Still, the majority of Windows users are still probably using an older version of Windows with their 2-3 year-old desktop machines, and are in no rush to buy a new computer.
Actually, no. The numbers are basically dead-even, at least according to the Google Zeitgeist: 49% of users are Win98/95, 46% are on XP/W2k/NT. (ME's not listed, probably buried in Other.) We've gotten rid of 98 (in favor of W2K) on our campus with the exception of a few old laptops that won't run anything else and other schools I know of have done the same.
The stacks in HP calculators were (don't know if this has changed) 4 deep, and that was generally enough.
It has changed: basically the new ones[1] have a stack that's as deep as the memory on the machines. Generally, there's not much need for more than 5 or 6 deep unless you're doing serious programming.
[1]Of course, there are no new ones. Thank you Carly for once again proving you don't know jack about HP.
I'm quite serious, if there is such a thing as idoit proof, I think these beasts qualify
You've never done help desk work, have you?
Macs are harder to screw up, but they make up for it by being a total PITA once they are fucked. Which set of obsolete/conflicting extensions actually work? "Oh, look: it boots from a CD but not from a clean install from that CD. That's weird..." Couple with the endless joys of "My Powerpoint won't open/save. It says something about running out of memory. I've got 512MB- why is it running out?"
OSX so far has been better, but not much. My TiBook has Finder locks about twice a week now when trying to access a CD: no alternative but to reboot the machine. My very expensive video editing system and Final Cut won't talk to my Formac A-D bridge. Apple has no clue why: they want me to install the OS9 version of Final Cut but it refuses to install on my system. Again, no idea why. I can't wait until I have to train our Mac-using technophobic faculty how to use OSX: they're going to have a cow.
Then, of course, you get Apple's legendary service. We sent away a Cube the other day after it was dropped by a mover. Came back and wouldn't burn CDs. Hmm- I wonder why? Maybe it's because they replaced the CD-RW with a DVD-ROM without asking. Kind of goes with the first system I ever sent back to Apple that came back without the CD cables attached.
Macs suck. (Before I get flamed by Mac partisans, I'm the Mac guru here and the one keeping them from going away entirely. ObBossQuote: "Anything that gets rid of a Mac on campus I'll approve.") But Windows sucks even more. I had a parent ask me the other day why we don't just transition to Linux and I couldn't help laughing out loud. I've got a Linux machine of my own, but the day I have to support faculty members trying to use Linux is the day I quit to go work as a garbageman.
Remember, most copies of VPC come with a MS OS already installed. Therefore, it's another sale to MS.
MS can generate license codes: I'm sure they can get Connectix the info needed to generate a set. (Which will probably run only on VPC emulation so you can't take that copy of XP and move it to a "real" PC.)
Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.
Damn straight. I recently ran out of space on my video editing box: it's got 160GB of disk. That wasn't from doing a huge amount either. Uncompressed digital video runs about 1GB/5 minutes, so that drive will hold a grand total of ~26 hours of video assuming you use it for nothing else. That's not a lot if you are editing and keep scratch copies around. (Although good NLEs don't muck up the source at all.)
Yeah, they've been tightening budgets up, but they sure haven't been laying people of in droves.
Depends on where you are. I bailed from Virginia Tech when my 3-year contract got reduced to a 1-year on renewal. Being the newest non-tenure track person in the department I had a bad feeling about that. Talking to my old boss recently, he commented that I'd made the right call: Tech is $25M in the hole and is laying off people.. He's already attritted 3 positions (including my old one) and will probably have to do more soon. Overall, the university is shedding about 300 people- not horrible in terms of percentages, but very rare in academia.
My current job at a small private school seems to be safe since they're doing everything possible to avoid layoffs, but we're losing people by attrition. My boss (head of IT) is moving on and they are replacing him with the assistant director, but not filling her space. Raises were close to nonexistant this year and my budget got cut by 5%- again, not much, but the days of getting everything we asked for are over.
