Re:New... Athlon! With triple-cleaning power!
on
K7 Renamed "Athlon"
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· Score: 1
According to The Register In Belgium and possibly France, K7 is the 'rating?' for Male Homoerotic videos. That could possibly be why they don't want to use K7 for the name of their processor.
Ummm, No. Only if you modify GPLed code are you forced to release the source. You can release all the proprietary code you want in Linux without a problem. You just can't take a GPLed program and change it, then not release the source. You can even have proprietary binary kernel modules and link them to the kernel without a problem. You just can't change the GPLed kernel and not release your source changes.
Tell that to my friend who had beta2 wipe out not only itself, but also crapped all over his NT4 partition. Behavior like this is simply not acceptable in a OS. Even a beta shouldn't be that wretched. A decent amount of software testing should be done before you release your beta software. I should know, I spend about half my time at work testing our software releases.
And one problem I have trouble believing MS has addressed is performance. Their minimum setup (last time I looked) was a 300MHz CPU and 64 MB RAM. This should translate to 128 MB Ram and a P2-450 based on how their minumum's translated before.
If you don't like Linux, don't use it. I don't plan on moving to W2K, but I'm certainly not going to stop you... Of course even the Gartner group has said it would probably be a bad idea to migrate anything important to W2K. (Is it just me or is Win2000 a really dumb name? Why didn't they stick with NT5?)
First I'll say I don't agree with the tone of your piece, have you actually run some of the new Linux distributions? Second in the next to last paragraph there is a factual error. You say "All Unixes make up 17 percent, and Linux is a small fraction of that." According to this IDC Report Linux alone makes up 17% of the server market now. This is up from 7% last year, NT's share grew significantly slower than linux's in the same period.
Some additional things to think about might be the stories at CNN and IDC. These talk about where NT is actually used in business settings.
The Asustek v3800 and the Elsa Erazor III both support these(TV in & out). If you don't think that will work for you, grab any TNT2 or TNT2 Ultra board and a Hauppage WinTV 98 . The single card or the combo should do everything your old cards did, only faster.
So there you have it, the NVidia based boards that do everything you want, or a two board solution (like you have now), that does everything you want. But why would you want to watch TV? Don't you know it rots your brain?:)
Re:I don't know how far I'm straying off of topic
on
The Onion on Robots
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· Score: 1
Maybe you work in disneyland. If so, good fer you!
I know you didn't mean it literally. But their is a reason some people who work at disney world call it Mauschwitz. They seem to want to have ridiculous amounts of control over their employees.
You can read "Inside the Mouse" for some reasons why they say this (though I hear the authors are a little too biased to begin with [haven't read it, couldn't swear to it]). I'm not sure where better sources would be.
Amen, Hallelujah brother! I understand their shooting for the lowest common denominator, but jesus the paralell port is so slow. Especially since we have better things available. I vote for ethernet personally 10BT are SO cheap, and you can get one to work on almost anything. Just have a button on it to cycle through 10.0.0.1 -> 10.0.0.254 and we'll be set.
Re:Another article on same site, even better...
on
DNA Encryption
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· Score: 1
This news was on slashdot a while ago (a week or two maybe). Not this specific article, but talking about the same paper they're talking about.
Ah well, I knew vaguely there was a limit somewhere, but I wasn't sure where. I am aware that real time is different than non-RT, but I was just trying to get a feel for what speed processor you would need. It would be more than a bit silly to 'compress' a 44khz - 16 bit - stereo stream to 1068 kbps, that's something like 135 kBps, which is only 15 kBps less than the original stream.
With today's processors and codecs, there's not too much challenge with encoding voice down to 64 kbps or 32 or 16. The problem lies more with TCP/IP. Packets arriving out of order, dying, being delayed, etc. IPv6 (I believe) does have QOS features, so IP telephony should get quite a bit better when this happens.
think we can encode a Real time voice at 64k/sec into a streaming mp3?:) that would be pretty sweet....:)
I can encode 128 kbps mp3's off my cd's at about 8.5x. So if we assume the algorithim scales linearly for encoding (I have no idea if this is right or not). With a PIII-450 we could encode 128 * 8.5 = 1068 kbps in realtime...
With my k6-2 250 I was getting about 2.2x so about 280 kbps in realtime.
