"If Joe Sixpack is too proud to ask his nephew to help him buy a computer, it's his own damn fault when he pays three grand for a Hewlett Packard that has been out of date for six months."
The sad thing is that he probably would have gotten along fine with a $600 machine from the mom and pop shop. A duron on a motherboard with integrated sound and LAN is good enough for most.
"Name any field (Computers, Engineering, Finance, Medicine, Skateboarding) and if you are not involved, you will get blown away by terminology."
The difference is that in medicine, engineering and finance, you still have to deal with computers all the time and this it is important to understand something about them, but the reverse is NOT true.
Therefore it's quite distressing that most people don't know basic computer terminology but not distressing that the computer literate don't know advanced medical or skateboarding terminology.
I'm currently a PC Tech at a financial company and in passing I overheard some words between investors having a meeting. I was not distressed that I had to look up what an underwriter is.
...you really can't read slashdot without going blind unless you have very specific sets of knowledge.
When I started reading slashdot some years ago after 'graduating' from C|Net, I had to look quite a few things up before I understood the conversations. People kept talking about something called Mozilla which I eventually realised was a web browser;-) (This was back in the Milestone 0.7 days.) I eventually realised that an OS and the GUI were separate things and Linux wasn't simply that desktop I saw when I booted Corel Linux one time. And at that point, I could already take a computer apart, put it together again, set up networks and such.
Now here is an exercise for you: Load up the slashdot homepage in another browser tab. Now go over the homepage word by word. Would your mother understand each of these words? Or your boss? What percentage of sentences would your mother not understand?
Sometimes I forget that it takes an immense amount of time and reading each week even for people like you and me to keep up with everything on this front. The general public... well... it doesn't have a chance.
"Maybe it's just Iowa, but, like, i'm going into twelfth grade next year, and there are actually a surprising number of kids that can't pronounce simple words like "consequences"."
Honestly, I am more appalled at the number of kids that *can* pronounce the 'word' ROFLAMO.
But seriously, I hear you. I am from the generation that was just on the leading edge of the 'net -- When I was in highschool, ICQ was still in the 5 million user range and the occasional person still asking 'what's the internet' or 'what's K2Y?' So I really see a difference in the kids that are 4 years younger than me. They don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" or even worse, "are" and "our' because they just type "ur" or "r".
It is sickening. But at least it makes it easier for me to apply to jobs. I have looked at the things on some of the coverletters coming out of university printers and frankly, it's scary. I am so thankful that I learned grammar from my mom who learned it correctly in the British system than from the broken Ontario school system that doesn't even teach you want a pronoun is anymore.
"respond to team comunications, either voice comms or text, I've been playing for years and still can't absorb the infomation from a top clan using text comms when I'm watching a game, they can do that while playing (new instructions/information every.5 seconds) "
That's because clans have macros for all these things. And they just have to see the line out of the corner of their eye to know which text macro the other person sent.
What really surprises me is the macros they have. There's one I'll always remember from the classic Quake1 mod Team Fortress: "Enemy HWGuy at the bottom of our spiral!" (If you played the infamous 2fort4 map you know what I'm talking about. HWGuy = Heavy Weapons guy, one of the character classes. And if you were ever frustrated in TF by an annoyingly good spy, that may have been me;-)
"actually have some trouble thinking of which "entertainment" games would be good for teaching individual facts. Several discuss how to make gunpowder (hardly what you want your kids to be doing)"
Would you want your kids to make gunpower? Probably not.
Would you want your kids to become interested in learning about chemistry? Yes.
If they start talking about methods of how to make gunpower, then get them a chemistry set for their birthday. It's a lot safer than gunpower and they will probably learn something too.
"Of course. Not only do they encourage hand-eye coordination, they also encourage important skills like pattern recognition (play any Mega Man game and you'll see what I mean) and innovative thinking (I could list a whole slew of games here...any strategy game, various Zelda games...in fact, any well made game will require you to innovate and adapt in order to progress through its levels.)."
Absolutely.
And additionally: Abstract thought that arises from complex strategic thinking. I expect that all people here who have had a serious Civilization or Alpha Centauri addiction can attest to this. You stay up all night thinking of complex strategems to catpure or defend a city or to prevent an enemy from building a certain crucial structure. There are so many variables to coordinate and dimensions to consider that it makes the brain all the more powerful.
I expect that this helps a lot in anything where creative abstraction is required: Programming, higher mathematics, design work... the list goes on.
