I know a lot of people that would like it. All of my Windows using acquantances use "Media Player Classic" or something like thta, which is (I'm guessing) a copy of the original WMP (pre-version 5? Whenever they fuglified it), plus codecs.
In Windows it does. NTFS is a huge fucking whore, and when the disk gets close to full, it takes forever to do even the most basic tasks due to constant filesystem index retrival and searching.
Also keep in mind that a "full" install of even Debian is under 7Gb. A 'reasonable' install (IE, one that's practical and provides all the basic desktop applications, a full-size game, plus some other misc. stuff) is still only around 2.5Gb or so - maybe 3Gb.
I've got a 13Gb disk in my desktop machine right now which is (in total) about 92% full. It still performs just fine - without any such slowdown due to the disk being full.
It might help if Windows used a real swap partition, but I doubt that's the root problem, as disabling the swap file all together doesn't seem to do shit.
Now, just imagine how powerful a componentized version of Windows would be. I don't mean the nonsense of adding or removing "Notepad" and "Calc" during the install, I mean full-blown customization.
Think of the power and increased ease of administration that would result for network administrators if the following things were componentized (and how completely it would essentially annihilate the desire for Linux on desktops, I think):
Internet Explorer
Windows Media Player
Control Panel and hardware modification
add any application you wanted as an 'install candidate' for the install image
proper security
Now, I'm not talking about irritating stuff like "remove access to this application". I'm talking about completely removing the 'package' from the install image. Granted, you can do this to a limited degree, but imagine the power it would provide if such complex customizations could be made by companies to Windows for their own individual organization. It would help streamline Windows to the point where it became attractive to Unix people.
IMO, if MS were to go this route (the security changes making the WinNT permissions work properly would be key, IMO) and just use their existing XP base (but retool it and make it slick for admin geeks) instead of going the "bigger, better, more money" route, they'd likely profit more in the long term. They'd keep Windows on desktops, and they'd earn some currency with geeks who are tired with difficult-to-modify systems.
Dude, there's hardly any reason to have a ringer on a cell phone at all. A ringer is there in order to inform you you've got a call - not everyone around you. With a cell phone, it's almost invariably in your pocket, on your hip, etc. - unless you're a female trend setter and have to have it in a purse. But I digress.
Just put the damned phone on vibrate. That's my policy. It drives me batty how many different tones phones have, how irritating most of them are, etc. - and not just in a classroom; anywhere.
It would be simple enough for the person to hit *key combination* and de-activate the vibrate function when they go back to their rooms and put the phone on their desk, etc.
Not sure where else you've studied, but it's my experience that this is predominantly the case in the US - at least in the Midwest.
There's not much rational thought like there is in the Real World. If you're late by 10 minutes for a final exam because of a traffic accident or something like that, you still don't get to take the exam. Or, if you're late for class, don't come to class. Stuff like that. Nothing so reasonable as "you're adults, make adult decisions, and I won't treat you like children".
Granted, maybe that's the mindset of most of the professors anyway. Most US students are children still, as they've been forcefully kept back socially throughout high school.
I think I'm getting you started on the meal plans.:)
I'm one of those students that's paid for my own college. I was in a roaming-about stage for a while, and lived in the dorms at SDSU (That's South Dakota State - one of the cheapest schools in the country - not San Diego State, unfortunately) - which requires a mandatory meal plan selection.
Of course, they obligingly added the cost of the plan to my dorm costs - about $850/semester, if I recall correctly. I did the math at the time, and dorm costs were about $350/month for a setup which essentially required the beds be elevated 6' off the floor in order to have any room whatsoever. The $350 doesn't have the $850/quarter added in, either.
Now, consider all this in light of the fact that a person can get a single-bedroom appartment in Brookings, SD (the town the campus is in) for $350 without even looking too hard. It's even possible to find comfortable and new(ish) 2 bedroom appartments which cost less (per of 2 people) for a 12 month lease than the dorms: no irritating "moving day". Just put your clothes in the car and go home (or stay for essentially free, as you've already paid for a full year).
Now, consider that freshman and sophmores are required by the school to remain in the dorms, and upper-classmen are given discounts for such foolishness.
