why do companies still think it's acceptable to integrate things like 56k modems, when it's a centrino capable laptop, meaning it can be fully wireless. also noted is the lack of gigabit nic, as this is starting to make it's way into offices, however slowly.
Why, exactly, do you feel that integrating an 56k Modem is unacceptable? It's a laptop. It travels. It travels by plane, train, automobile and just being lugged around the great big world in a bag. Most of that great bit world has POTS telephone cables. Most of it doesn't have 802.11b.
This may be a technology for the future, but at present we must still have "the old" way available for those not comfortable using computers.
If they're willing to go somewhere else and pay the premium for human interaction, I'm sure that some places will remain around that do it the "old way". If not, thats too damn bad.
Why slashbots bitch and moan about Intel I'll never understand. Sure, x86 and IA64 are gross nasty ISAs -- but how many posters here really work on the gcc's code generator?
Many of us will bitch about intel and bemoan the passing of Alpha because, to make an analogy, we want to be flying F22's. We look at the F14 that is Alpha and see the sleek, powerful processor it could have become with a fraction of the investment of money, manpower and time that has been invested in Itanium or x86. Instead it looks like we're going to get the same rusty Gremlin we were driving back in the early 90's when the Alpha first hit the market, only now Intel has somehow managed to bolt on the Space Shuttles SSB's. It's faster than aging Alpha design, but we can't help but feel that we might be getting somthing a lot better if similar resources had been expended on a good design to start with, instead of the kind of "pigs will fly with sufficient thrust" sort of engineering we get from Intel.
Vintage 1984 with a solid steel backplate the thing weighs almost 5lbs. The buckling spring keys give excellent tactile and audible feedback. I need to get a new PC but the keyboard is staying
Ditto. Same year, different model. No @#$% windows keys, either.
He's not, he should escalate it to the real techs. That's what they're getting paid the big bucks for. Not for sitting on their asses and following a script the IT Manager wrote up, but solving problems. Problems that may not even have a documented solution. To just give up because "It's not our standard" is beyond being a totally lame loser.
Your assumption is that these people are just sitting on their asses reading their scripts because they're lazy. As opposed to say, helping the 50 other people who have real problems with their systems, and doing all the other stuff their bosses wanted done last week but that hasn't been done because half the support staff were laid off? If someone wants support for something non-standard and there are resources available to devote to it, great. But just because the IT staff doesn't have time to devote to learning a shiny new operating system because some employee thinks it's so much shiner and newer than his boring charcoal grey Dell doesn't mean they're incompetent. (It doesn't rule it out either, but hey).
He doesn't have networking experience, that's what the IT department is for. Seems to me like they were completely unable to do their jobs.
Spoken like someone whos never had to admin a large number of users. They picked a standard platform, Windows on Dell. They know about that platform. They have Dells with windows on them that management has bought for them. They can use them as testbeds. I generally hate and despise windows, but the only "unusuable" Dell Laptops I've run into over the years are the ones that belong to non-technical people whose system trays extend more than a third of the way accross the screen.
So he goes out and buys a Mac, and suddenly the IT people are magically supposed to know about Macs. Why are they supposed to know about Macs? They haven't had any Mac training. They don't have company supplied Macs to use as testbeds. They probably don't own Macs at home. They may never have admined a Mac ever. Yet suddenly because jackass employee went out and bought a Mac, the IT guy (Read: Some poor sap manning the help desk for $9.00/hr) is supposed to know all about Mac configuration, with all of its quirks and oddities(every OS has them). If he'd bought a SparcBook, would you expect them to become Solaris Admins over night? How about if he'd just decided to install BeOS on his Dell? VMS?
I hate the implication that every guy whos ever worked with computers is supposed to know about every platform in existence and everything that can possibly be wrong with it and that if they don't they must be incompetent. It seems to be a fairly prevelent attitude. I don't expect my proctologist to know why I've got these funny headaches and doubled vision, I don't ask my my optomotrist to look at my twisted knee. Why the hell should the the help desk guy in a Windows-standard shop be expected to know about Macs when one suddenly shows up on his doorstep one day?
You are assuming some kind of general multi-use operating system then. If the device is used for heavily graphical tasks and hardly any number crunching, then it pays to design the kernel for use with the graphical environment. A server on the other hand might benefit from throughput enhancing features that might impair interactive graphical performance. Either way the kernel is hardly independent from the GUI.
