Half the/. posts say this, but many many people have
computers worth more than $300-400,
On Slashdot? Probably quite a few of us. We realize
just what sort of crap you get for $400 (not to mention,
we can make $400 go quite a lot further by rolling our
own). But among Mom & Pop and Joe Sixpack? When people
can't tell the technological difference, they decide with
their wallet. I'd wager that the majority of home
PCs sold since early 2004 have cost under $500, and a
steadily increasing percent for under $400.
if you're using that kind of low-end machine, you generally
can't afford this kind of tech support anyways.
However, there you hit a rather nasty snag - Those us us
who know better than to buy the $450 Dell Special-of-the-week
basically know how to take care of our machines. Those who
buy such machines have no choice but to pay through
the nose (or beg a nephew/cousin/brother-in-law) for
help.
The problem, once you've got the data off, is how you
store it on a media that won't degrade over time.
Simple - Redundant serial copies. Unlike analog, digital
copies don't lose anything from generation to generation.
I use DVDs for backups, but don't actually "trust" them
to work, only as a last-resort fallback. I keep my old
files by keeping them on live systems.
My first HDD held 10MB. My second held 40MB - So I just
copied the entire contents of the first over. My next
drive held 340MB, again, just copied the entire 40 to it,
complete with the final state of the 10MB drive. Then a
1.2GB, same process again.
Now my home file server holds over half a TB (though
I'll soon need to add a bit more space to it). I had
started to worry about not having a good complete backup
of that (I have 90% of it backed to DVD, but like I said,
I'd rather not need to actually depend on that)... Until
I recently upgraded my SO's desktop machine. Poof, threw
in a 400GB drive, she needs about 20GB, and has a complete
mirror of all my files up to March of this year.
I see no reason for that trend not to continue... The original
media (the floppies from which I loaded files onto the 10MB
drive) have long since vanished, and even the fifth generation
of the above sequence (the 1.2GB drive) has vanished into the
landfill. Yet I still have all the files I would need to
run a vintage XT clone with MS-DOS 3.3, neatly filed away
with no fewer than three redundant copies still in existance.
So I see the problem of how to store something "forever" as a
bit of a red herring - We don't need any particular
medium that lasts forever, only to last a few years and then
we can make another new copy of it.
There's just something you get out of
playing the Zork Trilogy on the old hardware
that you don't get on the new stuff.
Yeah, "fed up with buggy old hardware".
Once upon a time, I owned an original NES.
Great console, had a ton of games for it,
had a few of the spiffy "advanced" gamepads
for it like the Advantage, even had the stupid
robot that it took me about five minutes to
realize I could play Gyromite easier using
one controller per hand than trying to get
the robot to cooperate.
However, NES games (and all cartridge-based
systems for that matter) had an annoying habit of
of not making proper contact with the console
after a while. I still have all my games, as
well as three separate (working) NES consoles,
yet I have less than a 10% chance of getting
any given game to actually run.
Insert, turn on, growl, turn off, remove, blow
dust from cart, insert, turn on, growl a bit
louder, turn off, remove, blow dust from
console, repeat the above three or four times,
insert, turn on, rip cart from still-powered
console and throw across the room. You think a
lot of people know the Konami code? A lot more
will know the above routine far better.
Compare that to running a game in FCE Ultra:
Start emulator, load rom, play. And those
miserable low quality batteries that conveniently
forget your game right before you would finally
beat it (or worse, burst and corrode the cartridge,
though I never personally had that happen to me)?
Thanks to the magic of saved states, you don't
even need to find a purple fairy or green crystal
or floating disk or glowing pentagram or beat the
current boss/level or any sort of annoying "save
point". Just press the save state key, and go
have dinner.
Yeah, I have nostalgia for the great classics,
but I can do without the classic hardware
itself, thankyouverymuch.
Most of the executives of mid-to-large
sized companies make more than the president.
And that includes "non-profit" companies, which
just mean they don't generate any net revenue,
not that their employees don't make a ton of
money out of some mythical sense of benevolence
(although, non-profits do have an amazing
ability to con such benevolent people into
volunteering at the lowest levels, doing the
gruntwork for free so the CEO can take home
2.5 million instead of a mere 1.7 million).
On the other hand, harboring a database
like this, seems to me outside of the public
interest.
No, the database itself most definitely
does serve the public interest... Trying
to secure exclusive access to that data, however,
does not.
Personally, I had the apparently-erroneous
belief that you couldn't
copyright/patent/trademark/whatever mere
facts, only the application of those facts,
or the layout of specific collections
of those facts. So, while the ACS could
stop someone from downloading their entire
database and reselling access to it, they
don't have much say in someone else offering
their own version of the same basic
information.
Then again, I also would have thought you
couldn't patent trivial boolean operators
such as XOR. Silly me.
Actually, try to find me a 12" PC laptop, with a
competitive price compared to the iBook.
For the laptop, I'll agree - I have yet to see anything
even remotely as nice as an iBook in the sub-$1000
range.