So do IR detection. Dumping heat has always been a big problem on spaceships (hint: space is a vacuum) If you're doing ship/ship combat you've probably got big engines, lots of computers, redundant life support and other energy generating/consuming devices. Your spectrum is going to be totally unlike a star, so even if you're end on and basically a point to the sight on the other ship, you won't be hard to find. (Hey look- what's this blackbody source without iron lines?)
In my days as a tanker, I basically stopped using optical sights altogether. Thermal imaging is so much better it's scary- you really can see in the dark, through camo, etc. Even in fog/rain it's still better than optical.
Re:Not a troll, just a question ...
on
AMD's Athlon XP 2700+
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm not normal, but here's a few from my background
Video editing. Nothing out there is remotely fast enough for what I want to do, and what I want to do is pretty limited.
Computatational chemistry. Nothing out there (or scheduled for the next ~100 years) is fast enough to do the simulations people are really interested in.
License key cracking for those companies who decide to use encryption.:^)
One classic (non-tech) example. Our former (idiot*) governor had exactly one idea his entire term: cut the car tax. It was all he cared about.
One county near to me watched its revenues crash to the point where they couldn't pay teachers or policemen. So they voted to reinstitute a car tax to keep them solvent. Gilmore went out of his way to try and get rid of the county government. But hey- he cut taxes! What more do you need?
*You know you're a moron when the RNC fires your ass after only a year. Took him almost nine months to find another job.
Until there is definitive proof that we evolved from chimps it remains a theory.
Nitpick. We didn't evolve from chimps anymore than I came from my sister. Chimps and humans had common ancestors.
All the same, macro-evolution isn't a fact quite yet, although there's one hell of a lot of evidence supporting the theory. But until there is observed evolution from one genus to another, one family to another, all the way to kingdoms, it can't be called a fact.
Well, there's a fossil record that shows macroevolution quite clearly. No, we didn't watch it happen, but we can't/don't watch lots of things we believe in. If I find a fallen tree laying in the woods I don't assume that it's some wierd tree that grows sideways: I assume it grew like all the others and then fell over. I *might* even hazard a guess that a beaver did it if I see gnawing marks on the stump, even if I didn't see a beaver. Indeed, even if I had never seen a beaver or knew they existed I'd probably take a guess that it was eaten by an animal and I'd have a pretty good idea of how big it was and what its teeth and claws looked like. Palentologists are pretty good at that sort of reasoning which is why the fossil record is such strong evidence- most of it fits, although there's still lots to argue about.
We'll never see evolution of new kingdoms: we won't be around long enough.
If I remember correctly, amino-acid chains cannot exist in the current atmosphere (I don't know that for sure). If that is the case, then at some point along the way the atmosphere changed, and at this moment life would have had to change with it. The chances of this happening are extroirdinary
Very well, let us assume that the gliding pre-bat was equipped to survive. Why isn't it still around?
It was outcompeted by "better" mammals (their children), better meaning that they were better adapted to the changing enviroment.
Why isn't there any fossil record of it?
Not everything fossilizes: the fossil record is not perfect. (And I'm making an assumption just because I haven't heard of this particular transitional form.) Perhaps you'd be willing to settle for the whale linage instead, where we have a set of really nice intermediates ranging from legged land dwellers to current whales? (Although the exact relationship between them is still a subject of debate.) Or the transition from dinosaurs to birds?
If they were a viable species why didn't they continue to live?
Again, outcompeted. You seem to be under the impression that once a species forms it never changes again and is perfectly optimal. This isn't the case: even the best optimized species may not survive if the environmental niche it occupies changes enough: it may either go extinct or evolve into something better suited for its new environment.
And if they didn't continue to live, how did they live for long enough to mutate into something else?
I think more scientist should study history and learn just how many times they have been wrong before stating absolute fact -- unless of course you still contend that the world is flat?
Umm, scientists have known the world is round since at least the Greeks and probably long before that. The even knew the Earth's diameter to within 5%. The idea that scientists didn't know this until recently is laughable
maybe you should consider real network hardware. we have a large installation of Foundry Networks gear and we happily throw around terabytes of data daily.
I work for a small (~750 student) woman's college in a small town in Virginia. I'd love all the fun hardware you list, but I ain't getting it.
