More to the point : what could possibly be more important than paying attention to the people you're with ? And what could possibly be more rude than to temporarily ignore them to accept an interruption ? Exactly. If I'm going out for dinner/drinks/whatever with a bunch of friends or family it is for the purpose of spending time with them. We're supposed to chat, joke, communicate, catch up on things. If someone spends the entire time on their cell phone talking with someone else, why did they bother to show up?
My wife and I recently went to the movies... Someone, seated a couple rows ahead of us, spent the entire movie texting someone. All through the movie you could see the glow of their cell phone's screen, and their thumbs bouncing around on the keypad. They obviously weren't paying any attention to the movie. They also had another person with them, who appeared to actually be watching the movie. What are they going to talk about afterwards?
"What did you think about the movie? Wasn't it amazing when that guy did that thing" "Oh, I didn't notice, I was too busy texting..."
Anyone who wants or needs to concentrate suffers from the constant barrage of interruptions from this 'always on' technology.
IM, Cellphones, SMS etc. It seems to be expected now that everyone should be instantly contactable, at any time, for the most trivial of communications. Indeed. It can be downright difficult to get work done when people decide they need to get in touch with you. IMs start popping up, the phone starts ringing, and suddenly it's difficult to focus on the job at hand for more than a few minutes at a time.
Sometimes it's a genuine emergency, and that's understandable. I don't mind getting interrupted when a server is down or something like that... But entirely too often it's questions that could easily have been answered by looking in the documentation or pulling up a help screen.
It gets to the point where I'm almost happy to go out to one of our remote clients, where cell coverage and bandwidth are iffy. At least I know I'll be able to get the job done without interruptions.
I leave Skype on full time these days for Biz purposes, and my GF wants to pop up a chat window every 10 freaking minutes, breaking my concentration, effectively ending my ability to do any meaningful work; I end up just surfing instead of trying to do anything, because I know I'm just going to get interrupted anyway. For me it's ICQ, and almost entirely so my wife can get in touch with me if she needs to... I've managed to keep most of my business contacts off IM and on email instead... But I do agree with the distraction issues.
I don't like IM because it interrupts what I'm doing. The icon blinks, or the window pops up, and I know that someone is on the other end right now, waiting for a response from me. It feels rude to just ignore the message, I have to read it and respond. And that interrupts whatever it was that I was doing... Whatever train of thought I had is now pretty much derailed.
I have the same problem with telephone calls - they're also a disruption. Yes, I know, I'm supposed to be able to juggle and multi-task and whatever else... And sometimes that actually works ok... But very frequently the interruptions are detrimental to the project I'm trying to work on.
Email works much better for me... I still get a notification that I've got email, but the immediacy isn't there. I can wait until there's a lull in what I'm working on to check my email and then take my time to respond appropriately...maybe by putting the current project on hold and addressing the new issue...maybe just by sending off a response...maybe by ignoring it until a more opportune time...
The card in my system will be the LAST Creative product I own
I gave up on Creative a couple years ago. I've had tons of trouble with their drivers and eventually just decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
Does anyone know of any other company that doesn't use Creative hardware or chipsets in their sound cards where I can plug my guitar in and have access to pitch-shifting, chorus, flange, auto-wah, like the old SBLive! 5.1 had in their EAX control panel?
Since all I use my sound for is gaming, and I've just got some cheap desktop stereo speakers, I've been using the on-board sound for a while now.
Previously, however, I had a lot of luck with Turtle Beach sound cards. Very good sound quality and a lot less driver trouble. I've never done any professional sound work though, nor plugged a guitar into anything, so I have no idea if their cards would work for you.
These days SCSI is serial, just like ATA. Modern drives use SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, and they'll still blow the doors off SATA drives. If you absolutely, positively, have to connect massive numbers of very fast drives - SAS is the way to go. Far more bandwidth available than anything SATA has to offer.
And...I still use good ol' parallel SCSI all the time. Lots of tape drives still use it. I just installed a new server last month with an external LTO drive connected with SCSI.
SCSI is about as far from "obsolete" as you can get when it comes to servers.
So they're using nerf guns. What's the big deal. Even if an innocent bystander gets caught in the crossfire, no big deal. Shouldn't they have better things to do?
I would assume it was probably an issue with some innocent bystander not understanding what was going on or just having absolutely no sense of humor and complaining to someone who couldn't ignore them.
Although... Some LARPers build some very nice equipment. Maybe some folks had modded their Nerf guns so they looked more realistic - repainted them or something. I could see that causing quite a bit of trouble.
Or maybe it's just some kind of idiotic "zero tolerance" policy.
A console who's sole purpose for existing is to play games doesn't need to (a) be a general purpose computing system and (b) contain anything particularly sensitive. It can dispense with operating system security.
That just isn't true anymore. Many (most?) consoles have on-line capabilities these days. They can connect to the web, log into your webmail account, facebook, perhaps even your bank account. Many consoles have on-line marketplaces where you can purchase and download software. And they're generally attached directly to your LAN in order to get on-line. Security is just as important on consoles these days as it is a PC. Someone can steal your account information just as easily through a compromised web browser on a console as they can a compromised web browser on a PC.
