-reader utility to find the manufacturer name. If it's a good manufacturer (i.e. a manufacturer you have carefully researched and is known to make very good CD-Rs) then go back and buy a truckload. Otherwise keep searching.
Not necessarily true. There were some horribly manufactured brands out there that did fail badly on this test. But that's about poor materials and poor quality control. Read the very end of the register article:
"Unfortunately, the article seems to focus on white label CD-Rs, and doesn't mention any premium brands that performed well."
So there is no indication where those higher end MAM-E, Mitsui, Taiyo-Yuden and Kodak Gold discs will fail like that. So keep in mind: you get what you pay for. Don't store anything you want to keep around for a long time on bargain basement media.
I can't anymore. Your 'amnesty' was too costly.
Because the PC users will buy iPods of course. That's where the real money for Apple is with the iTMS.
Apple cares a lot about user experience. If they made it web based, you know that someone out there will try to access it using netscape 4 and complain about javascript problems or whatever. You'd get all these applications hijacking the browser helper associations and all that. And people would never know where they downloaded their files.
Using iTunes to access the iTMS gives a very consistent way of finding, searching for, downloading and playing the music. It avoids all browser problems, user-incompetence-in-file-management problems, etc. This is one of the reasons why Apple 'got it right.'
And sadly, even though I do have a mac, I can't buy anything at the iTMS because I don't have a billing address in the USA. I hope they expand it to Canada. And soon.
One job like that per week and I can buy a new set of textbooks in winter semester.
The only time I've seen a non-working model-M was one that got constant 10h/day use in the lab since it was manufactured in 1984. The keys were simply pressed so often that the connections wore out and some keys just didn't work anymore.
But still, the model M has got to be one of the most indestructable PC peripherals in existence. The one I am typing on right now has always served me well. And I can use it to make fun of my brother since it's older than he is ;-)
I used this book in my own first year CS java course. I think that it does quite a good job of teaching exactly how to program in Java and how to use its object oriented techniques and other tools like overloaded constructors and polymorphic programming to your advantage. It would probably be appropriate to the submitter's needs.
The thing to remember about Horton's book is that it is very specifically about how to program IN JAVA. It is not so great if you want to learn the things that CS is really about. It does not spend much time on algorithms or or the ever-important discrete structures. If you want to teach about those in java, I suggest you look up is Data Structures and Algorithms in Java by Goodrich and Tamassia. It assumes you know some java beforehand, and jumps right into some very good explanations of those things that CS really is about. I've used it and found it very informative and easy to understand.
You: "I only keep my ADSL line because that ISP provides a static IP, but with a measy 2.5Mbit bandwidth and 768Kbit upload. My real pipe is a 10BaseT socket, connected to a switch in the basement, and fiber optics from there."
Me: I will dance on your grave after I kill you.
Yes, I do wonder where the broadband is. My friends 15 minutes away can get 3M/640K broadband and I'm stuck on dialup. Living in rural canada is not fun. (And yes, I am are that that article is talking particularly about the slow pace of broadband deployment in the USA.)
I should have said that 1990 was Windows 3.0, not windows 3.1 - you are correct about that being wrong.
But Windows 3.11 and WFW 3.11, even though they introduced some significant new things, they did not introduce a major revision of the OS. It was still the same OS with some important new features, particularly in the networking department.
Even though some consider Win98/se to be major revisions, they were still updates to win95 and did not give a fundamental change in the OS's operation (except for IE integration) and basically built on what was already there. They were significant updates but I do not count them as major revisions.
As to NT, that does not apply here. I'm talking about desktop OSs. Notice that I mentioned that Win2k was the first 32 bit desktop windows. I do know that NT was out there long before win2k came out.
This 'delay' is no surprise for me. Every major version of windows has come out in 5 year intervals:
1985: Windows 1.0 (the first windows)
1990: Windows 3.1 (the first windows that had enough flare to get widespread useage)
1995: Win95 (the first windows for the desktop with 32 bit code and memory protection)
2000: Windows 2000 (the first 32 bit windows for the desktop)
2005: Longhorn
1. Don't buy new books right off the bat. This should be obvious. You can get it used later on, or you might find out that the textbook for the course has changed or it's gone to a new version. Profs won't expect you to have the texts on the first day, or not even the first week when you're in first year.
2. Don't put your trust in any heavily advertised "We'll buy your used textbooks" program. They'll pay you $15 for a $90 textbook and then sell it for $67.50.
3. Do find out who the professor of your course is. And then compare your knowledge with the knowledge of the people who took it last year. If it's the same professor then you can probably dive into the used book market. If not, wait until you get the course outline or other official piece of information and get the actual title and volume, and then you'll know if the people with the used books have what you want.
4. If you are trying to get your books early and can't get a course outline to find out what book will be used for a course, then try scouting the 'official' bookstores because they usually know well in advance and have everything labelled in their stock supplies on the shelves. I always go on a scouting trip in early september with a notepad and take notes on prices to make sure people selling used books aren't selling above the retail prices. (This does happen once in a while.) On this scouting trip, I usually end up explaining to some first year kid and their parents why they should put down that $500 stack of books and wait for used books.
5. One you are sure of what books you actually do need, then make it your religion to scour those used books boards (online or not) and if you see something you want, then phone them up instantly and pick it up.
6. When you have all your books, don't go writing in them or whatnot. You want to have them keep their value so you can sell then for $5 less in the next semester. Remember that you can sell a used book for almost exactly the same as you got it (or probably even more) but with new books, your profit ceiling is probably only 75% of the retail price since the 'official' store's supply of used books is generally priced at this level.
If you can get your hands on one of these, it might help you out.
Yes, that is what a read on first glance ;-) It made me take a double-take!
Ditch all OS sound effects. Whenever I set up a new machine for someone I always turn off the sound effects. This is especially important on laptops so they don't wake up all the people within a 10 foot radius on the train.
There is a dilbert book which has a specific section on cubicles. It's called "Dilbert Gives You The Business (ISBN 0740703382.)" It is essential reading for situations like this.
Get it. Read it. Seriously.
All the shareholders who massively bought into them and then lost (or will lose) money will sue ... eventually. The question is whether or not they will sue before McBride and cohorts make it to Cuba.
2. Inflate stock price.
But there is a corollary to this.
After 3. Profit, you must add:
4. Federal prison
True, but it does mean that if the item is recovered, the police have grounds to give it back to you. I think the police in my town still come around to the elementary schools and give a talk about bike safety, and how kids should have their parents take the bicycle down to the main police station to get an ID stamped on it and have that ID associated with the real owner. This way, if the bike is stolen and found, they can give it back to you.
On the other hand, if your bike did not have an ID, was stolen, and then found, the police can't just instantly give it to you even though it is yours.
So even though serials and IDs don't do anything to help recover lost properties, they do help you recover properties where were lost and then found by the authorities.