Well, let's compare it to the system I just got to do video editing:
800MHz G4
512 MB RAM
120 GB disk
Gigabit Ethernet
Final Cut Pro
Mine is a very low end system. It's nowhere near as fast as I want: a typical render on a 5 minute scene takes 20+ minutes. I hit swap since I'm also running Photoshop and iDVD at the same time. I'm about halfway through my disk space and I've done maybe an hour's worth of total video. Networking? Don't make me laugh: the only way I output is to DVD since I'll kill our LAN if I tried to copy files around.
I laugh when I hear people commenting on new higher speed computers with "Who needs to run Quake at 400fps?". The real world isn't Quake: video editing will eat anything you throw at it and still want more. The specs listed really are the minimums.
currently manage nine people, four of whom are developers. I have to say I have more respect when people have a little backbone and say "No, I requested this time off under the company policies" than "Okay boss, I'll cancel my wedding to reboot the server."
Back when I was in the National Guard, I freaked out my commander when I told the battalion XO "Hell no sir" when he told me to attend a workshop prior to our NTC rotation. I wasn't about to miss my wedding no matter how important the cause, but my CO kept telling me that I had to learn how to phrase things a bit more nicely when speaking to flag officers. WTF: I did say "sir"!
(For those not familar with the army, think of an NTC rotation as a day 1 rollout of a huge project: lots of prep work and now you're going to be stress-tested to destruction.)
NPR had a bit on this the other day. The FCC projected that all the analog transmitters would go dark by 2006. They then expected to make ~$15 billion by selling the spectrum to wireless communications companies.
The problem is, the balanced budget agreement signed in 1997 already factored in this money as part of government revenues, and budgets were set assuming the money would be available on schedule. The first auctions were supposed to start this September.
Of course, virtually nobody actually owns a digital TV in 2002, so now the FCC is panicking.
The States that oppose the settlement are right. Nothing but an OS, no browser or media player.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. What's an OS? Just the kernel? Are you allowed to add a file browser? A GUI? A network stack?
Every one of these used to be available as an extra-cost add on for Windows and other OSs. Trumpet used to make good coin with Winsock: do we make MS strip the TCP/IP stack from Windows? (It wasn't just MS: we paid serious dollar$ for a TCP/IP stack for the VMS cluster I used to admin.)
Indeed, perhaps even the kernel is removeable: Win3 ran fine with DR-DOS underneath instead of MS-DOS, despite what MS said.
I have a really hard time with this: where *exactly* do you draw the line on what you include? Does that line move? Selling an OS without modem support and a network stack would be suicide today, but it wasn't ten years ago.
A web browser IMHO has reached the point where it should be included as part of the OS: there isn't a single OS on the market today that doesn't bundle one. A media player might be under the umbrella. Just try and strip Quicktime out of MacOSX and see how far you get.
If I remember correctly, Apple customers were not "required" to pay $20 for the OSX upgrade... you only had to pay if you wanted the upgrade on CDROM. I've always updated my copy of OSX through the Software Update application for free. It's nice on broadband but a little painful on a dialup connection- but it worked and was free.
10.0 to 10.1 was never available through Software Update. You had to get the CD, and Apple botched this badly.
Witness me, the lone Apple guy in a horde of Windows folks. I wanted to update the copy of OSX on my TiBook. Simple, right?
Well, no. I could do it through Apple, if I was willing to spend $20, send them proof I owned OSX and then wait *8* weeks. WTF? I've already registered my copy!
So I go to an Apple training center. Surely they'll have them? Well, a week after 10.1 was released, they didn't. Apple had sent them 10.1 install CDs, but not the upgrade and they were told they weren't going to get the upgrade ones. How about the 2 Circuit Citys I visited? They were supposed to have stacks of upgrade CDs. Nope: the salesdroids had never even heard of them, much less realized they were supposed to have them.
What did I finally do? I wrote to a guy I knew on the Internet who was nice enough to burn me a CD and mail it to me. Apple finally got around to sending us upgrade CDs a month later.