There's really no reason why a PC has to sacrifice security for gameplay. Most games these days run in userspace. Heck, lots of drivers run in userspace. And if you really don't trust your software you can always run it in a virtual machine. Hardware is fast these days... Sacrificing a few cycles for security isn't even noticeable.
I can get a 64bit mobo, 64bit proc, and still ahve problem finding on that can take more then 8Gigs of ram.
I just bought a couple GIGABYTE GA-M52L-S3 motherboards from NewEgg... They weren't the cheapest things there, but I've certainly paid more for a motherboard. And they support up to 16 GB RAM. Actually... Most of the GIGABYTE AMD motherboards on NewEgg support up to 16 GB.
well I wish 64 Bit would get pushed and 32 Bit activly phased out. as in, stop making it.
It is happening... Slower than I'd like, but it is happening. As RAM gets cheaper you're going to see more and more machines with 4+ GB standard. And then they'll have to switch over to 64-bit.
RAM is getting cheaper every day. Capacity is constantly growing. I just bought 4 GB RAM for about the same price I paid a few years ago for 1 GB. Right now I could build a system with 16 GB RAM without breaking the bank, all from basic consumer-grade parts available on NewEgg. It isn't going to be long before we see systems with more RAM than we know what to do with. Turning a chunk of it into a big RAMdisk sounds like a good idea to me.
in fact even on windows, why do virus scanners need high privileges?
Typically, on a Windows system, antivirus software will embed itself into the operating system fairly deeply. They usually scan all file I/O in real-time, watch memory for suspicious things, and sandbox much of what is run. It isn't as simple as just scanning files here and there. Most Windows antivirus software installs itself (or parts of itself) as a service and starts running even before the shell comes up.
You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?
The problem that I have with most HDD activity lights is that they're seldom where I can actually see them during general use. Pretty much every PC I work on is stuffed under/into a desk, so if I want to see an activity light I have to look away from what I'm working on to check on it. I'm also frequently logged into machines remotely, so any activity lights they may have (and, to be fair, any noises they may make) are miles away. An on-screen indicator of HDD activity is frequently very handy.
I am puzzled. In last thirty years, our country in the heart of Europe has independently manufactured about twenty five complete reactor units. And we're not exactly the pinnacle of the world's engineering, even though compared to our neighbours, we might be pretty good. I would expect USA and other western countries having much more resources than us to be more independent in this respect. Now it may be that the qualiry criteria have been tightened up a little, but still, USA, for example, is a huge country. Don't tell me that a country capable of delivering people to Moon and space probes to the outer Solar system can't manufacture even a single bloody reactor vessel.
Well, to start with, there isn't much desire over here to build nuclear power plants. Years of anti-nuke press have made it a very unpopular form of power generation. This resistance makes it nearly impossible to build new nuclear power plants here in the US.
Secondly, we've outsourced much of our manufacturing capability. The US is largely a service economy these days. Lots of stores, restaurants, etc. - very little actual production. I doubt if there are many (any?) large-scale steel manufacturers in the US anymore. Most places simply import it... Or import pre-made bits and pieces that they need... Or import the finished products...
The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every company's management.
The reason you don't have a "Chief Plumbing Officer" is because the analogy isn't so great.
Most businesses don't grind to a screeching halt when their toilet gets clogged up or the water doesn't work. Most businesses have a very hard time functioning at all these days if a server goes down.
Most businesses don't have to constantly upgrade their plumbing either. They don't suddenly have to upgrade to Toilet2000 in order to keep support... And they don't have vendors telling them Toilet2000 will only run on MSPipeLine2008. And they don't have to worry whether MSPipeLine2008 will play nice with their existing SinkStation98's and DrinkingFountain2001's.
Generally speaking, your plumbing decisions don't impact all that many aspects of your company. But your employees likely use their computers the majority of the time they're at work...and your server is likely used for absolutely anything of importance...and decent bandwidth is the lifeblood of business these days...and if you make the wrong purchases/decisions you could have a very hard time keeping everything up and running.
I would suggest that if plumbing were as integral and dynamic as modern IT you would in fact have a "Chief Plumbing Officer".
Or you could've just kept your 4 year old PC instead of gutting it, use it to watch movies, listen to music, read the news, surf the web, get email. I assume you were already doing all that with it anyhow since I was doing all that back in 1998, on a Pentium 2 with barely 64 MB of ram. In Linux on top of it.
My old PC was, indeed, playing movies/music, surfing the web, getting email - that is true. It even played most games relatively well. So I probably could have kept using it if I'd wanted to.
Then you could've gotten a PS3 for 100$ less then you spent, and used it as a Media center and gaming platform. That extra 100$ could've went to games.
No... Not really.
Part of that $600 "upgrade" was an LCD monitor that replaced my seven year old CRT that was really starting to show its age. I could certainly have used the extra $100 I would have theoretically saved by getting a PS3 to buy an LCD monitor...but then I wouldn't have been saving any money.
Another part of that $600 upgrade was a much larger HDD, because mine was very nearly full. Again, getting a PS3 would not fix that and I would have had to purchase a bigger HDD anyway. Not a significant expense...storage is cheap these days...but now we've gone over the price of my new PC.
