Remember we had a/. discussion on this awhile back? I got a good theory behind the why (and I think it's a medical fact too)
Basically it goes like this.. The chances for a child being born with autism increases with the age of the parents. Silicon valley, being such an expensive place to live, forces responsible parents to wait until they are a bit older and settled before they have children..
I wish I had some sort of online study I could show you to back up my claim, but I just have my own observations..
My grandparents had their kids in their teens, my parents had us in their early 20's and wife and I are pushing 30, still no kids yet. We have a ton of friends in the same boat as us, struggling to get into a house and settled before having kids.
Half the problem is the politicians allowing the land grabs to go on.. I'd explain it to you but I just don't feel like it. I'll just say that the politicians have made it very hard for farmers to survive here in silicon valley and leave it at that.
I've pointed out the population explosion in the bay area many times, every time I bring that point up I get modded into oblivion... But fuck it, I got karma to burn...
First let me explain why I'm an expert on this. My family has lived in san jose since 1901, we started out here as immigrant sicilian ranchers, and over the years went from being just the fruitpickers to owning a lot of east side san jose, and now we own strip malls (w00t) I hang out on slash because during the boom, I was quite the sysadmin, and came to know this place.
Back to the subject of enviromental disasters...
My great grandfather, grandfather, heck even my uncles could go to any stream in the bay area and fish without worries of toxic fish with 3 eyes. Before milpitas became a great big office complex they would take their shotguns out to the duck blinds and get duck.
These days though, there isn't shit left. Guadelupe river has a big sign "DONT EAT THESE FISH POISONOUS" all along it's banks. They say it's because of the "quicksilver" (read mercury) mines that were prevalent in the almaden valley area, but those existed WAY before IBM, which sits along the coyote creek which is a feeder into the Guadelupe.
What does this have to do with recycling computer stuff? Well let me tell you....
Since i've pretty much been jobless the last 2 years, i've gone back to my second love of bicycle riding. Riding a bike is a lot differerent than driving a car because if you want to stop to look at something.. No big deal. Hit the breaks and stop for a minute..
Last week I was riding along almaden expressway when I saw an AT style case laying in the creekbed (Almaden expressway runs along the guadelupe) I parked my bike, walked over and decided to take a look.
It looked like an old pentium class PC, I whipped out my swiss army knife's phillips attatchment to see what was under the hood..
Well, there was definetly a p133 in there. Nice of socket7 to make it easy to pocket this little treasure. Ram turned out to be 4 16bit EDO ram modules totaling 64 megs.
Hard drive had enough oxidation where I didn't want it, same went for the floppy....
But the point i'm trying to make is here in SV people have been dumping this type of semi usefull electronic shit for years in our creeks, and the combination of population explosion with enviromental hazzards has really fucked up the ecology of SV.
Now moderators, (and rob, cause i know you mod my shit once in a while) please.. This is the god honest truth i'm telling here, any negative mods would be an injustice to the truth (isn't that what good journalism is about anyways?)
Compare San Jose ecological system with a close sister city like portland. Portland OR. has just as many bright talented people as SJ/SV (think M$) The health of their river and stream systems just blows doors over anything we have because they took the time to think ahead (should we whore ourselves out for business or should we keep quality of life in mind)
Here in SJ, people are basically dumping their systems in the creeks and steams. Maybe i'm just being a bit optimistic here, but since so many of us geeks are outta work right now shouldn't we do something about it??? Seriously folks, go download some "router centric" version of *nix, turn those old POS 133's into broadband routers for those not in know. WTF I can find any ISA 3com NIC at a surplus store for less than a dollar.
I love what I used to do, I loved edumucating people on just how they can get the most out of their pc's. In this day and age of firewire capture and such, we need to let people know that their old 486-pentium 200mhz still got some life left in them in the form of hella phat broadband routers that will not only protect them from the evil assholes of the internet, but will log it too (Soooooo much better than my old linksys router)
You know... this is our scene.. And despite GWB being a total cocksucking dickhead to technology (yeah i hear you GWB, u n daddy want oil) we put our faith, our geeky little belief in thing like fuel cells, organic LED's and the like because ultimately we know it's better.
I can't really comment much on the havoc IBM and other companies have wreaked havoc on our ecology, but I know what we gotta do to stretch out the "usefullness" of what we got. And folks, there are two ways you can fucking approach it..
A. educate people.. B. stick your head up your ass.
So my advice to all of you is, if you want to prevent this sort of crap from continueing, DO IT FOR FREE!!! seriously, I consider myself an out of work techno hippie. Set up that killer BSD server with no backdo0rz fo free. Fuck it, aint no shame in promotin yo name. Trust me folks, all the no-geek people out there will love it when you show them how they can use their sprintlink wirelesss dsl to link to an 20 gig archive of data being served over a wireless link. Just don't whine about it, do something!@!!!!!
Well, i hope I've inspired folks to do something instead of whining about it. Sorry u all but im on my second glass of wine and aint coming down. (still can type:) geek cominucae continues) Since we're the teachers its up to us to show the y to the (quote"l4m3rz"unquote) the path to rightiousnuss.
Becoming an enviromentall activist on this subject requies more than post on/...... it requires some action.
Any win9x and ME is complete shit just like it's 95 predecessor. Everything in the 9x series is built on top of dos.
And why is this bad???
1. 9x versions of windows are a 32 bit OS talking to a 16 bit OS, this is called "thunking" i believe. So despite there being 32 bit IDE drivers, they still basically have to go through dos. You lose some efficiency here.
2. Any program has direct access to your hardware because memory space isn't run in it's own protected enviroment. This means any program can potentially screw you over by lets say.. taking over the memory space used for your IDE drive. Nothing shittier than a 9x BSOD while you're in the middle of doing something important (like lets say that term paper)
XP, 2k, and NT4 are completely different. The core of the OS is 32 bit. Everything is run in protected memory space. A program crashing into another programs memory space doesn't take down the entire system. On top of the stability it adds there are policies you can set to prevent the user from doing some really nasty damage to their machine.
Now granted, once you get past NT4 the space requirements for the OS goes up signifigantly, but unless you're running on 1 gig hard drives (in which case you should get a new one anyways) it isn't really an issue. Heck a gnome desktop install of redhat 8 takes more space than XP does.
Thing is, everything evolves. The fact that XP takes up 1/2 a gig for a default install isn't really a sign of how bloated things have become, it's just a sign of how things have evolved. Sure you can install 98 on 300 megs of space or less, but then you would be using an OS outdated by at least 4 years.
So my advice to you is give it a try. I gave up on the 9x series the day NT4 came out and never looked back.
How dare you! The first web page I ever made was "crap"
But I went to the wayback machine and checked it out. It was cool to see how far along i've come in my web design skills. Now I can show my friends the very first web site I ever made, and crap or not, it's there on the wayback machine and brings with it a lot of nostalgia. That's just the way sentimental crap goes, no matter how ugly or whatever, just the fact that you can go back and look at it makes it "cool"
There are dictation services availiable on the net, basically you e-mail them an MP3 and they e-mail back a fully typed document.