So I figure you'd need about a p133 to comfortably handle encoding and decoding in realtime for voice conferencing (this is assuming you use the xing codec). But then why would you use mp3 for this? Speak freely and bunch of other good software are already out there for this specifically.
Well as far as it goes for me, I find myself buying more music as a result of mp3. I'll find a single song, or listen to mp3spy, and realize I haven't heard their stuff before and really like them. I bought four albums as a direct result of this last week. I would not have bought these if it wasn't for being able to hear mp3's of them. Recoil, Curve, Placebo, Legendary Pink Dots, Einsturzende Neubauten, I never hear any of these on the local radio, or anything like them for that matter.
My friend ken is an example of the person who incessantly searches ftp & web sites for mp3's. He needs to write a new CD about every 2-3 months. How has this changed his music buying habits you ask? Well he probably buys five or six cd's a year, the same as before. The artists aren't losing any cash from him.
As far as declining sales in any particular age group, it probably has more to do with how corporate rock has sucked the life out of the music industry. Corporate radio has almost completely removed any choice you might have from the equation. Almost all the station follow a top 40 format and replay their song list at least 3 times a day. Hopefully the FCC will go through with their Low Power FM Radio Broadcasting plan so we can have decent radio available.
Mmmm.... You aren't an electrical engineer are you? Doing precision measurement in electronics is a major PAIN in the ass. I spent a whole quarter in measurement lab getting only slightly accurate results. Measuring electricity is liking finding the exact position and speed of an electron. The more you know about it, the more you are interfering with it (it's not quite that bad). But it is a real pain to get PRECISE measurements, and you have to continually calibrate it.
I'm skeptical of the cold fusion thing I admit. I'd really like it to be true, but I just don't find these experiments credible. I can see where the electrical energy supply would be a source of error.
> Maybe I'd just rather have somebody think of me as inept than as a bad guy.
Hmmm, actually I'd much rather someone think I was evil than inept. No one wants to hire an incompetent programmer, but some people don't mind evil... (Yes I do have a voodoo doll & the 23rd Psalm to Cthulu on my desk at work)
Hypernova are approximately 100 times more powerful than supernova. This still gives a fudge factor of approximately 55 times. So it's equivalent to a supernova at a distance of about 750 light years. A supernova at this distance would be harmful, but again not a complete killer. It still wouldn't be healthy but nothing like a close up view of a supernova. Now if a hypernova went off within ~1000 light years, we would be completely screwed.
Of course if the hypernova are a factor of 10,000 times as energetic as a supernova we would be cooked. Though since it probably won't happen in the next millenium or so gives us plenty of time to advance and prevent this kind of thing from wiping us out.
I'm talking about the kind of radiation that would completely sterilize the earth. Nothing would live through it , not even cockroaches, not even Dick Clark. At 75 times the distance, the amount of radiation necessary for us to be wiped out would have to 5625 times as strong a source. The difference between this and a regular supernova won't be that spectacular I imagine.
Oh sure in a worst case scenario, there might be a year or two where it would be a phenomonally bad idea to go out and suntan. There might be some species die off, and a higher mutation rate. But nothing like a close by Supernova. A close by Supernova would do quite a bit more than strip the paint off your house and give your cat a permanent orange afro.
7500 light years is a good amount of elbow room. Now if it was say 100 LY away I'd start to worry. A supernova at that distance would probably sterilize the earth. It's a good thing we live out in the unfashionable end of a spiral arm of our galaxy. The core probably has some fearsome radiation levels.
Because the power switch goes through the MB instead of to the power supply it makes it more difficult to narrow down problems with a computer. Is it the Power Supply? Is it the Motherboard? You can't tell without popping out the power supply and trying a known good one.
Additionally, is it just me or are the ATX power supplies more fragile than AT's? I've had to replace two of them myself in the period of one year, and my brother had to replace his a few months after he got his. I don't know about him, but I have a UPS (APC) so I know my power is clean. And I've been buying good quality power supplies. Argghh, I like the ATX case design thing-ma-bobs, but I REALLY don't like the power supplies. Is it just me? Am I cursed? Or have other's experienced my travails?
BTW, this is very recent so it's not because I'm using pre 2.01 compliant power supplies.
Too bloody right, I gave up on Star Trek years ago (even before I threw my telly out the window). It's such a mish-mash of well... crap. I know some of it's supposed to be 'way out' sci-fi. But if you're going to do that sort of thing, you can still make it believable.