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Still, the majority of Windows users are still probably using an older version of Windows with their 2-3 year-old desktop machines, and are in no rush to buy a new computer.
Actually, no. The numbers are basically dead-even, at least according to the Google Zeitgeist: 49% of users are Win98/95, 46% are on XP/W2k/NT. (ME's not listed, probably buried in Other.) We've gotten rid of 98 (in favor of W2K) on our campus with the exception of a few old laptops that won't run anything else and other schools I know of have done the same.
The stacks in HP calculators were (don't know if this has changed) 4 deep, and that was generally enough.
It has changed: basically the new ones[1] have a stack that's as deep as the memory on the machines. Generally, there's not much need for more than 5 or 6 deep unless you're doing serious programming.
[1]Of course, there are no new ones. Thank you Carly for once again proving you don't know jack about HP.
God, I love gestures.
I'm quite serious, if there is such a thing as idoit proof, I think these beasts qualify
You've never done help desk work, have you?
Macs are harder to screw up, but they make up for it by being a total PITA once they are fucked. Which set of obsolete/conflicting extensions actually work? "Oh, look: it boots from a CD but not from a clean install from that CD. That's weird..." Couple with the endless joys of "My Powerpoint won't open/save. It says something about running out of memory. I've got 512MB- why is it running out?"
OSX so far has been better, but not much. My TiBook has Finder locks about twice a week now when trying to access a CD: no alternative but to reboot the machine. My very expensive video editing system and Final Cut won't talk to my Formac A-D bridge. Apple has no clue why: they want me to install the OS9 version of Final Cut but it refuses to install on my system. Again, no idea why. I can't wait until I have to train our Mac-using technophobic faculty how to use OSX: they're going to have a cow.
Then, of course, you get Apple's legendary service. We sent away a Cube the other day after it was dropped by a mover. Came back and wouldn't burn CDs. Hmm- I wonder why? Maybe it's because they replaced the CD-RW with a DVD-ROM without asking. Kind of goes with the first system I ever sent back to Apple that came back without the CD cables attached.
Macs suck. (Before I get flamed by Mac partisans, I'm the Mac guru here and the one keeping them from going away entirely. ObBossQuote: "Anything that gets rid of a Mac on campus I'll approve.") But Windows sucks even more. I had a parent ask me the other day why we don't just transition to Linux and I couldn't help laughing out loud. I've got a Linux machine of my own, but the day I have to support faculty members trying to use Linux is the day I quit to go work as a garbageman.
MS can generate license codes: I'm sure they can get Connectix the info needed to generate a set. (Which will probably run only on VPC emulation so you can't take that copy of XP and move it to a "real" PC.)
Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.
Damn straight. I recently ran out of space on my video editing box: it's got 160GB of disk. That wasn't from doing a huge amount either. Uncompressed digital video runs about 1GB/5 minutes, so that drive will hold a grand total of ~26 hours of video assuming you use it for nothing else. That's not a lot if you are editing and keep scratch copies around. (Although good NLEs don't muck up the source at all.)
Yeah, they've been tightening budgets up, but they sure haven't been laying people of in droves.
Depends on where you are. I bailed from Virginia Tech when my 3-year contract got reduced to a 1-year on renewal. Being the newest non-tenure track person in the department I had a bad feeling about that. Talking to my old boss recently, he commented that I'd made the right call: Tech is $25M in the hole and is laying off people.. He's already attritted 3 positions (including my old one) and will probably have to do more soon. Overall, the university is shedding about 300 people- not horrible in terms of percentages, but very rare in academia.
My current job at a small private school seems to be safe since they're doing everything possible to avoid layoffs, but we're losing people by attrition. My boss (head of IT) is moving on and they are replacing him with the assistant director, but not filling her space. Raises were close to nonexistant this year and my budget got cut by 5%- again, not much, but the days of getting everything we asked for are over.
In my days as a tanker, I basically stopped using optical sights altogether. Thermal imaging is so much better it's scary- you really can see in the dark, through camo, etc. Even in fog/rain it's still better than optical.