And that's only one dimension of it all. Raise your hand if Civilization made you become interested in history or archeology. [raises hand]
"Because unlike Microsoft, Apple truely does have a monopoly. They have total control over the hardware and the operating system, whereas MS makes an OS that runs on many flavors of hardware."
I agree with this. Apple acts like Microsoft only wishes it could. But I still own an iBook because Apple's products are decent and well thought out, even if they are monopolistic.
"(BTW, the DV500 is crap, like anything Pinnacle has ever made)"
This is very correct. In the 'enthusiast' arena, if you want bad quality, unreliable video capture, get a Dazzle or Pinnacle product. If you want solid, reliable video capture then get a Canopus or Matrox product.
"I guess when you are used to being the only bully on the block, and have thus come to enjoy forcing people to pay your extremely high prices (since there isn't anywhere else to go), then you would react in such a non-sensical way to sudden competition. First post?"
I don't follow your logic.
Competition on Mac: Final Cut Pro
Competition on PC: AVID, Vegas Video
There's MORE competition on the PC Platform for premiere than there is on the Mac Platform.
"With all the media hype about wireless, a growing number of people are simply buying an access point and a couple of NICs, flicking through the manual, and then running default configurations, because the average user probably isn't aware that what they are doing *is* insecure, and has never heard of WEP."
Ironically, the only access points I have seen that come with WEP enabled out-of-the-box are the Microsoft models;-)
"I always get disoriented when I fire up IE instead of Moz, because IE adds all those stupid click sounds when you click on links."
Same here, except my disorientation from IE comes from the fact that I run mozilla at work with an IE skin (go to themes.mozdev.org to get it) so that I don't raise the eyebrows of all the people walking by. When I actually use IE on some other machine, I try to open a new tab and then wonder 'wtf?' and after that I remember that I'm using real IE. Since my work PC does not have speakers, I don't worry about any of the windows sound effects.
"I've never really truly recovered. It's amazing how you largely don't notice the sound effects when you trigger them yourself. It's similarly amazing how maddening they can be when the guy next to you keeps triggering "Beep... snap... gloop... clink! Tronggggg... gloop.... shshshshshshshsh... Bleep!""
Absolutely... this is why, whenver I set up a new laptop for someone at my company, I always disable all sound effects. The user's never gonna notice, but I have been sleeping on the train and gotten woken up by someone's stupid 'windows starting up' chimes far too many times.
"Or a seagate.:D
Course they're fine these days, but several years back it was like setting off a chainsaw inside your machine."
They're better than 'fine' these days;-) I doubt you're going to find a 7200 RPM drive that runs more quietly than a Seagate Barracuda IV. Well except for the Barracuda V.
"Finally, a good high-tech solution would not be to cancel the noise, but to create quiet components."
Exactly. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I have implemented this by tossing away the AMD athlon factory heatsink with is relatively noisy and replacing it with an Alpha PAL 8045 which is one of the best heatsinks out there. (The Thermalright SLK-800 comes to mind as well.) Use Artic Silver 3 or Ceramique thermal compound and then put a big ol' 80 mm silent fan on top (Panaflo Low or Vantec Stealth 80 mm) and presto! Much of the case noise is gone and still with decent CPU temps.
Don't replace your PSU's fan with a low noise one though because PSUs were specifically designed to work with the fans they came with. Instead, you could get a silent PSU. I am seriously looking a Nexus NX-3000 silent PSU as well as one of the Zalman ones. (FYI: Zalman is a Korean company that specialises in low-noise components. You can get silent GeForce4 coolers from them.)
For hard drives, look into Seagate's Barracuda IV (IDE) and V (ASTA) series - they are the quietest 'modern high-end consumer' drives on the market right now.
With this setup, you can actually avoid generating the noise in the first place. That way, noise dampening material will not be necessary.
Anyway, if you're in Canada and you're looking to get some of this gear, check out QuietPC (which also has US, British, Kiwi and Irish dealers) as well as Bigfoot Computers. I am a satsified customer of both of these dealers.
"Well, you can run into trouble if you try to scan this [krotus.com] zip file.
I forget the exact stats, but it decompresses out about 7 levels deep, 16 files per level, and 4gig files at the last level. So, that's a lot of unzipping your virusscanner would be doing."