Paul Hogan, Robert Forward and other's do a good job at this sort of Hard SF writing. Star Drek doesn't even come close.
I think it sucks of course, just like I think it sucks in Toledo and Cincinnati. We just had an incident a month or two ago where some cops pulled a guy over for DWB*. They said initially that he 'was trying to run away'(on foot). He was completely unarmed and had no prior arrests or convictions. He was just some guy. They shot him twice, once in the shoulder and once in the head. He hadn't even gotten out of the car, his car door was still closed.
Errr, actually no. Words can hurt no matter who says them, it just hurts more when someone you care about/love/respect says them. Why do I say this? Because there's been a lot of psychological research done on these topics. Mainly in regards to how/why brainwashing works, also in studying things like boot camps and cult recruiting. Even if you don't care at all about the other person,their constant and repeated verbal assaults will change you. If you're constantly told you suck, you're stupid, you're ugly you will have serious mental problems as a result. If you're constantly interrupted, never allowed to respond, it does bad things to the logic circuits in you're brain. There are whole bodies of literature out there on these kinds of things. Granted if you're mentally prepared for these things you'll weather them better.
This is especially true when a large group of people is doing this to you. A concerted action by a large group of people over a longish period of time, like at a cult 'retreat', a boot camp, or a High School. A toxic atmosphere like this is unacceptable at a POW camp, so why do accept it in a HS? Hell if I know... I know I'm planning on running for the school board whenever I settle down.
So sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can also hurt me.
Well 'jocks' almost certainly don't listen to it, and most of the people listening are over thirty, but... The intelligent people who are often in charge of schools and in positions of influence do. It might not change many minds, but a few here, a few there. You can't win all at once(not that you can't try), you need to take anything you can get.
The sheer mental inertia of our society as a whole precludes any quick change. Look how long it's taken to make racism go from accepted -> tolerated -> social faux pas -> unacceptable. It used to be perfectly acceptable to discriminate against anyone who wasn't white, now the members of the KKK are mostly seen as subhuman scum (Of course it doesn't hurt when their grand [dragon? wizard? what do you call these bozo's?]get's arrested and convicted for raping a 12 year old and a 13 year old).
Any coverage is good, and NPR is much more likely to give balanced intelligent coverage than any of the other organs of the news media. Hmmm if NPR is the brain of news media, what does that make hard copy? The colon? So I guess the point behind all this wind is that don't shoot the reporter until you see the story printed/broadcast.
Browser do not just do 'web surfing' they were originally meant to be an all-in-one kinda pocketknife tool. Why do think you can do file:// gopher:// ftp:// http:// telnet:// ? Because it is bloody well supposed to do ALL kinds of things. Just because you dont think it's not a browsing kind of function doesn't mean it shouldn't be in there.
Anyway, I think it would kind of cool to be able to browse chat groups, maybe have them all linked like an array of starbursts.... Quickly jumping from one to the next till you find one you think is perfect, with people adding links between related ones or at random... Kinda a nifty idea really...
Of course it doesn't help that the US is always interfering with the government of these nations. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world precisely because US companies are invested there. Chiquita has used violence and bloodshed to keep the people from unionizing or even starting there own cooperatives. The choices are not even one thousandth as simple as you think my friend, The US has been using third world countries (especially Latin America) as our source of cheap materials for over a century now.
Where do you think the term "Banana Republic" comes from. It comes from our using these countries to grow the products we want (banana's and other produce) and knocking over there government whenever they tried to take the kind of self-determination your espousing.
I agree with you that there is a large amount of trickle down effect with technology, however I think it will make a big difference to all of us if we can get everyone connected and not just the global middle class.
I come from a similar enough situation that I sympathize with them. Granted I don't think hanging about on the computer is a social life, but not everybody is able/willing to deal with the norms.
I'm making my own way through college, I'm managing it on loans and working 20-30 hours a week. And I DO think that it's built a lot of character, enough to almost drive me mad a time or two. I've never made fake ID's but I know I thought about it, I especially thought about making a bathtub-load of LSD to finance college. And it wasn't because I'm especially inclined to criminal activity, it's because I was desperate.
It's really easy to sit on your moral high horse and say 'No one should ever commit those crimes!' when you have three square, college paid for, and your parents to fall back on if things go to hell. Did they go out and mug people? No, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying you're damn quick to judge.
