You just described my $500 brushed aluminum chassis touchscreen i3-3217U laptop, except it has 4GB of RAM, 120GB of flash, boots cold in 8 seconds, has zero moving parts, and can run Java, Firefox, Windows, AND Linux. Just watched 45 minutes of video on a TV and battery went down 20%.
Agreed. Look at dentistry: prices are offered upfront and are drastically lower than basically all other fields of medicine, plus the level of care is far greater since it operates like a real business (supply and demand, need to acquire and maintain customers, quality of service matters or people go elsewhere, etc.) The main reason dentistry is different seems to be the fact that dental insurance is almost useless crap that isn't worth paying for unless included as a small add-on to a larger insurance plan, resulting in out-of-pocket payment as the king and dealing with grouchy insurance companies who refuse to pay anything as a much smaller influence. Insurance companies are the crux of the overall problem, not a part of the solution in any way.
Besides, getting a medical bill post-treatment that has $30.00 enumerated for what is essentially two cotton swabs is total bullshit.
Calling someone a sociopath because they don't want the government to be able to force someone to purchase a product from a private entity for owning and operating a human body? You clearly have no cogent arguments in favor of your position if ad hominem is the best you can come up with.
Get a thermoblock espresso maker. Fill the metal basket with a scoop of normal grounds. Put enough water in the tank to fill the mug up. Put your mug where the decanter goes (or use the decanter as an intermediate cup if there's not enough space) and flip the switch. Bam, poor man's Keurig. Been doing it for six years.
To be fair, LibreOffice is doing a good job of fixing OpenOffice, but you have to look at how massive the task at hand really is. OO was designed to pull in Java for as much as it could, and the list of dependencies for OO is absolutely nuts. LO is better, and a prime long-term goal is to strip out all Java dependencies, but when you're trying to fix a complex program that has over a decade of a "let's pull Java in BECAUSE JAVA" mentality, it's going to take a monumental effort to fix the code base to not be a bloated suckfest. Microsoft Office is better, but LibreOffice has potential to get there eventually. In my estimation, the biggest problem with LibreOffice is that it really is pretty bad in terms of bloat. Calc on an old P4 laptop is barely usable; Excel 2007 on the same laptop is just fine.
If you want to point out an open source project that sucks hard, pick anything Lennart Poettering has had a major hand in (PulseAudio, systemd, and important programs GNOME 3 and udev that are forcing systemd dependencies despite massive outcry and a severe break from the UNIX philosophy that makes UNIX-like systems so great in the first place) and with a cursory search it won't take long to find out why they're so crappy and community-dividing in nature. LibreOffice is a bloated thing that needs a decent bit of CPU power to function, but systemd is slowly destroying core Linux software and is rapidly working as Red Hat's agent for its own embrace, extend and extinguish campaign.
Hangouts videos need to go away like yesterday. They're amateurish at best and always sound horrid, plus no one ever does any cutting of them before posting them to the Internet, so they're needlessly lengthy and if they have interesting content it's lost in the sea of "uhhhh....ummm....paaaaaaaaause." *sigh* I couldn't get through a quarter of this video because it's just so freaking bad.
I still browse in a console often with Lynx, elinks, and/or links2 depending on where I am and how I feel. I also use NoScript. Sites that require JavaScript are something I absolutely hate. Even Reddit posts and comments can be (mostly) read using a text-mode browser, so no excuses for Slashdot. I also can't stand how when I set a minimum comment threshold in the mobile view, it doesn't hide the comments! WHAT IS THE POINT of having that option when you're just going to replace the comment text with a giant italic "comment not shown because it's below selected threshold" that takes up the same amount of fucking space?!
I designed better stuff than that on GeoCities in the 90s.
Ah yes, the ACPI device SNY5001. Sony Firmware Extension Parser. I totally would think of that when I see "Unknown Device" and "ACPI\SNY5001". Thanks, Sony!
As someone who has had to rip open and repair Sony VAIO desktops and laptops for a long time, I can say with authority that they're the WORST computer brand EVER when it comes to the repair business. Every computer has two different model numbers, there are a seemingly infinite number of minor incompatible variants, finding used parts is a ridiculous endeavor (because everything has to have multiple model and part numbers and almost no part seems to be drop-in compatible) and I don't care if I never see another one on my workbench ever again.
Any full-sized laptop that requires you to remove the keyboard, all the top plastics, and heaps of fragile FPC cables just to get to the hard drive and memory is automatically ultra-shitty shit and the engineers responsible should be bear dick punched. Maybe the new owners will fix some of this mess./rant
There's nothing like getting fucked.
