"As for support I don't know what age the support people who work at MS are but they sure are some of the most useless people on the planet. Whenever you call MS you spend the first three days trying to convince them that you are actually having a problem with one of their products. The fuckers want to blame everything else except their product. Are you having a problem with access? Oh that's because you installed firefox!."
I did NT4 Server support for Microsoft and take offense to that post. Before I started supporting Windows, I was a Macintosh and FreeBSD bigot. Unfortunately, I couldn't go any higher where I was and the work enviroment doing MS Support seemed really nice. Within a month, I did a complete 180 on my opinion of their support. They give their staff extensive training, mentorship, invaluable resources, etc. Sure there are always the bad eggs, but I didn't see many of them. Most of us knew that when a customer called us, they expected us to point fingers and not know what we're doing. We knew to expect this because that's what we expected of Microsoft support before we started working on it (Probably due to the higher percentage of idiot 95/98/ME engineers). As a result, 95% of us would actually find other vendors issues like bugs from old firmware revisions for the customer just to avoid getting the bad finger-pointing image. If it came down to what we believed was an unresolved bug, we'd conference call the vendor and remain on the call until the customer was confident that it wasn't our issue. Even then, we'd leave the case open and follow-up the next day to make sure everything went smoothly.
The only other company I've ever dealt with that provided that level of support and expertise is Adtran. I will always have faith in purchasing a Microsoft or Adtran product as a result.
You're right. However, if you use it as a way of getting dates with down to Earth people that aren't your typical bar flies, it's a great tool. I met one girl on Yahoo Personals back in early 99 and we had a four and a half year relationship. I met a girl in December of 2003 and we lasted over a year and a half. Those two girls were unlike any I have ever met and chances are, I wouldn't have met them in real life. The first was a Physics and Astronomy double major and attractive on top of that. The second was one of the most intelligent women I have ever met, an amazing artist and attractive. Heck, her name on Match had "42" in it and come to find out, it most certainly was a Hitchhiker's Guide reference! I mean, come on. That's a pot of gold!
The downside is that it's kind of depressing when I go out and meet girls because they're usually shallow, immature and still looking for the jerk because they can't see past the games. Guys can be even worse since we can get a hard-on and make excuses in our head for some pretty serious character flaws when faced with a good looking girl. It seems like a lost cause as you waste each night out, ending up with a one night stand at best. When I do go out and have a clear head, I find very few real women and they're usually taken.
Alternatively, on these matchmaking sites, I'll check out the profile of a good looking girl. If I see the scribblings of a 6 year old, I immediately hit the back button without giving it a second thought. In 10 seconds or less, I managed to move on without any uncomfortableness. If her profile is well thought out and doesn't come off as being desperate for a warm body, chances are that she's tired of the bar flies as well and ready to meet someone at her level. Even better, you know in advance with almost absolute certainty that she's single!
The replies I've received thus far miss out on my main point. You'll get faster speeds running on a LAN and for less $. The only purpose that distributing over a WAN provides is fault tolerance from outages and disasters.
Why spread them out to 300 locations? The only reason I can think of is to minimize risk of disaster from fire, earthquake and so on. However, when trying to do that, companies usually split it up into a handful of locations. Not 300 locations.
Creating fearless soldiers would have to be the dumbest idea ever. Just think about what happens in any FPS when you run in all gung-ho. Now imagine you don't respawn.
"Yes, they lost quite a few soldiers; but Europe was reduced to smoking ruins and half of it was occupied by Soviet empire"
292,000 American soldiers lost in WWII is more soldiers than any other allied nation except for possibly Poland (6 million deaths, but not sure how many were soldiers). If you include civilian deaths, France lost 600,000 people and Great Britian and Italy last low to mid 300's. Our Pacific coast was very close to being attacked.
People that talk like the grandparent poster are just ignorant of history or out of touch with reality, desensetized by media and entertainment.
"The plan was prompted by an employee whose constant complaining prompted the other staff to complain about her complaining"
It's not that they revealed the gender of the employee. It's in the way that they did it. There was absolutely no reason to say "a female employee". How about if they said "An employee with freckles"? Does that add anything to the story? Is it relevant to the situation? Even if the writer was raising awareness that the employee was female to gain sympathy, it's sexism just like affirmative action is racism.
