158 episodes in total according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Twilight_ Zone_episodes 89.99 + 74.99 + 79.99 + 79.99 + 69.99 = 394.95, not including shipping (which I think would be free anyhow) 394.95/158 = 2.499684 or about $2.50 per episode. This doesn't include, however, all the DVD extras. Director commentary, unreleased episodes, unreleased versions of episodes, etc. I imagine if you include all of that, it will be more comparable price-wise to google's offering.
It isn't as if he just linked the website on slashdot; he told people to go there and press F5 in an attempt to slow down or halt the computer system. That's malicious, and a lesson that this guy needs to learn is that malicious intent is what defines the difference between a prank and a crime. If he had just linked the website and told people to refresh the page over and over because they're going to be posting some hot news item or something, that would be totally fine and wouldn't be getting him into trouble. But that isn't what he did, so he's in trouble.
I thought that at 18 you became an adult in the eyes of the law. It's when you register for selective service and also when you become legally responsible for your actions (instead of your parents, who were responsible from 0 to 17).
There were no kids involved here, just an adult who did something stupid.
Actually, thanks to subsidies from Apple, most public schools in the USA run on Macintoshes.
I used to be a nighttime tech for a datacenter (www.forest.net) that was a largely Macintosh facility, and it was there that I learned about the perils of Mac-based web hosting. This was back in '02, when OSX was still "kinda new" and a lot of the machines in the DC still ran OS9 with Webstar as their web server software. Webstar had this "quirk" where, if it put a dialog on the screen, the machine stopped listening for incoming connection requests. It turns out though that this "quirk" isn't actually due to Webstar, but is actually the fault of MacOS 9.x and prior, because they're single-threaded operating systems and any time any application put a dialog onscreen, the entire system would halt pending the dismissal of the dialog box.
So when you hit the connection limit and a dialog appeared onscreen notifying you of such, guess what happened if nobody was there to dismiss the dialog? Yes that's right, it appeared as if the machine had completely vanished from the internet. Kind of like that school district machine has done, on a friday, after school hours, with nobody around to dismiss the dialog.
Hmmmm....
If I were a bettin' man, my money would be on Macintosh in this instance.
Do you want all television to be subscription only, then?
Yes.
Cable was originally supposed to be that way. Eventually, however, the cable networks realised that they could have it both ways and further increase their revenue, so they added commercials to their broadcasting just like the broadcast networks were doing.
I wouldn't mind paying $2 for an episode of a show that I want to see. I don't know how much these stations make on advertising revenue, but I would think that a million people paying $2 for an episode of a show would more than recoup the cost of making the episode (sets, actors, doughnuts).
Consider that America has a population of something like 280 million. If we only assume that ten percent of the population are television-watchers who would be willing to pay $2 for an episode, that's still 28 million people. Five percent, even, would be 14 million. Whether it's 28 million or 14 million, though, at $2/show the potential profits could put some box office movies to shame, and would still cover all of the costs of making the show.
I really don't get why they don't go to this format for content distribution, it makes complete sense. It's just less-expensive pay-per-view, really...
(Wikipedia, tangentially, says that the 2005 estimated population is 297 million)
Ok, your Fedex example kind of misses the point, so you're right, you are missing something.
The ISPs want to control the internet traffic based upon the content of that traffic. It would be like you going to Fedex and asking to buy overnight air service for a box of chocolates, but them telling you that they don't ship chocolates overnight by air, only 3-5 day by ground. Actually, that's a perfect example, because a box being shipped can be likened to a packet being transferred. The ISPs want to "look inside" these packets and determine their priority depending on their content.
One ISP in Canada (Rogers) is already doing this: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15033490?r= 946 Users of bittorrent report that the speed shave been throttled back to dialup-like speeds. Now keep in mind that there are many legitimate uses for bittorrent, such as Linux ISO distribution for example. But if you set your bittorrent to listen on port 1720, a port commonly used for H.323 videoconferencing, your speeds will pick back up again. They want to give priority to certain kinds of traffic and deprioritize other kinds of traffic, and they want to do it at their own whims.
Soon it won't be port-based traffic reprioritization, but protocol-based, or even content-based. Downloading something that isn't in line with the morality of the CEO of the company that provides your internet access but which is perfectly legal to download? Tough, you're throttled!
The answer is nine times out of ten people who download movies, audio or programs they haven't paid for.