Back to the meal plan again:
Now, in contrast, my experience at a liberal arts private college were somewhat different. Much more expensive up front ($27k/year), but all but around $7k of that was covered by grants and school-provided scholarships for me. I seem to recall the meal plan was a bit more reasonable (it was either around $1200/year or per semester), but it was also per-diem, all-you-can-eat. The phone plan at this school was, IIRC, $40 for the year (long distance not included). My parents would call me, or I'd call them collect (via a 1-800 number my dad set up which allowed someone to call him at his own long distance rates instead of the caller's - might want to look into it, I believe it was fairly inexpensive for setup.)
Overall, despite the up-front costs, I felt like i got fleeced a lot less at the private school (wihch I might as well mention - Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA). It was in just as much of a backwater town, but had a fairly lively and literate college campus (whereas a school in SD definately will not). I thought it was quite a good school, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a good school. I just couldn't afford it for subsequent years.:P (Grants and scholarships fully covered my tuition at SDSU).
BTW... let me know if you read this so I can feel like I didn't completely waste my time writing it.:P
Same thing happened around 1997 in my parent's town of residence (Huron, SD). It was one of the 'test' towns for cable Internet access, and as cable was fairly new to the town in general and it was a small town, they went with it.
The first couple years basically gave everyone incredible performance - 500Kbyte both up and down was normal, and you could get about 1.5Mbyte (not Mbit) to any of the other houses in town: in other words, the whole town was basically a WAN. You could even browse SMB shares with impunity. (Yes, this is a potential security problem, but there's no reason, IMO, to not leave it up to the user.) Quite a lot of file trading and music streaming went on through that method. Even the people a good 5 miles outside town limits got hooked up in many instances (if they were along the highway), and possibly further.
Despite all this, the cable company (Midcontinent) posted massive profits. And, if you'll remember correctly, the cable companies initially promised to decrease prices once they got off the ground and recouped installation and cable costs.
Well, a couple years went by. Roll around 1999, and they've raised prices (by requiring cable TV as well, unless you verbally bitch slap the reps until they give in as I did). Not only that, but hte cable internet prices are also about $5/month more expensive, and the modems have been capped at 512Kbit/128Kbit to top it off.
Roll around present day. To make the deal sting, "midconet" is one of the largest cable companies in the US, now that @home has gone out of business and Midco purchased their physical networks in the Midwest. They went from small Midwestern communications company to very large, profitable communications company (dare I say monopoly?) all on the good will of customers. Now, it's not even possible to use anything ICMP related on Midco networks. Things like "ping" are a business service, apparently.
(The ironic thing is, there's a debian apt mirror hosted by midco which has admirable speeds for midco users. It's all very confusing.)
A contract has nothing to do with the Social Security Administration. Being such, a contract does not require your SSN.
As has been said, the only people that need your SSN are people that need it for tax reporting reasons. In other words, this boils down to you and your employer (provided they do withholdings and such for you).
Anyone has that requests your SSN has no need of it other than to sell it to someone else.
386Mb should be enough for basic application use, I'd think, and not cost hardly anything. At this point, you could get 512Mb for likely less. I'm guessing he didn't plan well and buy the memory when it was dirt cheap, so now he's fucked and has to declare them trash.
Re:Real Estate and the age of InkJet Construction
on
Machine-Grown Housing
·
· Score: 1
The implications are also unrealistic.
Machines can do many things well, but something they can't account for the equivilent of a wrench getting thrown into their gears.
What if there's a problem? There are three basic kinds of problems that could occur (that i can think of at this moment): site-related, hardware/software, or materials.
The machines could, of course, make a lot of assumptions - due to their design - that things will work. This will be significantly cheaper, but result in lower-cost buildings overall. This is what is done now, to a large degree.
In order to not make assumptions, sensors would be required. Many, many sensors. Those sensors would then need to be connected to the computer, and routines written for their operation. This would cost a lot of money - the house building equivilant of RAID, if you will. Not so much to make it prohibotive, but enough to make it provacative: IE, enough to not change from methods which are less economically dangerous than buying massive machines. This is housing, remember - a very volitile market.