One of the best things about our country is the amount of tolerance we strive to have. Every once in a while though, we lose sight. Ever since the media campaigns against smoking, tolerance has dropped more and more to where I'm afraid to tell people that I smoke. Commercials depicting assholes with cigarettes and dogs pissing on them. Commercials comparing cigarettes to hard-core drugs with the pusher friend encouraging Joey Doright to light up. When I go out to a bar with coworkers, they're always surprised to find out I smoke and I can see in their eyes that they're thoroughly confused. Presumably, they liked me up until that point and now they don't know what to think.
Personally, I don't like chewing-gum one bit. You step in it, get it on your hand, sit on it, listen to people chew on it like cows. It's disgusting. If I wanted to see it illegal though, I'd move to Singapore. It may sound rediculous, but I'm sure the average person in Singapore must have seen gum at one point like Americans see tobacco for it to be illegal. Just think about it. Imagine people hating you for chewing gum. I know there's no health risks in gum, but that's absolutely the only difference. It's also the "reason" that all the haters constantly refer to in order to justify their prejudism. The real root of their hate is usually a mix of society's influence and the bad smell/smokey atmosphere of a bar or any other place where it's like a cloud. Personally, I'm the same way. I'm a half pack a day smoker, but if I'm in a bar with 100 people lighting up, my eyes go red and sting. So I leave and go somewhere else. It's not that difficult.
I'll tell you what. If you guys work with me to outlaw talking on Cell phones in public places and outlaw gum, I'll quit smoking.
Remove your old drive and do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive. Bring it up to the same service pack level of your old install. Boot off your old drive with the new one connected as slave. Do a backup of C and system state to a backup file on the new drive (E or whatever Windows automatically assigns to it). Boot from the new drive as master witht he old drive disconnected and do a restore of the backup file to original location and choose to always replace files. Use DBAN to wipe the old drive and sell on Ebay to recover some of the cost on the new drive. Done.
This will primarily be used for backbones. You have to remember though that backbones are always in need of more bandwidth. Many telecom providers are already utilizing VoIP to transfer voice thousands of miles. Also, LAN backbones could use the bandwidth to support gigabit enabled workstations and eventually, 10GbaseT enabled servers.
Up until about three months ago, my computer consisted of a P2-350 (Came with the shitty QDI BrillianX-1S mobo for $35 about 4 years ago), 386MB of RAM (Mostly thrown together from salvaged systems), Geforce 4 Ti 4200 ($80 a year ago), a $50 case, a good $60 power supply, an ATA133 PCI card I got for free with a drive I bought at work, an NEC DL DVD-RW ($37 on NewEgg), an 80GB 7200 RPM drive with 8MB buffer, and my old 17" Sony Trinitron I got 8 years ago which is a constant reminder why paying an obsene amount of money or anything more than enough to get you by for that matter is a complete waste. Basically, I just upgrade a part when I find that it slows me down in what I do. I value my time. Fortunately, the CPU/FSB/and memory speed is the least of my worries since I don't play games on my computer or do anything else CPU intensive. Most people look and say "Oh my god, how do you survive on that", but they just don't understand where the real bottlenecks lie. In normal use, the hard drive and a lack of system memory or VRAM are the only real killers. The part that I'll pay the most for is a fast hard drive. The part I'll upgrade last is the motherboard. For those wondering what I got three months ago, I got a P3-850 to run on my current mobo and memory and a larger 7200 RPM drive with 8MB buffer (I really got into newsgroups, heh). As a matter of fact, I may have hit my first real need for a faster CPU so I can run the par files faster when repairing downloads or to compress movies.
Thanks to the link posted by someone else and some creative Google seaching, here's a link to purchase the video. It even mentions the scene with the camera mounted on the whale.
How the heck do you people always link Bush up to everything? I'd swear he's an omnipotent god the way people blame him for so many things. It's Bush's fault that the little bunny got hit crossing the road because the bunny was hit by an SUV which is related to oil which is why we're at war. All because of Bush.
"on the backs of notebooks, adding to their pathetic battery life"
Does nobody remember the PowerBook 1400? The sheer popularity of that notebook should have sparked the iMac, iBook, etc. much, much sooner. One of the many personalized things you could get to fit in the back was in fact a solar charger! Check out the picture of the Powercover.
"I have yet to get a spyware infection from using Firefox..."
That's because malware is written by people that want to infect more than 10% of web surfers. Are people really so biased against Microsoft that they're willing to blind themselves from the obvious?
