If the tax tables were uniform then the "rich" would still pay more money.
Still pay more money? [laugh] "Only the little people pay taxes."
Hmm...so if the top 1% of income-earners pay more than a third of all income tax revenue, the top 5% pay over half, and the top 10% pay nearly two-thirds, how do you arrive at the conclusion that "only the little people pay taxes?"
The people shaped targets are mainly going to be used by people who have to shoot at people for their job, such as police and bodyguards.
I went shooting last weekend...half of the other lanes had people plinking at Osama bin Laden targets with anything from.38s or.357s on up to a machine gun of some sort that someone had rented.
(As for me, I made up a simple bullseye pattern in Publisher and printed a bunch of copies. So I'm cheap...sue me.:-) I had a new.22 target pistol to try out and didn't feel like shelling out 35 each (or whatever) for enough of the standard bullseye targets to take 200 rounds.)
But then again, a gun has only one rather specific specific use.
...and that would be what, exactly? (While a Glock 23 makes a fairly nice defensive weapon, a Ruger Mk. II is better suited to plinking and target shooting.)
(You'd think I'd know better by now than to respond to an anti-gun Euro-troll...oh well, it's only karma. Fat lot of good victim disarmament did the French the other day...)
Yeah, I used Unix (not Linux) in programming courses when I was in college, but most colleges now-a-days use Win2K labs and are phasing out their Unix labs (same programming courses in my college are using Visual Studio's version of C++).
I was on the "twelve-year plan" going through college.:-) When I started, the CS lab was full of SPARCstation 1s with a smattering of NeXTcubes and PS/2s. By the time I finished up, the lab was running P!!! boxen (from Dell) that dual-booted Win2K and Linux. Most of the time, when you walked up to a random machine it was booted into Linux. (I'd reboot to Win2K because I can't stand Nutscrape and no other browser was installed under Linux. Besides, all my projects were on my Linux server at home and I could get at them via ssh.) There were also some SGI O2s in the engineering lab, and some older P5 boxen that dual-booted NT4 and NetBSD.
Nearly every course I took that involved programming revolved around Pascal, C, or C++ on something UN*Xish...the only courses that didn't were systems programming (x86 assembly under DOS and VAX assembly under VMS), database systems (nothing more than some simple SQL queries that were tested against Oracle, though you could use MySQL or even Access and still get correct results), and the two graphics courses I took. C++ under Win32 was recommended for those graphics courses, but all my image-processing projects (including a DCT-based image compressor and decompressor) were written in C as Linux command-line apps.
(FWIW, this was at a midsized public university. It'd be interesting to see any correlation between public/private, large/small, etc. institutions and what tends to get used at each.)
so, how difficult is it to get a firewire port on a windows machine?
Not at all difficult...the card will run you $40 or less, and Win2K & WinXP have built-in support for the more common FireWire chipsets. Hell, some computers have it built-in (not that that matters, since nobody here uses storebought computers). FireWire beats the snot out of USB for storage devices, and there are also FireWire webcams that deliver higher resolutions/framerates than USB can handle. I've used it for the past few months; it's good stuff.
Re:This is a trojan horse, plain and simple.
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Spy v. Spy
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That's like your trusty Chevy switching to Battlebots mode every time it detects a Honda in the highway
Serious implications aside, thats hilarious.:)
I saw this on the rear window of a F*rd pickup recently:
The Surgeon General said nothing about smoking imports...
That'd be right at home on the back of my S10 (better there than on something that needs to be Fixed Or Repaired Daily)...
If they had the balls, they would reject this ultimatum policy entirely and compete and be successful without Microsoft or Windows. There are other OSes out there, lots of them. Or if none of them are sufficient, they could team with a software manufacturer to create or port one for exclusive distribution. Or they could just sell their hardware without a bundled OS.
Umm, I'll spare you the "you're a complete moron" line and just go to this:
Mass produced PCs without Windows DON'T SELL ! I hope that was clear enough.
Try telling that to these guys, who've managed just fine without Microsoft for more than 25 years.
After I found out about their 'MS on all machines' issue, I just stopped buying from them all togather.
And how did you manage to find a vendor that did not do this?