When your in your own particular circle of hell you'll do damn near anything to get out. See what you do when you land in a bad corner with your back against the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
According to The Register In Belgium and possibly France, K7 is the 'rating?' for Male Homoerotic videos. That could possibly be why they don't want to use K7 for the name of their processor.
Ummm, No. Only if you modify GPLed code are you forced to release the source. You can release all the proprietary code you want in Linux without a problem. You just can't take a GPLed program and change it, then not release the source. You can even have proprietary binary kernel modules and link them to the kernel without a problem. You just can't change the GPLed kernel and not release your source changes.
Tell that to my friend who had beta2 wipe out not only itself, but also crapped all over his NT4 partition. Behavior like this is simply not acceptable in a OS. Even a beta shouldn't be that wretched. A decent amount of software testing should be done before you release your beta software. I should know, I spend about half my time at work testing our software releases.
And one problem I have trouble believing MS has addressed is performance. Their minimum setup (last time I looked) was a 300MHz CPU and 64 MB RAM. This should translate to 128 MB Ram and a P2-450 based on how their minumum's translated before.
If you don't like Linux, don't use it. I don't plan on moving to W2K, but I'm certainly not going to stop you... Of course even the Gartner group has said it would probably be a bad idea to migrate anything important to W2K. (Is it just me or is Win2000 a really dumb name? Why didn't they stick with NT5?)
Here's the letter I sent him.
Subject: Errors in your 'from the ether column'
First I'll say I don't agree with the tone of your piece, have you actually run some of the new Linux distributions? Second in the next to
last paragraph there is a factual error. You say "All Unixes make up 17 percent, and Linux is a small fraction of that." According to this
IDC Report Linux alone makes up 17% of the server market now. This is up from 7% last year, NT's share grew significantly slower than linux's in the same period.
Some additional things to think about might be the stories at CNN and IDC. These talk about where NT is actually used in business settings.
The Asustek v3800 and the Elsa Erazor III both support these(TV in & out). If you don't think that will work for you, grab any TNT2 or TNT2 Ultra board and a Hauppage WinTV 98 . The single card or the combo should do everything your old cards did, only faster.
:)
So there you have it, the NVidia based boards that do everything you want, or a two board solution (like you have now), that does everything you want. But why would you want to watch TV? Don't you know it rots your brain?
Maybe you work in disneyland. If so, good fer you!
I know you didn't mean it literally. But their is a reason some people who work at disney world call it Mauschwitz. They seem to want to have ridiculous amounts of control over their employees.
You can read "Inside the Mouse" for some reasons why they say this (though I hear the authors are a little too biased to begin with [haven't read it, couldn't swear to it]). I'm not sure where better sources would be.
Amen, Hallelujah brother! I understand their shooting for the lowest common denominator, but jesus the paralell port is so slow. Especially since we have better things available. I vote for ethernet personally 10BT are SO cheap, and you can get one to work on almost anything. Just have a button on it to cycle through 10.0.0.1 -> 10.0.0.254 and we'll be set.
This news was on slashdot a while ago (a week or two maybe). Not this specific article, but talking about the same paper they're talking about.
Ah well, I knew vaguely there was a limit somewhere, but I wasn't sure where. I am aware that real time is different than non-RT, but I was just trying to get a feel for what speed processor you would need. It would be more than a bit silly to 'compress' a 44khz - 16 bit - stereo stream to 1068 kbps, that's something like 135 kBps, which is only 15 kBps less than the original stream.
With today's processors and codecs, there's not too much challenge with encoding voice down to 64 kbps or 32 or 16. The problem lies more with TCP/IP. Packets arriving out of order, dying, being delayed, etc. IPv6 (I believe) does have QOS features, so IP telephony should get quite a bit better when this happens.
think we can encode a Real time voice at 64k/sec into a streaming mp3? :) that would be pretty sweet.... :)
I can encode 128 kbps mp3's off my cd's at about 8.5x. So if we assume the algorithim scales linearly for encoding (I have no idea if this is right or not). With a PIII-450 we could encode 128 * 8.5 = 1068 kbps in realtime...
With my k6-2 250 I was getting about 2.2x so about 280 kbps in realtime.
So I figure you'd need about a p133 to comfortably handle encoding and decoding in realtime for voice conferencing (this is assuming you use the xing codec). But then why would you use mp3 for this? Speak freely and bunch of other good software are already out there for this specifically.