Now, this is just off the top of my head, but there are certain things which would (I'm guessing) be fairly difficult to pull off successfully (at a reasonable cost): - the building's structural integrity - the sturdyness and durability of individual construction parts (lumber, mostly) - proper setup for concrete hardening, etc. - real masonry (people still make a lot of money for doing this as artists!) - clean-up (do you know of -any- product out there that can effectively clean automated? I think this is why they hire people to clean grocery stores at night "still") - plumbing (often tricky business requiring a lot of attention to detail to prevent leaks) - electrical (same as plumbing. both would be well compared to building your own custom motherboard for every custom system, vs. your thought process of simply slapping together prefab computer parts)
I take it you've never lived in a house or building that suffered from problems caused by human shortcomings - such as lazyness, taking intentional shortcuts to save cost, and downright building code violations, then.
Oh, and by the way: you can give the 'computer' restraints on how to build things. Maybe give it 4 or 5 inputs ("inhabitants will be between 4'10" and 6'4", "kitchen must be at least 15' from bathroom and bedrooms", etc.), and let it fly.
If only they'd let these people fight in the streets, back alleys, and basements like civilized humans, and not require all this pent up false agression.
A K6-2/350 is about 7 or 8 years old - but nice try. Seven years ago we were looking at 500Mhz stuff in that realm. In 1999 (6 years ago, in case you can't count), we had Athlon CPUs which (IIRC) started at 550MHz. In 2000 (that's 5 years ago, btw), we had 1+ GHz CPUs from both Intel and AMD.
On another note... I currently use two Pentium II 350MHz systems at work, exclusively. One runs linux, the other runs Win98. I have absolutely no problem being productive on it. It's combination of software (Win98, Office 97, and various other apps) are roughly as stable as Windows XP is with Office 2003. I don't program (maybe that's what you're talking about?) but I do a fair amount of SSH administration and things of that order.
Yes, the daemon makes FreeBSD look unprofessional.
Meanwhile, Linux - complete with an over-stuffed penguin - is completely trouncing *BSD, to say nothing of simply FreeBSD, commercially. I wonder why?
Might it have something to do with the actual operating system?
Not only that, but the daemon is something which peole identify with - and have identified with. "Oh yeah, that cute little demon thing! That's UNIX! I'd like to try that."
I would have wanted to strangle that woman. Seriously. She's like a retarded monkey that keeps running into the electric fence to get to the bannanas.
not entirely on topic, but freshman year of college (2000) I had a friend with a viral video card. Literally.
The motherboard he had it in orignally died, so he replaced the motherboard. Plugged everthing in, started it up, and nothing. So he sent it back, assuming it was defective. While he was waiting for the 3rd motherboard, he plugged the card into his old system and... it didn't start up. That's when he figured it out, and ordered a new video card for the new board.
that happened to me while i was playing doom 3 recently, actually. I shot it before it could finish spawning, but had to grab the chemical extinguisher anyway.
my list (not so long): 1997: RAM (gradually died) 1998: hard drive (5.25") 1999: Motherboard (wouldn't boot) 2000: CD burner (just stopped working) 2002: video card (caused random freezes and failures for months until it finally died. could not figure out wtf the problem was until it died, despite pulling it and running w/ another card for a while) 2003: Power supply 2003: Power supply (already thoroughly used, and used as a replacement from an old Compaq for the previously failed psu) 2004: motherboard (blown capacitor)
All in all, I've not had a single disk failure of my own in the last 10 years (since I started computing), and fairly infrequent PSU problems. I chalk the latter up to having a battery backup unit which sanatizes the power and only buying high-quality PSUs (often 2x the median price). The former I attribute - in part - to buying good PSUs, decent hard drive brands, and being really fucking lucky.:P
Slashdot Mirror
I know a lot of people that would like it. All of my Windows using acquantances use "Media Player Classic" or something like thta, which is (I'm guessing) a copy of the original WMP (pre-version 5? Whenever they fuglified it), plus codecs.