As far as the reason for voice recognition not being on a PDA, I think it's space requirements. Of the two packages i've tried (dragon dictate and IBM) both of them require a lot of disk space to contain the recognition engine and your personal voice pattern files. Much more than your average PDA can hold. We're probably only a few years off from PDA's having that type of storage.
I'm just going to post a follow up to this, I see there's a lot of confusion because it's not the whole story...
The CEO had moved the company 50 miles from its original location, anyone in the bay area knows that a 50 mile commute anywhere is a nightmare. This was all so he could afford to pay for the exec's accomidations and the girl he wanted to have a liason with.
Now this girl never filed a suit, I was told this to "manipulate" me into doing my task with, uhh, I dunno fortitude? When you're the guy at everyones desk once a day you get to know them pretty good.
Unless you're a complete social retard, you can tell when someone has the hots for someone else. I could tell our CEO had the hots for this girl PLUS the fact he had tried to manipulate me made me question what was going on.
I was caught in a moral dilema. Should I really find out whats going on?
Well I did.. And sorry to anyone that hates me for it but I think I did what was right.
There's a lot more to it than that too. Did I mention the CTO that got a kick out of publically humiliating a female PHD simply because she was hired on to critique his work? He also enjoyed torturing me too. He seperated the workplace into a bunch of "cliques" and would order the people in his clique to give other people a hard time.
He would consistantly make demands that I purchased equipment worth 1000's of dollars on my credit card. I tried explaining to him about setting up a line of credit and giving me purchasing power, but he refused every attempt I made at this for he feared "losing his control"
Even after this guy being such a dickhead to me, I never heald it against him honest. The CEO asked me to destroy his 10 years of source code on a sun server, and I didn't touch it. IMHO both the CTO and the CEO were psychotic loonies that were so wrapped up in their "vision" they never took the time to see how their "visions" would fit together. It was an unfortunate thing these two didn't get along.
Back to my "tips/reimbursements"
Honestly, after the shit I took from them, too fucking bad if you don't think I should have gotten something. I know for a fact most of the other developers walked out of there with a load of G3's, sun E250's, cables, palm pilots, you name it. During my employment at this dot bomb I know I lost a lot of money along the way. Those of you that have never worked at a dot bomb (And I have the feeling a lot of you have) know of the kind of bullshit management that ran these places.
Honestly though, there was a silver lining to this cloud. I can only think of maybe 10 of the 50 people that worked there that I didn't like. There was 3 people that were totally cool on the exec team (CFO, COO, and the replacement CTO) and the rest of the team was pretty cool too. There were people from all walks of life there.
Yeah you're right, an i'll be the first to admit it...
The ceo of one of the dot bombs I worked for had been acting funny for weeks. He started asking me to make availiable the inbox of a paticular secratary he had the hots for, citing she was bringin up a sexual harrassment lawsuit.
Well, on my own initiave I got into the company quickbooks and found out they were so deep in the red it hurt. I gave several co-workers the warning of impeding doom.
Before I left, I grabbed a box of cat5, 2 128 meg dimms, a tone and probe kit, and some cat5 crimpers and a celeron 400mhz system.
The day after I left I recieved an e-mail from the girl we had working HR, with a list of items that were "missing" None of the items on her list matched what I had taken. The e-mail stated I either return the "stolen" items or my check would be withheald.
Upon a quick onceover of my letter of offer, I didn't read anywhere where it stated they could do this. I called my lawer and asked him if this was legal, which is wasn't. I forwarded his response to the HR girl and got my check fed ex'd the next day.
I don't mind being accused of stealing something I really stole, but when it's something I didn't touch it really pisses me off.
Well about 2 weeks after I left, the CEO called up our guys in sacramento with some big speech. "Blah blah blah" was most of the speach and it ended when he said "Blah, can't pay you guys would you work for free?" From what I heard they walked outta there with everything that the company owned (leaving the leased dell laptops)
I dunno, just wanted to support your comment I guess bro, I know i've stolen shit before.
1) because it saves time and work in keeping track of windows licenses.
While this may have been true in the pre win2k server days, using group policies you can really keep a handle on both OS and application licenses. Don't want a student installing that warezed copy of photoshop? Make a group policy, Only want the art computers to have photoshop? Make a group policy.
2) because it actually teaches children about computers, rather than just about GUIs and what can be done on them. When all the low-level things are done in the background, its no wonder the average american doesn't know what formatting a hard drive does aside from kill all their data.
So if I use a dos boot disk and type "format c:/s" that isn't teaching me? It doesn't matter if its pc windows linux mac or nextcube black, if a person doesn't know what formatting is and they nuke their hard drive the OS they're using has no relevance to that. Next point..
3) teaches troubleshooting. Using nothing but windows, you'll never realize how much easier it is to use a command line tool for something simple.
From my experience on the corporate lan, %85 of all trouble tickets go to outlook/exchange issues, %10 to network issues, and the other %5 go to hardware issues. So if you took outlook/exchange out of the loop and just dealt with the other %15 your troubleshooting methods would be the same on a windows machine as they are a linux box.
[on the network] Open up a shell/dos prompt. Ping that router, ping that nameserver, do a NSlookup. [hardware] jiggle that card, make sure that ram is seated correctly, make sure cables are plugged in where they supposed to be, smell for smoke
So basically you learn the same either way. The most basic networking tools exist on both platforms.
4) provides compilers and development environments for those who are adept enough to care to use them
You mean GCC? Here you can get it for windows too http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html#windows 5) difficult for learning students to bring down the whole computer from a user-class account
I'll go back to my first point with group policies on that one.
6) it's free, and provides alternatives to almost anything that can be done under windows that they'll need to do in anything but very specific areas (which will catch up with time anyway). I spent a month on RH8, i've got to say, it sucked for a desktop. Sure I love using it for a router and the website im in charge of uses it (check my sig) for a desktop it just plain sucks (didn't we have a discussion on this last week?) Sure there is open source alternatives (Read GIMP) but gimp isn't professional grade yet, it doesn't do CYMK seperations. Kids need to learn whats in the real world, real world desktops use windows.
7) UNIX is time-tested as a style of environment. Windows is controlled by the whims of the market.
So unix is like a stubborn child and windows does what the parents want?
Like I said before, i'm not trying to dis linux/unix in any way, but it's still not ready for primetime. If you wanted to give kids an insight into unix, get a bunch of macs with OSX. Then that way you can give them the best of both worlds.
May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead.
If I was in your situation, it would depend entirely on how I was treated while I was employed there.
They obviously didn't give a crap about your situation when they laid you off. If careers were like dating going back would be like friends with benifits, and i've never seen those situations work out...
You start doing little odd jobs, either you're going to desire working there again or they'll desire to have you back. Once a layoffer, always a layoffer. Don't trust them as far as you can cook em.