I'm not normal, but here's a few from my background
Video editing. Nothing out there is remotely fast enough for what I want to do, and what I want to do is pretty limited.
Computatational chemistry. Nothing out there (or scheduled for the next ~100 years) is fast enough to do the simulations people are really interested in.
License key cracking for those companies who decide to use encryption. :^)
One county near to me watched its revenues crash to the point where they couldn't pay teachers or policemen. So they voted to reinstitute a car tax to keep them solvent. Gilmore went out of his way to try and get rid of the county government. But hey- he cut taxes! What more do you need?
*You know you're a moron when the RNC fires your ass after only a year. Took him almost nine months to find another job.
I wish I could record TV to MiniDV, though...
Get a digital-analog bridge and you can. I've been using a Formac Studio with no problems. RCA/SVideo in, Firewire out or vice versa.
I was so stoked when I heard about vanilla Coke: I love vanilla and I love Coke. But the concoction they created is just plain bad.
Your stomach's trying to tell you something: listen to it. Have a nice cup of tea instead: I've got a cup of Prince of Wales brewing right now. Eric
Until there is definitive proof that we evolved from chimps it remains a theory.
Nitpick. We didn't evolve from chimps anymore than I came from my sister. Chimps and humans had common ancestors.
All the same, macro-evolution isn't a fact quite yet, although there's one hell of a lot of evidence supporting the theory. But until there is observed evolution from one genus to another, one family to another, all the way to kingdoms, it can't be called a fact.
Well, there's a fossil record that shows macroevolution quite clearly. No, we didn't watch it happen, but we can't/don't watch lots of things we believe in. If I find a fallen tree laying in the woods I don't assume that it's some wierd tree that grows sideways: I assume it grew like all the others and then fell over. I *might* even hazard a guess that a beaver did it if I see gnawing marks on the stump, even if I didn't see a beaver. Indeed, even if I had never seen a beaver or knew they existed I'd probably take a guess that it was eaten by an animal and I'd have a pretty good idea of how big it was and what its teeth and claws looked like. Palentologists are pretty good at that sort of reasoning which is why the fossil record is such strong evidence- most of it fits, although there's still lots to argue about.
We'll never see evolution of new kingdoms: we won't be around long enough.
Make it a rule that the government cannot do business with anybody that is a monopoly.
So what happens when all the lights go out in every government building in the country?
If I remember correctly, amino-acid chains cannot exist in the current atmosphere (I don't know that for sure). If that is the case, then at some point along the way the atmosphere changed, and at this moment life would have had to change with it. The chances of this happening are extroirdinary
Hardly: life itself did the change. The atmosphere and life on earth co-evolved.
Very well, let us assume that the gliding pre-bat was equipped to survive. Why isn't it still around?
It was outcompeted by "better" mammals (their children), better meaning that they were better adapted to the changing enviroment.
Why isn't there any fossil record of it?
Not everything fossilizes: the fossil record is not perfect. (And I'm making an assumption just because I haven't heard of this particular transitional form.) Perhaps you'd be willing to settle for the whale linage instead, where we have a set of really nice intermediates ranging from legged land dwellers to current whales? (Although the exact relationship between them is still a subject of debate.) Or the transition from dinosaurs to birds?
If they were a viable species why didn't they continue to live?
Again, outcompeted. You seem to be under the impression that once a species forms it never changes again and is perfectly optimal. This isn't the case: even the best optimized species may not survive if the environmental niche it occupies changes enough: it may either go extinct or evolve into something better suited for its new environment.
And if they didn't continue to live, how did they live for long enough to mutate into something else?
They did: that's what bats are.
I think more scientist should study history and learn just how many times they have been wrong before stating absolute fact -- unless of course you still contend that the world is flat?
Umm, scientists have known the world is round since at least the Greeks and probably long before that. The even knew the Earth's diameter to within 5%. The idea that scientists didn't know this until recently is laughable
maybe you should consider real network hardware. we have a large installation of Foundry Networks gear and we happily throw around terabytes of data daily.
