Now, now, don't be starting a religious war. Now personally, I wouldn't use a Mac. Ever. But then I'm a tech head who loves to fiddle with internals and despises being "protected" from such things by a company that thinks they know better.
A while back, I was the first guy in the ring to smack down the Mac zealots, but in my Old Age (tm) and expanding experience with multiple platforms I realized that only one question matters when picking a platform, and that is: "Will it work?"
PC's work for me. I have been handling all their little idiosyncrasies since 1985 when I got my first box. I use Windows as my desktop environment and Linux as my server. The mainstay of my experience has been in hardware and networking, and recently I've been getting into programming, so I'm using Visual Basic to write simple apps and explore the basics of programming. Yes, I know most Slashdotters cringe at the very mention of VB, but it is a good learning tool with almost instant debugging feedback. As I learn more about VB, I find that C source code doesn't look like a hopeless, jumbled mess anymore, which is something I wasn't able to see before.
My parents use PC's, but I wouldn't switch them to a Mac any sooner than I would put them on Linux. Why? My Dad uses Windows all day at his work, and all my mom wants to do on a PC is play poker, slots, and check her Hotmail account. If problems should arise, I would be nowhere near able to troubleshoot problems over the phone on a Mac or Linux as well as I can on Windows. So they run a Windows PC.
The way I see it is this: If you let idealism win out over practicality, you are just cutting off your nose to spite your face. I am guessing the poster you replied to switched his parents to a Mac because it "works" for them. Macs may have their problems, but what doesn't?
Last I checked, arcades were dead. Just about all of them here in SoCal are out of business. Yeah, you have your GameWorks and Dave & Busters, but those games are EXPENSIVE to play now. Consoles have caught up to what arcade machines can do graphics and speedwise, so all that you see now are those huge behemoths that you sit in and they vibrate and such. Thanks but no thanks. Does Microsoft really thing this will do ANYTHING for their gaming venture?
Not to troll, but why is anyone using Sendmail when it's a well-documented block of swiss cheese as far as security is concerned? As far as I know, Qmail hasn't been cracked yet.
What's wrong with game development is the same thing that's wrong with Hollywood...They are trying to roll stuff out to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make up for the insane production costs. Every once and awhile, though, some gems come along, but they are few. The rest is just fluff designed to get people to buy in. The reasons for a breakdown are obvious; the publisher is putting up the money for armies of musicians, artists, programmers, mappers, etc, etc to work on a game for three years or so, and they're going to want to see that money come back, otherwise it's bye bye developer. Gone are the days where all you needed to make a great game was ten (or less) people who didn't write the entire game eyeing the bottom line because they had to sell their souls to the publisher. They just wanted to make a game that would be fun.
A female Starbuck? Hahaha! Well if she's anything like the real Starbuck, they're going to have to make her hit up every guy on the ship. They're probably doing this in case this is going to develop into a series. When they run out of ideas they'll just play up the sexual tension between Apollo and Chickbuck and turn the thing into a damned soap opera, just like what happened in just about every permutation of Star Trek. Cripes, even X-Files did this with Fox and Scully towards the end.
Seeing as how the Cylons want to conquer the human race, my money's on MS software, probably Microsoft Subjugation Server 2.0. What is Microsoft Subjugation Server 1.0 then? Think Palladium:)
Now as all the married and almost married men out here know, that if i was to say what i was thinking, it would have been a very lonely night for me and my PC!:-)
Yeah, but you would have to got to blow away some hookers!
My girlfriend cackles like a banshee and says things like "Come here and die, bitch!" when she runs over people in Carmageddon. I'm almost afraid what's going to happen if I hand her GTA3.
Maybe so, but I judge radio stations based on how long it takes me to hit another preset. Classic rock and oldies stations I last the longest on without my finger getting itchy. Anything owned by Clear Channel lasts an average of 2.46 seconds (+- 0.5 secs...I have a manual transmission) before I switch.
Doesn't really matter...All the "hit" songs playing on the radio all follow the same basic formula. The suits already understand what makes a hit song and crank that garbage out ad nauseum. Is it Bratney? Christina Ugularia? Mandy Whore? Who cares, they all sound the same! The only stations I listen to now are the classic rock and oldies stations (except it kind of depresses me to listen the oldies stations...Some of my favorite songs from the 80's are starting to get playtime on them)
Everyone I know who has bought Turbotax has done so before they knew about the full pain in the ass that this copy protection is. To these people, I have evangelized TaxCut, which I have used for my taxes this year. Most people's hangup is that they think that TaxCut can't bring in their previous year information from a TurboTax file, but it can. As far as the protection itself is concerned, I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing any kind of information to the MBR other than the day you format a disk or install a bootloader is a big no-no. Inuit is deluding themselves if they think this won't affect them in the long run.