But for a typical desktop machine, sorry, but when
Mom n' Pop, Joe Sixpack, and the rest just want to
read their email, surf the web, and occasionally do
their taxes, convincing them to spend twice as much
for what amounts to eye-candy just doesn't cut it.
And just as a disclaimer, I like OS-X. Better
than Windows, by far. But given the choice of running
OS-X or feeding a starving family of four in Jumoogar
for a year, I'll take the PC and a few hundred in random
toys every time.;-)
This function is provided only for compatibility
with 16-bit Windows. Applications should use the
CreateProcess function.
99% of the time, you use such functions because
you just want to run an external program. You
don't care about their security attributes, or
environment, or inheritance, or "where" they think
they run - You just want them to start and do their
thing. CreateProcess() will let you do that, but
takes TEN parameters, including two structures,
to do so.
So yes, I too still use WinExec() most of the time. I've
actually written a drop-in replacement for it that calls
CreateProcess, but y'know, I've found that it,
doing everything the "right" way, fails more often than
just calling WinExec()! Now, you can probably fairly
say I've missed some subtle caveat of using CreateProcess(),
and I would't disagree (TEN useless parameters!) - But until
you can explain to me why running "test.exe -qvb foo 27" in
the current directory, in my own security context, with
a clone of my own environment and without needing any
special handle inheritance, should require a function with
more than a single parameter? Personally, I even consider
the second parameter of WinExec() useless, since most
programs don't honor the window style passed into them
anyway, but one useless parameter I'll deal with. Nine
seless parameters, (and the one useless one from
WinExec() has expanded into a whopping 18-item structure)
I can do without, thankyouverymuch.
Apple computers are already price
competitive; $999 for an iBook, $1299
for an iMac...
Competative in what market, exactly?
I don't particularly want to let myself get
drawn into a debate about Macs vs PCs, but
the absolutely lowest priced Mac available,
the stripped-down, all-but-useless Mac Mini,
costs in the same range as a typical
name-brand desktop PC.
Going into the $1300 range, you can get some
fairly sweet business-class machines from
Dell, just shy of "with the works".
Amazon seems to be charging cover price on
most paperbacks now, and their CDs are about
the same price as Circuit City and Best
Buy -- and that's before S&H.
In general, I try to support small and/or
local businesses. And I'll always try to
spend my money with them first...
But as you mention, for selection, no
physical store can possibly compete.
As for price...
For CDs, I agree, most of what Amazon has costs
pretty much the same as anywhere else. But
for books...Perhaps we buy totally different
kinds of books, but I've gotten to the point
where I'll check Amazon first, make a
shopping list, and only then go visit
the local stores. For well over 2/3rds of
the books I get (at least a dozen per
month), local stores don't even come close to
Amazon's price. I find that for cheaper and
best-selling material, everyone has pretty much
the same price. But for anything over $20 or
a bit less common, Amazon usually saves me
25-50% off anything I can get local. Almost
without fail, if I go into (for example) Borders
and make an impulse buy, I'll regret it later
when I check the price online.
Now, compared to other online vendors, Amazon
doesn't usually have the best price.
But considering how often I've felt extremely
dissatisfied buying things online (particularly
electronics, although for that I'll go to NewEgg,
not Amazon, but for the same reason), or even
gotten outright burned, I'll pay a buck or two
more to get it from someone reputable. So far, I
can't say Amazon has ever screwed me. They
ship quickly, ship what I order, charge me for only
what I order, and if I have any problems at all
(even my own fault), they don't make a peep
about accepting it back.
Well, last year alone, half a billion
dollars net.
Granted, they had a VERY rocky start, but
they have become the online store.
Sure, you have other niche stores like
NewEgg, and electronic versions of physical
stores like WalMart.com, but when most people
think to themselves "Can I get that cheaper
online", they go straight to Amazon.com.
And now that shopping online has grown into
more than just a faddish thing we geeks do,
that means huge profits for Amazon.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see them
post numbers in the tens of billions by the
end of the decade.
and some Xbox game boxes are using it
to create an animated picture on the side
of the box
Okay, stupid question time...
Why can they use this for DISPOSEABLE FRICKIN'
PACKAGING, but I can't get an arbitrarily-sized
flat (as in, wallpaper) 200dpi monitor for less
than $1000 per square foot?
When a replacement screen for a decent laptop
costs more than the entire laptop (for me,
of course, certainly Dell gets them much
cheaper than that), and they can use this
stuff for a throw-away part of a product's
packaging, you need to suspect someone
holds the strings of the market in a way that
borders on illegal...
Isn't this just a lot of peer reviewed
thesis backed "The SIMS"?
Y'know, you might have meant that as a joke,
but on a more serious note, why wouldn't
we transmit a sort of fictitious avatar rather
than a true representation of ourselves?
Why do a "live" 3d conference, when you can
simply fix everything you've never liked
about yourself? Perhaps you consider your
nose a bit large, or don't like your current
hair-color, or want bigger eyes (they
inspire trust via that whole creepy-baby
psychological thing, very useful in
business dealings).
Personally, I don't look good in a suit
(the sort of person you just know
hates every second of it, and would rather
have on flip-flops, cutoffs and a T)... Why
should my telepresence suffer from that same
problem?