Without advance warning.
With a rake.
In the eyes.
In the corner of an Internet prison cafeteria.
Slashdot BETA is a war against the Internet proletariat.
Oh well, back to 4chan.
You don't, but then again this applies to every piece of equipment that has any kind of computer code running on it, from NIC firmware to entire operating systems and software suites (TrueCrypt came under fire for precisely this line of reasoning, and comments on/. TrueCrypt posts go into great depth about it.) What this does allow you to do is to check the compiled code already in firmware against the source code and see if there are discrepancies between them that should set off red flags. If you find an unaccounted-for function in the firmware code, alarm bells can be set off and everyone will know that something is amok.
I would specifically like to see this gain the ability to spoof or randomly generate phone ID data for that "read phone identity and number" permission. That'd be pretty fun.
This is why the FIRMWARE of phone radio CPUs needs to be fully open-sourced. Until they are, there is no way to audit them for privacy concerns nor modify them to close such loopholes.
fdupes will work and is faster than writing a homemade script for the job. The big problem is "across multiple machines" which might require use of, say, sshfs to bring all the machines' data remotely onto one temporarily for duplicate scanning. fdupes checks sizes first, and only then starts trying to hash anything, so obvious non-duplicates don't get hashed at all. Significant time savings. Across multiple machines, another option is using md5deep to build recursive hash lists.
The only tool so far that I've used for image duplicate finding that checks CONTENT rather than bitwise 1:1 duplicate checking is GQview on Linux. It works fairly well, though it's a bit dated by now it's still a good viewer program. Add -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 to the CFLAGS if you compile it yourself on a 32-bit machine today though.
I would have preferred that they take the opportunity and destroy Facebook completely. Then maybe people would get the hell off the computer once in a while and, say, sit around a campfire with marshmallows. You know, "the original social network."
For what it's worth, I never have a problem with their RMA process these days. I manage a computer repair shop and pretty much all the major manufacturers seem to have a fairly smooth RMA process, though WD's website and login requirement is definitely somewhat annoying. Lately we have been getting tons of Hitachi drives to replace dying ones with and those seem to have largely held up for the customers. For us, the RMA being mostly painless is the most important process since if affects the service level we can provide to the customer. HDD reliability in general (based on customers returning with a failed drive within manufacturer warranty) seems to be pretty good, but it could have just been incredibly good luck since our volume isn't even near 200+ drives replaced per year.
If a manufacturer starts jerking us around on clear-cut RMA stuff though, I will vendor-blacklist their asses faster than you can say "load cycle count."
Sadly, as the owner of a computer service shop, I see this all the time. If we tell someone a Mac either is not worth repairing or is going to cost several hundred dollars due to the severely limited used parts market for Apple products and the high price it commands as a result, they go buy a brand new Mac for $1000 or more and only pick the old one up in about 1/3 of cases. A large segment of Mac owners are either rich or have great credit. The worst part is that the shorter lifespan of a typical Mac (due to quicker OS releases and software that "expands to fit the developer machine's container" so to speak AND high post-warranty repair costs all leading to premature obsolescence) means Macs probably find their way to the attic or the trash can faster than a lot of PCs.
There are still PC/XT computers from the early 80s that are fully functional and in production use today. I don't think anecdotes about a computer that's been in service for X years supports the assertion that the entire series of said computer is generally "higher in longevity" than another. By such standards, my VIC-20 is better in longevity than any Mac ever made.;)
You seem to forget that what we call "most people" here consists largely of ignorant fools incapable of critical thinking, thus the myopic "HURR DURR MY BACKYARD RAIN BARREL PREDICTS GLOBAL TRENDS!"
I would have watched the whole thing but the unexpected giant chicken made me laugh so much that I had to stop before my spleen ruptured. Holy crap, you have to warn people before you do that!
I think that part of this notion is that if global warming is "a thing," particularly such a disastrous and horrible one, people believe they would be able to observe what is being discussed. 0.326 degrees F increase in the temperature of the top of the global ocean isn't exactly something that most people would be alarmed about, and certainly doesn't have a major impact on the weather in front of some guy's house in Michigan. People have been told for decades that everything is bad and everything will kill them, so it's not a surprise (to me, at least) that people would start to push back and demand more support for assertions of impending doom.