Buying a PS3 would not have made my network any faster (my new PC has a Gb NIC). It also wouldn't have made working with large photos any faster, or editing home videos. Nor would buying a PS3 have made my existing collection of PC games look or play any better. I'd still be playing Oblivion, Portal, and Unreal Tournament at 800x600 with all the options turned down as low as they'll go.
So it would have only been a matter of time until I wound up wanting to upgrade my old PC anyway. Of course I wouldn't have $600 to spend on it anymore, so I would only be able to do something like add some more RAM or a bigger video card, and I wouldn't be getting anywhere near the performance that I currently am on my nice new PC.
The PS3 is going to have a longer lifetime of running current games than your 600$ PC will anyhow.
I somehow doubt this. Right off the bat the PS3 isn't going to run a lot of the titles that I enjoy - Dawn of War, Portal, World of Warcraft, etc. Sure, I could still play those on my old computer... But then we're back to my previous comment needing an upgrade anyway.
The PS3 also is not going to play a number of new titles that I'm very interested in like Sins of a Solar Empire, Spore, and StarCraft 2. I'm sure there are tons of great titles on the PS3. I'm sure there's stuff I'd really enjoy playing. But I honestly can't name a single game for it that I really want to play right now, or care about in the near future. And I don't think my old PC would have run Spore, so again I would have wound up wanting an upgrade anyway.
And if we get back to the original comment about being able to upgrade your computer... In a couple years I can throw in another GB or two of RAM for about the price of a single game (going by current prices). Or I can throw in a new video card. Or I can put in a faster processor. And a year or two after that I can add something else. Basically, for the cost of a game or two every year, I can keep my PC very nearly top-of-the-line...if I choose to. And in five or six years when Sony decides that the PS3 is obsolete and rolls out something new I'll still have a perfectly good gaming PC.
It's interesting that you mention your old Pentium II from 1998, because that's what my "old PC" started as. Back around 1998 I bought an off the shelf HP. It served me very well, but eventually I discovered PC games and decided to start upgrading it. I added more RAM and a better video card, but that PC was really never intended to be terribly upgradeable. So I had to replace the motherboard and processor... You get the picture. I upgraded that thing time and again over the years. I refer to
You can't upgrade the CPU (usually) without upgrading the mobo (that is, while you might be able to upgrade to a slightly faster CPU, usually you can't upgrade to the next generation of CPU which gives the big performance gains vs. the incremental upgrade from 3.0 to 3.2 GHz)
I guess that depends on the motherboard that you bought in the first place... Many (most?) AM2 motherboards don't really care what you put in them, and AM2 CPUs scale from some low-end single core Semperons all the way up to some very nice dual core Athlon 64s. There's certainly plenty of room to upgrade there... You could almost double your speed depending on what you buy.
You might be able to upgrade the graphics card, once; about every 2-3 generations of graphics cards and mobos use a new physical interface (i.e. the recent transition from AGP to PCI-X), which requires a new Mobo
Maybe, maybe not. Again, it depends on what you buy. If you get the right motherboard you can support a couple different interfaces at once - for a while there were motherboards that supported both AGP and PCI-X. These days AGP is pretty much gone, but you could always get something with SLI capabilities. Then you can upgrade your individual card, and when that tops out you can add a second one. The point is that you can definitely get more than one video card upgrade.
You can upgrade the amount of ram, but ram is constantly getting faster, and to use the faster ram requires a new mobo
RAM may be constantly getting faster, but I'm not sure that it matters. I'd be willing to bet that you'll see more of a benefit in going from 2 GB to 4 GB than you would staying at 2 GB and just upping the speed of your RAM. And with modern motherboards supporting up to 16 GB there's plenty of room to upgrade.
Then the new Mobo might possibly require you to get a new hard drive (if, e.g. it supports only SATA, and not PATA. . . or it supports the same physical interface standard, but at a slower speed, e.g. the transitions over the years from 33Mbit/s to 66 to 100 and beyond) - yes, you could by a PCI card to provide the old interface, but at that point it might make sense to use the money instead to get a new hard drive (so that the HD isn't a performance bottleneck in your upgraded system.
Again, just buy the right motherboard. There are tons of motherboards out there that support SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, and whatever else you might need. There's no reason for you to replace your HDD unless you actually want to.
Then when you upgrade the Mobo, so that you can upgrade everything else, the new mobo might require a new case and power supply, or other new components (almost certainly it requires new RAM, but you were planning to buy that anyhow)
Again, it depends on what you buy. If you shop carefully you can almost certainly avoid replacing things you don't want to (depending on just how old your machine is). But the case and PSU are probably the last things you'd actually need to replace. I recently completely gutted a 4 year old PC, replaced pretty much everything, but I didn't need to replace my case or PSU.
By the time you finish upgrading your computer, you've spent enough money that it might have made more sense to by a medium-spec next gen machine, instead of trying to upgrade your last-gen machine to high-spec (for that generation). Because the medium spec machine will likely be more powerful than the high-spec last-gen machine. Or, you have, really, bought a new computer, one part at a time, anyhow, and probably spent $400-$600, at least, to do it.