With more and more megapixels, you can take bad pictures,
incredibly off-center, etc.. crop, and voila, the subject is
now perfect center(you can even measure it with photoshop to
be sure!).
You've just given the best reason why professional photographers
will still have a job, regardless of how good digital cameras
get.
The overall composition of a picture, hardness of focus, lighting,
centering, depth of field, and choice of background make the
difference between "Another picture of Sally" in your photo album,
and "My darling wife standing in the mist from Niagra Falls at sunrise
on our honeymoon", which you have blown up and hung on your wall.
In your particular example - Unless you need a passport photo or
the like, you very rarely want the subject centered and maximized
in a picture placed in a context - As a good rule of thumb, shoot
the person at about 1/3rd, and the reason you chose to take the
picture "here" as the other 2/3rds.
Now, you might fairly say that you could do that after-the-fact,
and even control some aspects of the focus and exposure, all in image
processing software. But most people won't, because they don't
have the experience to tell them how to compose a good shot in the first
place.
The big, high-volume machines that photofinishers use
can produce prints at a much lower price-per-print than
a good quality photo printer.
Yeah, but the owners of such multi-$thousand machines don't
sell you those prints cheaper than you could make your
own.
If you have even a hundred digital photos printed per year,
you'd do better to get your own photo printer.
Personally, I don't really see the point of such printing
services - I switched to digital photos so I DON'T
have to keep boxes of pictures in the attic. So I don't
need to search through 6000 physical objects to find a
particular one. So I don't, 50 years from now, go to
find that cherished picture of my childhood dog, only to learn
that the company I had process it used some sort of slowly
decaying dyes, making Rex now bright purple and shaped like
a hedgehog painted by Van Gogh.
Print yourself out a
release form before going, sign it (might want to make up a name
different than your own, in case you get a (rare) particularly observant
salesdrone), and if the "Associate" gives you even the slightest
hassle, whip out said form.
I don't like lying, either, but the war against fair use claimed
"personal integrity" as one of its first victims. If filing
meaningless paperwork in triplicate will get the job done, they can
have a ball filling their filing cabinets with fiction.
What we really need... is a "How the
Slasdot effect Works"
Simple, really...
Write something that tangentially
touches on a geeky subject
subscribe to a million and one pageads
submit your link to Slashdot
Profit!
Notice the lack of a "..." step here... Slashdot
has nicely answered that (apparently-not-so-)eternal
question for us.
The only real skill involved occurs in step
#1... In this case, I have to admit, getting
geeks to read a description of what boils
down to a fashion accessory really takes the
cake!
As an aside, some people totally misunderstand
the Slashdot effect. They believe it involves
writing something factual for step 1, and
trying to harden their webserver as step 2 - Thus
entirely missing out on step 4, and often
actually have to pay more to cover the bandwidth
spike. Tsk tsk tsk, silly people... When will you
learn, the world doesn't want hard data, it wants
the illusion of hard data. real
factual information takes (gasp!) thought to
process.
That presents quite a logistical issue when
your're growing your own food on Mars...
They can grow potatoes but not fennel?
Okay, some spices (saffron, for example) they
would most likely need to import. But even then,
a single kilogram of most spices would last a
few dozen people for years. And for most
commonly used spices, they literally grow as
weeds in the wild. Deliberately growing them
requires no more effort than stuffing the right
seeds in some healthy dirt.
And it's interesting to note that the new menus
were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the
French chef
No specific offense to the French intended, but as
a vegetarian, I can think of much better choices to
have designed the menu (not to mention, not everyone
likes real French-style food).
Indian food, for example, has a truly huge
variation of veggie-only dishes, as does Spanish
(though on that, I'll admit, my experience with
it involves mostly South-American-Spanish, not
Southern-Europe-Spanish food). Greek has a decent
selection as well, and you replace the lamb with
falafel for most of the rest.
But French? The French have a reputation for taking
perfectly good, otherwise healthy and veggie safe foods,
and drenching them in lard. Wrapping them in thinly
sliced meat. Stuffing them with unnameable mollusks
and cephalopods.
Your typical $30-$50 standalone DVD player
doesn't have nearly that level of
sophistication... Preloading? Hah! They
can't even buffer enough to get deinterlacing
and layer breaks right!
No, the annoying menu effects have always existed
for one reason and one reason only - To prepare
us for the overwhelming quantity and slowness of
scene change effects in Revenge of the Sith.
Lucas has known for years that they would
annoy us, so he used his substantial Hollywood
influence to force similar effects anytime you
press the simplest button on your DVD player's
remote, in hopes of desensitizing the public to
such a huge annoyance.
He would apologize, but his "artistic vision"
for RotS demanded this minor sacrifice on our
part.
Subtitles? Spinning cutscene coming at you just
to pick "English". Stereo to Surround? Six-way
slice. Back to the main menu? Fade to black
and back. Actually picking something
from the main menu? Get ready for a transition
longer than the MST3k "movie sign" sequence.