I would think most screwdriver shops would do this...they're already using whatever processor, RAM, HD, etc. you specify, so the logical extension would be that you could specify the OS to be installed. I've bought parts for complete systems at PC Club and not had to pay the "MS tax" along with those parts. I've never had them assemble a system (I can do that myself), but I would think they'd build a "naked PC" if you asked.
The problem is with the PHBs who expect a "brand name" on their computers. You might have to do some homework on marketdroid concepts like Return On Investment and making a "Business case" for going the white-box route, but I am confident that a business case can indeed be made for building you own machines or finding a trustworthy screwdriver shop and having them build a whole bunch of computers to your very exacting specifications.
Fortunately, the boss isn't of the pointy-haired type. I just think he didn't know better. I built the last two machines the company bought (1.4-GHz Athlon XPs on nForce motherboards, with Win2K on one and Linux From Scratch on the other). When we add more machines in the future, I think I've already made the case that build-your-own is the way to go.
Then again if CBDTPA (The evil bill formerly known as SSSCA and commonly called the "Hollings/Disney Act") passes, "name brand" crappy computers with "digital rights management" boobytraps will be all you can buy legally in the US.
Drugs and illegal aliens won't be the only things smuggled in from Mexico if that should happen, I think. At least the dogs won't be able to sniff out the contraband motherboards, hard drives, etc. hidden in unexpected places...
Hmm, I wonder what it would take to cut out Dell and "Be [really] DIRECT?"
I know someone who bought a Sceptre notebook...they're another of Dell's suppliers. If you can track down a reseller for Sceptre, Quanta, or whoever, you can probably still save a few hundred bucks compared to what Dell would ask for the same machine.
I'm not so sure about that...one of my work machines is an HP Pavilion (don't laugh...it wasn't my decision), and the 80GB 5400rpm Maxtor (ugh) in it croaked after less than a year. This drive was in a 1.2-GHz Athlon system...not too far from the top of the line when it was purchased. While it has the usual DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives and also includes FireWire, it was built with an el-cheapo nVidia TNT Vanta video card (which also died recently) and only 192 MB RAM.
(It now has an 80GB 7200rpm Western Digital hard drive and a GeForce2 MX 400-based graphics card. I would've preferred a Radeon of some sort, but PC Club didn't have any in stock at the time.)
Does anybody really use usenet anymore? everytime i've poked around on my ISP's NNTP server, it seems to be filled with 90% spam, and non-spam posts seem to always be grossly offtopic.
Maybe it depends on what newsgroups you frequent. The worst that I usually see is flamage over abandonware in comp.sys.apple2, which is jihad fodder for some. Aside from a few easily-filtered kooks, several of the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.* groups offer decent S/N. Last time I checked, comp.os.linux.* wasn't too bad either.
I hate to break the news to you, but Usenet is not just for text discussions any more.
Has it ever been? I was downloading software posted to comp.binaries.apple (what's now called comp.binaries.apple2) as far back as 1989. If Usenet was ever text-only, that would've been before my time.:-)
Ignoring soy allergies for the moment, wouldn't it be easier (and maybe safer) to eat tofu?
Considering that tofu is nutritionally inadequate (there are essential proteins that you just can't get from vegetable sources), it's probably "six of one, half-a-dozen of the other." (This also assumes that the test-tube fish is nutritionally equivalent to one that was raised in the normal manner.)
I don't think the nutrient solution they're using would be particularly harmful as long as you're not getting it from Europe (that's where all the BSE problems have popped up). This process doesn't sound all that appetizing, but neither does the idea of processing excrement (among other things) to get the water out for other uses (which I think is something they're already doing).
It seems strange that they used goldfish, though...why not a fish that's more commonly used for food? (Yes, I know there are some people who are into swallowing whole live goldfish, for sport, entertainment, or whatever...these people are commonly known as "freaks.":-) )
it seems there should be an option to say no to having the magnetic strip on a license.
You could also move someplace that doesn't use them. Nevada still uses old-school Polaroid-generated licenses, for instance. (I think that might change in the next few years...on the upside, though, they quit issuing licenses with numbers derived from your SSN a few years ago.)