Next door to my friends grandparents lived the bo family. Kim Bo was the oldest son, sorta suffered from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and had lived in his parents house well into his 40's.
Nice enough guy, when we were teens he let us put a bunch of carp in his nasty green algea swimming pool. We spent the summer getting high, learning guitar rifts, and fishing for carp in our backyard fishing hole.
Well, eventually, his dad, the glue that was holding it all together died so his brothers and sisters wanted to sell the house and divide up the inheretance. Kim took his 150k share, bought a van, and spent the next 2 years living in his van, driving around playing music and doing odd jobs. It's not like he couldn't have gone and gotten a place, but at 40 this was what he decided to do with his life..
One day he got an e-mail "NIGERIAN OFFICIAL NEEDS HELP IN FUNDS TRANSFERS" or some shit like that. I saw him in person one day and he asked me if it was a scam. From all the stuff on slash I had read I knew it was.. But the promises in the e-mails were just too good for him to pass up.
The scammers had him convert everything to a cashiers check, then had him fly to amsterdam in person to deliver the check. He flew halfway across the world thinking there was going to be some big payoff for helping these people..
3 months later he hasn't seen a dime or heard from the people. He got screwed out of 150k in just one moment of handing over a check..
I know most smart people wouldn't fall for this, their "SCAM ALERT" alarm would go off in their heads. The sad thing is these people prey on people not of sound mind, the elderly, the lonely. To say, "Oh they should have known better" just doesn't fit because the MO of these scammers takes them directly to these types of people.
Kim Bo is doin alright. He had to sell his bass guitar, which he loved dearly and some other music stuff. He's doing odd jobs to keep gas in the van and food in his belly but at his age in his mental condition the outlook isn't going to be so bright in another 10 years.
Before someone suggest he goes to the FBI, well he's done that already, but the FBI told him there's not much they can do. Kinda sucks we got them goin on these wild Osama Bin Laden goose chases because the frequency of these scams seem to be increasing.
I hope the FTC nails these fuckers to the wall. Hopefully they'll be in the same cell as nasty nate and really get what they deserve:)
Well, I talk to my grandma all the time, Like I said, these opinions came from the older men in my family, I.E. my great grandfathers sons.
Mom, Dad, fuck em... Same goes for the rest of the idiots in my family. I'm happy I got a wife, and my grandma makes up for all the lack of parents I ever had.
Most modern Fighter jets use ramdrives exclusively because the high-G manuvers, shaking, ect would cause a normal drives heads to go smashing into the platters. I know the B2-stealth has some, so does the F-16.
When you're the goverment, and you want reliable killing machines, 250k for a 250meg ram drive back in 1987 isn't even an afterthought. It's a requirement. Now that it's dirt cheap to produce memory, it can finally trickle down in price enough to have become feasable for a civilian to afford one.
I know originally the early drives were used to hold map data for the HUD, which was basically just the data gained from our digital elevation modeling sattelites launched in the 80's. Given the advances in 3d modeling and sattelite map aquisition, I would guess whatever system they're using today probably contains terrabytes of map data.
I'm sure the old green vector graphic huds have been replaced with something a lot better to utilize the new data too. I'd suspect that in the actual control area there must be a LCD display, much like what you see on a modern 737.
It must be one helluva video game for them pilots:)
"Dammit toqer, look at all those nips driving up the road, they're going to take over!" my uncle vince said to me one day as we stood outside the family fruit stand.
"You know, I hear they eat cats and dogs!"
This is but a small sample of what I heard from the men in my family. Every derogetory racial slur you could imagine. Funny thing is, despite only being 4th gen american, the older men in the family were always trying to get people to drop the idea that we were "dago wop Guinni Italians" for the cowboy white bread image they were trying to portray..
It would have worked too, if my parents wouldnt have been such fuckups.
Around 12 or so, the problems with my parents escalated to the point where I had to spend as little time as possible around them. The other white kids didn't really want to hang out with the kid from a broken family (divorced)
My first mexican friend manny and his family helped me get through a lot of stuff, even though they lived in an apartment, and dad was dead, his mom was so supportive of letting him be who he wanted, something my parents never even considered.
My second education into non-white culture was with my surrogate japanese family. When my mom kicked me out at 16, my japanese friends and their family would let me take showers at their house, feed me, give me clean clothes to wear. I gained culinary insight with sushi, and learned eating raw fish with a sake bomb could be quite tasty..
Doesn't really have a lot to do with the article does it? I read the topic was on EU adopting anti hate laws for the web, well ok here's my insight into the article.
I think everyone has a right to their opinion, no matter how wrong it is. Despite all the bad opinions I learned early on, later in life I learned the truth about people for myself. I don't need parliment acting as the thought police for me.
It's human nature to question everything.. No matter how a person is brought up, eventually they'll find their own truth.
Yeah tech happens, but look at the side effects...
You used to be able to catch edible fish out of any creek in san jose 20 years ago (note this is with agruculture pesticide residue being released into the water too) Now you would be hard pressed to find ANY body of fresh/running water in San Jose that doesn't have dangerous amounts of lead, mercury, PCB's and whatever other nasty toxins you can through in there. Guadalupe River carries large signs along its banks "WARNING MERCURY IN FISH"
Where did all these toxins come from? Well the ground used to soak and filter most of it, but with the city now populated to damn near a million people, it comes from anywhere.
What about the cost of living? How many people had to move out of san jose and back east when the.com imploded? Gee I thought technology was supposed to miniaturize things and make them cheaper, mass production and all that shit.
Did you know that most people living in San Jose are on average a 3 income household now? It's either.. A couple, and a roomate. 3 girls 3 guys
Why should it take 4/5'ths of anyones paycheck just to cover 1/3 of the rent? I don't call that progress.
Yeah great, grand, wonderful fucking technology. I can play counterstrike at 100fps woohoo. Where's my flying cars and teleporters. Food Generators? I thought poverty was supposed to be a thing of the past. It's all a pipe dream of bullshit to make us work harder for this imaginary goal of "techtopia"
Here bill gates makes a trolling remark and I respond to it, take the time to SHOW YOU STUPID FUCKING MODERATORS THAT IM A FARMER FROM SILICON VALLEY and you dumbasses just mod me down as a troll.
Dumbasses..
If Bill gates is behind the city politics that forced my family out of business, he's an asshole plain and simple as that. I should have gotten a damn insightful +1 moderation for my parent post but instead we have twits moderating today.
Bill Gates admitted that in many cases building Internet in the rural area just speeded up the exodus
You mean like my hometown San Jose?
Admittedly, I love technology, I love the richness of information it brings into my life. Yet, seeing all of my families orchards being sold off one by one because of city land grabs has been sad to say the least.
I grew up on a family orchard in the evergreen area of san jose. I remember summer days napping on the stumps of the eucaliptus trees my uncle had cut down..