As I said, I recently gutted my 4 year old PC. Completely replaced just about everything. Wound up with a very nice new system for about $600. Sure, I guess I could have bought a console for that price... But then I'd need to buy/build a new PC for my day-to-day use as well,
I don't get people who claim how frequently they have to upgrade their machine, or how much time they allegedly spend maintaining it. I'm calling it BS and the person who modded you up some clueless console fanboy.
I upgraded last summer to a core 2 duo, an 8800 GTX, and a SB X-Fi. I bought the machine 3 years ago. In that 3 years the only thing I'd done was add 1 GB of ram to it and a TV Tuner card. During that time I played all the latest and greatest including first person shooters all the way along.
I have no plans to upgrade 6 months from when I bought that unless I travel back in time, and likely I won't upgraded the graphics card for another year and a half. I can't recall the last time I had a problem so severe on my machine that I had to stop anything I was doing and focus on it rather than do what I wanted to do on the machine.
I used to be a pretty big gamer myself... Used to spend almost every spare dollar upgrading something. Birthday, Christmas, whatever - the ideal gift was an upgrade of some sort. I never had the income to be "bleeding edge", but it was a fun hobby.
That all ended about four years ago. I changed jobs, my lifestyle changed, bought a house, and I just didn't have the time or resources to put into constant upgrades like that. That computer served me very well over those four years. I was able to play pretty much anything I wanted to - World of Warcraft, Condemned, Half-Life 2, Portal, WarCraft III, Oblivion. Sure, I had to turn down the options on some of them...some of them ran a little slow...but I was still able to enjoy myself.
This year, for Christmas, I decided it was time to upgrade. I spent approximately $600 to build a new PC from scratch. Dual-Core CPU, 4 GB RAM, decent video card, LCD monitor... Nothing bleeding edge, but a substantial upgrade for me. I can play absolutely anything on the market right now, most of it with the settings completely maxed out. And unless the industry changes dramatically in the next year or two, I should get the same 4+ years of use out of this computer.
And my old computer has been recycled into a very nice media center PC.
The folks who claim that you have to constantly pour hundreds of dollars and hours of time into PC gaming are simply doing it wrong. Sure, some folks get a kick out of being bleeding edge... But you don't have to do that just to play games on the PC. You can get a perfectly good gaming PC for nearly the same price as a console, and get nearly the same life out of it.
I like to come home, flip on my 360, know it'll work (joke's on me I guess) and play games for an hour or two.. then put it away and go on with my life. It's nice to have a system that just does what it's supposed to do. The game makers know what hardware I'll be using and optimize the game for it. Perfect.
Just like me... Except that I'm a PC gamer... And I simply cannot stand trying to play most games with a controller.
I tried playing Halo on the Xbox... Pure frustration. I had to wait for it to come out on the PC. I'm too used to the keyboard and mouse. And I really enjoy my RTS games, which you don't see much on the console... Same thing goes for 4X titles, though you don't see many of those on the PC anymore either... And I play MMORPGs, which you don't see too often on consoles... I guess the point I'm trying to make is not that PCs are necessarily better or worse than consoles, but rather that they meet different requirements. Consoles just don't cut it for me.
Maybe we care more about having fun than about worrying about optimum input devices, highest possible mouse resolution, upgrading our video cards every 6 months, and so on. All to end up with a "gaming" PC that makes too much noise and crashes all the time (or is down for repairs)
I certainly care more about having fun. I've never worried about "optimum input devices"... Yeah, I like my keyboard and mouse, but that's about as far as it goes. I've never upgraded my video card every 6 months, even when I was a really rabid gamer... I've been able to play most everything I want to for the last four years or so without substantially upgrading my PC at all. Nor have I ever noticed my PC making too much noise, but that's probably because I'm busy listening to the game instead. Nor would I say that my PC crashes terribly often... Maybe once a month... But there have been occasions where I came home from a long, crappy day at work and just didn't want to look at another computer.
The PC is fundamentally flawed... by being a moving target. How fast is a PC? What graphics chipset does a PC have? A developer has to make the game tweakable, so that it works on everyone's PC and the people with the lithium-cooled turbofan graphics card can stop moaning that it doesn't play at 15241x19841 in 64 bit colour.
I've always thought this was part of the appeal of PC gaming myself.
Sure, not everyone wants to stay on the upgrade treadmill... I fell off it a while back myself, and my system is nowhere near "bleeding edge" anymore... But it's nice to be able to constantly push the limits of what the hardware and software can do. The Wii/360/PS3 is only capable of a certain level of performance even under the best of conditions. And in a few years it'll be obsolete, and replaced by a new console. And everyone will rejoice because the new console lets you do new and wonderful things that you couldn't do before.
But on the PC you don't need to wait a few years for your entire platform to be declared obsolete to get new and wonderful things. All you have to do is throw in a new video card, or physics accelerator, or more RAM, or a faster CPU, or whatever. This lets developers constantly push the envelope. And it isn't even just a matter of making new games do cool things. I can throw a new video card in my system and see better performance in my old games as well.
And, to be honest, most PC titles are fairly scalable. I was able to play Oblivion on a machine that had not been substantially upgraded in about four years. It didn't look great, but it played, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit. The same thing can be said for Half-Life 2, and Portal. So you certainly don't have to constantly upgrade your machine if you don't want to...
