I've set a few people up with old PII/350's, just to get them a computer in the first place..
I get similar requests about "what computer should I buy" at work, and usually a 350 is about all they need. But I still get "Is this the fastest you can get? Because I don't want to upgrade in 2 years". Well they'll probably upgrade in 2 years anyway or they wont reguardless of speed. So I just recommend they get some computer with an Athlon (not Duron) and that they don't spend more than $650 on it. Most other questions about RAM and disk space are moot because they're enough for most users now days even at the low end, and I don't want to get into explanations they probably won't understand.
If people want really advanced advice I usually only explain that they want a really good power supply, and a good main board (MSI makes pretty decent ones in my experience). Two critical components that no one ever looks at because they're focused on the processor.
Actually I'm interested in SCO too. Having had the misfortune being an admin for a SCO system for 2 months (before we switched to Linux) I wonder if anyone seriously would use SCO as a webserver. If s o I'd really like to hear about their experiences =P
Netcraft has all sorts of interesting data to dig through. But no place just too look for a total list of OS hosts. Also sort of neat to see what domains interest people the most. (Like #5 linuxsucks.org running on Linux)
I'm wondering what others think of the impact efforts like this may have on software development jobs in the US. Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?
The problem with these statements are that the person wonders about "IT" yet wonders about the impact of software development (a subsect of IT). You want to know what is having a bigger impact on software development then OSS? They're countries like India and China. IT in general will probably be just as important, especially as open source stuff gets more popular. It's easy to say that you can get a lot of stuff for free, but what do you do with it? Apache, PHP, Postgresql (the list goes on) are all tools, and someone has to put them together. Some would say that can be outsourced as well, but IMHO most businesses want someone that actually sees what their buisness needs and knows what's going on. I think the jobs will be there, but it will definatly shift from where it was going during the dot com era - and with sane wages as well.
Who would really trust getting anything from AOL anyway? I mean it's one thing if I buy from Amazon and they mysteriously start customizing the home page to "fit my tastes" - which is sort of disturbing from a privacy sort of view, and also sort of disturbing seeing death metal stuff mixed in with anime on a front page. But if I had AOL and bought music from them, I imagine that the harassment would never end. I mean AOL is like a big commercial already, and with the control they have over their user's Internet experience, I can see major harassment to follow.
After 16 yours you should be taking a break anyway. The amount of eye strain you are probably experiencing is likely hurting your vision. I somehow doubt you look away from the screen every 15 minutes or so like your supposed to either (but who does that anyway?:) . I don't really see how this would make things that much harder to see than say, making an application look "3d" instead of strait black lines.
I think if there is any tragedy in Linux eyestrain it's anti-aliasing fonts, where I get the choice of: 1) looks like an ass (normal) 2) looks like a blurry mess (aliased).
Lets hope to God this triggers another investigation - there is such a huge increase in their deliberatly destructive antics now that even a half blind judge would break them up.
Unfortunatly we all know how slow this would be even if there was another investigation. The way the system works is just too lethargic to keep up with technology. Besides which those who stand to judge Microsoft aren't even qualified to really judge what they have or haven't done wrong.
At this point I wouldn't even need a breakup of the company, just STOP Microsoft from buying other software companies for gods sakes. It's almost disgusting realising how MS continues to buy company after company and virtually eliminating choices.
Before that, "innovation" was Netscape ignoring the W3C and making up new "standards" every other week.
Well if we'd been following the W3C all along we'd still be at the pathetic level of HTML 2. Netscape did majorly push innovation but right around the 4x series of browsers that all turned into a nightmare. Even worse in that the 4x browsers were so buggy in that they never did what they were supposed to even by their own standards. Netscape played their part in browser innovation, and did so mainly by making up their own rules. I think most people agree that HTML+CSS+javascript is a sufficent toolset that we can standardize on. I can't say that the end justifies the means, but that's the way it works sometimes.
That's okay if your a Zealot. He's paying for your internet with every popup he views, while you have the privelege of not having to put up with that garbage.