Just deal with it. At least they don't show
commercials between "scenes", as well.
perhaps it is becasue he uses an old release, or
maybe it is the presence or lack of certain plug-ins
I run FF 1.04, but as another person pointed out, a
slightly older version of FlashBlock caused the problem.
I do, however, still find it exceedingly odd that
changing the user agent string had any effect on
the problem, and have to suspect some deliberate
ill-intent on the part of such sites (who presumeably
do not want us to block their highly annoying flash-based
ads). If merely an accident or historical oversight,
you would expect, if anything, they would only support
MSIE and not do anything special for FireFox...
Seriously, remove the cactus from your rectum and
learn to relax...
Heh... Word of advice - Don't even read AC
posts, unless by some miracle they get modded up a
bit. If their author had something intelligent to
say, they would post it from their own account in
hopes of getting some karma for it.
I'll probably get flammed to death for this,
but I'm very sympathetic to groups that think
'net porn it too accessible and goes too
far.
Nothing at all wrong with that view... To
the extent that it ends at your front door.
If you don't want to see porn, or to have
your kids see porn, you have every right to simply
not look at it!
Now, on the bright side, this law requires users
to opt-in. Fair 'nuff. It requires their ISP
to act as more than just a provider-of-bandwidth,
however. Not at all kosher. That raises overall
operating costs, meaning that your lack
of self-control (or control over your kids)
costs me money when the ISP raises
rates for everyone to pay for this.
Personally, if I ran an ISP in Utah, I'd make
damned sure that anyone requesting such a block
got a 100% perfect implementation - Cancel their
acocunt. Poof, no more internet porn getting to
that house!
Personally, I'd like to see a law that makes
it illegal for adult context to appear on a URL
unless is has a special extension, something like
".xxx".
First, define "adult content".
Second, a law of what country? Even if you got
such a law in the US, you could still get to
nastygoatsex.com in Taiwan, or Denmark, or
Vanuatu... The US doesn't control the internet,
as much as we may pretend we do.
I agree with you on that point - I'd love
to have commercial content forced to.com (so I
could block it with a single filter!), ISPs
all on.net, assorted nonprofits as.org, and
so on. But Internic let that one out of
the box a long time ago, and we can't go back
now.
Ah, many thanks! In over ten responses to me,
you've posted the only truly useful one
so far. I had 1.2.9 installed, and it apparently
had some serious issues.
After the sixth person responded simply "well it
works for me", I gained a new appreciation for
why most people hate it when we geeks say the
same thing about most of their problems.;-)
If I hadn't already posted to this topic, you'd
have a mod point coming your way right about
now. Kudos.
I switched my folks over to Firefox, and
this is what I got.
As did I... And when they made that same
complaint (somewhat more eloquently phrased),
I explained that pages not loading (or even
crashing their browser) meant, in no uncertain
terms, that the owner of that site didn't
want their business.
Problem solved.
As an aside - I've noticed that quite a few
"major" sites DELIBERATELY crash
Firefox... Weather.com, as the example I
notice most often (since I actually visit it
regularly)... I use the User Agent Switcher
extension, and if I set it to MSIE (or even
to no user agent at all), such sites work
just fine. If I set it to FF or Moz - Bam!, dead browser.
I mean, not taking the effort to make a site
compatible, I can understand - But to actually
exert effort to deliberately break some
browsers? You'd almost think such actions
must violate some law...
I'm more interested in hearing how they
plan to increase the bandwidth between cpu,
memory, and I/O devices to keep up with 32
processors.
Well, the approach that Opterons currently
take would work just fine, though not necessarily
a cheap solution - Namely, have a bank of RAM
dedicated to each processor.
Ironically enough, however, that approach suits
desktop use far better than server use - you
don't incur any penalties as long as no one
process needs more memory than belongs to a
single CPU. That rarely happens on
desktop systems (with "enough" memory), but
the sort of tasks that might require an 8-way
Opteron also tend to suck as much memory as
you can afford to stick in the box.
That, or you need to run multiple programs at the same
time to take advantage of more than one core at a time.
On my home XP Pro box, freshly after a reboot, I currently
have 15 distinct processes running, with FireFox as the
only obviously user-interactive one.
And that on a box with all the useless default XP
crap turned off - I frequently see machines at work where,
with nothing user-interactive running, the task
list doesn't fit on one screen.
The whole red herring about not having enough multithreaded
apps yet (BTW, please write "Hyperthreading does not equal
multithreading, nor does it equal multicore" a hundred times
on the black board, please) has not mattered since the first
version of Windows 95. I can find ways to use a few more
CPUs, multithreaded apps or not. Just having a second core,
so you can keep your "boring" processes like the OS and antivirus
separate from your interactive programs, makes a system
immensely more responsive.
If you want a single-threaded program to run faster, more
cores won't help. If you want your entire system to run
faster, throw CPUs at it. However, looking at both Intel
and AMD's roadmaps, I'd say the days of a MHz race have
(finally!) neared their conclusion. They'll keep pushing
their clocks, sure, but major leaps will move increasingly
toward number of cores and how those cores interconnect
(those two will basically need to alternate: A
few doublings of core counts leading to memory bottlenecks,
then a new way to keep the cores fed, then a few more
doublings, rinse wash repeat).