Last year, bought a Seagate drive (yes I know....),
Why the negativity? I've found Seagates to be quite reliable (Their Decathlon series was atrocious though, agh, those were data death waiting to happen) I've had much worse luck with the IBM DeathStar (60GXP/75GXP, which get the click of death when they get a bit hot under the collar)series, and Maxtors (A customer of mine had a Maxtor drive that decided to totally fry one day. After I determined it was unsalvagable, I took it apart to find out what happened. When the drive went to park the heads during shutdown, the PLASTIC HEAD STOP broke and the heads went right off the platter. When the drive started up again the heads tried to get back into their position on the platters...*PLING*, the arms crashed right into the edge of the platter and busted the heads clean off)
I've never had a problem with any Seagate drive I've owned, but I guess everyone has their own preferences and horror stories and sucesses with particular vendors.
And I know what you mean by waiting around for the drive to heal itself...Many times (especially on drives that have been running for awhile) I've had drives simply not want to start up after the system powers off for maintenance. Just about every time a good whack or quick power cycles will coax the platters into spinning again, after which a backup is promptly done:)
Feh. Not to troll, but my own experience with DriveSavers has been, well, not so good. We had a drive go bad in a customer's server once, of course they had no backups, and all their accounting and business data on it. DriveSavers to the rescue, right? Wrong. Turns out the drive had a head crash in the FAT region and the drive had never been defragged, so what it came down to is that we were charged a couple grand for a CDR full of corrupt data. w00t.
Salvation came from a most unlikely place. Turns out that a secretary who they had fired only a few months ago had used the backup program that comes with Windows to archive the entire server drive on to her local machine. The data was 4 months out of date, but it beat the hell out of starting from scratch.
Oh, but you haven't thought of the children and the environment. That thing probably spews out toxin in the form of byproducts of gasoline combustion. You are an evil, evil man.
Ah, how right you are. However the electricity required to charge the Segway comes from such wonderful things as combustion, nuclear reactors, and other not-so-environment friendly things. I'm of the school of thought that if dirty work must be done, it should be done yourself. Therefore, I will fly over the Segway zealots in my Skycar, pollute the hell out of the atmosphere with my rotary combustion engine, and look way cool doing it!
Forget the Segway. As long as we are dealing in the pipe dream of alternative transporation, I'd rather put my money here. And the best part is nobody would think you are gay for showing up to a party in one of them.
Re:The segway may stink... but the hype is impress
on
Buy a Segway... Please
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've been scratching my head over the same thing. The only thing I can come up with is that it seems that Dean Kamen has a Steve Jobs-type charisma and celebrity status, and everyone knows that half of a journalist's job is celebrity ass-kissing, which is why you haven't heard anyone say "So what?". Everything you see written about Dean Kamen says stuff like "inventor, entrepreneur, all round great guy, blah blah blah", but what it comes down to is that he's trying to sell a scooter for 5 grand that's being outlawed in the very city centers it was intended for in the first place....San Francisco comes to mind.
Here's why I think the Segway is failing: Those who can afford it and those who would use it are two separate markets. The people who can afford it would tend to be successful professionals who have cars to drive to work and live in suburbia. Are they going to drive their cars to the edge of the city, pull their 80-pound Segway out of the trunk, and cruise to work that way? I think not. Those who would use it would most likely live in the city where they work and would cruise there in a Segway. The problem is that when you are paying $2100/mo for 600 sq ft, you might want to think about stretching your legs and walking instead of racking up another $5000 bill. Also to consider is the fact that most city dwellings are in highrise buildings...Are you going to haul your Segway up the stairs?
My question is, is it really feasible to know everything about a given system? A jack of all trades is a master of none, after all. And that isn't even taking into account classified systems, where different parts of the working system are not only farmed out to different departments, but sometimes different companies. This is why very detailed software specifications are so important. It is the responsibility of the hardware engineers to tell you what the machine expects. Can you, who specializes in programming, really be expected to know everything about the hardware if you didn't design it? Tell you what, let's forget about programming and consider other things where responsibilites need to be split up, like building a house. While a builder may do general construction, there are areas where he may not be so good in, so things like electrical, roofing, masonry and such will be farmed out to subcontractors who specialize in said activities. The builder still knows the big picture, but can't handle the miniscule details. If he tried to, certain aspects of the house would probably be poor quality and take way to much time to do. The way I see it, programming is no different. It's about making the highest quality product possible in the shortest amount of time. And like everything else, it can't be expected to be perfect.