What if they have paid for it? I listen to streaming radio through Digitally Imported at www.di.fm which, for a paltry sum, allows me access to high-quality electronic music of a multitude of genres, and they keep adding genres all the time outside of electronic music.
128 kilobits per second is 16 kilobytes per second. If I leave the stream going all day (as I usually tend to do, as I like having music playing all the time--even when I sleep) then I'm consuming 86,400 (seconds in a day) * 16 = 1,382,400 kilobytes or 1.3 gigabytes a day. Over the course of 30 days, that's just slightly under 40 gigabytes. Maybe I'll listen to a 192kbps stream though, landing me slightly under 60 gigabytes. Suppose I download a few DVD ISOs of Linux, that's another 10 to 20 gigabytes for that month... Buy a couple streamed movies from various internet services out there which serve, say, copyright-expired movies for example? Another 30 or 40 gigabytes. What about porn? If I pay for access to a porn site and they say I've got unlimited access, what is to stop me from using wget to mirror their entire site? How much porn does the average site have, do you think? 10gb? 20gb? Sometimes even more, if they have high-quality multimedia streams. I can legitimately surpass 100gb in a month, no sweat. I could legitimately surpass 200gb in a month, most likely.
Show me a legit person doing work or playing a game that gets nailed and then I'll care.
So, do you care about legitimate multimedia downloads or hobbyists downloading Linux DVD ISOs? Or do you only make exceptions for work or playing a game? It makes you sound awfully narrow-minded, if you only take exception with the latter two.
haha, you make me laugh. What does ISP stand for, you dolt? Internet Service Provider. You are, actually, paying for a service, which is provided to you. They aren't called "ICPs" for a reason (all potential mix-ups with the insane clown posse aside).
>>No. The majority of LED aspects for traffic lights are much LESS efficient than the halogen lamps usually fitted - LEDs are only used because they require (in theory) less maintenance.
They're far more efficient than halogen lamps because they produce only the color needed while halogen lamps heat up a filament (wasting much energy to heat, firstly) and then filter out all but the color required. LEDs consume a fraction of the power of filtered halogen or tungsten incandescent lamps. Even if they're only 10% efficient at converting electricity into light (most single-color LEDs are at 15 to 20 percent these days), they convert it into only the color required, whereas a halogen source at 10% must be filtered to produce the color required, which also affects efficiency. You may install the lights for a living, but you don't appear to know much about how they work.
I was addressing the whiner who was posting a comment on slashdot, somebody I expect to have a certain level of technical prowess. This isn't an end-all solution to the problem of lack of adoption, but it is a solution for the "must reboot four times and go to windows update lots omg woe is me" comment that was posted.
Programming is a skill, not a career. Programming is like mathematics. There are few "programming" jobs out there just as there are few "math" jobs out there, but there are a lot of jobs which heavily involve programming just as there are jobs which heavily involve mathematics.
Another way to think of programming, is as a proficiency with a certain set of tools, like hammers and wrenches and pliers for example. It doesn't matter how well you know how to use these tools, because there's no jobs out there which simply need you for your knowledge of these tools. Most jobs out there require you to know how to apply these tools in a given scenario in order to accomplish a goal or solve a problem.
So to answer the question, "programmers" stop being "programmers" as soon as they realise this, that programming is only a skill and not a career. Once this has been realised, they take their knowledge of programming (which is essentially telling a machine to solve complex logical problems for them) into another arena. Law, Science, Administration, Teaching, etc. They don't stop programming, they just stop being simply "programmers" and instead become IP Lawyers, Data Modeling Scientists, Systems Administrators and Professors of Computer Programming.
Piracy aside, I see three main reasons why Service Pack 2 is slow to be adopted.
1. It's huge. About 260 megs, I think. Try that one on analog (33.6kbps or less) dialup sometime. Better yet, try it in Internet Explorer which has no support for resuming interrupted downloads. Even more, try it in Internet Explorer which has no support for resuming interrupted downloads on an analog modem running on a telephone line for which you need to pay for the telephone service by the minute and the internet access by the hour. Yeah, just try it. I dare you. Here's another good one: Try downloading it when you don't even HAVE internet access!
2. It breaks stuff. A lot of older applications just stop working as soon as you install Service Pack 2. If somebody relies upon such an older piece of software for their business' billing or their hospital's patient tracking system, they aren't upgrading, nuh-uh.