I grabbed the cheap $5 MP3 download... But couldn't actually download anything. It died after about 1.5 MB. I wound up grabbing a.torrent of it as well.
They don't have to put up with juvenile behavior, learn how to socialize from adults and kids I get to choose
This is one of the best arguments I have against home schooling.
It's entirely possible that you can provide at least as good an education at home as they can in the Public schools, if not a better education. But what you cannot do is provide adequate opportunities to learn social skills. One of the best things that a kid learns in Public School is how to deal with other human beings. They learn how to make friends and how to lose friends, they get in arguments, get picked on, pick on other people, get bullied, bully other people, get told what to do by an assortment of teachers that they probably don't like much, fall in love, fall out of love, etc. Home schooling cannot teach all of that.
I've had the opportunity to work with lots of folks who were home schooled...and they're almost universally awkward people to work with. One of the worst absolutely could not deal with other people at all - he couldn't stand any distractions, needed absolute silence to work, and couldn't handle people telling him what to do. He didn't last too long. Most of them aren't so bad... Most are just kind of awkward and don't know how to communicate with other human beings very well.
This is more P2P patch distribution, which is not a bad idea.
Blizzard uses BitTorrent to distribute patches to World of Warcraft. It generally works quite well, and I'd assume it takes a lot of the load off of Blizzard's servers. The only problem is when you've got an ISP that doesn't like BT...
Why bother? Because cost doesn't seem to be an issue with the ecofriendly crowd that want alternative energy in use. If it costs 5 cents per kilowatt over 10 years or $5.00, it doesn't matter because they said it needs to happen and you will pay for it anyways if it is the only thing available.
And if there are people too cheap to pay the extra, then demonize them, complain and cause the cost of regular energy to increase to a point there is a trade off with regulations and such then get mad at the government for a failing economy when energy costs are sucking all the extra money out of it.
I strongly suspect this is less about "green" energy than it is generating energy in out-of-the-way places. The knee brace article mentions soldiers using it to charge/power their equipment in the field - where they'd typically be carrying around piles of batteries, or solar cells, or hauling around a generator. Being able to generate some electricity from simply walking sounds like a pretty nice trade-off. Similarly if you could make the soldier's uniforms out of this material, or make tents out of it, you could again reduce all the batteries and crap that they have to carry around.
Or you could use these technologies in camping/hiking gear. Charge up your phone/laptop/radio while simply walking through the countryside.
Or they could be used to create tech-friendly apparel. A jacket, perhaps, that keeps your iPod charged up at all times.
Or they could be used to supply power where the local infrastructure is damaged or outright missing. Throw up some tents/shelters made out of this cloth and generate electricity for lighting.
Or maybe something to throw into a survival kit. A little radio beacon sending out a constant SOS that's powered by your movement, or the clothes you wear.
I mean, there are literally tons of non-green reasons to look into technology like this. It may never be an economically viable way to generate large-scale electricity... You may never power your house with it... But there are also plenty of places/situations where economics are not the most important factor.
So how are they supposed to come up with a happy compromise in a no-win situation?
Ideally you want a balance of price to value, so that people feel they are genuinely getting their money's worth. I know there are some pieces of software that I gladly pay for because they do what they are supposed to and do it very well. I genuinely want to help the developers out and ensure that they will continue to develop the product. Then there are other pieces of software that seem like a waste of money.
No matter what the price there is always going to be someone out there who'll pirate the software just because they can. Just for the hell of it. The goal is to get as many people as possible to pay for it. And the best way to do that is to turn out a good product for a good price - not by making it harder to pirate.
Simple solution: pay for a copy, throw it in the bin, and install a stolen copy instead.
This is honestly what I do with the games I play. Purchase the game legally from my favorite retailer, install it from the disc, and promptly download the no-CD crack/patch.
I started doing this a year or two back when the latest and greatest copy protection broke a game that I had legitimately purchased. It wouldn't run at all. No matter what I did it told me I didn't have the disc. So I grabbed the no-CD patch and had no trouble with it.
Ever since then I've made it a habit to crack/patch every game I purchase. Not only do I no longer have to dig through my discs to find the right one when I want to play, but it seems to me that the games run better too.
All these assorted copy protection schemes only affect those of us who actually pay for the software. The folks who are pirating the stuff are already bypassing it all anyway, so they never get inconvenienced at all.
The funny thing is: Here in Europe we have ID cards, but we're very rarely asked to present them (I've had to show mine last time to get the birth certificate for my daughter). However, in the countries that seem so proud of not having national ID cards, everyone and their dog wants my ID for all kinds of crap (I'm 30+ years old and still they want to see my ID if I'm buying alcohol. And they wanted to see it when I was accompanying my wife to the federal building where she had to take care of some paperwork. ID necessary to enter what's essentially an office complex, WTF guys ??), forcing me to carry my passport around everywhere I go (which is _very_ annoying as it doesn't fit in a wallet and there's going to be major hassles if it ever gets lost or stolen).