40, hell even 20 years ago the quality of life in Silicon valley was very different. Housing was more affordable, freeways less congested, about the only bad thing was we were known as the capitol of PCP here in san jose.
Now when I go up on Mount Hamilton, and look down at the city, it's a very different view than what I saw even 10 years ago, my families ranches all replaced with housing, and now there's this constant brown smog layer that comes and goes, but I fear eventually it will stay.
Bill, from one nerd beat up in school to another, please don't make insensitive comments like that. Sure the 799,999 people that have moved here in the last 20 years may agree with you, but watching cookie cutter sheet housing pop up because the city wants more housing for the "tech sector" is just plain wrong.
Here's a little history lesson for those of you going to evergreen valley college and are wonderin why the family tore up the ranch..
About 10 years ago the city of SJ got a stick up it's butt about flood control. Our property is ajecent to a canal that feeds thompsons creek. The first year they took a big chunk out of our property for a "flood control" project. Then for the next 10 they kept moving the fence 6 inches over. By the time they were finished we had lost a good 15-20 acres for the city's "flood control project"
It wasn't just that either, we used to pump water from the creek for irrigation, about 15 years ago Santa Clara county made the practice illeagle, meaning we had to get our water from the city, which made our costs go up.
Sorry mods if you read this as a flame, but Bill saying "Oh we can stomp out the farmers and they'll find other work" is a load of fucking crap.
Bill, I learned your OS and supported it for 7 years. Now i'm out of a job. The demand for MSCE is null right now. Fuck you go to hell.
Re:After my last month with RH8 M$ has no worries
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Then why all the hoopla about what a wonderfully redesigned UI redhat has with its bastardized version of gnome?
Redhat has done nothing but make claims about how great it was going to be, ect but it wasn't.
While you're at work, go into the supply cabinet, see the big black marker with "Sharpie" written on it? Ok grab that, put it in your pocket and take it home to your music collection.
Now after a beer/bongrip/blowjob or whatever it is you do when you get home break out your brand new Sharpie A.k.a. 37337 0-day cr4ckz and pick the first BMI music CD out of your collection that has copy protection.
Now apply your 0-day sharpie cr4ckz to the outer rim of the CD. Story was run on slash a few months ago, surprised no one else mentioned it.
Re:After my last month with RH8 M$ has no worries
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Uhhm, That's sorta what I said... Here, 1 sentance summary of my complaint.
When I read a howto do something in linux, it should never be linked to a page that returns a 404.
Try searching google for the VCD howto and see what I mean.
RH8 still gets props for having a nice GUI, it's really polished and easy on the eyes. I could find almost no distinction between it and XP.
After my last month with RH8 M$ has no worries
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I run all my webservers on linux/php/mysql, but occassionally I get an itch to be different on my desktop, last time it was when XP released SP1 and I was so frustrated at M$ trying to keep me from pirating their software I thought i'd try and say "Fuck em!"
So I downloaded the new redhat Iso's when they came out, burned them, and wiped my system for redhat. To summarize that last month, let me just say I think having my balls cinched in a vice may be more pleasurable than trying to be productive with linux as a desktop.
Now my system is not some weak POS. It's a p4 with ultra 160, so it's very nice. The first thing I had to do was install the drivers for my nvidia card, oops that don't work, docs don't say anything, read the nvnews forums, oh ok gotta
rpmbuild --rebuild NVIDIA*.src.rpm
Ok it works.
Then it was onto my CDBurner. Again, not crappy hardware, brand spankin new Plextor dvd/cdr. ide-scsi emulator? WTF is that? Ok, I read some more, I know what it is, ok great, it's working.
Repeat process for my bt878 card and firewire.
So at this point, I pretty much had my hardware working as best it could under linux. I started setting out to get some applications going under linux. I needed some audio editing, video editing I started poking around and found some stuff that looks sweet.
tar xfzv reallysweetproggy.tar.gz./configure **Exit error 2** you need to install some library.so
So i'd dig around, find the library, then find out that library wanted this library and ect and so on. Some of the stuff i'd click on the page to download it and the page would be gone, making the software I wanted to try useless.
I thought it would be cool to burn some homemmade karaoke VCD's. Previously I had used a screencapture to avi program in windows coupled with powerpoint, or a karaoke plugin with winamp and AVS.
Well, open offices impress sucked dog balls compared to powerpoint, and when it came time to burn a VCD again, the howto was linked to dependancies that returned a 404 instead of what I needed.
So with the help of a friend I gave up on linux on the desktop. Yeah it runs nice, but not nowhere near as good as how windows runs. I can tell a big difference in how UT2003 runs under XP compared to linux, and sorry but the penguin is slow here too.
I hope linux gets over these problems on the desktop, it would be cool if it actually were an freely availiable OS for download, but linux just isn't that right now.
And if you don't believe I use linux, click the link on my sig. All PHP/postnuke/MySQL goodness runnin on linux, not my desktop. For now that's how it has to be.
There's not a whole lotta difference between "mobile" and desktop processors other than packaging.
Desktop CPU's use PGA's that were designed for socketed use. The extra 4 millimeters from the pins sticking out is worth it because it means the CPU can be swapped in and out. Flexibility is the goal here.
Mobile processors usually come in a BGA package because they're soldered directly to the motherboard via wave solder, or UV cured solder. Since they don't have that extra 4 millimeters of pins sticking out the bottom, their profile is smaller than that of a desktop processor.
Right now though, it seems a lot of manufacturers are at least trying to make the newer laptops as flexible as a desktop by offering expansion busses to replace the laptops video card, processor, ram ect.
Remember 7 or 8 years ago when you wanted to get laptop memory? Everytime you wanted to upgrade you would have to order a custom stick because the manufacturers were all doing their own thing. Back then they thought they had to keep every vertical market on their laptop to themselves. There were a few exceptions to this rule (chembook was one of the first to start using standard desktop parts in their laptops)
I don't think it's a bad thing either... Sorta lets you get more life outta your laptop.
Thresh won carmacks ferrarri years ago. A fully decked out ferrari is worth more than you or I make in a year combined.
I played with him at the first major lan event called fragfest, held by dennis racine and dave allision, this was like years and years ago. Check out http://fragfest.com for more info. I played him there, and also on the only doom online service at the time, called dwango (acronym for doom wide area network gaming online or something like that. Thresh was also buds with Usurper, who did the whole spaceorb sponsership scene (fuck u spaceorb) and slayer, we got free time on his dwango, which was based out of santa clara I think.
Anyways, go to any gamehouse, there's cash prizes and tournaments all the time. It's sad that you're one of those people who see video games as "just for fun" when the skill it takes to play some of them can be so competitive leagues, ladders and matches need to be created to see who's best.
Yeah dude, and you're trying to insinuate that i'm delusional. Why don't you roll a fat blunt and chill homie. Sheeit.
Slashdot Mirror
On the subject of bay area autism...