3. FUD. One person with some obscure app that gets broken when he installs SP2 tells all of his friends that SP2 is evil. They in turn tell more people, and so forth.
There's no real way around any of these three reasons, although the second and third reasons are related and if you could somehow fix the second one, the damage of the third could be lessened. But overall, the damage has already been done and the FUD demon is out of his cage.
Sure, if you're intent on going to Windows Update, yeah, it's going to involve lots of rebooting. But you don't have to do it that way, you can just download all the hotfixes directly and install them one at a time, if you aren't looking to create an up-to-date installation CD. I, personally, like the installation CD (or DVD) route. It's handy to be able to pop in the disc and walk away and come back to a crisp, clean, fully patched, up-to-date system with all of the latest drivers installed as well.
Who's going to believe that a man with 4 networked computers
The article didn't say they were networked. The article said, "Paramount has looked at all four computers in Lee's home, alleging he had one of them cleaned to erase evidence."
And what does cleaned mean, really? The article doesn't clarify. Does cleaned mean he got so sick of Windows running slow from spyware that he reinstalled his operating system, formatting the drive in the process because his friend told him to do so? Do you think that might be possible, mister guilty-until-proven-innocent with your snarky little perjury-is-a-crime comment bullshit?
Do you know how many people have wireless set up because their "Home DSL/Cable Gateway" that the man at bestbuy/circuitcity/compusa sold them on the pretense that "wireless is the future" and "if you get a laptop you can roam your house and always be on the internet." Care to venture a guess at how many stupid consumers get duped into that one? That's right I said stupid consumers, people who don't know how to secure the WAP they just bought "to keep the hackers out of [his] computer."
And before you go on the "why would a computer novice have FOUR computers?" rant, I offer you this: It's 1990, a man gets a computer. It's 1994, the man's computer stops working, he puts it in the closet, he gets another computer. It's 2000, his second computer stops working, he puts it and the first out in the garage and gets a new one. I'm sure you can guess where the fourth computer came from unless you are actually as stupid as your comment would lead me to believe.
Really, I don't know how you got modded insightful at all, because you lend no insight to the conversation, only FUD.
Your "raising the speed limit" is more groundless dreaming. Here's a hint: there are countries where the highways have absolutely no speed-limit whatsoever. I'm living in one of them. (Germany) I can tell you, as can any simple statistic, that this does *not* lead to significantly better driver, nor to less accidents.
I never made the implication that raising the speed limit makes better drivers. I made the implication that prohibiting most people from driving and allowing only the highly skilled drivers to be the ones driving would enable us to safely raise the speed limit. Here's a hint for you Mr. Germany: take an English class and re-read what I wrote.
The real world ain't likely to work like you imagine it though. Get over it.
I got over that about fifteen years ago, at the time I realised that the real world is run by the same skilless, stupid people that I would prefer to eliminate from the gene pool. The kind of people that would attack a man instead of his ideas because they can't come up with a reasoned argument against those ideas; people like you.
So, what is your solution then ? Prevent most people from driving ?
Sounds good to me. Fewer cars on the roads mean less congested streets, fewer opportunities for accidents, and less pollution overall. Everyone wins, except the whiny bitches that won't get to drive because they're incompetent. Sucks to be them. Another potential upside is raising the speed limits on the highways because the lowest common denominator of skill would be significantly higher than it is now.
Should I be allowed to drive while intoxicated on the condition that I pass my driving-test while under the same intoxication ? I'm pretty convinced I'd manage fine to drink say 2 liters of beer and pass the current driving-test, I'm *not* convinced that mean I (and others) should be allowed to do so.
This would require re-tuning the test in order to test the hard skills that driving relies upon such as response-time and hand-eye coordination, but I largely think it's a good idea. If you can drive competently and react rapidly enough to pass a quick-response driving test with a BAC of 0.15%, why should you be fined and/or arrested for blowing a 0.08%? There should be something on your license that indicates your own personal legal BAC limit, instead of restricting all people by an arbitrary amount.
Given today's new fancy technology, a breathalyzer could have a slot where you insert a driver's license which reads the mag-stripe containing BAC limit information (amongst other things). If the driver blows a BAC higher than the limit established on their license's mag-stripe, then they fail the test. You could even integrate the system into the automobile, using the driver's license and a breath from the driver as a dual-key system to start the car.