In Windows it does. NTFS is a huge fucking whore, and when the disk gets close to full, it takes forever to do even the most basic tasks due to constant filesystem index retrival and searching.
Also keep in mind that a "full" install of even Debian is under 7Gb. A 'reasonable' install (IE, one that's practical and provides all the basic desktop applications, a full-size game, plus some other misc. stuff) is still only around 2.5Gb or so - maybe 3Gb.
I've got a 13Gb disk in my desktop machine right now which is (in total) about 92% full. It still performs just fine - without any such slowdown due to the disk being full.
It might help if Windows used a real swap partition, but I doubt that's the root problem, as disabling the swap file all together doesn't seem to do shit.
Think of the power and increased ease of administration that would result for network administrators if the following things were componentized (and how completely it would essentially annihilate the desire for Linux on desktops, I think):
Internet Explorer
Windows Media Player
Control Panel and hardware modification
add any application you wanted as an 'install candidate' for the install image
proper security
Now, I'm not talking about irritating stuff like "remove access to this application". I'm talking about completely removing the 'package' from the install image. Granted, you can do this to a limited degree, but imagine the power it would provide if such complex customizations could be made by companies to Windows for their own individual organization. It would help streamline Windows to the point where it became attractive to Unix people.
IMO, if MS were to go this route (the security changes making the WinNT permissions work properly would be key, IMO) and just use their existing XP base (but retool it and make it slick for admin geeks) instead of going the "bigger, better, more money" route, they'd likely profit more in the long term. They'd keep Windows on desktops, and they'd earn some currency with geeks who are tired with difficult-to-modify systems.
Dude, there's hardly any reason to have a ringer on a cell phone at all. A ringer is there in order to inform you you've got a call - not everyone around you. With a cell phone, it's almost invariably in your pocket, on your hip, etc. - unless you're a female trend setter and have to have it in a purse. But I digress.
Just put the damned phone on vibrate. That's my policy. It drives me batty how many different tones phones have, how irritating most of them are, etc. - and not just in a classroom; anywhere.
It would be simple enough for the person to hit *key combination* and de-activate the vibrate function when they go back to their rooms and put the phone on their desk, etc.
Not sure where else you've studied, but it's my experience that this is predominantly the case in the US - at least in the Midwest.
There's not much rational thought like there is in the Real World. If you're late by 10 minutes for a final exam because of a traffic accident or something like that, you still don't get to take the exam. Or, if you're late for class, don't come to class. Stuff like that. Nothing so reasonable as "you're adults, make adult decisions, and I won't treat you like children".
Granted, maybe that's the mindset of most of the professors anyway. Most US students are children still, as they've been forcefully kept back socially throughout high school.
I think I'm getting you started on the meal plans. :)
:P (Grants and scholarships fully covered my tuition at SDSU).
:P
I'm one of those students that's paid for my own college. I was in a roaming-about stage for a while, and lived in the dorms at SDSU (That's South Dakota State - one of the cheapest schools in the country - not San Diego State, unfortunately) - which requires a mandatory meal plan selection.
Of course, they obligingly added the cost of the plan to my dorm costs - about $850/semester, if I recall correctly. I did the math at the time, and dorm costs were about $350/month for a setup which essentially required the beds be elevated 6' off the floor in order to have any room whatsoever. The $350 doesn't have the $850/quarter added in, either.
Now, consider all this in light of the fact that a person can get a single-bedroom appartment in Brookings, SD (the town the campus is in) for $350 without even looking too hard. It's even possible to find comfortable and new(ish) 2 bedroom appartments which cost less (per of 2 people) for a 12 month lease than the dorms: no irritating "moving day". Just put your clothes in the car and go home (or stay for essentially free, as you've already paid for a full year).
Now, consider that freshman and sophmores are required by the school to remain in the dorms, and upper-classmen are given discounts for such foolishness.
Back to the meal plan again:
Now, in contrast, my experience at a liberal arts private college were somewhat different. Much more expensive up front ($27k/year), but all but around $7k of that was covered by grants and school-provided scholarships for me. I seem to recall the meal plan was a bit more reasonable (it was either around $1200/year or per semester), but it was also per-diem, all-you-can-eat. The phone plan at this school was, IIRC, $40 for the year (long distance not included). My parents would call me, or I'd call them collect (via a 1-800 number my dad set up which allowed someone to call him at his own long distance rates instead of the caller's - might want to look into it, I believe it was fairly inexpensive for setup.)