I really think this is the key difference. I'm constantly reading stories about how various European countries are enacting new privacy laws or resisting re-defining copyright/piracy/fair use. Here in the US, the stories are always about new ways the government is shafting the average citizen. There is the perception, accurate or not, that a national ID card would be used for evil. That the government would have one more way to track us, tax us, bill us, and prosecute us. If the US government were smaller, less powerful, more transparent, or less invasive I doubt if there would be such resistance to the national ID card.
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And what could possibly be more rude than to temporarily ignore them to accept an interruption ? Exactly. If I'm going out for dinner/drinks/whatever with a bunch of friends or family it is for the purpose of spending time with them. We're supposed to chat, joke, communicate, catch up on things. If someone spends the entire time on their cell phone talking with someone else, why did they bother to show up?
My wife and I recently went to the movies... Someone, seated a couple rows ahead of us, spent the entire movie texting someone. All through the movie you could see the glow of their cell phone's screen, and their thumbs bouncing around on the keypad. They obviously weren't paying any attention to the movie. They also had another person with them, who appeared to actually be watching the movie. What are they going to talk about afterwards?
"What did you think about the movie? Wasn't it amazing when that guy did that thing" "Oh, I didn't notice, I was too busy texting..."
IM, Cellphones, SMS etc. It seems to be expected now that everyone should be instantly contactable, at any time, for the most trivial of communications. Indeed. It can be downright difficult to get work done when people decide they need to get in touch with you. IMs start popping up, the phone starts ringing, and suddenly it's difficult to focus on the job at hand for more than a few minutes at a time.
Sometimes it's a genuine emergency, and that's understandable. I don't mind getting interrupted when a server is down or something like that... But entirely too often it's questions that could easily have been answered by looking in the documentation or pulling up a help screen.
It gets to the point where I'm almost happy to go out to one of our remote clients, where cell coverage and bandwidth are iffy. At least I know I'll be able to get the job done without interruptions.
I don't like IM because it interrupts what I'm doing. The icon blinks, or the window pops up, and I know that someone is on the other end right now, waiting for a response from me. It feels rude to just ignore the message, I have to read it and respond. And that interrupts whatever it was that I was doing... Whatever train of thought I had is now pretty much derailed.
I have the same problem with telephone calls - they're also a disruption. Yes, I know, I'm supposed to be able to juggle and multi-task and whatever else... And sometimes that actually works ok... But very frequently the interruptions are detrimental to the project I'm trying to work on.
Email works much better for me... I still get a notification that I've got email, but the immediacy isn't there. I can wait until there's a lull in what I'm working on to check my email and then take my time to respond appropriately...maybe by putting the current project on hold and addressing the new issue...maybe just by sending off a response...maybe by ignoring it until a more opportune time...
Previously, however, I had a lot of luck with Turtle Beach sound cards. Very good sound quality and a lot less driver trouble. I've never done any professional sound work though, nor plugged a guitar into anything, so I have no idea if their cards would work for you.
These days SCSI is serial, just like ATA. Modern drives use SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, and they'll still blow the doors off SATA drives. If you absolutely, positively, have to connect massive numbers of very fast drives - SAS is the way to go. Far more bandwidth available than anything SATA has to offer.
And...I still use good ol' parallel SCSI all the time. Lots of tape drives still use it. I just installed a new server last month with an external LTO drive connected with SCSI.
SCSI is about as far from "obsolete" as you can get when it comes to servers.
Although... Some LARPers build some very nice equipment. Maybe some folks had modded their Nerf guns so they looked more realistic - repainted them or something. I could see that causing quite a bit of trouble.
Or maybe it's just some kind of idiotic "zero tolerance" policy.
There's really no reason why a PC has to sacrifice security for gameplay. Most games these days run in userspace. Heck, lots of drivers run in userspace. And if you really don't trust your software you can always run it in a virtual machine. Hardware is fast these days... Sacrificing a few cycles for security isn't even noticeable.
RAM is getting cheaper every day. Capacity is constantly growing. I just bought 4 GB RAM for about the same price I paid a few years ago for 1 GB. Right now I could build a system with 16 GB RAM without breaking the bank, all from basic consumer-grade parts available on NewEgg. It isn't going to be long before we see systems with more RAM than we know what to do with. Turning a chunk of it into a big RAMdisk sounds like a good idea to me.
Secondly, we've outsourced much of our manufacturing capability. The US is largely a service economy these days. Lots of stores, restaurants, etc. - very little actual production. I doubt if there are many (any?) large-scale steel manufacturers in the US anymore. Most places simply import it... Or import pre-made bits and pieces that they need... Or import the finished products...
Most businesses don't grind to a screeching halt when their toilet gets clogged up or the water doesn't work. Most businesses have a very hard time functioning at all these days if a server goes down.
Most businesses don't have to constantly upgrade their plumbing either. They don't suddenly have to upgrade to Toilet2000 in order to keep support... And they don't have vendors telling them Toilet2000 will only run on MSPipeLine2008. And they don't have to worry whether MSPipeLine2008 will play nice with their existing SinkStation98's and DrinkingFountain2001's.