I wonder, though... Will Microsoft, Apple, or Linux (or some
entirely new player) take the first leap to requiring one
(or even a few) cores dedicated solely to the OS?
Slashdot Mirror
Half the /. posts say this, but many many people have
computers worth more than $300-400,
On Slashdot? Probably quite a few of us. We realize just what sort of crap you get for $400 (not to mention, we can make $400 go quite a lot further by rolling our own). But among Mom & Pop and Joe Sixpack? When people can't tell the technological difference, they decide with their wallet. I'd wager that the majority of home PCs sold since early 2004 have cost under $500, and a steadily increasing percent for under $400.
if you're using that kind of low-end machine, you generally can't afford this kind of tech support anyways.
However, there you hit a rather nasty snag - Those us us who know better than to buy the $450 Dell Special-of-the-week basically know how to take care of our machines. Those who buy such machines have no choice but to pay through the nose (or beg a nephew/cousin/brother-in-law) for help.
The problem, once you've got the data off, is how you store it on a media that won't degrade over time.
Simple - Redundant serial copies. Unlike analog, digital copies don't lose anything from generation to generation.
I use DVDs for backups, but don't actually "trust" them to work, only as a last-resort fallback. I keep my old files by keeping them on live systems.
My first HDD held 10MB. My second held 40MB - So I just copied the entire contents of the first over. My next drive held 340MB, again, just copied the entire 40 to it, complete with the final state of the 10MB drive. Then a 1.2GB, same process again.
Now my home file server holds over half a TB (though I'll soon need to add a bit more space to it). I had started to worry about not having a good complete backup of that (I have 90% of it backed to DVD, but like I said, I'd rather not need to actually depend on that)... Until I recently upgraded my SO's desktop machine. Poof, threw in a 400GB drive, she needs about 20GB, and has a complete mirror of all my files up to March of this year.
I see no reason for that trend not to continue... The original media (the floppies from which I loaded files onto the 10MB drive) have long since vanished, and even the fifth generation of the above sequence (the 1.2GB drive) has vanished into the landfill. Yet I still have all the files I would need to run a vintage XT clone with MS-DOS 3.3, neatly filed away with no fewer than three redundant copies still in existance.
So I see the problem of how to store something "forever" as a bit of a red herring - We don't need any particular medium that lasts forever, only to last a few years and then we can make another new copy of it.
There's just something you get out of playing the Zork Trilogy on the old hardware that you don't get on the new stuff.
Yeah, "fed up with buggy old hardware".
Once upon a time, I owned an original NES. Great console, had a ton of games for it, had a few of the spiffy "advanced" gamepads for it like the Advantage, even had the stupid robot that it took me about five minutes to realize I could play Gyromite easier using one controller per hand than trying to get the robot to cooperate.
However, NES games (and all cartridge-based systems for that matter) had an annoying habit of of not making proper contact with the console after a while. I still have all my games, as well as three separate (working) NES consoles, yet I have less than a 10% chance of getting any given game to actually run.
Insert, turn on, growl, turn off, remove, blow dust from cart, insert, turn on, growl a bit louder, turn off, remove, blow dust from console, repeat the above three or four times, insert, turn on, rip cart from still-powered console and throw across the room. You think a lot of people know the Konami code? A lot more will know the above routine far better.
Compare that to running a game in FCE Ultra: Start emulator, load rom, play. And those miserable low quality batteries that conveniently forget your game right before you would finally beat it (or worse, burst and corrode the cartridge, though I never personally had that happen to me)? Thanks to the magic of saved states, you don't even need to find a purple fairy or green crystal or floating disk or glowing pentagram or beat the current boss/level or any sort of annoying "save point". Just press the save state key, and go have dinner.
Yeah, I have nostalgia for the great classics, but I can do without the classic hardware itself, thankyouverymuch.
he gets paid more than the president?
Most of the executives of mid-to-large sized companies make more than the president. And that includes "non-profit" companies, which just mean they don't generate any net revenue, not that their employees don't make a ton of money out of some mythical sense of benevolence (although, non-profits do have an amazing ability to con such benevolent people into volunteering at the lowest levels, doing the gruntwork for free so the CEO can take home 2.5 million instead of a mere 1.7 million).
On the other hand, harboring a database like this, seems to me outside of the public interest.
No, the database itself most definitely does serve the public interest... Trying to secure exclusive access to that data, however, does not.
Personally, I had the apparently-erroneous belief that you couldn't copyright/patent/trademark/whatever mere facts, only the application of those facts, or the layout of specific collections of those facts. So, while the ACS could stop someone from downloading their entire database and reselling access to it, they don't have much say in someone else offering their own version of the same basic information.
Then again, I also would have thought you couldn't patent trivial boolean operators such as XOR. Silly me.
Actually, try to find me a 12" PC laptop, with a competitive price compared to the iBook.
;-)
For the laptop, I'll agree - I have yet to see anything even remotely as nice as an iBook in the sub-$1000 range.