Um, what? Seriously, WHAT? Did you fail the licensing exam a few times or what? You might just be kind of slow, you know.
Maybe you don't possess the skill to drive, but I sure do and I loathe your generalization.
Anybody with a measurable level of driving skill doesn't even need their speedometer because they can judge how fast they're going. And in traffic, generally, your speed is less important than it is to just maintain a speed with the flow of traffic. Reading road signs is a pretty minor thing. Each sign takes a small fraction of a second to read (at least for me) and unless you're in unfamiliar territory you should already know what all the signs say. Yeah, you're watching for things approaching the road from either side, certainly, but a simple glance in either direction without even moving your head is all that takes. I use my side mirrors to check behind me because I have a darkly tinted rear window. I have blind-spot mirrors so I don't have to physically turn my head to check either blind spot; a simple glance is all it takes. Anything that I need to see on my console will have my attention drawn to it with a bright orange or red light. Overheating, battery problems, engine needing service, etc, they've all got a bright red or orange light which tells me what's up. And there's only one time when you need to monitor the situation behind you, and that's when you're slowing or stopping when travelling forwards, and whenever you're backing up. If you think driving is hard, you shouldn't be doing it.
I can talk on the phone and drive at the same time no sweat. I've got this skill known as "priorities" and from the sound of your comment and the comments of others, you all totally lack this skill.
Do you know what I do when I'm on my phone and I'm about to conduct a high-speed merge onto the freeway? "Hold on for a sec." Pulling out of a parking space? "Hang on a sec." In heavy traffic with a lot of stop-and-go and drivers not using their turn signals and cutting me off? "I'll call you back in five minutes." Cruisin' down the highway at sixty miles per hour at 4am without a single other car on the road? I conduct my goddamn conversation without any problems what-so-ever. If I'm in a new city, I'll not talk on the phone unless I'm talking on the phone to get directions.
It's all about priorities. I would drop my phone, my drink, my food, my anything if I ascertained the presence of a challenge or threat in my surroundings. It's about judgement, threat assessment, prioritization and survival instinct. They are completely right that gamers are better at talking on the phone while driving, because gamers have these skills, and then some.
It's when peoples' priorities are all fucked up that cellphones become a problem. Driving is the PRIMARY task, all others are secondary, tertiary, etc. One time some dumb broad almost merged right into my passenger side because she was on her phone not paying attention. She prioritized the call with whomever she was talking ahead of driving, and that's a no-no. Driving comes first, the conversations come second. Ask them to hold for a minute, tell them you'll call them back, but put driving first. If you can do that, everything else is cake.
The problem isn't cellphones, the problem is shitty drivers.
Download the hotfixes from another computer and burn them to a CD or copy them to a USB drive. See this thread on the Microsoft Software Forum Network for a list of the hotfixes currently out in the wild:
The page also lists the switches to specify to do a silent install, so once you've downloaded them all you can create a batch file to install them all, put the hotfixes and the batch file in a folder on a CD, insert CD, execute, get a snack, come back, your machine is now secure. huzzah!
Tip: If you have super sed ( http://sed.sf.net/grabbag/ssed/sed-3.59.zip ) Then you can make this batch file pretty easily. All of the hotfixes released after service pack 2 support the/q/n and/z switches (except the mailicious software removal tool, which isn't really a "hotfix" per se). So put all the hotfixes in one folder, open a command prompt and then navigate to that folder and then get your i/o redirection groove on:
Actually, if you'd ever seen the Microsoft campus, you'd know that while they don't have roses, they do have some of the most beautiful landscaping around. I can say with complete confidence that the MSN division is totally spoiled when it comes to the landscaping around their buildings, though.
Slashdot Mirror
UMass student admits "Little Red Book" Hoax:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510754
In addition to forgetting, you also evidently didn't do any due diligence on the linked material.
158 episodes in total according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Twilight_ Zone_episodes
89.99 + 74.99 + 79.99 + 79.99 + 69.99 = 394.95, not including shipping (which I think would be free anyhow)
394.95/158 = 2.499684 or about $2.50 per episode.
This doesn't include, however, all the DVD extras. Director commentary, unreleased episodes, unreleased versions of episodes, etc. I imagine if you include all of that, it will be more comparable price-wise to google's offering.