/. discussion on this awhile back? I got a good theory behind the why (and I think it's a medical fact too)
Remember we had a
Basically it goes like this.. The chances for a child being born with autism increases with the age of the parents. Silicon valley, being such an expensive place to live, forces responsible parents to wait until they are a bit older and settled before they have children..
I wish I had some sort of online study I could show you to back up my claim, but I just have my own observations..
My grandparents had their kids in their teens, my parents had us in their early 20's and wife and I are pushing 30, still no kids yet. We have a ton of friends in the same boat as us, struggling to get into a house and settled before having kids.
Oh fuck off you asshole....
Half the problem is the politicians allowing the land grabs to go on.. I'd explain it to you but I just don't feel like it. I'll just say that the politicians have made it very hard for farmers to survive here in silicon valley and leave it at that.
I've pointed out the population explosion in the bay area many times, every time I bring that point up I get modded into oblivion... But fuck it, I got karma to burn...
:) geek cominucae continues) Since we're the teachers its up to us to show the y to the (quote"l4m3rz"unquote) the path to rightiousnuss.
/. ..... it requires some action.
First let me explain why I'm an expert on this. My family has lived in san jose since 1901, we started out here as immigrant sicilian ranchers, and over the years went from being just the fruitpickers to owning a lot of east side san jose, and now we own strip malls (w00t) I hang out on slash because during the boom, I was quite the sysadmin, and came to know this place.
Back to the subject of enviromental disasters...
My great grandfather, grandfather, heck even my uncles could go to any stream in the bay area and fish without worries of toxic fish with 3 eyes. Before milpitas became a great big office complex they would take their shotguns out to the duck blinds and get duck.
These days though, there isn't shit left. Guadelupe river has a big sign "DONT EAT THESE FISH POISONOUS" all along it's banks. They say it's because of the "quicksilver" (read mercury) mines that were prevalent in the almaden valley area, but those existed WAY before IBM, which sits along the coyote creek which is a feeder into the Guadelupe.
What does this have to do with recycling computer stuff? Well let me tell you....
Since i've pretty much been jobless the last 2 years, i've gone back to my second love of bicycle riding. Riding a bike is a lot differerent than driving a car because if you want to stop to look at something.. No big deal. Hit the breaks and stop for a minute..
Last week I was riding along almaden expressway when I saw an AT style case laying in the creekbed (Almaden expressway runs along the guadelupe) I parked my bike, walked over and decided to take a look.
It looked like an old pentium class PC, I whipped out my swiss army knife's phillips attatchment to see what was under the hood..
Well, there was definetly a p133 in there. Nice of socket7 to make it easy to pocket this little treasure. Ram turned out to be 4 16bit EDO ram modules totaling 64 megs.
Hard drive had enough oxidation where I didn't want it, same went for the floppy....
But the point i'm trying to make is here in SV people have been dumping this type of semi usefull electronic shit for years in our creeks, and the combination of population explosion with enviromental hazzards has really fucked up the ecology of SV.
Now moderators, (and rob, cause i know you mod my shit once in a while) please.. This is the god honest truth i'm telling here, any negative mods would be an injustice to the truth (isn't that what good journalism is about anyways?)
Compare San Jose ecological system with a close sister city like portland. Portland OR. has just as many bright talented people as SJ/SV (think M$) The health of their river and stream systems just blows doors over anything we have because they took the time to think ahead (should we whore ourselves out for business or should we keep quality of life in mind)
Here in SJ, people are basically dumping their systems in the creeks and steams. Maybe i'm just being a bit optimistic here, but since so many of us geeks are outta work right now shouldn't we do something about it??? Seriously folks, go download some "router centric" version of *nix, turn those old POS 133's into broadband routers for those not in know. WTF I can find any ISA 3com NIC at a surplus store for less than a dollar.
I love what I used to do, I loved edumucating people on just how they can get the most out of their pc's. In this day and age of firewire capture and such, we need to let people know that their old 486-pentium 200mhz still got some life left in them in the form of hella phat broadband routers that will not only protect them from the evil assholes of the internet, but will log it too (Soooooo much better than my old linksys router)
You know... this is our scene.. And despite GWB being a total cocksucking dickhead to technology (yeah i hear you GWB, u n daddy want oil) we put our faith, our geeky little belief in thing like fuel cells, organic LED's and the like because ultimately we know it's better.
I can't really comment much on the havoc IBM and other companies have wreaked havoc on our ecology, but I know what we gotta do to stretch out the "usefullness" of what we got. And folks, there are two ways you can fucking approach it..
A. educate people..
B. stick your head up your ass.
So my advice to all of you is, if you want to prevent this sort of crap from continueing, DO IT FOR FREE!!! seriously, I consider myself an out of work techno hippie. Set up that killer BSD server with no backdo0rz fo free. Fuck it, aint no shame in promotin yo name. Trust me folks, all the no-geek people out there will love it when you show them how they can use their sprintlink wirelesss dsl to link to an 20 gig archive of data being served over a wireless link. Just don't whine about it, do something!@!!!!!
Well, i hope I've inspired folks to do something instead of whining about it. Sorry u all but im on my second glass of wine and aint coming down. (still can type
Becoming an enviromentall activist on this subject requies more than post on
Yours Truly...
--toq
Not trying to troll you guys but....
Any win9x and ME is complete shit just like it's 95 predecessor. Everything in the 9x series is built on top of dos.
And why is this bad???
1. 9x versions of windows are a 32 bit OS talking to a 16 bit OS, this is called "thunking" i believe. So despite there being 32 bit IDE drivers, they still basically have to go through dos. You lose some efficiency here.
2. Any program has direct access to your hardware because memory space isn't run in it's own protected enviroment. This means any program can potentially screw you over by lets say.. taking over the memory space used for your IDE drive. Nothing shittier than a 9x BSOD while you're in the middle of doing something important (like lets say that term paper)
XP, 2k, and NT4 are completely different. The core of the OS is 32 bit. Everything is run in protected memory space. A program crashing into another programs memory space doesn't take down the entire system. On top of the stability it adds there are policies you can set to prevent the user from doing some really nasty damage to their machine.
Now granted, once you get past NT4 the space requirements for the OS goes up signifigantly, but unless you're running on 1 gig hard drives (in which case you should get a new one anyways) it isn't really an issue. Heck a gnome desktop install of redhat 8 takes more space than XP does.
Thing is, everything evolves. The fact that XP takes up 1/2 a gig for a default install isn't really a sign of how bloated things have become, it's just a sign of how things have evolved. Sure you can install 98 on 300 megs of space or less, but then you would be using an OS outdated by at least 4 years.
So my advice to you is give it a try. I gave up on the 9x series the day NT4 came out and never looked back.
How dare you! The first web page I ever made was "crap"
But I went to the wayback machine and checked it out. It was cool to see how far along i've come in my web design skills. Now I can show my friends the very first web site I ever made, and crap or not, it's there on the wayback machine and brings with it a lot of nostalgia. That's just the way sentimental crap goes, no matter how ugly or whatever, just the fact that you can go back and look at it makes it "cool"
Sorry no links....
