You're calling me a liar? I know for a fact that 20 years ago I was able to make pictures, and even digital pictures on my Commodore 64. Can you read those with your computer today?
Also - about as long ago I saw an artist making paintings on a thing called the Quantel Paintbox (search ebay - you can sometimes find them floating around there) - it had 8 inch floppy disks. Can you read images made with the Quantel Paintbox?
In 20 years will you have a picture viewer that can look at that pristine digital picture?
Many cameras are taking pictures using camera raw - camera raw pictures can really only be read in a few programs right now - one of them is photoshop.
Take pictures made on computers 20 years ago - can you read those pictures easily right now? You'd probably have a hard time reading pictures made with graphics app that dec, quantel etc made back then.
I think you give programmers too much credit. I work for a software company in the support division and personally I don't think the "creativity" and "intellect" portion of it lends too well when the product actually ships and needs to be supported. More often than not programmers who are ineffective at supporting support people give no credibility to the product or the company.
Since I've seen companies live or die based on the level of customer service they give to end users you could say that tech support/customer service people should be as highly paid as some in these companies, unfortunately more often than not were the lowest paid (at least thats true in my company).
Is this true though? I used to work at Stream International and I spent all day talking to graphic professionals who made 5-10 times more than I did (these were people who all worked for companies and organizations everyone here has heard about), but had really no idea really how to use a computer - it was rare to talk to someone who actually had a grasp of clicking on the mouse, navigating folders and following basic instructions to solve problems.
What I found funny about this article is they were quick to say no other counties were affected. How do they know? The only reason someone noticed this is because the machine gave Bush votes to 4000+ people more than the town had.
Also - it isn't curious how the machine errored on the side of Bush?
Plus there's no talk on what kind of bug could automatically enter in votes for Bush? I support point of sale software for a living, and despite the many bugs they do have I've never once, ever, ever, ever seen the programs I support enter line items automatically, or create invoices automatically - or even create more than one invoice when the user only wanted to create one.
Whats funny about scsi vs ide in general - for me at least. The most catastrophic disk failures I've ever had were all on scsi disks - even back when I used to use scsi-2 on older sun4m systems. Were talking where the disk wouldn't power up, read, or anything. And I abuse scsi disks just as much as I do ide. And I've always paid more for scsi. I have some 18 gig 10,000 RPM IBM drives around here that cost over 450$ a piece as little as 4 years ago.
In the past 5 years I had only two ide problems - both were minor. In both cases I was able to recover all the data off the disks before setting up an RMA. They simply started to mark more and more sectors bad every day.
With scsi on the other hand I've had a mixture of IBM, and Seagate disks that have failed for no apparent reason very suddenly. And they were always being actively cooled. And as far as speed goes - there really no quicker than a well setup hardware based IDE raid. My 3ware 7450 can perform just as well as my DPT raid controller that has 7 U80 10000 rpm seagates. The other nice thing about IDE is the drives are usually a lot more quiet. I'm talking about ear piercing vs. almost wisper quiet for a 4 drive raid 5 array.
Its strange though - because I don't recall any mention of objection when the russians first activated glonas in 93. Last I heard the network is still operational.
If you knew so much about 3ware you'd know that you can force a rebuild on a degraded raid 5 - even if you've lost more than 2 drives. Even my cheapo 7540-4 can do this.
3ware also supports hot spares - so why you'd end up having to do this on an enterprise system is beyond me.
It worked okay until one day I had to reboot my file server (moved locations) and I couldn't get the raid to come back up. I lost all my data:(. The bad part is - when it came to forums, irc and generally trying to get help there really wasn't any, a good amount of the documentation out there and the troubleshooting information is for the older tools. I generally believe that when it comes to your data you can only trust tools you can actually support - software raid for all intents and purposes seems highly alpha/beta.
Anyhow I bought a 3ware 7450 Raid controller and haven't looked back - its brutally fast (over 20-30 megs a second in a sequental write), fully supported in linux and it a piece of cake to setup.
Its not bad at recovering either - I had a power failure and the ups failed later on - machine restarted of course when the power came back on and the 3ware controller automatically rewrote all the parity on the disks - everything was fine. While it wrote the parity the system was up and running instantly (raid was in a fail state of course).