Well as far as it goes for me, I find myself buying more music as a result of mp3. I'll find a single song, or listen to mp3spy, and realize I haven't heard their stuff before and really like them. I bought four albums as a direct result of this last week. I would not have bought these if it wasn't for being able to hear mp3's of them. Recoil, Curve, Placebo, Legendary Pink Dots, Einsturzende Neubauten, I never hear any of these on the local radio, or anything like them for that matter.
My friend ken is an example of the person who incessantly searches ftp & web sites for mp3's. He needs to write a new CD about every 2-3 months. How has this changed his music buying habits you ask? Well he probably buys five or six cd's a year, the same as before. The artists aren't losing any cash from him.
As far as declining sales in any particular age group, it probably has more to do with how corporate rock has sucked the life out of the music industry. Corporate radio has almost completely removed any choice you might have from the equation. Almost all the station follow a top 40 format and replay their song list at least 3 times a day. Hopefully the FCC will go through with their Low Power FM Radio Broadcasting plan so we can have decent radio available.
Mmmm.... You aren't an electrical engineer are you? Doing precision measurement in electronics is a major PAIN in the ass. I spent a whole quarter in measurement lab getting only slightly accurate results. Measuring electricity is liking finding the exact position and speed of an electron. The more you know about it, the more you are interfering with it (it's not quite that bad). But it is a real pain to get PRECISE measurements, and you have to continually calibrate it.
I'm skeptical of the cold fusion thing I admit. I'd really like it to be true, but I just don't find these experiments credible. I can see where the electrical energy supply would be a source of error.
> Maybe I'd just rather have somebody think of me as inept than as a bad guy.
Hmmm, actually I'd much rather someone think I was evil than inept. No one wants to hire an incompetent programmer, but some people don't mind evil... (Yes I do have a voodoo doll & the 23rd Psalm to Cthulu on my desk at work)
Hypernova are approximately 100 times more powerful than supernova. This still gives a fudge factor of approximately 55 times. So it's equivalent to a supernova at a distance of about 750 light years. A supernova at this distance would be harmful, but again not a complete killer. It still wouldn't be healthy but nothing like a close up view of a supernova. Now if a hypernova went off within ~1000 light years, we would be completely screwed.
Of course if the hypernova are a factor of 10,000 times as energetic as a supernova we would be cooked. Though since it probably won't happen in the next millenium or so gives us plenty of time to advance and prevent this kind of thing from wiping us out.
Your probably looking for the sci-tech section of of the bbc news page.
BBC Science News
I'm talking about the kind of radiation that would completely sterilize the earth. Nothing would live through it , not even cockroaches, not even Dick Clark. At 75 times the distance, the amount of radiation necessary for us to be wiped out would have to 5625 times as strong a source. The difference between this and a regular supernova won't be that spectacular I imagine.
Oh sure in a worst case scenario, there might be a year or two where it would be a phenomonally bad idea to go out and suntan. There might be some species die off, and a higher mutation rate. But nothing like a close by Supernova. A close by Supernova would do quite a bit more than strip the paint off your house and give your cat a permanent orange afro.
7500 light years is a good amount of elbow room. Now if it was say 100 LY away I'd start to worry. A supernova at that distance would probably sterilize the earth. It's a good thing we live out in the unfashionable end of a spiral arm of our galaxy. The core probably has some fearsome radiation levels.
Because the power switch goes through the MB instead of to the power supply it makes it more difficult to narrow down problems with a computer. Is it the Power Supply? Is it the Motherboard? You can't tell without popping out the power supply and trying a known good one.
Additionally, is it just me or are the ATX power supplies more fragile than AT's? I've had to replace two of them myself in the period of one year, and my brother had to replace his a few months after he got his. I don't know about him, but I have a UPS (APC) so I know my power is clean. And I've been buying good quality power supplies. Argghh, I like the ATX case design thing-ma-bobs, but I REALLY don't like the power supplies. Is it just me? Am I cursed? Or have other's experienced my travails?
BTW, this is very recent so it's not because I'm using pre 2.01 compliant power supplies.
Too bloody right, I gave up on Star Trek years ago (even before I threw my telly out the window). It's such a mish-mash of well... crap. I know some of it's supposed to be 'way out' sci-fi. But if you're going to do that sort of thing, you can still make it believable.
Paul Hogan, Robert Forward and other's do a good job at this sort of Hard SF writing. Star Drek doesn't even come close.