Slashdot Mirror
You just described my $500 brushed aluminum chassis touchscreen i3-3217U laptop, except it has 4GB of RAM, 120GB of flash, boots cold in 8 seconds, has zero moving parts, and can run Java, Firefox, Windows, AND Linux. Just watched 45 minutes of video on a TV and battery went down 20%.
Agreed. Look at dentistry: prices are offered upfront and are drastically lower than basically all other fields of medicine, plus the level of care is far greater since it operates like a real business (supply and demand, need to acquire and maintain customers, quality of service matters or people go elsewhere, etc.) The main reason dentistry is different seems to be the fact that dental insurance is almost useless crap that isn't worth paying for unless included as a small add-on to a larger insurance plan, resulting in out-of-pocket payment as the king and dealing with grouchy insurance companies who refuse to pay anything as a much smaller influence. Insurance companies are the crux of the overall problem, not a part of the solution in any way.
Besides, getting a medical bill post-treatment that has $30.00 enumerated for what is essentially two cotton swabs is total bullshit.
Calling someone a sociopath because they don't want the government to be able to force someone to purchase a product from a private entity for owning and operating a human body? You clearly have no cogent arguments in favor of your position if ad hominem is the best you can come up with.
Get a thermoblock espresso maker. Fill the metal basket with a scoop of normal grounds. Put enough water in the tank to fill the mug up. Put your mug where the decanter goes (or use the decanter as an intermediate cup if there's not enough space) and flip the switch. Bam, poor man's Keurig. Been doing it for six years.
To be fair, LibreOffice is doing a good job of fixing OpenOffice, but you have to look at how massive the task at hand really is. OO was designed to pull in Java for as much as it could, and the list of dependencies for OO is absolutely nuts. LO is better, and a prime long-term goal is to strip out all Java dependencies, but when you're trying to fix a complex program that has over a decade of a "let's pull Java in BECAUSE JAVA" mentality, it's going to take a monumental effort to fix the code base to not be a bloated suckfest. Microsoft Office is better, but LibreOffice has potential to get there eventually. In my estimation, the biggest problem with LibreOffice is that it really is pretty bad in terms of bloat. Calc on an old P4 laptop is barely usable; Excel 2007 on the same laptop is just fine.
If you want to point out an open source project that sucks hard, pick anything Lennart Poettering has had a major hand in (PulseAudio, systemd, and important programs GNOME 3 and udev that are forcing systemd dependencies despite massive outcry and a severe break from the UNIX philosophy that makes UNIX-like systems so great in the first place) and with a cursory search it won't take long to find out why they're so crappy and community-dividing in nature. LibreOffice is a bloated thing that needs a decent bit of CPU power to function, but systemd is slowly destroying core Linux software and is rapidly working as Red Hat's agent for its own embrace, extend and extinguish campaign.
Hangouts videos need to go away like yesterday. They're amateurish at best and always sound horrid, plus no one ever does any cutting of them before posting them to the Internet, so they're needlessly lengthy and if they have interesting content it's lost in the sea of "uhhhh....ummm....paaaaaaaaause." *sigh* I couldn't get through a quarter of this video because it's just so freaking bad.
I still browse in a console often with Lynx, elinks, and/or links2 depending on where I am and how I feel. I also use NoScript. Sites that require JavaScript are something I absolutely hate. Even Reddit posts and comments can be (mostly) read using a text-mode browser, so no excuses for Slashdot. I also can't stand how when I set a minimum comment threshold in the mobile view, it doesn't hide the comments! WHAT IS THE POINT of having that option when you're just going to replace the comment text with a giant italic "comment not shown because it's below selected threshold" that takes up the same amount of fucking space?!
I designed better stuff than that on GeoCities in the 90s.
Ah yes, the ACPI device SNY5001. Sony Firmware Extension Parser. I totally would think of that when I see "Unknown Device" and "ACPI\SNY5001". Thanks, Sony!
As someone who has had to rip open and repair Sony VAIO desktops and laptops for a long time, I can say with authority that they're the WORST computer brand EVER when it comes to the repair business. Every computer has two different model numbers, there are a seemingly infinite number of minor incompatible variants, finding used parts is a ridiculous endeavor (because everything has to have multiple model and part numbers and almost no part seems to be drop-in compatible) and I don't care if I never see another one on my workbench ever again.
/rant
Any full-sized laptop that requires you to remove the keyboard, all the top plastics, and heaps of fragile FPC cables just to get to the hard drive and memory is automatically ultra-shitty shit and the engineers responsible should be bear dick punched. Maybe the new owners will fix some of this mess.
There's nothing like getting fucked.