I must be lucky - I had a PS2 from the day they were released (yes I waited all night) - and it still seems to work just fine and I haven't done anything to it. In fact just bought the new GTA/SA game and it works just fine.
Same with my Xbox - I have an original one, bought the day they came out. Still works just fine.
And I do use them both for extended periods of time regularly.
Whats funny is you don't have to go all that far to see this sort of thing. Last time I was in BC (in Vancouver) I saw pirated cd's, pirated dc games (in this case they were burned copies with nicely printed covers) and pirated VCD's - these were silver and had nice covers etc - but they sold for like 2$ usd.
Direct, one-on-one access to tiger support engineers
I work in tech support - my only thought was can you imagine some idiot end user getting a hold of this complaining to an engineer every day about various bugs in a beta version of an OS?
Why buy it off steam though? Where's the advantage? At first it was going to be because people who bought cz were going to get a discount (this was said by a valve employee on the steam forums) we didn't.
Then it was like we were going to get it before it hit the shelves. We won't.
Frankly I kinda feel cheated. The only thing I got out of this was counter-strike.
I'd like to second that - I bought a dvd player that is supposed to be divx certified (even has the divx.com logo on it). So far if its a perfect divx clip, with mp3 soundtrack it works great. If its anything but - forget it. Many times it seems to have poor audio.
Xbox on the other hand with xbmc plays it all, divx, wmp, xvid, quicktime, real media, you name it. I have seriously yet to see a media format it won't play with absolute perfection.
I should also mention lightwave (which most people seem to ignore - even though its almost always ahead of the curve feature wise) has had this feature since 94 (at least thats when I first saw it) - Check it out (under rendering)
Part 97.1 - obviously all those questions in the general class exam never did anything for you. It quite clearly states,
"(1) The licensee must perform the routine RF environmental evaluation prescribed by 1.1307(b) of this chapter, if the power of the licensee's station exceeds the limits given in the following table:"
I won't print the whole table here - but for 80 meters the power limit is "500 watts"
I was off a bit sure, but those are definately the rules. Read em.
You're obviously a ham without access to hf frequencies. There's nothing more magical, or scarce than hf - it is a natural phenomenon not at all unlike the so called 7 wonders of world. Would you destroy a natural monument to put up a shopping mall? You might, but I certianly wouldn't want to sacrifice such a thing.
Nothing can replace HF - no frequency on the electro-megnetic spectrum has the same propagation properities.
Also HF is crowded - there isn't a whole lot of bandwidth there to begin with.
Clinging to HF in a day of FRS, GMRS, WiMax, 3G and 802.11g is silly.
When I talk to someone in Japan or Russia or South America on my HF transciever I didn't have to rely on some corperation to connect me up, I don't have to make sure my bill is paid and I not have to make sure I'm in range with the nearest access point or cell repeater. It was just me, the hf band and my radio - nothing else. When I'm passing traffic for an operator in South America you have to remember they don't have telephones at all - never mind cell phones, 802.11 or gmrs. The reason they need a message relayed, or a phone call made is because they don't have these things.
You're not going to provide world wide communications with 802.11, frs and gmrs. There are parts of the state I live in (Oregon)that cell phones don't even work (never mind 802.11) because the company that provides the service didn't deam it necessary. All one has to do is drive off the I-5 corridor to find this out - GSM phones for instance don't work at all in most costal towns, and CDMA coverage is spotty at best.
Ham radio is a hobby enjoyed by a decreasing number of aging people. I would not expect a bunch of Civil War re-enactors to be driving military policy any more than I'd expect a bunch of radio hobbyists to be driving spectrum use policy.
Sounds like you have an axe to grind more than anything - if I had mod points I would have modded this flamebait. I'm 27 and I still enjoy amateur radio. I'm always doing my best to get others my age interested - I agree its an uphill battle. But having a defeatist attitude like yours won't help.
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I call BS
You're calling me a liar? I know for a fact that 20 years ago I was able to make pictures, and even digital pictures on my Commodore 64. Can you read those with your computer today?
Also - about as long ago I saw an artist making paintings on a thing called the Quantel Paintbox (search ebay - you can sometimes find them floating around there) - it had 8 inch floppy disks. Can you read images made with the Quantel Paintbox?