Exactly. In fact, Microsoft is having a hard time pushing.NET because of that problem...Nobody knows what it is. I sure as hell don't...The first question in my mind is "How does.NET relate to my infrastructure?" It seems that a lot of other IS guys are wondering that too because Microsoft changed their next generation server OS's name from.NET Server to Server 2003. Remember the days of Novell, how we went from Novell 4.x to Novell Intranetware? Nobody bought it beacuse nobody knew how it fit in. "Is it supposed to be newer than what I have now?," people would ask. At least Microsoft caught this problem before they rolled out, but I'm still wondering how all of this is going to fit in with XP. IMHO, one of the dumbest things Microsoft ever did was change their product names to reflect years/letters/whatever instead of version numbers. Are people so clueless so as to be intimidated by something called Windows 6.0? Is it really less confusing to have crap floating around like Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows Server.NET, etc? All the same, I don't see what advantages the next version could give me. I'm looking at the feature list right now, and there only marginal differences betweeen 2003 and 2000. But even if it has some whizbang stuff, I don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling about having to pray to the holy computer gods that all the software I currently run is compatible and that an upgrade could be performed without serious downtime (yeah right) Since we upgraded from Win98 to 2000 I haven't heard a peep out of any of my users, the server doesn't need too much TLC, and that's the way I like it. An upgrade would only serve to piss everyone off.
Do not forget that Microsoft forced most of those upgrades in the early days...The native file formats between all versions of Office were incompatible until Office 2000 came out. No doubt this newfound compatibility was due to the DOJ investigation. What exactly DOES your company do when somebody sends you an Office 97/2000/XP formatted file?
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I'll take his place for $5M. I know it's a sacrifice, but what a deal for the studio! *ahem* "With great power comes great responsibility"
Thank you, thank you very much.
Maybe not? This looks like prophecy to me!
Now, now, don't be starting a religious war. Now personally, I wouldn't use a Mac. Ever. But then I'm a tech head who loves to fiddle with internals and despises being "protected" from such things by a company that thinks they know better.
A while back, I was the first guy in the ring to smack down the Mac zealots, but in my Old Age (tm) and expanding experience with multiple platforms I realized that only one question matters when picking a platform, and that is: "Will it work?"
PC's work for me. I have been handling all their little idiosyncrasies since 1985 when I got my first box. I use Windows as my desktop environment and Linux as my server. The mainstay of my experience has been in hardware and networking, and recently I've been getting into programming, so I'm using Visual Basic to write simple apps and explore the basics of programming. Yes, I know most Slashdotters cringe at the very mention of VB, but it is a good learning tool with almost instant debugging feedback. As I learn more about VB, I find that C source code doesn't look like a hopeless, jumbled mess anymore, which is something I wasn't able to see before.
My parents use PC's, but I wouldn't switch them to a Mac any sooner than I would put them on Linux. Why? My Dad uses Windows all day at his work, and all my mom wants to do on a PC is play poker, slots, and check her Hotmail account. If problems should arise, I would be nowhere near able to troubleshoot problems over the phone on a Mac or Linux as well as I can on Windows. So they run a Windows PC.
The way I see it is this: If you let idealism win out over practicality, you are just cutting off your nose to spite your face. I am guessing the poster you replied to switched his parents to a Mac because it "works" for them. Macs may have their problems, but what doesn't?
Last I checked, arcades were dead. Just about all of them here in SoCal are out of business. Yeah, you have your GameWorks and Dave & Busters, but those games are EXPENSIVE to play now. Consoles have caught up to what arcade machines can do graphics and speedwise, so all that you see now are those huge behemoths that you sit in and they vibrate and such. Thanks but no thanks.
Does Microsoft really thing this will do ANYTHING for their gaming venture?
Not to troll, but why is anyone using Sendmail when it's a well-documented block of swiss cheese as far as security is concerned? As far as I know, Qmail hasn't been cracked yet.