It isn't as if he just linked the website on slashdot; he told people to go there and press F5 in an attempt to slow down or halt the computer system. That's malicious, and a lesson that this guy needs to learn is that malicious intent is what defines the difference between a prank and a crime. If he had just linked the website and told people to refresh the page over and over because they're going to be posting some hot news item or something, that would be totally fine and wouldn't be getting him into trouble. But that isn't what he did, so he's in trouble.
Pranking kids, you say?
I thought that at 18 you became an adult in the eyes of the law. It's when you register for selective service and also when you become legally responsible for your actions (instead of your parents, who were responsible from 0 to 17).
There were no kids involved here, just an adult who did something stupid.
HTTP Status 500 -
t .java:743)t .java:856)
----------
type Exception report
message
description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.
exception
java.lang.NullPointerException
OrdinanceGet2.doGet(OrdinanceGet2.java:43)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServle
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServle
note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Tomcat logs.
----------
Apache Tomcat/5.0.19
Yeah, I hate it when I break that ordinance...
Actually, thanks to subsidies from Apple, most public schools in the USA run on Macintoshes.
I used to be a nighttime tech for a datacenter (www.forest.net) that was a largely Macintosh facility, and it was there that I learned about the perils of Mac-based web hosting. This was back in '02, when OSX was still "kinda new" and a lot of the machines in the DC still ran OS9 with Webstar as their web server software. Webstar had this "quirk" where, if it put a dialog on the screen, the machine stopped listening for incoming connection requests. It turns out though that this "quirk" isn't actually due to Webstar, but is actually the fault of MacOS 9.x and prior, because they're single-threaded operating systems and any time any application put a dialog onscreen, the entire system would halt pending the dismissal of the dialog box.
So when you hit the connection limit and a dialog appeared onscreen notifying you of such, guess what happened if nobody was there to dismiss the dialog? Yes that's right, it appeared as if the machine had completely vanished from the internet. Kind of like that school district machine has done, on a friday, after school hours, with nobody around to dismiss the dialog.
Hmmmm....
If I were a bettin' man, my money would be on Macintosh in this instance.
Costco Gas @ $1.99/gal FTW!
So use Google as a proxy:
w .snopes.com/toxins/water.htm&langpair=en|en
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://ww
See the langpair=en|en bit? Translate from English...to English! I read about this trick on digg a few days ago.
Do you want all television to be subscription only, then?
Yes.
Cable was originally supposed to be that way. Eventually, however, the cable networks realised that they could have it both ways and further increase their revenue, so they added commercials to their broadcasting just like the broadcast networks were doing.
I wouldn't mind paying $2 for an episode of a show that I want to see. I don't know how much these stations make on advertising revenue, but I would think that a million people paying $2 for an episode of a show would more than recoup the cost of making the episode (sets, actors, doughnuts).
Consider that America has a population of something like 280 million. If we only assume that ten percent of the population are television-watchers who would be willing to pay $2 for an episode, that's still 28 million people. Five percent, even, would be 14 million. Whether it's 28 million or 14 million, though, at $2/show the potential profits could put some box office movies to shame, and would still cover all of the costs of making the show.
I really don't get why they don't go to this format for content distribution, it makes complete sense. It's just less-expensive pay-per-view, really...
(Wikipedia, tangentially, says that the 2005 estimated population is 297 million)
Ok, your Fedex example kind of misses the point, so you're right, you are missing something.
= 946
The ISPs want to control the internet traffic based upon the content of that traffic. It would be like you going to Fedex and asking to buy overnight air service for a box of chocolates, but them telling you that they don't ship chocolates overnight by air, only 3-5 day by ground. Actually, that's a perfect example, because a box being shipped can be likened to a packet being transferred. The ISPs want to "look inside" these packets and determine their priority depending on their content.
One ISP in Canada (Rogers) is already doing this: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15033490?r
Users of bittorrent report that the speed shave been throttled back to dialup-like speeds. Now keep in mind that there are many legitimate uses for bittorrent, such as Linux ISO distribution for example. But if you set your bittorrent to listen on port 1720, a port commonly used for H.323 videoconferencing, your speeds will pick back up again. They want to give priority to certain kinds of traffic and deprioritize other kinds of traffic, and they want to do it at their own whims.
Soon it won't be port-based traffic reprioritization, but protocol-based, or even content-based. Downloading something that isn't in line with the morality of the CEO of the company that provides your internet access but which is perfectly legal to download? Tough, you're throttled!