But for a typical desktop machine, sorry, but when Mom n' Pop, Joe Sixpack, and the rest just want to read their email, surf the web, and occasionally do their taxes, convincing them to spend twice as much for what amounts to eye-candy just doesn't cut it.
And just as a disclaimer, I like OS-X. Better than Windows, by far. But given the choice of running OS-X or feeding a starving family of four in Jumoogar for a year, I'll take the PC and a few hundred in random toys every time.
This function is provided only for compatibility with 16-bit Windows. Applications should use the CreateProcess function.
99% of the time, you use such functions because you just want to run an external program. You don't care about their security attributes, or environment, or inheritance, or "where" they think they run - You just want them to start and do their thing. CreateProcess() will let you do that, but takes TEN parameters, including two structures, to do so.
So yes, I too still use WinExec() most of the time. I've actually written a drop-in replacement for it that calls CreateProcess, but y'know, I've found that it, doing everything the "right" way, fails more often than just calling WinExec()! Now, you can probably fairly say I've missed some subtle caveat of using CreateProcess(), and I would't disagree (TEN useless parameters!) - But until you can explain to me why running "test.exe -qvb foo 27" in the current directory, in my own security context, with a clone of my own environment and without needing any special handle inheritance, should require a function with more than a single parameter? Personally, I even consider the second parameter of WinExec() useless, since most programs don't honor the window style passed into them anyway, but one useless parameter I'll deal with. Nine seless parameters, (and the one useless one from WinExec() has expanded into a whopping 18-item structure) I can do without, thankyouverymuch.
Just give me the good old system() call any day.
Apple computers are already price competitive; $999 for an iBook, $1299 for an iMac...
Competative in what market, exactly?
I don't particularly want to let myself get drawn into a debate about Macs vs PCs, but the absolutely lowest priced Mac available, the stripped-down, all-but-useless Mac Mini, costs in the same range as a typical name-brand desktop PC.
Going into the $1300 range, you can get some fairly sweet business-class machines from Dell, just shy of "with the works".
Amazon seems to be charging cover price on most paperbacks now, and their CDs are about the same price as Circuit City and Best Buy -- and that's before S&H.
In general, I try to support small and/or local businesses. And I'll always try to spend my money with them first... But as you mention, for selection, no physical store can possibly compete.
As for price...
For CDs, I agree, most of what Amazon has costs pretty much the same as anywhere else. But for books...Perhaps we buy totally different kinds of books, but I've gotten to the point where I'll check Amazon first, make a shopping list, and only then go visit the local stores. For well over 2/3rds of the books I get (at least a dozen per month), local stores don't even come close to Amazon's price. I find that for cheaper and best-selling material, everyone has pretty much the same price. But for anything over $20 or a bit less common, Amazon usually saves me 25-50% off anything I can get local. Almost without fail, if I go into (for example) Borders and make an impulse buy, I'll regret it later when I check the price online.
Now, compared to other online vendors, Amazon doesn't usually have the best price. But considering how often I've felt extremely dissatisfied buying things online (particularly electronics, although for that I'll go to NewEgg, not Amazon, but for the same reason), or even gotten outright burned, I'll pay a buck or two more to get it from someone reputable. So far, I can't say Amazon has ever screwed me. They ship quickly, ship what I order, charge me for only what I order, and if I have any problems at all (even my own fault), they don't make a peep about accepting it back.
how much of a profit have they turned?
Well, last year alone, half a billion dollars net.
Granted, they had a VERY rocky start, but they have become the online store. Sure, you have other niche stores like NewEgg, and electronic versions of physical stores like WalMart.com, but when most people think to themselves "Can I get that cheaper online", they go straight to Amazon.com.
And now that shopping online has grown into more than just a faddish thing we geeks do, that means huge profits for Amazon. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see them post numbers in the tens of billions by the end of the decade.
and some Xbox game boxes are using it to create an animated picture on the side of the box
Okay, stupid question time...
Why can they use this for DISPOSEABLE FRICKIN' PACKAGING, but I can't get an arbitrarily-sized flat (as in, wallpaper) 200dpi monitor for less than $1000 per square foot?
When a replacement screen for a decent laptop costs more than the entire laptop (for me, of course, certainly Dell gets them much cheaper than that), and they can use this stuff for a throw-away part of a product's packaging, you need to suspect someone holds the strings of the market in a way that borders on illegal...
Isn't this just a lot of peer reviewed thesis backed "The SIMS"?
Y'know, you might have meant that as a joke, but on a more serious note, why wouldn't we transmit a sort of fictitious avatar rather than a true representation of ourselves?
Why do a "live" 3d conference, when you can simply fix everything you've never liked about yourself? Perhaps you consider your nose a bit large, or don't like your current hair-color, or want bigger eyes (they inspire trust via that whole creepy-baby psychological thing, very useful in business dealings).
Personally, I don't look good in a suit (the sort of person you just know hates every second of it, and would rather have on flip-flops, cutoffs and a T)... Why should my telepresence suffer from that same problem?