Overall, despite the up-front costs, I felt like i got fleeced a lot less at the private school (wihch I might as well mention - Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA). It was in just as much of a backwater town, but had a fairly lively and literate college campus (whereas a school in SD definately will not). I thought it was quite a good school, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a good school. I just couldn't afford it for subsequent years.
BTW... let me know if you read this so I can feel like I didn't completely waste my time writing it.
Same thing happened around 1997 in my parent's town of residence (Huron, SD). It was one of the 'test' towns for cable Internet access, and as cable was fairly new to the town in general and it was a small town, they went with it.
The first couple years basically gave everyone incredible performance - 500Kbyte both up and down was normal, and you could get about 1.5Mbyte (not Mbit) to any of the other houses in town: in other words, the whole town was basically a WAN. You could even browse SMB shares with impunity. (Yes, this is a potential security problem, but there's no reason, IMO, to not leave it up to the user.) Quite a lot of file trading and music streaming went on through that method. Even the people a good 5 miles outside town limits got hooked up in many instances (if they were along the highway), and possibly further.
Despite all this, the cable company (Midcontinent) posted massive profits. And, if you'll remember correctly, the cable companies initially promised to decrease prices once they got off the ground and recouped installation and cable costs.
Well, a couple years went by. Roll around 1999, and they've raised prices (by requiring cable TV as well, unless you verbally bitch slap the reps until they give in as I did). Not only that, but hte cable internet prices are also about $5/month more expensive, and the modems have been capped at 512Kbit/128Kbit to top it off.
Roll around present day. To make the deal sting, "midconet" is one of the largest cable companies in the US, now that @home has gone out of business and Midco purchased their physical networks in the Midwest. They went from small Midwestern communications company to very large, profitable communications company (dare I say monopoly?) all on the good will of customers. Now, it's not even possible to use anything ICMP related on Midco networks. Things like "ping" are a business service, apparently.
(The ironic thing is, there's a debian apt mirror hosted by midco which has admirable speeds for midco users. It's all very confusing.)
1-2 minutes per query? Dear god. what were they using for a db server, a 386?
Or did htey just have a copious number of users (all of which did frequent queries)?
A contract has nothing to do with the Social Security Administration. Being such, a contract does not require your SSN.
As has been said, the only people that need your SSN are people that need it for tax reporting reasons. In other words, this boils down to you and your employer (provided they do withholdings and such for you).
Anyone has that requests your SSN has no need of it other than to sell it to someone else.
The idiot probably only has 64M - maybe 128M.
386Mb should be enough for basic application use, I'd think, and not cost hardly anything. At this point, you could get 512Mb for likely less. I'm guessing he didn't plan well and buy the memory when it was dirt cheap, so now he's fucked and has to declare them trash.
The implications are also unrealistic.
Machines can do many things well, but something they can't account for the equivilent of a wrench getting thrown into their gears.
What if there's a problem? There are three basic kinds of problems that could occur (that i can think of at this moment): site-related, hardware/software, or materials.
The machines could, of course, make a lot of assumptions - due to their design - that things will work. This will be significantly cheaper, but result in lower-cost buildings overall. This is what is done now, to a large degree.
In order to not make assumptions, sensors would be required. Many, many sensors. Those sensors would then need to be connected to the computer, and routines written for their operation. This would cost a lot of money - the house building equivilant of RAID, if you will. Not so much to make it prohibotive, but enough to make it provacative: IE, enough to not change from methods which are less economically dangerous than buying massive machines. This is housing, remember - a very volitile market.
Now, this is just off the top of my head, but there are certain things which would (I'm guessing) be fairly difficult to pull off successfully (at a reasonable cost):
- the building's structural integrity
- the sturdyness and durability of individual construction parts (lumber, mostly)
- proper setup for concrete hardening, etc.