There are dictation services availiable on the net, basically you e-mail them an MP3 and they e-mail back a fully typed document.
As far as the reason for voice recognition not being on a PDA, I think it's space requirements. Of the two packages i've tried (dragon dictate and IBM) both of them require a lot of disk space to contain the recognition engine and your personal voice pattern files. Much more than your average PDA can hold. We're probably only a few years off from PDA's having that type of storage.
I'm just going to post a follow up to this, I see there's a lot of confusion because it's not the whole story...
The CEO had moved the company 50 miles from its original location, anyone in the bay area knows that a 50 mile commute anywhere is a nightmare. This was all so he could afford to pay for the exec's accomidations and the girl he wanted to have a liason with.
Now this girl never filed a suit, I was told this to "manipulate" me into doing my task with, uhh, I dunno fortitude? When you're the guy at everyones desk once a day you get to know them pretty good.
Unless you're a complete social retard, you can tell when someone has the hots for someone else. I could tell our CEO had the hots for this girl PLUS the fact he had tried to manipulate me made me question what was going on.
I was caught in a moral dilema. Should I really find out whats going on?
Well I did.. And sorry to anyone that hates me for it but I think I did what was right.
There's a lot more to it than that too. Did I mention the CTO that got a kick out of publically humiliating a female PHD simply because she was hired on to critique his work? He also enjoyed torturing me too. He seperated the workplace into a bunch of "cliques" and would order the people in his clique to give other people a hard time.
He would consistantly make demands that I purchased equipment worth 1000's of dollars on my credit card. I tried explaining to him about setting up a line of credit and giving me purchasing power, but he refused every attempt I made at this for he feared "losing his control"
Even after this guy being such a dickhead to me, I never heald it against him honest. The CEO asked me to destroy his 10 years of source code on a sun server, and I didn't touch it. IMHO both the CTO and the CEO were psychotic loonies that were so wrapped up in their "vision" they never took the time to see how their "visions" would fit together. It was an unfortunate thing these two didn't get along.
Back to my "tips/reimbursements"
Honestly, after the shit I took from them, too fucking bad if you don't think I should have gotten something. I know for a fact most of the other developers walked out of there with a load of G3's, sun E250's, cables, palm pilots, you name it. During my employment at this dot bomb I know I lost a lot of money along the way. Those of you that have never worked at a dot bomb (And I have the feeling a lot of you have) know of the kind of bullshit management that ran these places.
Honestly though, there was a silver lining to this cloud. I can only think of maybe 10 of the 50 people that worked there that I didn't like. There was 3 people that were totally cool on the exec team (CFO, COO, and the replacement CTO) and the rest of the team was pretty cool too. There were people from all walks of life there.
Yeah you're right, an i'll be the first to admit it...
The ceo of one of the dot bombs I worked for had been acting funny for weeks. He started asking me to make availiable the inbox of a paticular secratary he had the hots for, citing she was bringin up a sexual harrassment lawsuit.
Well, on my own initiave I got into the company quickbooks and found out they were so deep in the red it hurt. I gave several co-workers the warning of impeding doom.
Before I left, I grabbed a box of cat5, 2 128 meg dimms, a tone and probe kit, and some cat5 crimpers and a celeron 400mhz system.
The day after I left I recieved an e-mail from the girl we had working HR, with a list of items that were "missing" None of the items on her list matched what I had taken. The e-mail stated I either return the "stolen" items or my check would be withheald.
Upon a quick onceover of my letter of offer, I didn't read anywhere where it stated they could do this. I called my lawer and asked him if this was legal, which is wasn't. I forwarded his response to the HR girl and got my check fed ex'd the next day.
I don't mind being accused of stealing something I really stole, but when it's something I didn't touch it really pisses me off.
Well about 2 weeks after I left, the CEO called up our guys in sacramento with some big speech. "Blah blah blah" was most of the speach and it ended when he said "Blah, can't pay you guys would you work for free?" From what I heard they walked outta there with everything that the company owned (leaving the leased dell laptops)
I dunno, just wanted to support your comment I guess bro, I know i've stolen shit before.
Just curious, can this be done on DSL too?
Sorry man but I disagree...
/s" that isn't teaching me? It doesn't matter if its pc windows linux mac or nextcube black, if a person doesn't know what formatting is and they nuke their hard drive the OS they're using has no relevance to that. Next point..
1) because it saves time and work in keeping track of windows licenses.
While this may have been true in the pre win2k server days, using group policies you can really keep a handle on both OS and application licenses. Don't want a student installing that warezed copy of photoshop? Make a group policy, Only want the art computers to have photoshop? Make a group policy.
2) because it actually teaches children about computers, rather than just about GUIs and what can be done on them. When all the low-level things are done in the background, its no wonder the average american doesn't know what formatting a hard drive does aside from kill all their data.
So if I use a dos boot disk and type "format c:
3) teaches troubleshooting. Using nothing but windows, you'll never realize how much easier it is to use a command line tool for something simple.
From my experience on the corporate lan, %85 of all trouble tickets go to outlook/exchange issues, %10 to network issues, and the other %5 go to hardware issues. So if you took outlook/exchange out of the loop and just dealt with the other %15 your troubleshooting methods would be the same on a windows machine as they are a linux box.
[on the network]
Open up a shell/dos prompt. Ping that router, ping that nameserver, do a NSlookup.
[hardware]
jiggle that card, make sure that ram is seated correctly, make sure cables are plugged in where they supposed to be, smell for smoke
So basically you learn the same either way. The most basic networking tools exist on both platforms.
4) provides compilers and development environments for those who are adept enough to care to use them
You mean GCC? Here you can get it for windows too http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html#windows
5) difficult for learning students to bring down the whole computer from a user-class account
I'll go back to my first point with group policies on that one.
6) it's free, and provides alternatives to almost anything that can be done under windows that they'll need to do in anything but very specific areas (which will catch up with time anyway).
I spent a month on RH8, i've got to say, it sucked for a desktop. Sure I love using it for a router and the website im in charge of uses it (check my sig) for a desktop it just plain sucks (didn't we have a discussion on this last week?) Sure there is open source alternatives (Read GIMP) but gimp isn't professional grade yet, it doesn't do CYMK seperations. Kids need to learn whats in the real world, real world desktops use windows.
7) UNIX is time-tested as a style of environment. Windows is controlled by the whims of the market.
So unix is like a stubborn child and windows does what the parents want?
Like I said before, i'm not trying to dis linux/unix in any way, but it's still not ready for primetime. If you wanted to give kids an insight into unix, get a bunch of macs with OSX. Then that way you can give them the best of both worlds.
The Magic of 'Mira'
Around here (San Jose) my mexican buddies would have translated the above statement to..
The Magic of 'Shit'
Mira=Shit in spanish, no joke!
May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead.
If I was in your situation, it would depend entirely on how I was treated while I was employed there.