Choosing Microsoft is the final decision, because after that there won't be any easy choices anymore.
You have lots of choices... it's just that they're all from Microsoft! And who would want those pesky choices anyway? Especially considering the massive innovations in products such as MS Office and Internet Explorer =P
Well I don't think N4 really matters. Seriously if you use N4 I'm sure you must be used to the entire internet looking completely fucked up. I can't say how happy I am to finally have a browser that you can build web pages from scratch based on standards, fire up a browser and actually have it look like you intended (well aside from the file download box which gets totally messed up when you try to control it with CSS in Mozilla).
IE still has a ways to go with CSS. And unfortunatly now that MS has dominance in the browser market, I don't think they really care either.
Re:Words change in meaning over time
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 1
Actually that's an interesting point. I could say the same for irony. Especially considering trying to explaining irony to some people is like rocket science. People do it in other respects as well, such as urban legends. Most people I know actually believe we only use 10% of our brain, and never really investigated it farther themselves.
This isn't like 1984 where the government tried to control the population through language. That was the entire point of that aspect of the book. If anything this (the use of irony) shows that: stupid people pick up a word and misuse it -> there are a lot of stupid people -> a lot of people can change a language -> stupid people control our language. =P
Well we could always go to the "pinball score inflation system".
As you can see windows is very good for a desktop operating sytem, which gives it another 8 million points. KDE on Linux while not being perfect also did quite well so it only scored 2 million below windows. Emacs comes in at a low score of 3 million total as a desktop operating sytem. In our next review we will be showing the differences between file servers... as soon as our point system is upgraded to a 64 bit processor
Did I say marketing was unneeded? no. What I'm saying is that the marketing is out of control - and even the record labels are starting to flinch at how much it's costing them to get airplay on the radio. So by your taking we can't have music without marketing? And in all of human history we haven't had music, or any popular songs until the wonderful music undustry that has evolved has saved us from our ignoance? Whatever.
I'm not talking about "buisness" and if my "rudamentary understainding" of such. I'm talking about music, and I could give a fuck about the buisness. It's not like 95% of music artists are getting rich (reguardless of talent) because of the music industry. Simply put the music cartel has made the industry a sick parody of what it should be.
What we've taken out of the picture is the people, which is exactly what the music industry wants because it's what they can predict, control and push. And they can (try to) do this by overwhealming marketing.
I'm glad you understand how marketing works and why it works so well. Please enjoy all the shit music because of it.
That's BS. We like to think that it costs a zillion dollars to promote an artist, but in reality the record industry dug themselves into this hole. Just look at how much it costs to get a song played on the radio. I mean God forbit a dj just picks up some music they like and starts playing it. Who knows what sort of anarchy would ensue if MTV (assuming they would play a video at all) would simply play a video that people just liked.
Record companies spend ass loads of money promoting artists because it's all they know how to do. They want to push that one cookie cutter artist that has "the right sound" as far as their worth, because finding multiple artists with a lot of tallent takes way too much effort to scout. If they would just make the effort to scout some REAL tallent that might not be in their formula, and then just give it some airplay WITHOUT payola, we might have a system where the actuaal population buying the shit could decide what they want to buy , instead of being bombarded with these million dollar music propaganda campains that drown out smaller artists.
So I don't go to these places because they sell the same crap that everyone else does and basically have an all around poor selection and over charge as well (well in the malls anyway, where you tend to find them).
Now then, why in the hell would I go to their website to buy music? If people are going to buy from anywhwere it's probably going to be from somewhere that you can get a variety of things; Amazon, B&N etc.
I for one am sick and tired of people labeling me as a lazy ass bastard because i spend a shitload of my time on computers.
Well there's a difference between what he's talking about and what you're talking about. I got stuck on Everquest for a while, and while I've always been into games, I've never wasted such a large portion of time per day. The key term here is wasting time because getting some crap sword in a game isn't really "productive". Gaming for entertainment is fine, but there's a gray area for just becoming a loser =P . Same goes for instant messenging, or many other things. Saying you're addicted to computers comes with a bad connotation of wasting time because that's what most people do with a computer.