What's wrong with game development is the same thing that's wrong with Hollywood...They are trying to roll stuff out to appeal to the lowest common denominator to make up for the insane production costs. Every once and awhile, though, some gems come along, but they are few. The rest is just fluff designed to get people to buy in. The reasons for a breakdown are obvious; the publisher is putting up the money for armies of musicians, artists, programmers, mappers, etc, etc to work on a game for three years or so, and they're going to want to see that money come back, otherwise it's bye bye developer. Gone are the days where all you needed to make a great game was ten (or less) people who didn't write the entire game eyeing the bottom line because they had to sell their souls to the publisher. They just wanted to make a game that would be fun.
Ah, a kindred spirit! I loved to lick 9V batteries when I was little rugrat. Well, OK and way past that too. Mmmm...Bitter.
A female Starbuck? Hahaha! Well if she's anything like the real Starbuck, they're going to have to make her hit up every guy on the ship. They're probably doing this in case this is going to develop into a series. When they run out of ideas they'll just play up the sexual tension between Apollo and Chickbuck and turn the thing into a damned soap opera, just like what happened in just about every permutation of Star Trek. Cripes, even X-Files did this with Fox and Scully towards the end.
Seeing as how the Cylons want to conquer the human race, my money's on MS software, probably Microsoft Subjugation Server 2.0. What is Microsoft Subjugation Server 1.0 then? Think Palladium :)
Now as all the married and almost married men out here know, that if i was to say what i was thinking, it would have been a very lonely night for me and my PC! :-)
Yeah, but you would have to got to blow away some hookers!
My girlfriend cackles like a banshee and says things like "Come here and die, bitch!" when she runs over people in Carmageddon. I'm almost afraid what's going to happen if I hand her GTA3.
Maybe so, but I judge radio stations based on how long it takes me to hit another preset. Classic rock and oldies stations I last the longest on without my finger getting itchy. Anything owned by Clear Channel lasts an average of 2.46 seconds (+- 0.5 secs...I have a manual transmission) before I switch.
Doesn't really matter...All the "hit" songs playing on the radio all follow the same basic formula. The suits already understand what makes a hit song and crank that garbage out ad nauseum. Is it Bratney? Christina Ugularia? Mandy Whore? Who cares, they all sound the same!
The only stations I listen to now are the classic rock and oldies stations (except it kind of depresses me to listen the oldies stations...Some of my favorite songs from the 80's are starting to get playtime on them)
Everyone I know who has bought Turbotax has done so before they knew about the full pain in the ass that this copy protection is. To these people, I have evangelized TaxCut, which I have used for my taxes this year. Most people's hangup is that they think that TaxCut can't bring in their previous year information from a TurboTax file, but it can.
As far as the protection itself is concerned, I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing any kind of information to the MBR other than the day you format a disk or install a bootloader is a big no-no. Inuit is deluding themselves if they think this won't affect them in the long run.
Last year, bought a Seagate drive (yes I know....),
:)
Why the negativity? I've found Seagates to be quite reliable (Their Decathlon series was atrocious though, agh, those were data death waiting to happen) I've had much worse luck with the IBM DeathStar (60GXP/75GXP, which get the click of death when they get a bit hot under the collar)series, and Maxtors (A customer of mine had a Maxtor drive that decided to totally fry one day. After I determined it was unsalvagable, I took it apart to find out what happened. When the drive went to park the heads during shutdown, the PLASTIC HEAD STOP broke and the heads went right off the platter. When the drive started up again the heads tried to get back into their position on the platters...*PLING*, the arms crashed right into the edge of the platter and busted the heads clean off)
I've never had a problem with any Seagate drive I've owned, but I guess everyone has their own preferences and horror stories and sucesses with particular vendors.
And I know what you mean by waiting around for the drive to heal itself...Many times (especially on drives that have been running for awhile) I've had drives simply not want to start up after the system powers off for maintenance. Just about every time a good whack or quick power cycles will coax the platters into spinning again, after which a backup is promptly done
Well my story happened about 4 years ago, so perhaps things have changed.
Feh. Not to troll, but my own experience with DriveSavers has been, well, not so good. We had a drive go bad in a customer's server once, of course they had no backups, and all their accounting and business data on it. DriveSavers to the rescue, right? Wrong. Turns out the drive had a head crash in the FAT region and the drive had never been defragged, so what it came down to is that we were charged a couple grand for a CDR full of corrupt data. w00t.
Salvation came from a most unlikely place. Turns out that a secretary who they had fired only a few months ago had used the backup program that comes with Windows to archive the entire server drive on to her local machine. The data was 4 months out of date, but it beat the hell out of starting from scratch.