Lots of hypotheticals "Well there might be some unspecified feature that would be good for graphical performance that would trash the server performance and vice versa..." Name one. The only OS I can think of off hand that integrates the GUI with the kernel in any siginficant way comes from Microsoft. (I'm not sure about MacOS previous to X). Really, aside from putting drivers for the devices in the kernel, in what way is the GUI dependent? The only issue I can even think of is responsiveness - Preemptible kernel, timeslices and such, but this is hardly a GUI specific issue. Even SGI who was king of Graphics for years always used X, which is about as far from kernel/Gui integration as you can get.
Those without. Totally non-scientific research suggests that the most frequent use for these laptops is extremely expensive (These suckers are really getting reamed to the tune of about $500/semester) Solitaire machines.
but I'm truly wondering if spending somewhere between 500 and 1000 bucks per student on something that depreciates so incredibly fast makes any sense.
Not to mention something that may not have significant educational value...At a college level, my University has a mandatory laptop program for certain majors (propeller heads) and 802.11b. Many professors who multiple sections of classes in rooms with and without wireless access have noticed a major difference in grades between those classes where students have laptops on the net and those without.
Of course, as I type this I'm sitting in my databases class...
It's not technically difficult, it's just something that will take quite a while to implement the in everyones browsers (not to mention that some companies are unlikely to want to change to attempting to resolve to the wildcarded WX records as they have their own bright ideas for making money off typos).
No it doesn't Theres no reason to. What possible advantage does this provide to anyone? If the web browser gets back a domain not found, it deals with it like a web browser, if the ftp client does, it deals with it like an FTP client. Works fine. DNS doesn't know about protocols, DNS shouldn't _have_ to.
The $64,000 question is, can the domain not found response be modified at all without breaking the protocol? For instance, to have older programs recognize the error, but next generation programs (web browsers mainly) be able to return useful information like possible alternatives? This would allow for smarter, more functional programs without breaking legacy apps.
Can it be? Yes. Is there any reason to? No.
DNS has a specific purpose. It takes a hierarchical, human readable name, and gives back an numerical IP that's usable for routing. It does it pretty well. It doesn't know why an IP is being requested, whether it's for HTTP, FTP or any other protocol. If it did, we'd be modifying the DNS protocol whenever we added a new protocol that wanted some other sort of information from the DNS. This is why we have a layered protocol stack - each layer/protocol takes care if it's own job, and doesn't have to know about the rest. It works much better than single insanely complex monolithic protocol that has to know about every other protocol in use.
The decision as to what should be done when a name is invalid should rest with the client. You know, the way that Internet Explorer has been providing almost exactly the same functionality for several years now? In a way that broke _nothing_ else? Modifying the DNS protocol to provide possible alternatives provides nothing over a solution which implements it over the appropriate level.
only on slashdot would an orgy scene be described as a waste
Cost/Benefit ratio, my good man. If I want to see an orgy, I'll break out my copies of "Girls Gone Wild", aquired on DVD for about the same price as my ticket to see "The Matrix". Much more entertaining, and I don't have to see Keanu's pasty white ass.
It may be complicated for a mom & pop store to manually calculate sales tax for 50 states, but it's trivial for them to purchase or download software which does 98% of the work automatically. I could see this being an issue before software was cheap and readily available, but do you really think it's a problem today?
In a word: Yes. Taxes suck. Many trees die. Having to do them under 50 sets of state rules would be a nightnmare. I frequently purchase things for a University Organization. At those retailers located only in North Dakota, I have an easy time of it. I just have to tell them my tax ID number, I buy things tax exempt. The larger retailers (Walmart, Target) are much more complicated. Walmart requires I have a card with me every time. The target cashiers interrogate me and enter all the information into the register, then make me fill out about 10 feet of paper tape. Calculating the amounts isn't the problem, filling out and filing the paper work on an quarterly basis is. Not to mention what happens when all the localities with their own sales taxes inevitably get into the mix...
Nasa wasted millions developing a zero-G ballpoint, whereas the Russians used pencils.
As another poster pointed out, this is an urban legend. Also, there is a significant advantage to using pens - you don't have (conductive) graphite dust floating around your zero-G envrionment.