With more and more megapixels, you can take bad pictures, incredibly off-center, etc.. crop, and voila, the subject is now perfect center(you can even measure it with photoshop to be sure!).
You've just given the best reason why professional photographers will still have a job, regardless of how good digital cameras get.
The overall composition of a picture, hardness of focus, lighting, centering, depth of field, and choice of background make the difference between "Another picture of Sally" in your photo album, and "My darling wife standing in the mist from Niagra Falls at sunrise on our honeymoon", which you have blown up and hung on your wall.
In your particular example - Unless you need a passport photo or the like, you very rarely want the subject centered and maximized in a picture placed in a context - As a good rule of thumb, shoot the person at about 1/3rd, and the reason you chose to take the picture "here" as the other 2/3rds.
Now, you might fairly say that you could do that after-the-fact, and even control some aspects of the focus and exposure, all in image processing software. But most people won't, because they don't have the experience to tell them how to compose a good shot in the first place.
The big, high-volume machines that photofinishers use can produce prints at a much lower price-per-print than a good quality photo printer.
Yeah, but the owners of such multi-$thousand machines don't sell you those prints cheaper than you could make your own.
If you have even a hundred digital photos printed per year, you'd do better to get your own photo printer.
Personally, I don't really see the point of such printing services - I switched to digital photos so I DON'T have to keep boxes of pictures in the attic. So I don't need to search through 6000 physical objects to find a particular one. So I don't, 50 years from now, go to find that cherished picture of my childhood dog, only to learn that the company I had process it used some sort of slowly decaying dyes, making Rex now bright purple and shaped like a hedgehog painted by Van Gogh.
I fail to see the problem, here...
Print yourself out a release form before going, sign it (might want to make up a name different than your own, in case you get a (rare) particularly observant salesdrone), and if the "Associate" gives you even the slightest hassle, whip out said form.
I don't like lying, either, but the war against fair use claimed "personal integrity" as one of its first victims. If filing meaningless paperwork in triplicate will get the job done, they can have a ball filling their filing cabinets with fiction.
Simple, really...
- Write something that tangentially
touches on a geeky subject
- subscribe to a million and one pageads
- submit your link to Slashdot
- Profit!
Notice the lack of a "..." step here... Slashdot has nicely answered that (apparently-not-so-)eternal question for us.The only real skill involved occurs in step #1... In this case, I have to admit, getting geeks to read a description of what boils down to a fashion accessory really takes the cake!
As an aside, some people totally misunderstand the Slashdot effect. They believe it involves writing something factual for step 1, and trying to harden their webserver as step 2 - Thus entirely missing out on step 4, and often actually have to pay more to cover the bandwidth spike. Tsk tsk tsk, silly people... When will you learn, the world doesn't want hard data, it wants the illusion of hard data. real factual information takes (gasp!) thought to process.
That presents quite a logistical issue when your're growing your own food on Mars...
They can grow potatoes but not fennel?
Okay, some spices (saffron, for example) they would most likely need to import. But even then, a single kilogram of most spices would last a few dozen people for years. And for most commonly used spices, they literally grow as weeds in the wild. Deliberately growing them requires no more effort than stuffing the right seeds in some healthy dirt.
And it's interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef
No specific offense to the French intended, but as a vegetarian, I can think of much better choices to have designed the menu (not to mention, not everyone likes real French-style food).
Indian food, for example, has a truly huge variation of veggie-only dishes, as does Spanish (though on that, I'll admit, my experience with it involves mostly South-American-Spanish, not Southern-Europe-Spanish food). Greek has a decent selection as well, and you replace the lamb with falafel for most of the rest.
But French? The French have a reputation for taking perfectly good, otherwise healthy and veggie safe foods, and drenching them in lard. Wrapping them in thinly sliced meat. Stuffing them with unnameable mollusks and cephalopods.
Not the best choice, IMO.
Is this done for performance?
Your typical $30-$50 standalone DVD player doesn't have nearly that level of sophistication... Preloading? Hah! They can't even buffer enough to get deinterlacing and layer breaks right!
No, the annoying menu effects have always existed for one reason and one reason only - To prepare us for the overwhelming quantity and slowness of scene change effects in Revenge of the Sith. Lucas has known for years that they would annoy us, so he used his substantial Hollywood influence to force similar effects anytime you press the simplest button on your DVD player's remote, in hopes of desensitizing the public to such a huge annoyance.
He would apologize, but his "artistic vision" for RotS demanded this minor sacrifice on our part.
Subtitles? Spinning cutscene coming at you just to pick "English". Stereo to Surround? Six-way slice. Back to the main menu? Fade to black and back. Actually picking something from the main menu? Get ready for a transition longer than the MST3k "movie sign" sequence.
Just deal with it. At least they don't show commercials between "scenes", as well.
The bundled apps like iPhoto, iDVD, iCal or iTunes make the system useful, out of the box, to your average Soccer Mom or Nascar Dad.
Funny - Don't they call that "anticompetitive behavior" when Microsoft does it?
perhaps it is becasue he uses an old release, or maybe it is the presence or lack of certain plug-ins
I run FF 1.04, but as another person pointed out, a slightly older version of FlashBlock caused the problem.