It'd be interesting to see what would happen if you "accidentally" left a license with a magnetic strip sitting on top of a really powerful magnet...assuming that all the stuff anybody needs is also printed on the license, maybe that's a fix for your problem.
Seriously, MS spent millions(from what I understand) studying GUI's and making them look better.
...and failed miserably, IMHO. Try creating a quick-launch bar and then copy the Calculator and Notepad shortcuts from the start menu into the quick-launch bar. In WinXP, the icons are so similar that you have to look carefully to tell the difference. On my Win2K boxen, the Calculator and Notepad icons are easily distinguishable by shape and shading. Everything in XP looks like the same pastel shades...maybe the focus groups liked it, but I think it makes things more difficult.
(There's an option to at least get rid of the hideous new title bars, start menu, etc. and replace them with the older types. It's too bad this wasn't extended to replacing the icons as well.)
I still want the focus to follow my mouse, among other things
Ick...that's been a major annoyance for me with the twm that's bundled with the Cygwin port of X. If something accidentally moves the mouse to another window, the focus shifts? No thanks. Fortunately, KDE doesn't suffer from this deficiency...you either Alt-Tab to the window or you click on it to bring it into focus, which is The Way Things Ought To Be. (I feel a holy war coming on...:-))
General Motors would not promote even it's best engineer to be the companies CEO
It has done so in the past, and should consider doing so in the future. It'd be better to have a "car guy" running an automaker than a beancounter...or worse, the "shampoo salesmen" the company has been known to hire into top positions in recent years. I suspect that one of the factors in the imminent demise of Oldsmobile, for instance, was that they installed a "brand manager" at the top who they'd gotten from Procter & Gamble who didn't know jack sh*t about cars. (FWIW, GM appears to be relearning this truth right now...some of the "shampoo salesmen" and their ilk are going away and being replaced with car guys.)
Business sense is a Good Thing, but it isn't everything. Probably 95% of it is just common sense to anybody who isn't a communist (at least that's the impression I got from the macroeconomics course I took one semester).
The biggest problem with using these as a DVR is that many (most) TV cards still have problems with non-intel chipsets.
That's news to my AIW Radeon, which has been running for a few months through an AMD 761. (I wish the FUD would stop...you'd think the people here would know better.)
Take one of these impressive little boards and couple it with a Nvida nForce chipset? I would pounce on one of these small systems in a heartbeat if the graphics didn't suck ass so bad. I had one about a year ago and just ended up totally disgusted with overall video performance.
Sticking an AGP slot in would be a big improvement. If you could stick an All-In-Wonder Radeon (or one of the newer models with the remote control), a big-ass hard drive, and a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive (or a DVD±RW drive) inside one of these, you'd have a schweet entertainment computer.
Frankly I don't see why companies like supernews and other usenet providers aren't held accountable.
As soon as they start blocking one type of traffic, they're no doubt worried that pressure will be put on them to block other types of traffic. I'm not sure if they're considered common carriers (I somewhat doubt it), but they probably want that kind of indemnification against whatever passes through their servers. Kiddie porn is nasty stuff, but they'd see blocking it as making things much easier when someone else asks them to block certain other types of traffic.
a multiprocessor (multituring) can solve the halting problem.
How? The machine returns its answer when it stops—it returns one value if the program ends normally or another value if it crashes. If you feed it a program that runs forever (doesn't crash, doesn't end), it'll never be able to determine a correct answer. How does using multiple machines change this?
I seem to recall the Duron core is the same too with some memory cells lasered?
You recall incorrectly. If you put a Duron and an Athlon side-by-side, you will see that the Duron is smaller. The smaller L2 cache on the Duron is responsible for this size difference.
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Hmm...so if the top 1% of income-earners pay more than a third of all income tax revenue, the top 5% pay over half, and the top 10% pay nearly two-thirds, how do you arrive at the conclusion that "only the little people pay taxes?"
(Source: http://www.atr.org/talkingpoints/012202tp-2.htm)
I went shooting last weekend...half of the other lanes had people plinking at Osama bin Laden targets with anything from .38s or .357s on up to a machine gun of some sort that someone had rented.