The sheer number of vulnerabilities reported month to month has gone up tremendously as Firefox made headlines as a "More secure" product. The people that find vulnerabilities have a motive of fame and fortune. You could have several hundred known vulnerabilities in Firefox and it would still be relatively "Safe" from infection because the people that spread malware and viruses have a different motive. They're aiming for high numbers. The truth is that Mac OS, Linux, Firefox, etc. are living a good life in a safe haven, but it will last only so long as they aren't common enough to attract the attention of the type of people that want high infection rates.
"The only people complaining about the style not being sufficiently grown-up are 14 year old morons who have no sense of how not to bitch about things, and no idea of what adult actually means."
While I agree that many people can't see past the "kiddy" graphics, I believe that most of us diehard Zelda fans that were turned off were turned off by the shocking change. They changed the whole style that Zelda has matured elegantly with since the Super Nintendo version. Where we left off at was Majoras Mask, an extremely creative and dark game. A game where even though the engine didn't change and there was no Zelda to rescue, the experience felt like something Link would encounter. It truly felt like a next step in the evolution of the game. Then they show us a clip for what appeared to be a great step forward with a darker, deeper experience. It's like the game was growing up with us and with what technology could permit it to do. Then all of a sudden, that game is pulled and we're shown a clip of a trendy, cell shaded link and expected to awe at the Dreamcast regurgitated "style" and over the top facial expressions. They weren't believable, they were overdone to make sure you didn't miss out on any smile or frown! The video clip was then topped off with a pig that dances his feet mid-air before he falls down a hole. Can you see why so many of us were so pissed off? It was a repeated mistake like Mario 2 (Fun game, BTW) or Zelda 2 on the NES
Between the Zelda decision and news when Rare was bought out by Microsoft, I saw no more reason to pick the Gamecube over the Xbox. However, about a year ago, I did pick up a used gamecube and have played through Zelda. Did I think it was a fun game and worth my time? Absolutely. Am I disappointed that it didn't feel like the Zelda I had been waiting years to play? Absolutely. Would I be less peeved if they gave us the two games in opposite order or if they never set the wrong expectations to begin with? Probably. I'll be scheduling a few days off from work when the new one releases! Nintendo is really scoring big points with its fans by seeing this project through.
Slashdot Mirror
I did NT4 Server support for Microsoft and take offense to that post. Before I started supporting Windows, I was a Macintosh and FreeBSD bigot. Unfortunately, I couldn't go any higher where I was and the work enviroment doing MS Support seemed really nice. Within a month, I did a complete 180 on my opinion of their support. They give their staff extensive training, mentorship, invaluable resources, etc. Sure there are always the bad eggs, but I didn't see many of them. Most of us knew that when a customer called us, they expected us to point fingers and not know what we're doing. We knew to expect this because that's what we expected of Microsoft support before we started working on it (Probably due to the higher percentage of idiot 95/98/ME engineers). As a result, 95% of us would actually find other vendors issues like bugs from old firmware revisions for the customer just to avoid getting the bad finger-pointing image. If it came down to what we believed was an unresolved bug, we'd conference call the vendor and remain on the call until the customer was confident that it wasn't our issue. Even then, we'd leave the case open and follow-up the next day to make sure everything went smoothly.
The only other company I've ever dealt with that provided that level of support and expertise is Adtran. I will always have faith in purchasing a Microsoft or Adtran product as a result.
You're right. However, if you use it as a way of getting dates with down to Earth people that aren't your typical bar flies, it's a great tool. I met one girl on Yahoo Personals back in early 99 and we had a four and a half year relationship. I met a girl in December of 2003 and we lasted over a year and a half. Those two girls were unlike any I have ever met and chances are, I wouldn't have met them in real life. The first was a Physics and Astronomy double major and attractive on top of that. The second was one of the most intelligent women I have ever met, an amazing artist and attractive. Heck, her name on Match had "42" in it and come to find out, it most certainly was a Hitchhiker's Guide reference! I mean, come on. That's a pot of gold!
The downside is that it's kind of depressing when I go out and meet girls because they're usually shallow, immature and still looking for the jerk because they can't see past the games. Guys can be even worse since we can get a hard-on and make excuses in our head for some pretty serious character flaws when faced with a good looking girl. It seems like a lost cause as you waste each night out, ending up with a one night stand at best. When I do go out and have a clear head, I find very few real women and they're usually taken.