Generally speaking, your plumbing decisions don't impact all that many aspects of your company. But your employees likely use their computers the majority of the time they're at work...and your server is likely used for absolutely anything of importance...and decent bandwidth is the lifeblood of business these days...and if you make the wrong purchases/decisions you could have a very hard time keeping everything up and running.
I would suggest that if plumbing were as integral and dynamic as modern IT you would in fact have a "Chief Plumbing Officer".
My old PC was, indeed, playing movies/music, surfing the web, getting email - that is true. It even played most games relatively well. So I probably could have kept using it if I'd wanted to.
No... Not really.
Part of that $600 "upgrade" was an LCD monitor that replaced my seven year old CRT that was really starting to show its age. I could certainly have used the extra $100 I would have theoretically saved by getting a PS3 to buy an LCD monitor...but then I wouldn't have been saving any money.
Another part of that $600 upgrade was a much larger HDD, because mine was very nearly full. Again, getting a PS3 would not fix that and I would have had to purchase a bigger HDD anyway. Not a significant expense...storage is cheap these days...but now we've gone over the price of my new PC.
Buying a PS3 would not have made my network any faster (my new PC has a Gb NIC). It also wouldn't have made working with large photos any faster, or editing home videos. Nor would buying a PS3 have made my existing collection of PC games look or play any better. I'd still be playing Oblivion, Portal, and Unreal Tournament at 800x600 with all the options turned down as low as they'll go.
So it would have only been a matter of time until I wound up wanting to upgrade my old PC anyway. Of course I wouldn't have $600 to spend on it anymore, so I would only be able to do something like add some more RAM or a bigger video card, and I wouldn't be getting anywhere near the performance that I currently am on my nice new PC.
I somehow doubt this. Right off the bat the PS3 isn't going to run a lot of the titles that I enjoy - Dawn of War, Portal, World of Warcraft, etc. Sure, I could still play those on my old computer... But then we're back to my previous comment needing an upgrade anyway.
The PS3 also is not going to play a number of new titles that I'm very interested in like Sins of a Solar Empire, Spore, and StarCraft 2. I'm sure there are tons of great titles on the PS3. I'm sure there's stuff I'd really enjoy playing. But I honestly can't name a single game for it that I really want to play right now, or care about in the near future. And I don't think my old PC would have run Spore, so again I would have wound up wanting an upgrade anyway.
And if we get back to the original comment about being able to upgrade your computer... In a couple years I can throw in another GB or two of RAM for about the price of a single game (going by current prices). Or I can throw in a new video card. Or I can put in a faster processor. And a year or two after that I can add something else. Basically, for the cost of a game or two every year, I can keep my PC very nearly top-of-the-line...if I choose to. And in five or six years when Sony decides that the PS3 is obsolete and rolls out something new I'll still have a perfectly good gaming PC.
It's interesting that you mention your old Pentium II from 1998, because that's what my "old PC" started as. Back around 1998 I bought an off the shelf HP. It served me very well, but eventually I discovered PC games and decided to start upgrading it. I added more RAM and a better video card, but that PC was really never intended to be terribly upgradeable. So I had to replace the motherboard and processor... You get the picture. I upgraded that thing time and again over the years. I refer to
I guess that depends on the motherboard that you bought in the first place... Many (most?) AM2 motherboards don't really care what you put in them, and AM2 CPUs scale from some low-end single core Semperons all the way up to some very nice dual core Athlon 64s. There's certainly plenty of room to upgrade there... You could almost double your speed depending on what you buy.
Maybe, maybe not. Again, it depends on what you buy. If you get the right motherboard you can support a couple different interfaces at once - for a while there were motherboards that supported both AGP and PCI-X. These days AGP is pretty much gone, but you could always get something with SLI capabilities. Then you can upgrade your individual card, and when that tops out you can add a second one. The point is that you can definitely get more than one video card upgrade.
RAM may be constantly getting faster, but I'm not sure that it matters. I'd be willing to bet that you'll see more of a benefit in going from 2 GB to 4 GB than you would staying at 2 GB and just upping the speed of your RAM. And with modern motherboards supporting up to 16 GB there's plenty of room to upgrade.
Again, just buy the right motherboard. There are tons of motherboards out there that support SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, and whatever else you might need. There's no reason for you to replace your HDD unless you actually want to.
Again, it depends on what you buy. If you shop carefully you can almost certainly avoid replacing things you don't want to (depending on just how old your machine is). But the case and PSU are probably the last things you'd actually need to replace. I recently completely gutted a 4 year old PC, replaced pretty much everything, but I didn't need to replace my case or PSU.
As I said, I recently gutted my 4 year old PC. Completely replaced just about everything. Wound up with a very nice new system for about $600. Sure, I guess I could have bought a console for that price... But then I'd need to buy/build a new PC for my day-to-day use as well,
That all ended about four years ago. I changed jobs, my lifestyle changed, bought a house, and I just didn't have the time or resources to put into constant upgrades like that. That computer served me very well over those four years. I was able to play pretty much anything I wanted to - World of Warcraft, Condemned, Half-Life 2, Portal, WarCraft III, Oblivion. Sure, I had to turn down the options on some of them...some of them ran a little slow...but I was still able to enjoy myself.