Do you see why this is bad, now?
The answer is nine times out of ten people who download movies, audio or programs they haven't paid for.
What if they have paid for it? I listen to streaming radio through Digitally Imported at www.di.fm which, for a paltry sum, allows me access to high-quality electronic music of a multitude of genres, and they keep adding genres all the time outside of electronic music.
128 kilobits per second is 16 kilobytes per second. If I leave the stream going all day (as I usually tend to do, as I like having music playing all the time--even when I sleep) then I'm consuming 86,400 (seconds in a day) * 16 = 1,382,400 kilobytes or 1.3 gigabytes a day. Over the course of 30 days, that's just slightly under 40 gigabytes. Maybe I'll listen to a 192kbps stream though, landing me slightly under 60 gigabytes. Suppose I download a few DVD ISOs of Linux, that's another 10 to 20 gigabytes for that month... Buy a couple streamed movies from various internet services out there which serve, say, copyright-expired movies for example? Another 30 or 40 gigabytes. What about porn? If I pay for access to a porn site and they say I've got unlimited access, what is to stop me from using wget to mirror their entire site? How much porn does the average site have, do you think? 10gb? 20gb? Sometimes even more, if they have high-quality multimedia streams. I can legitimately surpass 100gb in a month, no sweat. I could legitimately surpass 200gb in a month, most likely.
Show me a legit person doing work or playing a game that gets nailed and then I'll care.
So, do you care about legitimate multimedia downloads or hobbyists downloading Linux DVD ISOs? Or do you only make exceptions for work or playing a game? It makes you sound awfully narrow-minded, if you only take exception with the latter two.
haha, you make me laugh. What does ISP stand for, you dolt? Internet Service Provider. You are, actually, paying for a service, which is provided to you. They aren't called "ICPs" for a reason (all potential mix-ups with the insane clown posse aside).
>>No. The majority of LED aspects for traffic lights are much LESS efficient than the halogen lamps usually fitted - LEDs are only used because they require (in theory) less maintenance.
They're far more efficient than halogen lamps because they produce only the color needed while halogen lamps heat up a filament (wasting much energy to heat, firstly) and then filter out all but the color required. LEDs consume a fraction of the power of filtered halogen or tungsten incandescent lamps. Even if they're only 10% efficient at converting electricity into light (most single-color LEDs are at 15 to 20 percent these days), they convert it into only the color required, whereas a halogen source at 10% must be filtered to produce the color required, which also affects efficiency. You may install the lights for a living, but you don't appear to know much about how they work.
I was addressing the whiner who was posting a comment on slashdot, somebody I expect to have a certain level of technical prowess. This isn't an end-all solution to the problem of lack of adoption, but it is a solution for the "must reboot four times and go to windows update lots omg woe is me" comment that was posted.
That I was sitting at my desk at Microsoft may have something to do with that.
just sayin'.
Programming is a skill, not a career. Programming is like mathematics. There are few "programming" jobs out there just as there are few "math" jobs out there, but there are a lot of jobs which heavily involve programming just as there are jobs which heavily involve mathematics.
Another way to think of programming, is as a proficiency with a certain set of tools, like hammers and wrenches and pliers for example. It doesn't matter how well you know how to use these tools, because there's no jobs out there which simply need you for your knowledge of these tools. Most jobs out there require you to know how to apply these tools in a given scenario in order to accomplish a goal or solve a problem.
So to answer the question, "programmers" stop being "programmers" as soon as they realise this, that programming is only a skill and not a career. Once this has been realised, they take their knowledge of programming (which is essentially telling a machine to solve complex logical problems for them) into another arena. Law, Science, Administration, Teaching, etc. They don't stop programming, they just stop being simply "programmers" and instead become IP Lawyers, Data Modeling Scientists, Systems Administrators and Professors of Computer Programming.
Piracy aside, I see three main reasons why Service Pack 2 is slow to be adopted.
1. It's huge. About 260 megs, I think. Try that one on analog (33.6kbps or less) dialup sometime. Better yet, try it in Internet Explorer which has no support for resuming interrupted downloads. Even more, try it in Internet Explorer which has no support for resuming interrupted downloads on an analog modem running on a telephone line for which you need to pay for the telephone service by the minute and the internet access by the hour. Yeah, just try it. I dare you. Here's another good one: Try downloading it when you don't even HAVE internet access!