Saying "I was on the computer all night" to a person and they assume you were just surfing for porn or something. Saying "I was up til 3 am writing a program" to a person usually gets a more "favorable" response. But either way you tend to waste your life if that's all you do and you have no variety.
"I was innocently poking around on limewire, when i found a small (50k or so) WMA or ASF file ( i just know it was an MS format) titled "must have - hilarious.WMA" so i clicked, and downloaded"
A lesson to us all: No funny buisness, just go strait for the porn.
Yeah it was NTFS and using the standard cluster size. Since that time windows update completely f'ed up the computer to the point where I couldn't recover windows to a running state, so I transferred the files off the drive and reformatted it. Now I've been keeping a closer eye on the drive and avoid storing things on it so I haven't had any other problems with it.
operagost does bring up an interesting point with swap files and such, as I imagine if I got critically low with space (as I often was) that it's possible that windows started going nuts on the small space that was left especially considering the windows swap file could end up extending and shrinking which would magnify the fragmentation.
But really I don't know, I've never seen anything like it to tell you the truth *shrug*
Hmm... well that depends because the space in question was all within my user directory on Win2k. I'm not sure that windows would put such things in my user directory, but really I can't say for sure.
It would be slack if the files were small. There were a lot of text files and such (about 100) but most of them were files over 2megs (mp3s etc) so no it is not slack - it would take like, what 10000 small files all perfectly the wrong size for the filesystem to account for the slack between 200Mb and 1Gb? That's highly doubtful. Besides which I've found that defragmenting does indeed save you space in situations where obviously you end up with large files spattered all over the place because of low free space. On Linux this is rarely a problem, but Windows seems to have bad issues with what to do with a 700Mb file when you have 2gb free.
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I've set a few people up with old PII/350's, just to get them a computer in the first place..
I get similar requests about "what computer should I buy" at work, and usually a 350 is about all they need. But I still get "Is this the fastest you can get? Because I don't want to upgrade in 2 years". Well they'll probably upgrade in 2 years anyway or they wont reguardless of speed. So I just recommend they get some computer with an Athlon (not Duron) and that they don't spend more than $650 on it. Most other questions about RAM and disk space are moot because they're enough for most users now days even at the low end, and I don't want to get into explanations they probably won't understand.
If people want really advanced advice I usually only explain that they want a really good power supply, and a good main board (MSI makes pretty decent ones in my experience). Two critical components that no one ever looks at because they're focused on the processor.
Actually I'm interested in SCO too. Having had the misfortune being an admin for a SCO system for 2 months (before we switched to Linux) I wonder if anyone seriously would use SCO as a webserver. If s o I'd really like to hear about their experiences =P
Netcraft has all sorts of interesting data to dig through. But no place just too look for a total list of OS hosts. Also sort of neat to see what domains interest people the most. (Like #5 linuxsucks.org running on Linux)
I'm wondering what others think of the impact efforts like this may have on software development jobs in the US. Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?
The problem with these statements are that the person wonders about "IT" yet wonders about the impact of software development (a subsect of IT). You want to know what is having a bigger impact on software development then OSS? They're countries like India and China. IT in general will probably be just as important, especially as open source stuff gets more popular. It's easy to say that you can get a lot of stuff for free, but what do you do with it? Apache, PHP, Postgresql (the list goes on) are all tools, and someone has to put them together. Some would say that can be outsourced as well, but IMHO most businesses want someone that actually sees what their buisness needs and knows what's going on. I think the jobs will be there, but it will definatly shift from where it was going during the dot com era - and with sane wages as well.
Who would really trust getting anything from AOL anyway? I mean it's one thing if I buy from Amazon and they mysteriously start customizing the home page to "fit my tastes" - which is sort of disturbing from a privacy sort of view, and also sort of disturbing seeing death metal stuff mixed in with anime on a front page. But if I had AOL and bought music from them, I imagine that the harassment would never end. I mean AOL is like a big commercial already, and with the control they have over their user's Internet experience, I can see major harassment to follow.