Alternatively, on these matchmaking sites, I'll check out the profile of a good looking girl. If I see the scribblings of a 6 year old, I immediately hit the back button without giving it a second thought. In 10 seconds or less, I managed to move on without any uncomfortableness. If her profile is well thought out and doesn't come off as being desperate for a warm body, chances are that she's tired of the bar flies as well and ready to meet someone at her level. Even better, you know in advance with almost absolute certainty that she's single!
The replies I've received thus far miss out on my main point. You'll get faster speeds running on a LAN and for less $. The only purpose that distributing over a WAN provides is fault tolerance from outages and disasters.
Why spread them out to 300 locations? The only reason I can think of is to minimize risk of disaster from fire, earthquake and so on. However, when trying to do that, companies usually split it up into a handful of locations. Not 300 locations.
Creating fearless soldiers would have to be the dumbest idea ever. Just think about what happens in any FPS when you run in all gung-ho. Now imagine you don't respawn.
Shit, thanks. I totally forgot about their contribution (duh).
292,000 American soldiers lost in WWII is more soldiers than any other allied nation except for possibly Poland (6 million deaths, but not sure how many were soldiers). If you include civilian deaths, France lost 600,000 people and Great Britian and Italy last low to mid 300's. Our Pacific coast was very close to being attacked.
People that talk like the grandparent poster are just ignorant of history or out of touch with reality, desensetized by media and entertainment.
*applause*
Keep going. The propoganda you got from your classmates was really turning me off. Calling him a moron is what really gets my attention and holds it.
And calling the President a goofy name really inspires others to see things your way. Congrats.
"The plan was prompted by an employee whose constant complaining prompted the other staff to complain about her complaining"
It's not that they revealed the gender of the employee. It's in the way that they did it. There was absolutely no reason to say "a female employee". How about if they said "An employee with freckles"? Does that add anything to the story? Is it relevant to the situation? Even if the writer was raising awareness that the employee was female to gain sympathy, it's sexism just like affirmative action is racism.
fag. I Pwn U
One of the best things about our country is the amount of tolerance we strive to have. Every once in a while though, we lose sight. Ever since the media campaigns against smoking, tolerance has dropped more and more to where I'm afraid to tell people that I smoke. Commercials depicting assholes with cigarettes and dogs pissing on them. Commercials comparing cigarettes to hard-core drugs with the pusher friend encouraging Joey Doright to light up. When I go out to a bar with coworkers, they're always surprised to find out I smoke and I can see in their eyes that they're thoroughly confused. Presumably, they liked me up until that point and now they don't know what to think.
Personally, I don't like chewing-gum one bit. You step in it, get it on your hand, sit on it, listen to people chew on it like cows. It's disgusting. If I wanted to see it illegal though, I'd move to Singapore. It may sound rediculous, but I'm sure the average person in Singapore must have seen gum at one point like Americans see tobacco for it to be illegal. Just think about it. Imagine people hating you for chewing gum. I know there's no health risks in gum, but that's absolutely the only difference. It's also the "reason" that all the haters constantly refer to in order to justify their prejudism. The real root of their hate is usually a mix of society's influence and the bad smell/smokey atmosphere of a bar or any other place where it's like a cloud. Personally, I'm the same way. I'm a half pack a day smoker, but if I'm in a bar with 100 people lighting up, my eyes go red and sting. So I leave and go somewhere else. It's not that difficult.
I'll tell you what. If you guys work with me to outlaw talking on Cell phones in public places and outlaw gum, I'll quit smoking.
Other than sexism, was there a reason to point out that the individual is female?
Make a custom windows 2000 boot cd that includes the controller driver. http://www.thetechguide.com/forum/index.php?showto pic=5090
Remove your old drive and do a fresh install of Windows on the new drive. Bring it up to the same service pack level of your old install. Boot off your old drive with the new one connected as slave. Do a backup of C and system state to a backup file on the new drive (E or whatever Windows automatically assigns to it). Boot from the new drive as master witht he old drive disconnected and do a restore of the backup file to original location and choose to always replace files. Use DBAN to wipe the old drive and sell on Ebay to recover some of the cost on the new drive. Done.
This will primarily be used for backbones. You have to remember though that backbones are always in need of more bandwidth. Many telecom providers are already utilizing VoIP to transfer voice thousands of miles. Also, LAN backbones could use the bandwidth to support gigabit enabled workstations and eventually, 10GbaseT enabled servers.