They obviously didn't give a crap about your situation when they laid you off. If careers were like dating going back would be like friends with benifits, and i've never seen those situations work out...
You start doing little odd jobs, either you're going to desire working there again or they'll desire to have you back. Once a layoffer, always a layoffer. Don't trust them as far as you can cook em.
Next door to my friends grandparents lived the bo family. Kim Bo was the oldest son, sorta suffered from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and had lived in his parents house well into his 40's.
:)
Nice enough guy, when we were teens he let us put a bunch of carp in his nasty green algea swimming pool. We spent the summer getting high, learning guitar rifts, and fishing for carp in our backyard fishing hole.
Well, eventually, his dad, the glue that was holding it all together died so his brothers and sisters wanted to sell the house and divide up the inheretance. Kim took his 150k share, bought a van, and spent the next 2 years living in his van, driving around playing music and doing odd jobs. It's not like he couldn't have gone and gotten a place, but at 40 this was what he decided to do with his life..
One day he got an e-mail "NIGERIAN OFFICIAL NEEDS HELP IN FUNDS TRANSFERS" or some shit like that. I saw him in person one day and he asked me if it was a scam. From all the stuff on slash I had read I knew it was.. But the promises in the e-mails were just too good for him to pass up.
The scammers had him convert everything to a cashiers check, then had him fly to amsterdam in person to deliver the check. He flew halfway across the world thinking there was going to be some big payoff for helping these people..
3 months later he hasn't seen a dime or heard from the people. He got screwed out of 150k in just one moment of handing over a check..
I know most smart people wouldn't fall for this, their "SCAM ALERT" alarm would go off in their heads. The sad thing is these people prey on people not of sound mind, the elderly, the lonely. To say, "Oh they should have known better" just doesn't fit because the MO of these scammers takes them directly to these types of people.
Kim Bo is doin alright. He had to sell his bass guitar, which he loved dearly and some other music stuff. He's doing odd jobs to keep gas in the van and food in his belly but at his age in his mental condition the outlook isn't going to be so bright in another 10 years.
Before someone suggest he goes to the FBI, well he's done that already, but the FBI told him there's not much they can do. Kinda sucks we got them goin on these wild Osama Bin Laden goose chases because the frequency of these scams seem to be increasing.
I hope the FTC nails these fuckers to the wall. Hopefully they'll be in the same cell as nasty nate and really get what they deserve
Well, I talk to my grandma all the time, Like I said, these opinions came from the older men in my family, I.E. my great grandfathers sons.
Mom, Dad, fuck em... Same goes for the rest of the idiots in my family. I'm happy I got a wife, and my grandma makes up for all the lack of parents I ever had.
n.
:)
Most modern Fighter jets use ramdrives exclusively because the high-G manuvers, shaking, ect would cause a normal drives heads to go smashing into the platters. I know the B2-stealth has some, so does the F-16.
When you're the goverment, and you want reliable killing machines, 250k for a 250meg ram drive back in 1987 isn't even an afterthought. It's a requirement. Now that it's dirt cheap to produce memory, it can finally trickle down in price enough to have become feasable for a civilian to afford one.
I know originally the early drives were used to hold map data for the HUD, which was basically just the data gained from our digital elevation modeling sattelites launched in the 80's. Given the advances in 3d modeling and sattelite map aquisition, I would guess whatever system they're using today probably contains terrabytes of map data.
I'm sure the old green vector graphic huds have been replaced with something a lot better to utilize the new data too. I'd suspect that in the actual control area there must be a LCD display, much like what you see on a modern 737.
It must be one helluva video game for them pilots
"Dammit toqer, look at all those nips driving up the road, they're going to take over!" my uncle vince said to me one day as we stood outside the family fruit stand.
"You know, I hear they eat cats and dogs!"
This is but a small sample of what I heard from the men in my family. Every derogetory racial slur you could imagine. Funny thing is, despite only being 4th gen american, the older men in the family were always trying to get people to drop the idea that we were "dago wop Guinni Italians" for the cowboy white bread image they were trying to portray..
It would have worked too, if my parents wouldnt have been such fuckups.
Around 12 or so, the problems with my parents escalated to the point where I had to spend as little time as possible around them. The other white kids didn't really want to hang out with the kid from a broken family (divorced)
My first mexican friend manny and his family helped me get through a lot of stuff, even though they lived in an apartment, and dad was dead, his mom was so supportive of letting him be who he wanted, something my parents never even considered.
My second education into non-white culture was with my surrogate japanese family. When my mom kicked me out at 16, my japanese friends and their family would let me take showers at their house, feed me, give me clean clothes to wear. I gained culinary insight with sushi, and learned eating raw fish with a sake bomb could be quite tasty..
Doesn't really have a lot to do with the article does it? I read the topic was on EU adopting anti hate laws for the web, well ok here's my insight into the article.
I think everyone has a right to their opinion, no matter how wrong it is. Despite all the bad opinions I learned early on, later in life I learned the truth about people for myself. I don't need parliment acting as the thought police for me.
It's human nature to question everything.. No matter how a person is brought up, eventually they'll find their own truth.
Yeah tech happens, but look at the side effects...
.com imploded? Gee I thought technology was supposed to miniaturize things and make them cheaper, mass production and all that shit.
You used to be able to catch edible fish out of any creek in san jose 20 years ago (note this is with agruculture pesticide residue being released into the water too) Now you would be hard pressed to find ANY body of fresh/running water in San Jose that doesn't have dangerous amounts of lead, mercury, PCB's and whatever other nasty toxins you can through in there. Guadalupe River carries large signs along its banks "WARNING MERCURY IN FISH"
Where did all these toxins come from? Well the ground used to soak and filter most of it, but with the city now populated to damn near a million people, it comes from anywhere.
What about the cost of living? How many people had to move out of san jose and back east when the
Did you know that most people living in San Jose are on average a 3 income household now? It's either..
A couple, and a roomate.
3 girls
3 guys
Why should it take 4/5'ths of anyones paycheck just to cover 1/3 of the rent? I don't call that progress.
Yeah great, grand, wonderful fucking technology. I can play counterstrike at 100fps woohoo. Where's my flying cars and teleporters. Food Generators? I thought poverty was supposed to be a thing of the past. It's all a pipe dream of bullshit to make us work harder for this imaginary goal of "techtopia"
Here bill gates makes a trolling remark and I respond to it, take the time to SHOW YOU STUPID FUCKING MODERATORS THAT IM A FARMER FROM SILICON VALLEY and you dumbasses just mod me down as a troll.
Dumbasses..
If Bill gates is behind the city politics that forced my family out of business, he's an asshole plain and simple as that. I should have gotten a damn insightful +1 moderation for my parent post but instead we have twits moderating today.
Bill Gates admitted that in many cases building Internet in the rural area just speeded up the exodus
You mean like my hometown San Jose?