I do, however, still find it exceedingly odd that changing the user agent string had any effect on the problem, and have to suspect some deliberate ill-intent on the part of such sites (who presumeably do not want us to block their highly annoying flash-based ads). If merely an accident or historical oversight, you would expect, if anything, they would only support MSIE and not do anything special for FireFox...
Seriously, remove the cactus from your rectum and learn to relax...
Heh... Word of advice - Don't even read AC posts, unless by some miracle they get modded up a bit. If their author had something intelligent to say, they would post it from their own account in hopes of getting some karma for it.
I'll probably get flammed to death for this, but I'm very sympathetic to groups that think 'net porn it too accessible and goes too far.
.com (so I
could block it with a single filter!), ISPs
all on .net, assorted nonprofits as .org, and
so on. But Internic let that one out of
the box a long time ago, and we can't go back
now.
Nothing at all wrong with that view... To the extent that it ends at your front door.
If you don't want to see porn, or to have your kids see porn, you have every right to simply not look at it!
Now, on the bright side, this law requires users to opt-in. Fair 'nuff. It requires their ISP to act as more than just a provider-of-bandwidth, however. Not at all kosher. That raises overall operating costs, meaning that your lack of self-control (or control over your kids) costs me money when the ISP raises rates for everyone to pay for this.
Personally, if I ran an ISP in Utah, I'd make damned sure that anyone requesting such a block got a 100% perfect implementation - Cancel their acocunt. Poof, no more internet porn getting to that house!
Personally, I'd like to see a law that makes it illegal for adult context to appear on a URL unless is has a special extension, something like ".xxx".
First, define "adult content".
Second, a law of what country? Even if you got such a law in the US, you could still get to nastygoatsex.com in Taiwan, or Denmark, or Vanuatu... The US doesn't control the internet, as much as we may pretend we do.
I agree with you on that point - I'd love to have commercial content forced to
Make sure you have 1.3.1 and dont autoupdate it.
;-)
Ah, many thanks! In over ten responses to me, you've posted the only truly useful one so far. I had 1.2.9 installed, and it apparently had some serious issues.
After the sixth person responded simply "well it works for me", I gained a new appreciation for why most people hate it when we geeks say the same thing about most of their problems.
If I hadn't already posted to this topic, you'd have a mod point coming your way right about now. Kudos.
I switched my folks over to Firefox, and this is what I got.
As did I... And when they made that same complaint (somewhat more eloquently phrased), I explained that pages not loading (or even crashing their browser) meant, in no uncertain terms, that the owner of that site didn't want their business.
Problem solved.
As an aside - I've noticed that quite a few "major" sites DELIBERATELY crash Firefox... Weather.com, as the example I notice most often (since I actually visit it regularly)... I use the User Agent Switcher extension, and if I set it to MSIE (or even to no user agent at all), such sites work just fine. If I set it to FF or Moz - Bam!, dead browser.
I mean, not taking the effort to make a site compatible, I can understand - But to actually exert effort to deliberately break some browsers? You'd almost think such actions must violate some law...
I'm more interested in hearing how they plan to increase the bandwidth between cpu, memory, and I/O devices to keep up with 32 processors.
Well, the approach that Opterons currently take would work just fine, though not necessarily a cheap solution - Namely, have a bank of RAM dedicated to each processor.
Ironically enough, however, that approach suits desktop use far better than server use - you don't incur any penalties as long as no one process needs more memory than belongs to a single CPU. That rarely happens on desktop systems (with "enough" memory), but the sort of tasks that might require an 8-way Opteron also tend to suck as much memory as you can afford to stick in the box.
That, or you need to run multiple programs at the same time to take advantage of more than one core at a time.
On my home XP Pro box, freshly after a reboot, I currently have 15 distinct processes running, with FireFox as the only obviously user-interactive one.
And that on a box with all the useless default XP crap turned off - I frequently see machines at work where, with nothing user-interactive running, the task list doesn't fit on one screen.
The whole red herring about not having enough multithreaded apps yet (BTW, please write "Hyperthreading does not equal multithreading, nor does it equal multicore" a hundred times on the black board, please) has not mattered since the first version of Windows 95. I can find ways to use a few more CPUs, multithreaded apps or not. Just having a second core, so you can keep your "boring" processes like the OS and antivirus separate from your interactive programs, makes a system immensely more responsive.
If you want a single-threaded program to run faster, more cores won't help. If you want your entire system to run faster, throw CPUs at it. However, looking at both Intel and AMD's roadmaps, I'd say the days of a MHz race have (finally!) neared their conclusion. They'll keep pushing their clocks, sure, but major leaps will move increasingly toward number of cores and how those cores interconnect (those two will basically need to alternate: A few doublings of core counts leading to memory bottlenecks, then a new way to keep the cores fed, then a few more doublings, rinse wash repeat).
I wonder, though... Will Microsoft, Apple, or Linux (or some entirely new player) take the first leap to requiring one (or even a few) cores dedicated solely to the OS?