Uncheck "Automatically restart" under "System failure"
Been done. Found shortly after the problem began.
BSODs are normally reserved for catastrophic failures (like the boot partition being damaged or broken RAM returning random information) and usually occur for good reason.
Catastrophic Failure = I unplugged a specific USB GPS device. Happens consistently accross a variety of machines. Lousy drivers.:) Not entirely windows fault, although it's a bit annoying that this requires a reboot.
The joke is DEAD. Geez, people. Get over it. It's been four years since blue screens were even commonplace on Windows machines. The rest of the world moved on at the turn of the millenium.
Funny, I still see them on a regular basis on my development machines (mummble crappy USB Drivers mummble). The only differnce is now they go away and reboot the system before you've had a chance to read what they say...
I think this can be summed up with the following quote from the fortune file(recalled from memory, wording could be wrong. Possibly supposed to be an attribution, as well):
"Reasonable people adapt to the world around them. Unreasonable people insist that the world adapt to them. Therefore, all progress in the world depends upon unreasonable people."
Humans have no value. We have made it as the single most populous species on Earth, by a a factor of 3 over the second most populous (rats, who only made it that high because they do well in the shadow of human settlements).
There are many species far more populous than us. Ants, termites, etc. Not that this really makes the argument in favor of Humans being valueable, but...
Re:64-benchmarks wont be good
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Intel's IA-64 emulates 32-bit unlike AMD's 64-bit chips which have 32-bit hardware. So we can expect AMD to beat Intel easily in 32-bit stuff.
Except that they're benchmarking against P4's, not Itaniums. P4's most definitely have 32 bit hardware.:)
My Ericsson T68i has 300 hours stand by time and 11 hours talk time. Ha! Seriously though, why is the difference so big? I mean, is it because differences between the phone networks or do all american product come with weak batteries?
Two words: Population Density. Europe's is about twice that of the US. This makes it more economical to put up more towers, more towers mean that digital phones are closer and thus broadcast at a lower power than they would if they were just barely on the edge of reception. Plus, as has been noted elsewhere above, CDMA allows for larger cells with more phones per cell, so once again you may be farther from the tower.
As a handy example, Germany is roughly the size of Minnesota + Wisconsin, if I recall correctly. A quick google indicates Germany has a population of about 82 million people. Minnesota is about 5 million, roughly half of which live in the Twin cities metro area. Wisconsin is about 5.4. So basically, a place like Germany would have 8 times the population density, making it more economical to put up a much denser network of cellphone towers so that your phone can broadcast at lower power. Hence, longer battery life.
Personally, I have a Motorola V60 and currently reside in North Dakota, which means I see the big old A for Analog Only on a pretty regular basis, and suddenly I get more like 20 minutes of talk time instead of several hours.
The fact is that a robot-driven world will mean that MUCH more will be done, and that everyone's job will be that of information management (whether a corporate manager type, a researcher, or a technician). In general, I predict very little change to wealth distribution.
Ahh, but the problem is that not everyone is manager, researcher or technician material. No amount of education is going to change that. Some people(a pretty fair proportion of them) don't have the intellectual initiative for these sorts of jobs. Think about the last cashiering job you had in high school. There was some 30 year old lady their wearing two wrist braces cause she's been a cashier for 10 years and _still_ hasn't been promoted to assistant manager? A certain number of people are bound to get left behind in this sort of an economy.
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Why, exactly, do you feel that integrating an 56k Modem is unacceptable? It's a laptop. It travels. It travels by plane, train, automobile and just being lugged around the great big world in a bag. Most of that great bit world has POTS telephone cables. Most of it doesn't have 802.11b.
If they're willing to go somewhere else and pay the premium for human interaction, I'm sure that some places will remain around that do it the "old way". If not, thats too damn bad.
Many of us will bitch about intel and bemoan the passing of Alpha because, to make an analogy, we want to be flying F22's. We look at the F14 that is Alpha and see the sleek, powerful processor it could have become with a fraction of the investment of money, manpower and time that has been invested in Itanium or x86. Instead it looks like we're going to get the same rusty Gremlin we were driving back in the early 90's when the Alpha first hit the market, only now Intel has somehow managed to bolt on the Space Shuttles SSB's. It's faster than aging Alpha design, but we can't help but feel that we might be getting somthing a lot better if similar resources had been expended on a good design to start with, instead of the kind of "pigs will fly with sufficient thrust" sort of engineering we get from Intel.