2. It breaks stuff. A lot of older applications just stop working as soon as you install Service Pack 2. If somebody relies upon such an older piece of software for their business' billing or their hospital's patient tracking system, they aren't upgrading, nuh-uh.
3. FUD. One person with some obscure app that gets broken when he installs SP2 tells all of his friends that SP2 is evil. They in turn tell more people, and so forth.
There's no real way around any of these three reasons, although the second and third reasons are related and if you could somehow fix the second one, the damage of the third could be lessened. But overall, the damage has already been done and the FUD demon is out of his cage.
A lot of trouble?!
Just take your installation CD, slipstream service pack 2, add in the latest hotfixes, and heck, while you're at it, make an answer file for an unattended install.
Sure, if you're intent on going to Windows Update, yeah, it's going to involve lots of rebooting. But you don't have to do it that way, you can just download all the hotfixes directly and install them one at a time, if you aren't looking to create an up-to-date installation CD. I, personally, like the installation CD (or DVD) route. It's handy to be able to pop in the disc and walk away and come back to a crisp, clean, fully patched, up-to-date system with all of the latest drivers installed as well.
Who's going to believe that a man with 4 networked computers
The article didn't say they were networked. The article said, "Paramount has looked at all four computers in Lee's home, alleging he had one of them cleaned to erase evidence."
And what does cleaned mean, really? The article doesn't clarify. Does cleaned mean he got so sick of Windows running slow from spyware that he reinstalled his operating system, formatting the drive in the process because his friend told him to do so? Do you think that might be possible, mister guilty-until-proven-innocent with your snarky little perjury-is-a-crime comment bullshit?
Do you know how many people have wireless set up because their "Home DSL/Cable Gateway" that the man at bestbuy/circuitcity/compusa sold them on the pretense that "wireless is the future" and "if you get a laptop you can roam your house and always be on the internet." Care to venture a guess at how many stupid consumers get duped into that one? That's right I said stupid consumers, people who don't know how to secure the WAP they just bought "to keep the hackers out of [his] computer."
And before you go on the "why would a computer novice have FOUR computers?" rant, I offer you this: It's 1990, a man gets a computer. It's 1994, the man's computer stops working, he puts it in the closet, he gets another computer. It's 2000, his second computer stops working, he puts it and the first out in the garage and gets a new one. I'm sure you can guess where the fourth computer came from unless you are actually as stupid as your comment would lead me to believe.
Really, I don't know how you got modded insightful at all, because you lend no insight to the conversation, only FUD.
Your "raising the speed limit" is more groundless dreaming. Here's a hint: there are countries where the highways have absolutely no speed-limit whatsoever. I'm living in one of them. (Germany) I can tell you, as can any simple statistic, that this does *not* lead to significantly better driver, nor to less accidents.
I never made the implication that raising the speed limit makes better drivers. I made the implication that prohibiting most people from driving and allowing only the highly skilled drivers to be the ones driving would enable us to safely raise the speed limit. Here's a hint for you Mr. Germany: take an English class and re-read what I wrote.
The real world ain't likely to work like you imagine it though. Get over it.
I got over that about fifteen years ago, at the time I realised that the real world is run by the same skilless, stupid people that I would prefer to eliminate from the gene pool. The kind of people that would attack a man instead of his ideas because they can't come up with a reasoned argument against those ideas; people like you.
So, what is your solution then ? Prevent most people from driving ?
Sounds good to me. Fewer cars on the roads mean less congested streets, fewer opportunities for accidents, and less pollution overall. Everyone wins, except the whiny bitches that won't get to drive because they're incompetent. Sucks to be them. Another potential upside is raising the speed limits on the highways because the lowest common denominator of skill would be significantly higher than it is now.
Should I be allowed to drive while intoxicated on the condition that I pass my driving-test while under the same intoxication ? I'm pretty convinced I'd manage fine to drink say 2 liters of beer and pass the current driving-test, I'm *not* convinced that mean I (and others) should be allowed to do so.
This would require re-tuning the test in order to test the hard skills that driving relies upon such as response-time and hand-eye coordination, but I largely think it's a good idea. If you can drive competently and react rapidly enough to pass a quick-response driving test with a BAC of 0.15%, why should you be fined and/or arrested for blowing a 0.08%? There should be something on your license that indicates your own personal legal BAC limit, instead of restricting all people by an arbitrary amount.