(As for me, I made up a simple bullseye pattern in Publisher and printed a bunch of copies. So I'm cheap...sue me. :-) I had a new .22 target pistol to try out and didn't feel like shelling out 35 each (or whatever) for enough of the standard bullseye targets to take 200 rounds.)
(You'd think I'd know better by now than to respond to an anti-gun Euro-troll...oh well, it's only karma. Fat lot of good victim disarmament did the French the other day...)
I was on the "twelve-year plan" going through college. :-) When I started, the CS lab was full of SPARCstation 1s with a smattering of NeXTcubes and PS/2s. By the time I finished up, the lab was running P!!! boxen (from Dell) that dual-booted Win2K and Linux. Most of the time, when you walked up to a random machine it was booted into Linux. (I'd reboot to Win2K because I can't stand Nutscrape and no other browser was installed under Linux. Besides, all my projects were on my Linux server at home and I could get at them via ssh.) There were also some SGI O2s in the engineering lab, and some older P5 boxen that dual-booted NT4 and NetBSD.
Nearly every course I took that involved programming revolved around Pascal, C, or C++ on something UN*Xish...the only courses that didn't were systems programming (x86 assembly under DOS and VAX assembly under VMS), database systems (nothing more than some simple SQL queries that were tested against Oracle, though you could use MySQL or even Access and still get correct results), and the two graphics courses I took. C++ under Win32 was recommended for those graphics courses, but all my image-processing projects (including a DCT-based image compressor and decompressor) were written in C as Linux command-line apps.
(FWIW, this was at a midsized public university. It'd be interesting to see any correlation between public/private, large/small, etc. institutions and what tends to get used at each.)
Not at all difficult...the card will run you $40 or less, and Win2K & WinXP have built-in support for the more common FireWire chipsets. Hell, some computers have it built-in (not that that matters, since nobody here uses storebought computers). FireWire beats the snot out of USB for storage devices, and there are also FireWire webcams that deliver higher resolutions/framerates than USB can handle. I've used it for the past few months; it's good stuff.
I saw this on the rear window of a F*rd pickup recently:
The Surgeon General said nothing about smoking imports...
That'd be right at home on the back of my S10 (better there than on something that needs to be Fixed Or Repaired Daily)...
Try telling that to these guys, who've managed just fine without Microsoft for more than 25 years.
I would think most screwdriver shops would do this...they're already using whatever processor, RAM, HD, etc. you specify, so the logical extension would be that you could specify the OS to be installed. I've bought parts for complete systems at PC Club and not had to pay the "MS tax" along with those parts. I've never had them assemble a system (I can do that myself), but I would think they'd build a "naked PC" if you asked.
Fortunately, the boss isn't of the pointy-haired type. I just think he didn't know better. I built the last two machines the company bought (1.4-GHz Athlon XPs on nForce motherboards, with Win2K on one and Linux From Scratch on the other). When we add more machines in the future, I think I've already made the case that build-your-own is the way to go.
Drugs and illegal aliens won't be the only things smuggled in from Mexico if that should happen, I think. At least the dogs won't be able to sniff out the contraband motherboards, hard drives, etc. hidden in unexpected places...
I know someone who bought a Sceptre notebook...they're another of Dell's suppliers. If you can track down a reseller for Sceptre, Quanta, or whoever, you can probably still save a few hundred bucks compared to what Dell would ask for the same machine.
I'm not so sure about that...one of my work machines is an HP Pavilion (don't laugh...it wasn't my decision), and the 80GB 5400rpm Maxtor (ugh) in it croaked after less than a year. This drive was in a 1.2-GHz Athlon system...not too far from the top of the line when it was purchased. While it has the usual DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives and also includes FireWire, it was built with an el-cheapo nVidia TNT Vanta video card (which also died recently) and only 192 MB RAM.
(It now has an 80GB 7200rpm Western Digital hard drive and a GeForce2 MX 400-based graphics card. I would've preferred a Radeon of some sort, but PC Club didn't have any in stock at the time.)