I would suggest the slashdot article posted within the last week...
Ditto. Same year, different model. No @#$% windows keys, either.
To just give up because "It's not our standard" is beyond being a totally lame loser.
Your assumption is that these people are just sitting on their asses reading their scripts because they're lazy. As opposed to say, helping the 50 other people who have real problems with their systems, and doing all the other stuff their bosses wanted done last week but that hasn't been done because half the support staff were laid off? If someone wants support for something non-standard and there are resources available to devote to it, great. But just because the IT staff doesn't have time to devote to learning a shiny new operating system because some employee thinks it's so much shiner and newer than his boring charcoal grey Dell doesn't mean they're incompetent. (It doesn't rule it out either, but hey).
Spoken like someone whos never had to admin a large number of users. They picked a standard platform, Windows on Dell. They know about that platform. They have Dells with windows on them that management has bought for them. They can use them as testbeds. I generally hate and despise windows, but the only "unusuable" Dell Laptops I've run into over the years are the ones that belong to non-technical people whose system trays extend more than a third of the way accross the screen.
So he goes out and buys a Mac, and suddenly the IT people are magically supposed to know about Macs. Why are they supposed to know about Macs? They haven't had any Mac training. They don't have company supplied Macs to use as testbeds. They probably don't own Macs at home. They may never have admined a Mac ever. Yet suddenly because jackass employee went out and bought a Mac, the IT guy (Read: Some poor sap manning the help desk for $9.00/hr) is supposed to know all about Mac configuration, with all of its quirks and oddities(every OS has them). If he'd bought a SparcBook, would you expect them to become Solaris Admins over night? How about if he'd just decided to install BeOS on his Dell? VMS?
I hate the implication that every guy whos ever worked with computers is supposed to know about every platform in existence and everything that can possibly be wrong with it and that if they don't they must be incompetent. It seems to be a fairly prevelent attitude. I don't expect my proctologist to know why I've got these funny headaches and doubled vision, I don't ask my my optomotrist to look at my twisted knee. Why the hell should the the help desk guy in a Windows-standard shop be expected to know about Macs when one suddenly shows up on his doorstep one day?
Lots of hypotheticals "Well there might be some unspecified feature that would be good for graphical performance that would trash the server performance and vice versa..." Name one. The only OS I can think of off hand that integrates the GUI with the kernel in any siginficant way comes from Microsoft. (I'm not sure about MacOS previous to X). Really, aside from putting drivers for the devices in the kernel, in what way is the GUI dependent? The only issue I can even think of is responsiveness - Preemptible kernel, timeslices and such, but this is hardly a GUI specific issue. Even SGI who was king of Graphics for years always used X, which is about as far from kernel/Gui integration as you can get.
Those without. Totally non-scientific research suggests that the most frequent use for these laptops is extremely expensive (These suckers are really getting reamed to the tune of about $500/semester) Solitaire machines.
Not to mention something that may not have significant educational value...At a college level, my University has a mandatory laptop program for certain majors (propeller heads) and 802.11b. Many professors who multiple sections of classes in rooms with and without wireless access have noticed a major difference in grades between those classes where students have laptops on the net and those without.
Of course, as I type this I'm sitting in my databases class...
Also, this ones a former Democrat. Switched to Republican, lost to Jesse before his congressional career.
No it doesn't Theres no reason to. What possible advantage does this provide to anyone? If the web browser gets back a domain not found, it deals with it like a web browser, if the ftp client does, it deals with it like an FTP client. Works fine. DNS doesn't know about protocols, DNS shouldn't _have_ to.
Can it be? Yes. Is there any reason to? No.
DNS has a specific purpose. It takes a hierarchical, human readable name, and gives back an numerical IP that's usable for routing. It does it pretty well. It doesn't know why an IP is being requested, whether it's for HTTP, FTP or any other protocol. If it did, we'd be modifying the DNS protocol whenever we added a new protocol that wanted some other sort of information from the DNS. This is why we have a layered protocol stack - each layer/protocol takes care if it's own job, and doesn't have to know about the rest. It works much better than single insanely complex monolithic protocol that has to know about every other protocol in use.