Up until about three months ago, my computer consisted of a P2-350 (Came with the shitty QDI BrillianX-1S mobo for $35 about 4 years ago), 386MB of RAM (Mostly thrown together from salvaged systems), Geforce 4 Ti 4200 ($80 a year ago), a $50 case, a good $60 power supply, an ATA133 PCI card I got for free with a drive I bought at work, an NEC DL DVD-RW ($37 on NewEgg), an 80GB 7200 RPM drive with 8MB buffer, and my old 17" Sony Trinitron I got 8 years ago which is a constant reminder why paying an obsene amount of money or anything more than enough to get you by for that matter is a complete waste. Basically, I just upgrade a part when I find that it slows me down in what I do. I value my time. Fortunately, the CPU/FSB/and memory speed is the least of my worries since I don't play games on my computer or do anything else CPU intensive. Most people look and say "Oh my god, how do you survive on that", but they just don't understand where the real bottlenecks lie. In normal use, the hard drive and a lack of system memory or VRAM are the only real killers. The part that I'll pay the most for is a fast hard drive. The part I'll upgrade last is the motherboard. For those wondering what I got three months ago, I got a P3-850 to run on my current mobo and memory and a larger 7200 RPM drive with 8MB buffer (I really got into newsgroups, heh). As a matter of fact, I may have hit my first real need for a faster CPU so I can run the par files faster when repairing downloads or to compress movies.
Thanks to the link posted by someone else and some creative Google seaching, here's a link to purchase the video. It even mentions the scene with the camera mounted on the whale.
How the heck do you people always link Bush up to everything? I'd swear he's an omnipotent god the way people blame him for so many things. It's Bush's fault that the little bunny got hit crossing the road because the bunny was hit by an SUV which is related to oil which is why we're at war. All because of Bush.
That's right, Bush killed the cute lil' bunny.
Does nobody remember the PowerBook 1400? The sheer popularity of that notebook should have sparked the iMac, iBook, etc. much, much sooner. One of the many personalized things you could get to fit in the back was in fact a solar charger! Check out the picture of the Powercover.
That's because malware is written by people that want to infect more than 10% of web surfers. Are people really so biased against Microsoft that they're willing to blind themselves from the obvious?
The sheer number of vulnerabilities reported month to month has gone up tremendously as Firefox made headlines as a "More secure" product. The people that find vulnerabilities have a motive of fame and fortune. You could have several hundred known vulnerabilities in Firefox and it would still be relatively "Safe" from infection because the people that spread malware and viruses have a different motive. They're aiming for high numbers. The truth is that Mac OS, Linux, Firefox, etc. are living a good life in a safe haven, but it will last only so long as they aren't common enough to attract the attention of the type of people that want high infection rates.
A smart company.
Aquisition is better than organic growth on almost all fronts. Ask anyone with a business degree and I'm sure they'd agree.
-Lucas
Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will run on it.
While I agree that many people can't see past the "kiddy" graphics, I believe that most of us diehard Zelda fans that were turned off were turned off by the shocking change. They changed the whole style that Zelda has matured elegantly with since the Super Nintendo version. Where we left off at was Majoras Mask, an extremely creative and dark game. A game where even though the engine didn't change and there was no Zelda to rescue, the experience felt like something Link would encounter. It truly felt like a next step in the evolution of the game. Then they show us a clip for what appeared to be a great step forward with a darker, deeper experience. It's like the game was growing up with us and with what technology could permit it to do. Then all of a sudden, that game is pulled and we're shown a clip of a trendy, cell shaded link and expected to awe at the Dreamcast regurgitated "style" and over the top facial expressions. They weren't believable, they were overdone to make sure you didn't miss out on any smile or frown! The video clip was then topped off with a pig that dances his feet mid-air before he falls down a hole. Can you see why so many of us were so pissed off? It was a repeated mistake like Mario 2 (Fun game, BTW) or Zelda 2 on the NES
Between the Zelda decision and news when Rare was bought out by Microsoft, I saw no more reason to pick the Gamecube over the Xbox. However, about a year ago, I did pick up a used gamecube and have played through Zelda. Did I think it was a fun game and worth my time? Absolutely. Am I disappointed that it didn't feel like the Zelda I had been waiting years to play? Absolutely. Would I be less peeved if they gave us the two games in opposite order or if they never set the wrong expectations to begin with? Probably. I'll be scheduling a few days off from work when the new one releases! Nintendo is really scoring big points with its fans by seeing this project through.
-Lucas