I work for a small (~750 student) woman's college in a small town in Virginia. I'd love all the fun hardware you list, but I ain't getting it.
Mine is a very low end system. It's nowhere near as fast as I want: a typical render on a 5 minute scene takes 20+ minutes. I hit swap since I'm also running Photoshop and iDVD at the same time. I'm about halfway through my disk space and I've done maybe an hour's worth of total video. Networking? Don't make me laugh: the only way I output is to DVD since I'll kill our LAN if I tried to copy files around.
I laugh when I hear people commenting on new higher speed computers with "Who needs to run Quake at 400fps?". The real world isn't Quake: video editing will eat anything you throw at it and still want more. The specs listed really are the minimums.
currently manage nine people, four of whom are developers. I have to say I have more respect when people have a little backbone and say "No, I requested this time off under the company policies" than "Okay boss, I'll cancel my wedding to reboot the server."
Back when I was in the National Guard, I freaked out my commander when I told the battalion XO "Hell no sir" when he told me to attend a workshop prior to our NTC rotation. I wasn't about to miss my wedding no matter how important the cause, but my CO kept telling me that I had to learn how to phrase things a bit more nicely when speaking to flag officers. WTF: I did say "sir"!
(For those not familar with the army, think of an NTC rotation as a day 1 rollout of a huge project: lots of prep work and now you're going to be stress-tested to destruction.)
The problem is, the balanced budget agreement signed in 1997 already factored in this money as part of government revenues, and budgets were set assuming the money would be available on schedule. The first auctions were supposed to start this September.
Of course, virtually nobody actually owns a digital TV in 2002, so now the FCC is panicking.
Forget those, try Intercal
The States that oppose the settlement are right. Nothing but an OS, no browser or media player.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. What's an OS? Just the kernel? Are you allowed to add a file browser? A GUI? A network stack?
Every one of these used to be available as an extra-cost add on for Windows and other OSs. Trumpet used to make good coin with Winsock: do we make MS strip the TCP/IP stack from Windows? (It wasn't just MS: we paid serious dollar$ for a TCP/IP stack for the VMS cluster I used to admin.)
Indeed, perhaps even the kernel is removeable: Win3 ran fine with DR-DOS underneath instead of MS-DOS, despite what MS said.
I have a really hard time with this: where *exactly* do you draw the line on what you include? Does that line move? Selling an OS without modem support and a network stack would be suicide today, but it wasn't ten years ago.
A web browser IMHO has reached the point where it should be included as part of the OS: there isn't a single OS on the market today that doesn't bundle one. A media player might be under the umbrella. Just try and strip Quicktime out of MacOSX and see how far you get.
If I remember correctly, Apple customers were not "required" to pay $20 for the OSX upgrade... you only had to pay if you wanted the upgrade on CDROM. I've always updated my copy of OSX through the Software Update application for free. It's nice on broadband but a little painful on a dialup connection- but it worked and was free.
10.0 to 10.1 was never available through Software Update. You had to get the CD, and Apple botched this badly.
Witness me, the lone Apple guy in a horde of Windows folks. I wanted to update the copy of OSX on my TiBook. Simple, right?
Well, no. I could do it through Apple, if I was willing to spend $20, send them proof I owned OSX and then wait *8* weeks. WTF? I've already registered my copy!
So I go to an Apple training center. Surely they'll have them? Well, a week after 10.1 was released, they didn't. Apple had sent them 10.1 install CDs, but not the upgrade and they were told they weren't going to get the upgrade ones. How about the 2 Circuit Citys I visited? They were supposed to have stacks of upgrade CDs. Nope: the salesdroids had never even heard of them, much less realized they were supposed to have them.
What did I finally do? I wrote to a guy I knew on the Internet who was nice enough to burn me a CD and mail it to me. Apple finally got around to sending us upgrade CDs a month later.
12cm is the bore on an M1*A1* or *A2* tank. The M1 has a 105 mm rifled gun, the same as on the older M60 series.
What the hell is that? Anything can be broken.
Not true. Encryption with a truly-random one time pad is proveably unbreakable.
Lose the pad and you're screwed.