Which is almost as scary as object oriented Fortran,
which is Fortran for those who think that they couldn't be any more scarred by Fortran...
After 16 yours you should be taking a break anyway. The amount of eye strain you are probably experiencing is likely hurting your vision. I somehow doubt you look away from the screen every 15 minutes or so like your supposed to either (but who does that anyway? :) . I don't really see how this would make things that much harder to see than say, making an application look "3d" instead of strait black lines.
I think if there is any tragedy in Linux eyestrain it's anti-aliasing fonts, where I get the choice of: 1) looks like an ass (normal) 2) looks like a blurry mess (aliased).
What they don't get in timeliness they make up for in volume (dupes).
Lets hope to God this triggers another investigation - there is such a huge increase in their deliberatly destructive antics now that even a half blind judge would break them up.
Unfortunatly we all know how slow this would be even if there was another investigation. The way the system works is just too lethargic to keep up with technology. Besides which those who stand to judge Microsoft aren't even qualified to really judge what they have or haven't done wrong.
At this point I wouldn't even need a breakup of the company, just STOP Microsoft from buying other software companies for gods sakes. It's almost disgusting realising how MS continues to buy company after company and virtually eliminating choices.
Before that, "innovation" was Netscape ignoring the W3C and making up new "standards" every other week.
Well if we'd been following the W3C all along we'd still be at the pathetic level of HTML 2. Netscape did majorly push innovation but right around the 4x series of browsers that all turned into a nightmare. Even worse in that the 4x browsers were so buggy in that they never did what they were supposed to even by their own standards. Netscape played their part in browser innovation, and did so mainly by making up their own rules. I think most people agree that HTML+CSS+javascript is a sufficent toolset that we can standardize on. I can't say that the end justifies the means, but that's the way it works sometimes.
That's okay if your a Zealot. He's paying for your internet with every popup he views, while you have the privelege of not having to put up with that garbage.
Choosing Microsoft is the final decision, because after that there won't be any easy choices anymore.
You have lots of choices... it's just that they're all from Microsoft! And who would want those pesky choices anyway? Especially considering the massive innovations in products such as MS Office and Internet Explorer =P
Well I think we just solved why it crashed.
Better submit that sucker to bugzilla.
Well I don't think N4 really matters. Seriously if you use N4 I'm sure you must be used to the entire internet looking completely fucked up. I can't say how happy I am to finally have a browser that you can build web pages from scratch based on standards, fire up a browser and actually have it look like you intended (well aside from the file download box which gets totally messed up when you try to control it with CSS in Mozilla).
IE still has a ways to go with CSS. And unfortunatly now that MS has dominance in the browser market, I don't think they really care either.
Actually that's an interesting point. I could say the same for irony. Especially considering trying to explaining irony to some people is like rocket science. People do it in other respects as well, such as urban legends. Most people I know actually believe we only use 10% of our brain, and never really investigated it farther themselves.
This isn't like 1984 where the government tried to control the population through language. That was the entire point of that aspect of the book. If anything this (the use of irony) shows that: stupid people pick up a word and misuse it -> there are a lot of stupid people -> a lot of people can change a language -> stupid people control our language. =P
Well we could always go to the "pinball score inflation system".
As you can see windows is very good for a desktop operating sytem, which gives it another 8 million points. KDE on Linux while not being perfect also did quite well so it only scored 2 million below windows. Emacs comes in at a low score of 3 million total as a desktop operating sytem. In our next review we will be showing the differences between file servers... as soon as our point system is upgraded to a 64 bit processor
every application I used was written in FORTRAN, and still is
Now I don't feel that bad not owning one.
*cringe*
Did I say marketing was unneeded? no. What I'm saying is that the marketing is out of control - and even the record labels are starting to flinch at how much it's costing them to get airplay on the radio. So by your taking we can't have music without marketing? And in all of human history we haven't had music, or any popular songs until the wonderful music undustry that has evolved has saved us from our ignoance? Whatever.