Given today's new fancy technology, a breathalyzer could have a slot where you insert a driver's license which reads the mag-stripe containing BAC limit information (amongst other things). If the driver blows a BAC higher than the limit established on their license's mag-stripe, then they fail the test. You could even integrate the system into the automobile, using the driver's license and a breath from the driver as a dual-key system to start the car.
This is a lot for anyone to handle.
Um, what? Seriously, WHAT? Did you fail the licensing exam a few times or what? You might just be kind of slow, you know.
Maybe you don't possess the skill to drive, but I sure do and I loathe your generalization.
Anybody with a measurable level of driving skill doesn't even need their speedometer because they can judge how fast they're going. And in traffic, generally, your speed is less important than it is to just maintain a speed with the flow of traffic. Reading road signs is a pretty minor thing. Each sign takes a small fraction of a second to read (at least for me) and unless you're in unfamiliar territory you should already know what all the signs say. Yeah, you're watching for things approaching the road from either side, certainly, but a simple glance in either direction without even moving your head is all that takes. I use my side mirrors to check behind me because I have a darkly tinted rear window. I have blind-spot mirrors so I don't have to physically turn my head to check either blind spot; a simple glance is all it takes. Anything that I need to see on my console will have my attention drawn to it with a bright orange or red light. Overheating, battery problems, engine needing service, etc, they've all got a bright red or orange light which tells me what's up. And there's only one time when you need to monitor the situation behind you, and that's when you're slowing or stopping when travelling forwards, and whenever you're backing up. If you think driving is hard, you shouldn't be doing it.
I can talk on the phone and drive at the same time no sweat. I've got this skill known as "priorities" and from the sound of your comment and the comments of others, you all totally lack this skill.
Do you know what I do when I'm on my phone and I'm about to conduct a high-speed merge onto the freeway? "Hold on for a sec."
Pulling out of a parking space? "Hang on a sec."
In heavy traffic with a lot of stop-and-go and drivers not using their turn signals and cutting me off? "I'll call you back in five minutes."
Cruisin' down the highway at sixty miles per hour at 4am without a single other car on the road? I conduct my goddamn conversation without any problems what-so-ever.
If I'm in a new city, I'll not talk on the phone unless I'm talking on the phone to get directions.
It's all about priorities. I would drop my phone, my drink, my food, my anything if I ascertained the presence of a challenge or threat in my surroundings. It's about judgement, threat assessment, prioritization and survival instinct. They are completely right that gamers are better at talking on the phone while driving, because gamers have these skills, and then some.
It's when peoples' priorities are all fucked up that cellphones become a problem. Driving is the PRIMARY task, all others are secondary, tertiary, etc. One time some dumb broad almost merged right into my passenger side because she was on her phone not paying attention. She prioritized the call with whomever she was talking ahead of driving, and that's a no-no. Driving comes first, the conversations come second. Ask them to hold for a minute, tell them you'll call them back, but put driving first. If you can do that, everything else is cake.
The problem isn't cellphones, the problem is shitty drivers.
Oh come ON! You have to tell us what they were! At least the top five!
Download the hotfixes from another computer and burn them to a CD or copy them to a USB drive. See this thread on the Microsoft Software Forum Network for a list of the hotfixes currently out in the wild:
8 6
/q /n and /z switches (except the mailicious software removal tool, which isn't really a "hotfix" per se). So put all the hotfixes in one folder, open a command prompt and then navigate to that folder and then get your i/o redirection groove on:
/b *.exe | ssed -e "s,$, /q /n /z," > InstallHotfixSilent.cmd
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=318
The page also lists the switches to specify to do a silent install, so once you've downloaded them all you can create a batch file to install them all, put the hotfixes and the batch file in a folder on a CD, insert CD, execute, get a snack, come back, your machine is now secure. huzzah!
Tip: If you have super sed ( http://sed.sf.net/grabbag/ssed/sed-3.59.zip ) Then you can make this batch file pretty easily. All of the hotfixes released after service pack 2 support the
dir
Actually, if you'd ever seen the Microsoft campus, you'd know that while they don't have roses, they do have some of the most beautiful landscaping around. I can say with complete confidence that the MSN division is totally spoiled when it comes to the landscaping around their buildings, though.