This year, for Christmas, I decided it was time to upgrade. I spent approximately $600 to build a new PC from scratch. Dual-Core CPU, 4 GB RAM, decent video card, LCD monitor... Nothing bleeding edge, but a substantial upgrade for me. I can play absolutely anything on the market right now, most of it with the settings completely maxed out. And unless the industry changes dramatically in the next year or two, I should get the same 4+ years of use out of this computer.
And my old computer has been recycled into a very nice media center PC.
The folks who claim that you have to constantly pour hundreds of dollars and hours of time into PC gaming are simply doing it wrong. Sure, some folks get a kick out of being bleeding edge... But you don't have to do that just to play games on the PC. You can get a perfectly good gaming PC for nearly the same price as a console, and get nearly the same life out of it.
I tried playing Halo on the Xbox... Pure frustration. I had to wait for it to come out on the PC. I'm too used to the keyboard and mouse. And I really enjoy my RTS games, which you don't see much on the console... Same thing goes for 4X titles, though you don't see many of those on the PC anymore either... And I play MMORPGs, which you don't see too often on consoles... I guess the point I'm trying to make is not that PCs are necessarily better or worse than consoles, but rather that they meet different requirements. Consoles just don't cut it for me.I certainly care more about having fun. I've never worried about "optimum input devices"... Yeah, I like my keyboard and mouse, but that's about as far as it goes. I've never upgraded my video card every 6 months, even when I was a really rabid gamer... I've been able to play most everything I want to for the last four years or so without substantially upgrading my PC at all. Nor have I ever noticed my PC making too much noise, but that's probably because I'm busy listening to the game instead. Nor would I say that my PC crashes terribly often... Maybe once a month... But there have been occasions where I came home from a long, crappy day at work and just didn't want to look at another computer.
Sure, not everyone wants to stay on the upgrade treadmill... I fell off it a while back myself, and my system is nowhere near "bleeding edge" anymore... But it's nice to be able to constantly push the limits of what the hardware and software can do. The Wii/360/PS3 is only capable of a certain level of performance even under the best of conditions. And in a few years it'll be obsolete, and replaced by a new console. And everyone will rejoice because the new console lets you do new and wonderful things that you couldn't do before.
But on the PC you don't need to wait a few years for your entire platform to be declared obsolete to get new and wonderful things. All you have to do is throw in a new video card, or physics accelerator, or more RAM, or a faster CPU, or whatever. This lets developers constantly push the envelope. And it isn't even just a matter of making new games do cool things. I can throw a new video card in my system and see better performance in my old games as well.
And, to be honest, most PC titles are fairly scalable. I was able to play Oblivion on a machine that had not been substantially upgraded in about four years. It didn't look great, but it played, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit. The same thing can be said for Half-Life 2, and Portal. So you certainly don't have to constantly upgrade your machine if you don't want to...
I grabbed the cheap $5 MP3 download... But couldn't actually download anything. It died after about 1.5 MB. I wound up grabbing a .torrent of it as well.
It's entirely possible that you can provide at least as good an education at home as they can in the Public schools, if not a better education. But what you cannot do is provide adequate opportunities to learn social skills. One of the best things that a kid learns in Public School is how to deal with other human beings. They learn how to make friends and how to lose friends, they get in arguments, get picked on, pick on other people, get bullied, bully other people, get told what to do by an assortment of teachers that they probably don't like much, fall in love, fall out of love, etc. Home schooling cannot teach all of that.
I've had the opportunity to work with lots of folks who were home schooled...and they're almost universally awkward people to work with. One of the worst absolutely could not deal with other people at all - he couldn't stand any distractions, needed absolute silence to work, and couldn't handle people telling him what to do. He didn't last too long. Most of them aren't so bad... Most are just kind of awkward and don't know how to communicate with other human beings very well.
Or you could use these technologies in camping/hiking gear. Charge up your phone/laptop/radio while simply walking through the countryside.
Or they could be used to create tech-friendly apparel. A jacket, perhaps, that keeps your iPod charged up at all times.
Or they could be used to supply power where the local infrastructure is damaged or outright missing. Throw up some tents/shelters made out of this cloth and generate electricity for lighting.
Or maybe something to throw into a survival kit. A little radio beacon sending out a constant SOS that's powered by your movement, or the clothes you wear.
I mean, there are literally tons of non-green reasons to look into technology like this. It may never be an economically viable way to generate large-scale electricity... You may never power your house with it... But there are also plenty of places/situations where economics are not the most important factor.
No matter what the price there is always going to be someone out there who'll pirate the software just because they can. Just for the hell of it. The goal is to get as many people as possible to pay for it. And the best way to do that is to turn out a good product for a good price - not by making it harder to pirate.
I started doing this a year or two back when the latest and greatest copy protection broke a game that I had legitimately purchased. It wouldn't run at all. No matter what I did it told me I didn't have the disc. So I grabbed the no-CD patch and had no trouble with it.
Ever since then I've made it a habit to crack/patch every game I purchase. Not only do I no longer have to dig through my discs to find the right one when I want to play, but it seems to me that the games run better too.
All these assorted copy protection schemes only affect those of us who actually pay for the software. The folks who are pirating the stuff are already bypassing it all anyway, so they never get inconvenienced at all.