In 20 years will you have a picture viewer that can look at that pristine digital picture?
Many cameras are taking pictures using camera raw - camera raw pictures can really only be read in a few programs right now - one of them is photoshop.
Take pictures made on computers 20 years ago - can you read those pictures easily right now? You'd probably have a hard time reading pictures made with graphics app that dec, quantel etc made back then.
I think you give programmers too much credit. I work for a software company in the support division and personally I don't think the "creativity" and "intellect" portion of it lends too well when the product actually ships and needs to be supported. More often than not programmers who are ineffective at supporting support people give no credibility to the product or the company.
Since I've seen companies live or die based on the level of customer service they give to end users you could say that tech support/customer service people should be as highly paid as some in these companies, unfortunately more often than not were the lowest paid (at least thats true in my company).
Is this true though? I used to work at Stream International and I spent all day talking to graphic professionals who made 5-10 times more than I did (these were people who all worked for companies and organizations everyone here has heard about), but had really no idea really how to use a computer - it was rare to talk to someone who actually had a grasp of clicking on the mouse, navigating folders and following basic instructions to solve problems.
Amazing isn't it. So desperate to bash the president they can pluck something out of thin air and blame Bush for it.
At least its not somehow clinton's fault.
What I found funny about this article is they were quick to say no other counties were affected. How do they know? The only reason someone noticed this is because the machine gave Bush votes to 4000+ people more than the town had.
Also - it isn't curious how the machine errored on the side of Bush?
Plus there's no talk on what kind of bug could automatically enter in votes for Bush? I support point of sale software for a living, and despite the many bugs they do have I've never once, ever, ever, ever seen the programs I support enter line items automatically, or create invoices automatically - or even create more than one invoice when the user only wanted to create one.
No - more like the different between Apple Macintosh executables and Windows executables. Completely different assembler output.
That it one cool thing about being a Mac gamer - you know which games are good because you can play all of them at least a year earlier on the PC.
Whats funny about scsi vs ide in general - for me at least. The most catastrophic disk failures I've ever had were all on scsi disks - even back when I used to use scsi-2 on older sun4m systems. Were talking where the disk wouldn't power up, read, or anything. And I abuse scsi disks just as much as I do ide. And I've always paid more for scsi. I have some 18 gig 10,000 RPM IBM drives around here that cost over 450$ a piece as little as 4 years ago.
In the past 5 years I had only two ide problems - both were minor. In both cases I was able to recover all the data off the disks before setting up an RMA. They simply started to mark more and more sectors bad every day.
With scsi on the other hand I've had a mixture of IBM, and Seagate disks that have failed for no apparent reason very suddenly. And they were always being actively cooled. And as far as speed goes - there really no quicker than a well setup hardware based IDE raid. My 3ware 7450 can perform just as well as my DPT raid controller that has 7 U80 10000 rpm seagates. The other nice thing about IDE is the drives are usually a lot more quiet. I'm talking about ear piercing vs. almost wisper quiet for a 4 drive raid 5 array.
I have no clue, but I have an advert here for a GLONASS reciever and it claims accuracy within 8 meters.
Do you expect me to believe Al-Jazeera has a spokesman named "Jihad Ballout"?
Its strange though - because I don't recall any mention of objection when the russians first activated glonas in 93. Last I heard the network is still operational.
If you knew so much about 3ware you'd know that you can force a rebuild on a degraded raid 5 - even if you've lost more than 2 drives. Even my cheapo 7540-4 can do this.
3ware also supports hot spares - so why you'd end up having to do this on an enterprise system is beyond me.
It worked okay until one day I had to reboot my file server (moved locations) and I couldn't get the raid to come back up. I lost all my data :(. The bad part is - when it came to forums, irc and generally trying to get help there really wasn't any, a good amount of the documentation out there and the troubleshooting information is for the older tools. I generally believe that when it comes to your data you can only trust tools you can actually support - software raid for all intents and purposes seems highly alpha/beta.
Anyhow I bought a 3ware 7450 Raid controller and haven't looked back - its brutally fast (over 20-30 megs a second in a sequental write), fully supported in linux and it a piece of cake to setup.