- real masonry (people still make a lot of money for doing this as artists!)
- clean-up (do you know of -any- product out there that can effectively clean automated? I think this is why they hire people to clean grocery stores at night "still")
- plumbing (often tricky business requiring a lot of attention to detail to prevent leaks)
- electrical (same as plumbing. both would be well compared to building your own custom motherboard for every custom system, vs. your thought process of simply slapping together prefab computer parts)
I take it you've never lived in a house or building that suffered from problems caused by human shortcomings - such as lazyness, taking intentional shortcuts to save cost, and downright building code violations, then.
Oh, and by the way: you can give the 'computer' restraints on how to build things. Maybe give it 4 or 5 inputs ("inhabitants will be between 4'10" and 6'4", "kitchen must be at least 15' from bathroom and bedrooms", etc.), and let it fly.
Granted, they'd still be ugly houses.
If only they'd let these people fight in the streets, back alleys, and basements like civilized humans, and not require all this pent up false agression.
You should've just "accidentially" spilled water into the case and get a new system: problem solved, as due to failure, you'd get a new system.
A K6-2/350 is about 7 or 8 years old - but nice try. Seven years ago we were looking at 500Mhz stuff in that realm. In 1999 (6 years ago, in case you can't count), we had Athlon CPUs which (IIRC) started at 550MHz. In 2000 (that's 5 years ago, btw), we had 1+ GHz CPUs from both Intel and AMD.
If you don't believe me, look here.
On another note... I currently use two Pentium II 350MHz systems at work, exclusively. One runs linux, the other runs Win98. I have absolutely no problem being productive on it. It's combination of software (Win98, Office 97, and various other apps) are roughly as stable as Windows XP is with Office 2003. I don't program (maybe that's what you're talking about?) but I do a fair amount of SSH administration and things of that order.
Yes, the daemon makes FreeBSD look unprofessional.
Meanwhile, Linux - complete with an over-stuffed penguin - is completely trouncing *BSD, to say nothing of simply FreeBSD, commercially. I wonder why?
Might it have something to do with the actual operating system?
Not only that, but the daemon is something which peole identify with - and have identified with. "Oh yeah, that cute little demon thing! That's UNIX! I'd like to try that."
this is just the first step of subscription based licensing... mark my words.
That's cool, I guess. I'd rather be able to see in sonic or infrared. Where can I get eyes like that?
I would have wanted to strangle that woman. Seriously. She's like a retarded monkey that keeps running into the electric fence to get to the bannanas.
not entirely on topic, but freshman year of college (2000) I had a friend with a viral video card. Literally.
The motherboard he had it in orignally died, so he replaced the motherboard. Plugged everthing in, started it up, and nothing. So he sent it back, assuming it was defective. While he was waiting for the 3rd motherboard, he plugged the card into his old system and... it didn't start up. That's when he figured it out, and ordered a new video card for the new board.
Everything worked fine after that.
that happened to me while i was playing doom 3 recently, actually. I shot it before it could finish spawning, but had to grab the chemical extinguisher anyway.
(kidding)
companies not selling quality power supply units in OEM machines, mostly, I'd imagine. build it cheap, markit up.
my list (not so long):
:P
1997: RAM (gradually died)
1998: hard drive (5.25")
1999: Motherboard (wouldn't boot)
2000: CD burner (just stopped working)
2002: video card (caused random freezes and failures for months until it finally died. could not figure out wtf the problem was until it died, despite pulling it and running w/ another card for a while)
2003: Power supply
2003: Power supply (already thoroughly used, and used as a replacement from an old Compaq for the previously failed psu)
2004: motherboard (blown capacitor)
All in all, I've not had a single disk failure of my own in the last 10 years (since I started computing), and fairly infrequent PSU problems. I chalk the latter up to having a battery backup unit which sanatizes the power and only buying high-quality PSUs (often 2x the median price). The former I attribute - in part - to buying good PSUs, decent hard drive brands, and being really fucking lucky.
often, when the powersupply dies, so does the motherboard, ram, pci cards, etc.
Women with shaved lips and hairy armpits wearing Greenpeace tshirts and men's pants!