If you're on a network where someone (other than you) gets an alert if your virus scanner detects something, *do not* download that file because it is identified as a 'zipcrash' trojan.
"It's pretty safe running unknown Java Applets in our browsers these days, barring the occasional VM bug. Why can't we run random executables without worrying that they'll delete everything/spam/etc."
Because Java stuff runs in a sandbox. If you are logged in as Administrator and run a java applet in your browser, it can only wreak havoc if you give it permission or it exploits a bug that you forgot to patch.
If you run a random.exe file as Administrator, it doesn't need permission from you to hose the machine.
"Given that most users love to download crap via hotmail etc. , lets hope you have a virus scanner on their PC too."
That is true. At one company I worked (with several thousand employees) there was an virus outbreak every one or two weeks on the corporate network.
This reduced to once or twice per year after they blocked off hotmail, yahoo mail, lycos mail, ICQ, AIM, etc. And really, if you are smary enough to get around this an use a small webmail provider then you're smart enough to not download a virus as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have been kind of annoyed if this was modded as funny. (Well it was.) But it irks me even more that it was modded as redundant ;-)
Now I get it. Thanks.
What did I spell incorrectly? Or is this a joke that I am not getting?
OMG. Great Jebus. I am completely freaking out here. I mean my brain is totally wholly spinning out of control.
You made a reality show reference and I actually recognised it and can relate to it because I saw the show last night.
DAMN YOU TELEVISION!!!!!!! I can actually the urge to drink Bud Lite! The stupid afro macott guy is calling to me! DAMN YOUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!
The sad thing is that he probably would have gotten along fine with a $600 machine from the mom and pop shop. A duron on a motherboard with integrated sound and LAN is good enough for most.
The difference is that in medicine, engineering and finance, you still have to deal with computers all the time and this it is important to understand something about them, but the reverse is NOT true.
Therefore it's quite distressing that most people don't know basic computer terminology but not distressing that the computer literate don't know advanced medical or skateboarding terminology.
I'm currently a PC Tech at a financial company and in passing I overheard some words between investors having a meeting. I was not distressed that I had to look up what an underwriter is.
When I started reading slashdot some years ago after 'graduating' from C|Net, I had to look quite a few things up before I understood the conversations. People kept talking about something called Mozilla which I eventually realised was a web browser ;-) (This was back in the Milestone 0.7 days.) I eventually realised that an OS and the GUI were separate things and Linux wasn't simply that desktop I saw when I booted Corel Linux one time. And at that point, I could already take a computer apart, put it together again, set up networks and such.
Now here is an exercise for you: Load up the slashdot homepage in another browser tab. Now go over the homepage word by word. Would your mother understand each of these words? Or your boss? What percentage of sentences would your mother not understand?
Sometimes I forget that it takes an immense amount of time and reading each week even for people like you and me to keep up with everything on this front. The general public ... well ... it doesn't have a chance.
Honestly, I am more appalled at the number of kids that *can* pronounce the 'word' ROFLAMO.
But seriously, I hear you. I am from the generation that was just on the leading edge of the 'net -- When I was in highschool, ICQ was still in the 5 million user range and the occasional person still asking 'what's the internet' or 'what's K2Y?' So I really see a difference in the kids that are 4 years younger than me. They don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" or even worse, "are" and "our' because they just type "ur" or "r".
It is sickening. But at least it makes it easier for me to apply to jobs. I have looked at the things on some of the coverletters coming out of university printers and frankly, it's scary. I am so thankful that I learned grammar from my mom who learned it correctly in the British system than from the broken Ontario school system that doesn't even teach you want a pronoun is anymore.
That's because clans have macros for all these things. And they just have to see the line out of the corner of their eye to know which text macro the other person sent.
What really surprises me is the macros they have. There's one I'll always remember from the classic Quake1 mod Team Fortress: "Enemy HWGuy at the bottom of our spiral!" (If you played the infamous 2fort4 map you know what I'm talking about. HWGuy = Heavy Weapons guy, one of the character classes. And if you were ever frustrated in TF by an annoyingly good spy, that may have been me ;-)
Would you want your kids to make gunpower? Probably not.
Would you want your kids to become interested in learning about chemistry? Yes.
If they start talking about methods of how to make gunpower, then get them a chemistry set for their birthday. It's a lot safer than gunpower and they will probably learn something too.
Absolutely.