The decision as to what should be done when a name is invalid should rest with the client. You know, the way that Internet Explorer has been providing almost exactly the same functionality for several years now? In a way that broke _nothing_ else? Modifying the DNS protocol to provide possible alternatives provides nothing over a solution which implements it over the appropriate level.
Cost/Benefit ratio, my good man. If I want to see an orgy, I'll break out my copies of "Girls Gone Wild", aquired on DVD for about the same price as my ticket to see "The Matrix". Much more entertaining, and I don't have to see Keanu's pasty white ass.
Newer is not nessecarily better.
Other examples:
Windows ME vs Windows 98
Windows NT vs Unix on the server.
In a word: Yes. Taxes suck. Many trees die. Having to do them under 50 sets of state rules would be a nightnmare. I frequently purchase things for a University Organization. At those retailers located only in North Dakota, I have an easy time of it. I just have to tell them my tax ID number, I buy things tax exempt. The larger retailers (Walmart, Target) are much more complicated. Walmart requires I have a card with me every time. The target cashiers interrogate me and enter all the information into the register, then make me fill out about 10 feet of paper tape.
Calculating the amounts isn't the problem, filling out and filing the paper work on an quarterly basis is. Not to mention what happens when all the localities with their own sales taxes inevitably get into the mix...
As another poster pointed out, this is an urban legend. Also, there is a significant advantage to using pens - you don't have (conductive) graphite dust floating around your zero-G envrionment.
Uncheck "Automatically restart" under "System failure"
:) Not entirely windows fault, although it's a bit annoying that this requires a reboot.
Been done. Found shortly after the problem began.
BSODs are normally reserved for catastrophic failures (like the boot partition being damaged or broken RAM returning random information) and usually occur for good reason.
Catastrophic Failure = I unplugged a specific USB GPS device. Happens consistently accross a variety of machines. Lousy drivers.
Funny, I still see them on a regular basis on my development machines (mummble crappy USB Drivers mummble). The only differnce is now they go away and reboot the system before you've had a chance to read what they say...
I think this can be summed up with the following quote from the fortune file(recalled from memory, wording could be wrong. Possibly supposed to be an attribution, as well):
"Reasonable people adapt to the world around them. Unreasonable people insist that the world adapt to them. Therefore, all progress in the world depends upon unreasonable people."
Not at all. Theres no real privacy issue here, nor is there a legitimate threat to someones life and safety.
Humans have no value. We have made it as the single most populous species on Earth, by a a factor of 3 over the second most populous (rats, who only made it that high because they do well in the shadow of human settlements).
There are many species far more populous than us. Ants, termites, etc. Not that this really makes the argument in favor of Humans being valueable, but...
Except that they're benchmarking against P4's, not Itaniums. P4's most definitely have 32 bit hardware. :)
Seriously though, why is the difference so big? I mean, is it because differences between the phone networks or do all american product come with weak batteries?
Two words: Population Density. Europe's is about twice that of the US. This makes it more economical to put up more towers, more towers mean that digital phones are closer and thus broadcast at a lower power than they would if they were just barely on the edge of reception. Plus, as has been noted elsewhere above, CDMA allows for larger cells with more phones per cell, so once again you may be farther from the tower.
As a handy example, Germany is roughly the size of Minnesota + Wisconsin, if I recall correctly. A quick google indicates Germany has a population of about 82 million people. Minnesota is about 5 million, roughly half of which live in the Twin cities metro area. Wisconsin is about 5.4. So basically, a place like Germany would have 8 times the population density, making it more economical to put up a much denser network of cellphone towers so that your phone can broadcast at lower power. Hence, longer battery life.
Personally, I have a Motorola V60 and currently reside in North Dakota, which means I see the big old A for Analog Only on a pretty regular basis, and suddenly I get more like 20 minutes of talk time instead of several hours.
Ahh, but the problem is that not everyone is manager, researcher or technician material. No amount of education is going to change that. Some people(a pretty fair proportion of them) don't have the intellectual initiative for these sorts of jobs. Think about the last cashiering job you had in high school. There was some 30 year old lady their wearing two wrist braces cause she's been a cashier for 10 years and _still_ hasn't been promoted to assistant manager?
A certain number of people are bound to get left behind in this sort of an economy.