Maybe it depends on what newsgroups you frequent. The worst that I usually see is flamage over abandonware in comp.sys.apple2, which is jihad fodder for some. Aside from a few easily-filtered kooks, several of the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.* groups offer decent S/N. Last time I checked, comp.os.linux.* wasn't too bad either.
Has it ever been? I was downloading software posted to comp.binaries.apple (what's now called comp.binaries.apple2) as far back as 1989. If Usenet was ever text-only, that would've been before my time. :-)
Considering that tofu is nutritionally inadequate (there are essential proteins that you just can't get from vegetable sources), it's probably "six of one, half-a-dozen of the other." (This also assumes that the test-tube fish is nutritionally equivalent to one that was raised in the normal manner.)
I don't think the nutrient solution they're using would be particularly harmful as long as you're not getting it from Europe (that's where all the BSE problems have popped up). This process doesn't sound all that appetizing, but neither does the idea of processing excrement (among other things) to get the water out for other uses (which I think is something they're already doing).
It seems strange that they used goldfish, though...why not a fish that's more commonly used for food? (Yes, I know there are some people who are into swallowing whole live goldfish, for sport, entertainment, or whatever...these people are commonly known as "freaks." :-) )
Sounds like yet another reason to block HTML email.
Considering what some people do with résumé spam and the morons who send it, maybe you should consider yourself lucky that they aren't doing that.
You could also move someplace that doesn't use them. Nevada still uses old-school Polaroid-generated licenses, for instance. (I think that might change in the next few years...on the upside, though, they quit issuing licenses with numbers derived from your SSN a few years ago.)
It'd be interesting to see what would happen if you "accidentally" left a license with a magnetic strip sitting on top of a really powerful magnet...assuming that all the stuff anybody needs is also printed on the license, maybe that's a fix for your problem.
(There's an option to at least get rid of the hideous new title bars, start menu, etc. and replace them with the older types. It's too bad this wasn't extended to replacing the icons as well.)
Ick...that's been a major annoyance for me with the twm that's bundled with the Cygwin port of X. If something accidentally moves the mouse to another window, the focus shifts? No thanks. Fortunately, KDE doesn't suffer from this deficiency...you either Alt-Tab to the window or you click on it to bring it into focus, which is The Way Things Ought To Be. (I feel a holy war coming on...:-))
It has done so in the past, and should consider doing so in the future. It'd be better to have a "car guy" running an automaker than a beancounter...or worse, the "shampoo salesmen" the company has been known to hire into top positions in recent years. I suspect that one of the factors in the imminent demise of Oldsmobile, for instance, was that they installed a "brand manager" at the top who they'd gotten from Procter & Gamble who didn't know jack sh*t about cars. (FWIW, GM appears to be relearning this truth right now...some of the "shampoo salesmen" and their ilk are going away and being replaced with car guys.)
Business sense is a Good Thing, but it isn't everything. Probably 95% of it is just common sense to anybody who isn't a communist (at least that's the impression I got from the macroeconomics course I took one semester).
That's news to my AIW Radeon, which has been running for a few months through an AMD 761. (I wish the FUD would stop...you'd think the people here would know better.)
Someone figured out how to fry an egg with his computer, so I don't see why not...
Sticking an AGP slot in would be a big improvement. If you could stick an All-In-Wonder Radeon (or one of the newer models with the remote control), a big-ass hard drive, and a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive (or a DVD±RW drive) inside one of these, you'd have a schweet entertainment computer.
As soon as they start blocking one type of traffic, they're no doubt worried that pressure will be put on them to block other types of traffic. I'm not sure if they're considered common carriers (I somewhat doubt it), but they probably want that kind of indemnification against whatever passes through their servers. Kiddie porn is nasty stuff, but they'd see blocking it as making things much easier when someone else asks them to block certain other types of traffic.
How? The machine returns its answer when it stops—it returns one value if the program ends normally or another value if it crashes. If you feed it a program that runs forever (doesn't crash, doesn't end), it'll never be able to determine a correct answer. How does using multiple machines change this?
You recall incorrectly. If you put a Duron and an Athlon side-by-side, you will see that the Duron is smaller. The smaller L2 cache on the Duron is responsible for this size difference.