And additionally: Abstract thought that arises from complex strategic thinking. I expect that all people here who have had a serious Civilization or Alpha Centauri addiction can attest to this. You stay up all night thinking of complex strategems to catpure or defend a city or to prevent an enemy from building a certain crucial structure. There are so many variables to coordinate and dimensions to consider that it makes the brain all the more powerful.
I expect that this helps a lot in anything where creative abstraction is required: Programming, higher mathematics, design work ... the list goes on.
And that's only one dimension of it all. Raise your hand if Civilization made you become interested in history or archeology. [raises hand]
I agree with this. Apple acts like Microsoft only wishes it could. But I still own an iBook because Apple's products are decent and well thought out, even if they are monopolistic.
This is very correct. In the 'enthusiast' arena, if you want bad quality, unreliable video capture, get a Dazzle or Pinnacle product. If you want solid, reliable video capture then get a Canopus or Matrox product.
I don't follow your logic.
Competition on Mac: Final Cut Pro
Competition on PC: AVID, Vegas Video
There's MORE competition on the PC Platform for premiere than there is on the Mac Platform.
I've seen similar sponsored links on slashdot before. This isn't the first time.
But I don't know Ursus or whether or not this person is up to anything her. It's not like he's family or anything ;-)
This line gave me a good chuckle. I expect that most people did not even notice the grammatical error in a sentence talking about low error densities.
Note: The rules for its/it's are not covered in Bob's Quick Guide To The Apostrophe, You Idiots since the Guide covers nouns and 'it' is a pronoun.
Ironically, the only access points I have seen that come with WEP enabled out-of-the-box are the Microsoft models ;-)
Same here, except my disorientation from IE comes from the fact that I run mozilla at work with an IE skin (go to themes.mozdev.org to get it) so that I don't raise the eyebrows of all the people walking by. When I actually use IE on some other machine, I try to open a new tab and then wonder 'wtf?' and after that I remember that I'm using real IE. Since my work PC does not have speakers, I don't worry about any of the windows sound effects.
Absolutely ... this is why, whenver I set up a new laptop for someone at my company, I always disable all sound effects. The user's never gonna notice, but I have been sleeping on the train and gotten woken up by someone's stupid 'windows starting up' chimes far too many times.
They're better than 'fine' these days ;-) I doubt you're going to find a 7200 RPM drive that runs more quietly than a Seagate Barracuda IV. Well except for the Barracuda V.
(Note: Only lamers will respond to this making some stupid joke about 'lubricants.')
Exactly. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
I have implemented this by tossing away the AMD athlon factory heatsink with is relatively noisy and replacing it with an Alpha PAL 8045 which is one of the best heatsinks out there. (The Thermalright SLK-800 comes to mind as well.) Use Artic Silver 3 or Ceramique thermal compound and then put a big ol' 80 mm silent fan on top (Panaflo Low or Vantec Stealth 80 mm) and presto! Much of the case noise is gone and still with decent CPU temps.
Don't replace your PSU's fan with a low noise one though because PSUs were specifically designed to work with the fans they came with. Instead, you could get a silent PSU. I am seriously looking a Nexus NX-3000 silent PSU as well as one of the Zalman ones. (FYI: Zalman is a Korean company that specialises in low-noise components. You can get silent GeForce4 coolers from them.)
For hard drives, look into Seagate's Barracuda IV (IDE) and V (ASTA) series - they are the quietest 'modern high-end consumer' drives on the market right now.
With this setup, you can actually avoid generating the noise in the first place. That way, noise dampening material will not be necessary.
Anyway, if you're in Canada and you're looking to get some of this gear, check out QuietPC (which also has US, British, Kiwi and Irish dealers) as well as Bigfoot Computers. I am a satsified customer of both of these dealers.
If you're on a network where someone (other than you) gets an alert if your virus scanner detects something, *do not* download that file because it is identified as a 'zipcrash' trojan.
Because Java stuff runs in a sandbox. If you are logged in as Administrator and run a java applet in your browser, it can only wreak havoc if you give it permission or it exploits a bug that you forgot to patch.
If you run a random .exe file as Administrator, it doesn't need permission from you to hose the machine.
That is true. At one company I worked (with several thousand employees) there was an virus outbreak every one or two weeks on the corporate network.
This reduced to once or twice per year after they blocked off hotmail, yahoo mail, lycos mail, ICQ, AIM, etc. And really, if you are smary enough to get around this an use a small webmail provider then you're smart enough to not download a virus as well.