Oh, but you haven't thought of the children and the environment. That thing probably spews out toxin in the form of byproducts of gasoline combustion. You are an evil, evil man.
Ah, how right you are. However the electricity required to charge the Segway comes from such wonderful things as combustion, nuclear reactors, and other not-so-environment friendly things. I'm of the school of thought that if dirty work must be done, it should be done yourself. Therefore, I will fly over the Segway zealots in my Skycar, pollute the hell out of the atmosphere with my rotary combustion engine, and look way cool doing it!
Forget the Segway. As long as we are dealing in the pipe dream of alternative transporation, I'd rather put my money here.
And the best part is nobody would think you are gay for showing up to a party in one of them.
I've been scratching my head over the same thing. The only thing I can come up with is that it seems that Dean Kamen has a Steve Jobs-type charisma and celebrity status, and everyone knows that half of a journalist's job is celebrity ass-kissing, which is why you haven't heard anyone say "So what?". Everything you see written about Dean Kamen says stuff like "inventor, entrepreneur, all round great guy, blah blah blah", but what it comes down to is that he's trying to sell a scooter for 5 grand that's being outlawed in the very city centers it was intended for in the first place....San Francisco comes to mind.
Here's why I think the Segway is failing: Those who can afford it and those who would use it are two separate markets. The people who can afford it would tend to be successful professionals who have cars to drive to work and live in suburbia. Are they going to drive their cars to the edge of the city, pull their 80-pound Segway out of the trunk, and cruise to work that way? I think not. Those who would use it would most likely live in the city where they work and would cruise there in a Segway. The problem is that when you are paying $2100/mo for 600 sq ft, you might want to think about stretching your legs and walking instead of racking up another $5000 bill. Also to consider is the fact that most city dwellings are in highrise buildings...Are you going to haul your Segway up the stairs?
I've got one word for you..."Bob".
My question is, is it really feasible to know everything about a given system? A jack of all trades is a master of none, after all. And that isn't even taking into account classified systems, where different parts of the working system are not only farmed out to different departments, but sometimes different companies. This is why very detailed software specifications are so important. It is the responsibility of the hardware engineers to tell you what the machine expects. Can you, who specializes in programming, really be expected to know everything about the hardware if you didn't design it?
Tell you what, let's forget about programming and consider other things where responsibilites need to be split up, like building a house. While a builder may do general construction, there are areas where he may not be so good in, so things like electrical, roofing, masonry and such will be farmed out to subcontractors who specialize in said activities. The builder still knows the big picture, but can't handle the miniscule details. If he tried to, certain aspects of the house would probably be poor quality and take way to much time to do. The way I see it, programming is no different. It's about making the highest quality product possible in the shortest amount of time. And like everything else, it can't be expected to be perfect.
Exactly. In fact, Microsoft is having a hard time pushing .NET because of that problem...Nobody knows what it is. I sure as hell don't...The first question in my mind is "How does .NET relate to my infrastructure?" It seems that a lot of other IS guys are wondering that too because Microsoft changed their next generation server OS's name from .NET Server to Server 2003. Remember the days of Novell, how we went from Novell 4.x to Novell Intranetware? Nobody bought it beacuse nobody knew how it fit in. "Is it supposed to be newer than what I have now?," people would ask. At least Microsoft caught this problem before they rolled out, but I'm still wondering how all of this is going to fit in with XP. IMHO, one of the dumbest things Microsoft ever did was change their product names to reflect years/letters/whatever instead of version numbers. Are people so clueless so as to be intimidated by something called Windows 6.0? Is it really less confusing to have crap floating around like Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows Server .NET, etc?
All the same, I don't see what advantages the next version could give me. I'm looking at the feature list right now, and there only marginal differences betweeen 2003 and 2000. But even if it has some whizbang stuff, I don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling about having to pray to the holy computer gods that all the software I currently run is compatible and that an upgrade could be performed without serious downtime (yeah right) Since we upgraded from Win98 to 2000 I haven't heard a peep out of any of my users, the server doesn't need too much TLC, and that's the way I like it. An upgrade would only serve to piss everyone off.
If MS Macro viruses do not replicate, then how do they spread?
There is - It does not self-replicate. This particular program is more trojan-like.
Do not forget that Microsoft forced most of those upgrades in the early days...The native file formats between all versions of Office were incompatible until Office 2000 came out. No doubt this newfound compatibility was due to the DOJ investigation. What exactly DOES your company do when somebody sends you an Office 97/2000/XP formatted file?