Its not bad at recovering either - I had a power failure and the ups failed later on - machine restarted of course when the power came back on and the 3ware controller automatically rewrote all the parity on the disks - everything was fine. While it wrote the parity the system was up and running instantly (raid was in a fail state of course).
I must be lucky - I had a PS2 from the day they were released (yes I waited all night) - and it still seems to work just fine and I haven't done anything to it. In fact just bought the new GTA/SA game and it works just fine.
Same with my Xbox - I have an original one, bought the day they came out. Still works just fine.
And I do use them both for extended periods of time regularly.
Here you go > http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_10_26.htm l#008280
Whats funny is you don't have to go all that far to see this sort of thing. Last time I was in BC (in Vancouver) I saw pirated cd's, pirated dc games (in this case they were burned copies with nicely printed covers) and pirated VCD's - these were silver and had nice covers etc - but they sold for like 2$ usd.
If its all about competing with msdn then they should have a program for students.
Direct, one-on-one access to tiger support engineers
I work in tech support - my only thought was can you imagine some idiot end user getting a hold of this complaining to an engineer every day about various bugs in a beta version of an OS?
Why buy it off steam though? Where's the advantage? At first it was going to be because people who bought cz were going to get a discount (this was said by a valve employee on the steam forums) we didn't.
Then it was like we were going to get it before it hit the shelves. We won't.
Frankly I kinda feel cheated. The only thing I got out of this was counter-strike.
I'd like to second that - I bought a dvd player that is supposed to be divx certified (even has the divx.com logo on it). So far if its a perfect divx clip, with mp3 soundtrack it works great. If its anything but - forget it. Many times it seems to have poor audio.
Xbox on the other hand with xbmc plays it all, divx, wmp, xvid, quicktime, real media, you name it. I have seriously yet to see a media format it won't play with absolute perfection.
I should also mention lightwave (which most people seem to ignore - even though its almost always ahead of the curve feature wise) has had this feature since 94 (at least thats when I first saw it) - Check it out (under rendering)
There's a cetian irony here - most bpl systems start at 30 MHz - so in effect citizens band will be destroyed too.
Part 97.1 - obviously all those questions in the general class exam never did anything for you. It quite clearly states,
"(1) The licensee must perform the routine RF environmental evaluation prescribed by 1.1307(b) of this chapter, if the power of the licensee's station exceeds the limits given in the following table:"
I won't print the whole table here - but for 80 meters the power limit is "500 watts"
I was off a bit sure, but those are definately the rules. Read em.
You're obviously a ham without access to hf frequencies. There's nothing more magical, or scarce than hf - it is a natural phenomenon not at all unlike the so called 7 wonders of world. Would you destroy a natural monument to put up a shopping mall? You might, but I certianly wouldn't want to sacrifice such a thing.
Nothing can replace HF - no frequency on the electro-megnetic spectrum has the same propagation properities.
Also HF is crowded - there isn't a whole lot of bandwidth there to begin with.
Clinging to HF in a day of FRS, GMRS, WiMax, 3G and 802.11g is silly.
When I talk to someone in Japan or Russia or South America on my HF transciever I didn't have to rely on some corperation to connect me up, I don't have to make sure my bill is paid and I not have to make sure I'm in range with the nearest access point or cell repeater. It was just me, the hf band and my radio - nothing else. When I'm passing traffic for an operator in South America you have to remember they don't have telephones at all - never mind cell phones, 802.11 or gmrs. The reason they need a message relayed, or a phone call made is because they don't have these things.
You're not going to provide world wide communications with 802.11, frs and gmrs. There are parts of the state I live in (Oregon)that cell phones don't even work (never mind 802.11) because the company that provides the service didn't deam it necessary. All one has to do is drive off the I-5 corridor to find this out - GSM phones for instance don't work at all in most costal towns, and CDMA coverage is spotty at best.
Ham radio is a hobby enjoyed by a decreasing number of aging people. I would not expect a bunch of Civil War re-enactors to be driving military policy any more than I'd expect a bunch of radio hobbyists to be driving spectrum use policy.
Sounds like you have an axe to grind more than anything - if I had mod points I would have modded this flamebait. I'm 27 and I still enjoy amateur radio. I'm always doing my best to get others my age interested - I agree its an uphill battle. But having a defeatist attitude like yours won't help.