Without advance warning.
With a rake.
In the eyes.
In the corner of an Internet prison cafeteria.
Slashdot BETA is a war against the Internet proletariat.
Oh well, back to 4chan.
You don't, but then again this applies to every piece of equipment that has any kind of computer code running on it, from NIC firmware to entire operating systems and software suites (TrueCrypt came under fire for precisely this line of reasoning, and comments on /. TrueCrypt posts go into great depth about it.) What this does allow you to do is to check the compiled code already in firmware against the source code and see if there are discrepancies between them that should set off red flags. If you find an unaccounted-for function in the firmware code, alarm bells can be set off and everyone will know that something is amok.
I would specifically like to see this gain the ability to spoof or randomly generate phone ID data for that "read phone identity and number" permission. That'd be pretty fun.
This is why the FIRMWARE of phone radio CPUs needs to be fully open-sourced. Until they are, there is no way to audit them for privacy concerns nor modify them to close such loopholes.
I always use: fdupes -nrSd *
fdupes will work and is faster than writing a homemade script for the job. The big problem is "across multiple machines" which might require use of, say, sshfs to bring all the machines' data remotely onto one temporarily for duplicate scanning. fdupes checks sizes first, and only then starts trying to hash anything, so obvious non-duplicates don't get hashed at all. Significant time savings. Across multiple machines, another option is using md5deep to build recursive hash lists.
The only tool so far that I've used for image duplicate finding that checks CONTENT rather than bitwise 1:1 duplicate checking is GQview on Linux. It works fairly well, though it's a bit dated by now it's still a good viewer program. Add -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 to the CFLAGS if you compile it yourself on a 32-bit machine today though.
I would have preferred that they take the opportunity and destroy Facebook completely. Then maybe people would get the hell off the computer once in a while and, say, sit around a campfire with marshmallows. You know, "the original social network."
For what it's worth, I never have a problem with their RMA process these days. I manage a computer repair shop and pretty much all the major manufacturers seem to have a fairly smooth RMA process, though WD's website and login requirement is definitely somewhat annoying. Lately we have been getting tons of Hitachi drives to replace dying ones with and those seem to have largely held up for the customers. For us, the RMA being mostly painless is the most important process since if affects the service level we can provide to the customer. HDD reliability in general (based on customers returning with a failed drive within manufacturer warranty) seems to be pretty good, but it could have just been incredibly good luck since our volume isn't even near 200+ drives replaced per year.
If a manufacturer starts jerking us around on clear-cut RMA stuff though, I will vendor-blacklist their asses faster than you can say "load cycle count."
This announcement brought to you by Paper Street Soap Company. Burn responsibly, Raymond K. Hessel.
Sadly, as the owner of a computer service shop, I see this all the time. If we tell someone a Mac either is not worth repairing or is going to cost several hundred dollars due to the severely limited used parts market for Apple products and the high price it commands as a result, they go buy a brand new Mac for $1000 or more and only pick the old one up in about 1/3 of cases. A large segment of Mac owners are either rich or have great credit. The worst part is that the shorter lifespan of a typical Mac (due to quicker OS releases and software that "expands to fit the developer machine's container" so to speak AND high post-warranty repair costs all leading to premature obsolescence) means Macs probably find their way to the attic or the trash can faster than a lot of PCs.
There are still PC/XT computers from the early 80s that are fully functional and in production use today. I don't think anecdotes about a computer that's been in service for X years supports the assertion that the entire series of said computer is generally "higher in longevity" than another. By such standards, my VIC-20 is better in longevity than any Mac ever made. ;)
You seem to forget that what we call "most people" here consists largely of ignorant fools incapable of critical thinking, thus the myopic "HURR DURR MY BACKYARD RAIN BARREL PREDICTS GLOBAL TRENDS!"
Then join a bro and lift off!
I would have watched the whole thing but the unexpected giant chicken made me laugh so much that I had to stop before my spleen ruptured. Holy crap, you have to warn people before you do that!
I think that part of this notion is that if global warming is "a thing," particularly such a disastrous and horrible one, people believe they would be able to observe what is being discussed. 0.326 degrees F increase in the temperature of the top of the global ocean isn't exactly something that most people would be alarmed about, and certainly doesn't have a major impact on the weather in front of some guy's house in Michigan. People have been told for decades that everything is bad and everything will kill them, so it's not a surprise (to me, at least) that people would start to push back and demand more support for assertions of impending doom.
The Kyoto Accord Song. Seems relevant.