Admittedly, I love technology, I love the richness of information it brings into my life. Yet, seeing all of my families orchards being sold off one by one because of city land grabs has been sad to say the least.
I grew up on a family orchard in the evergreen area of san jose. I remember summer days napping on the stumps of the eucaliptus trees my uncle had cut down..
40, hell even 20 years ago the quality of life in Silicon valley was very different. Housing was more affordable, freeways less congested, about the only bad thing was we were known as the capitol of PCP here in san jose.
Now when I go up on Mount Hamilton, and look down at the city, it's a very different view than what I saw even 10 years ago, my families ranches all replaced with housing, and now there's this constant brown smog layer that comes and goes, but I fear eventually it will stay.
Bill, from one nerd beat up in school to another, please don't make insensitive comments like that. Sure the 799,999 people that have moved here in the last 20 years may agree with you, but watching cookie cutter sheet housing pop up because the city wants more housing for the "tech sector" is just plain wrong.
Here's a little history lesson for those of you going to evergreen valley college and are wonderin why the family tore up the ranch..
About 10 years ago the city of SJ got a stick up it's butt about flood control. Our property is ajecent to a canal that feeds thompsons creek. The first year they took a big chunk out of our property for a "flood control" project. Then for the next 10 they kept moving the fence 6 inches over. By the time they were finished we had lost a good 15-20 acres for the city's "flood control project"
It wasn't just that either, we used to pump water from the creek for irrigation, about 15 years ago Santa Clara county made the practice illeagle, meaning we had to get our water from the city, which made our costs go up.
Sorry mods if you read this as a flame, but Bill saying "Oh we can stomp out the farmers and they'll find other work" is a load of fucking crap.
Bill, I learned your OS and supported it for 7 years. Now i'm out of a job. The demand for MSCE is null right now. Fuck you go to hell.
Then why all the hoopla about what a wonderfully redesigned UI redhat has with its bastardized version of gnome?
Redhat has done nothing but make claims about how great it was going to be, ect but it wasn't.
While you're at work, go into the supply cabinet, see the big black marker with "Sharpie" written on it? Ok grab that, put it in your pocket and take it home to your music collection.
Now after a beer/bongrip/blowjob or whatever it is you do when you get home break out your brand new Sharpie A.k.a. 37337 0-day cr4ckz and pick the first BMI music CD out of your collection that has copy protection.
Now apply your 0-day sharpie cr4ckz to the outer rim of the CD. Story was run on slash a few months ago, surprised no one else mentioned it.
Uhhm, That's sorta what I said... Here, 1 sentance summary of my complaint.
When I read a howto do something in linux, it should never be linked to a page that returns a 404.
Try searching google for the VCD howto and see what I mean.
RH8 still gets props for having a nice GUI, it's really polished and easy on the eyes. I could find almost no distinction between it and XP.
I run all my webservers on linux/php/mysql, but occassionally I get an itch to be different on my desktop, last time it was when XP released SP1 and I was so frustrated at M$ trying to keep me from pirating their software I thought i'd try and say "Fuck em!"
./configure
So I downloaded the new redhat Iso's when they came out, burned them, and wiped my system for redhat. To summarize that last month, let me just say I think having my balls cinched in a vice may be more pleasurable than trying to be productive with linux as a desktop.
Now my system is not some weak POS. It's a p4 with ultra 160, so it's very nice. The first thing I had to do was install the drivers for my nvidia card, oops that don't work, docs don't say anything, read the nvnews forums, oh ok gotta
rpmbuild --rebuild NVIDIA*.src.rpm
Ok it works.
Then it was onto my CDBurner. Again, not crappy hardware, brand spankin new Plextor dvd/cdr. ide-scsi emulator? WTF is that? Ok, I read some more, I know what it is, ok great, it's working.
Repeat process for my bt878 card and firewire.
So at this point, I pretty much had my hardware working as best it could under linux. I started setting out to get some applications going under linux. I needed some audio editing, video editing I started poking around and found some stuff that looks sweet.
tar xfzv reallysweetproggy.tar.gz
**Exit error 2**
you need to install some library.so
So i'd dig around, find the library, then find out that library wanted this library and ect and so on. Some of the stuff i'd click on the page to download it and the page would be gone, making the software I wanted to try useless.
I thought it would be cool to burn some homemmade karaoke VCD's. Previously I had used a screencapture to avi program in windows coupled with powerpoint, or a karaoke plugin with winamp and AVS.
Well, open offices impress sucked dog balls compared to powerpoint, and when it came time to burn a VCD again, the howto was linked to dependancies that returned a 404 instead of what I needed.
So with the help of a friend I gave up on linux on the desktop. Yeah it runs nice, but not nowhere near as good as how windows runs. I can tell a big difference in how UT2003 runs under XP compared to linux, and sorry but the penguin is slow here too.
I hope linux gets over these problems on the desktop, it would be cool if it actually were an freely availiable OS for download, but linux just isn't that right now.
And if you don't believe I use linux, click the link on my sig. All PHP/postnuke/MySQL goodness runnin on linux, not my desktop. For now that's how it has to be.
There's not a whole lotta difference between "mobile" and desktop processors other than packaging.
Desktop CPU's use PGA's that were designed for socketed use. The extra 4 millimeters from the pins sticking out is worth it because it means the CPU can be swapped in and out. Flexibility is the goal here.
Mobile processors usually come in a BGA package because they're soldered directly to the motherboard via wave solder, or UV cured solder. Since they don't have that extra 4 millimeters of pins sticking out the bottom, their profile is smaller than that of a desktop processor.
Right now though, it seems a lot of manufacturers are at least trying to make the newer laptops as flexible as a desktop by offering expansion busses to replace the laptops video card, processor, ram ect.
Remember 7 or 8 years ago when you wanted to get laptop memory? Everytime you wanted to upgrade you would have to order a custom stick because the manufacturers were all doing their own thing. Back then they thought they had to keep every vertical market on their laptop to themselves. There were a few exceptions to this rule (chembook was one of the first to start using standard desktop parts in their laptops)
I don't think it's a bad thing either... Sorta lets you get more life outta your laptop.
Uhhm no...
Thresh won carmacks ferrarri years ago. A fully decked out ferrari is worth more than you or I make in a year combined.
I played with him at the first major lan event called fragfest, held by dennis racine and dave allision, this was like years and years ago. Check out http://fragfest.com for more info.
I played him there, and also on the only doom online service at the time, called dwango (acronym for doom wide area network gaming online or something like that. Thresh was also buds with Usurper, who did the whole spaceorb sponsership scene (fuck u spaceorb) and slayer, we got free time on his dwango, which was based out of santa clara I think.
Anyways, go to any gamehouse, there's cash prizes and tournaments all the time. It's sad that you're one of those people who see video games as "just for fun" when the skill it takes to play some of them can be so competitive leagues, ladders and matches need to be created to see who's best.
Yeah dude, and you're trying to insinuate that i'm delusional. Why don't you roll a fat blunt and chill homie. Sheeit.