I think it sucks of course, just like I think it sucks in Toledo and Cincinnati. We just had an incident a month or two ago where some cops pulled a guy over for DWB*. They said initially that he 'was trying to run away'(on foot). He was completely unarmed and had no prior arrests or convictions. He was just some guy. They shot him twice, once in the shoulder and once in the head. He hadn't even gotten out of the car, his car door was still closed.
DWB = Driving While Black
Errr, actually no. Words can hurt no matter who says them, it just hurts more when someone you care about/love/respect says them. Why do I say this? Because there's been a lot of psychological research done on these topics. Mainly in regards to how/why brainwashing works, also in studying things like boot camps and cult recruiting. Even if you don't care at all about the other person ,their constant and repeated verbal assaults will change you. If you're constantly told you suck, you're stupid, you're ugly you will have serious mental problems as a result. If you're constantly interrupted, never allowed to respond, it does bad things to the logic circuits in you're brain. There are whole bodies of literature out there on these kinds of things. Granted if you're mentally prepared for these things you'll weather them better.
This is especially true when a large group of people is doing this to you. A concerted action by a large group of people over a longish period of time, like at a cult 'retreat', a boot camp, or a High School. A toxic atmosphere like this is unacceptable at a POW camp, so why do accept it in a HS? Hell if I know... I know I'm planning on running for the school board whenever I settle down.
So sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can also hurt me.
Well 'jocks' almost certainly don't listen to it, and most of the people listening are over thirty, but... The intelligent people who are often in charge of schools and in positions of influence do. It might not change many minds, but a few here, a few there. You can't win all at once(not that you can't try), you need to take anything you can get.
The sheer mental inertia of our society as a whole precludes any quick change. Look how long it's taken to make racism go from accepted -> tolerated -> social faux pas -> unacceptable. It used to be perfectly acceptable to discriminate against anyone who wasn't white, now the members of the KKK are mostly seen as subhuman scum (Of course it doesn't hurt when their grand [dragon? wizard? what do you call these bozo's?]get's arrested and convicted for raping a 12 year old and a 13 year old).
Any coverage is good, and NPR is much more likely to give balanced intelligent coverage than any of the other organs of the news media. Hmmm if NPR is the brain of news media, what does that make hard copy? The colon? So I guess the point behind all this wind is that don't shoot the reporter until you see the story printed/broadcast.
Browser do not just do 'web surfing' they were originally meant to be an all-in-one kinda pocketknife tool. Why do think you can do file:// gopher:// ftp:// http:// telnet:// ? Because it is bloody well supposed to do ALL kinds of things. Just because you dont think it's not a browsing kind of function doesn't mean it shouldn't be in there.
Anyway, I think it would kind of cool to be able to browse chat groups, maybe have them all linked like an array of starbursts.... Quickly jumping from one to the next till you find one you think is perfect, with people adding links between related ones or at random... Kinda a nifty idea really...
Of course it doesn't help that the US is always interfering with the government of these nations. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world precisely because US companies are invested there. Chiquita has used violence and bloodshed to keep the people from unionizing or even starting there own cooperatives. The choices are not even one thousandth as simple as you think my friend, The US has been using third world countries (especially Latin America) as our source of cheap materials for over a century now.
Where do you think the term "Banana Republic" comes from. It comes from our using these countries to grow the products we want (banana's and other produce) and knocking over there government whenever they tried to take the kind of self-determination your espousing.
I agree with you that there is a large amount of trickle down effect with technology, however I think it will make a big difference to all of us if we can get everyone connected and not just the global middle class.
I come from a similar enough situation that I sympathize with them. Granted I don't think hanging about on the computer is a social life, but not everybody is able/willing to deal with the norms.
I'm making my own way through college, I'm managing it on loans and working 20-30 hours a week. And I DO think that it's built a lot of character, enough to almost drive me mad a time or two. I've never made fake ID's but I know I thought about it, I especially thought about making a bathtub-load of LSD to finance college. And it wasn't because I'm especially inclined to criminal activity, it's because I was desperate.
It's really easy to sit on your moral high horse and say 'No one should ever commit those crimes!' when you have three square, college paid for, and your parents to fall back on if things go to hell. Did they go out and mug people? No, I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm just saying you're damn quick to judge.
When your in your own particular circle of hell you'll do damn near anything to get out. See what you do when you land in a bad corner with your back against the wall.