I'm not talking about "buisness" and if my "rudamentary understainding" of such. I'm talking about music, and I could give a fuck about the buisness. It's not like 95% of music artists are getting rich (reguardless of talent) because of the music industry. Simply put the music cartel has made the industry a sick parody of what it should be.
What we've taken out of the picture is the people, which is exactly what the music industry wants because it's what they can predict, control and push. And they can (try to) do this by overwhealming marketing.
I'm glad you understand how marketing works and why it works so well. Please enjoy all the shit music because of it.
That's BS. We like to think that it costs a zillion dollars to promote an artist, but in reality the record industry dug themselves into this hole. Just look at how much it costs to get a song played on the radio. I mean God forbit a dj just picks up some music they like and starts playing it. Who knows what sort of anarchy would ensue if MTV (assuming they would play a video at all) would simply play a video that people just liked.
Record companies spend ass loads of money promoting artists because it's all they know how to do. They want to push that one cookie cutter artist that has "the right sound" as far as their worth, because finding multiple artists with a lot of tallent takes way too much effort to scout. If they would just make the effort to scout some REAL tallent that might not be in their formula, and then just give it some airplay WITHOUT payola, we might have a system where the actuaal population buying the shit could decide what they want to buy , instead of being bombarded with these million dollar music propaganda campains that drown out smaller artists.
Look at these stores : Musicland, and Sam Goody
So I don't go to these places because they sell the same crap that everyone else does and basically have an all around poor selection and over charge as well (well in the malls anyway, where you tend to find them).
Now then, why in the hell would I go to their website to buy music? If people are going to buy from anywhwere it's probably going to be from somewhere that you can get a variety of things; Amazon, B&N etc.
I for one am sick and tired of people labeling me as a lazy ass bastard because i spend a shitload of my time on computers.
Well there's a difference between what he's talking about and what you're talking about. I got stuck on Everquest for a while, and while I've always been into games, I've never wasted such a large portion of time per day. The key term here is wasting time because getting some crap sword in a game isn't really "productive". Gaming for entertainment is fine, but there's a gray area for just becoming a loser =P . Same goes for instant messenging, or many other things. Saying you're addicted to computers comes with a bad connotation of wasting time because that's what most people do with a computer.
Saying "I was on the computer all night" to a person and they assume you were just surfing for porn or something. Saying "I was up til 3 am writing a program" to a person usually gets a more "favorable" response. But either way you tend to waste your life if that's all you do and you have no variety.
"I was innocently poking around on limewire, when i found a small (50k or so) WMA or ASF file ( i just know it was an MS format) titled "must have - hilarious.WMA" so i clicked, and downloaded"
A lesson to us all: No funny buisness, just go strait for the porn.
Reminds me of fast food joints where you have your choice of Medium, Large or Super-sized.
Yeah it was NTFS and using the standard cluster size. Since that time windows update completely f'ed up the computer to the point where I couldn't recover windows to a running state, so I transferred the files off the drive and reformatted it. Now I've been keeping a closer eye on the drive and avoid storing things on it so I haven't had any other problems with it.
operagost does bring up an interesting point with swap files and such, as I imagine if I got critically low with space (as I often was) that it's possible that windows started going nuts on the small space that was left especially considering the windows swap file could end up extending and shrinking which would magnify the fragmentation.
But really I don't know, I've never seen anything like it to tell you the truth *shrug*
Hmm... well that depends because the space in question was all within my user directory on Win2k. I'm not sure that windows would put such things in my user directory, but really I can't say for sure.
It would be slack if the files were small. There were a lot of text files and such (about 100) but most of them were files over 2megs (mp3s etc) so no it is not slack - it would take like, what 10000 small files all perfectly the wrong size for the filesystem to account for the slack between 200Mb and 1Gb? That's highly doubtful. Besides which I've found that defragmenting does indeed save you space in situations where obviously you end up with large files spattered all over the place because of low free space. On Linux this is rarely a problem, but Windows seems to have bad issues with what to do with a 700Mb file when you have 2gb free.