The parent poster sounds a lot like a friend of mine who moved out-of-state. He would frequently get fed up with Windows, install Linux, bork it up then reformat and switch back to windows. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sure, he had experience in Windows because he knew how to point and click his way around. He didn't like reading docs and thought he could just wing his way through Linux like he could in Windows.
He claimed he was trying to learn Linux for much the same reason as the parent poster, so he could say he was familiar with it. To borrow and modify a line from Mortal Kombat, "That cannot be your only reason for installing Linux, or you will FAIL!" Linux is fundamentally different than Windows. I ran into the same annoyances when I first tried Macs. "This is different than Windows, therefore it sucks."
Whether you're learning a new OS or a new platform, you have to realize it may work a lot different than what you're familiar with and you'll probably have to RTFM a lot. There's plenty of documentation for Linux and if you're genuinely interested, you can learn all about it. If that requires too much of an investment of your time, just accept the fact that you can't be a master of everything. I don't know much about gardening, myself. I'm not about to think I can tell people I've got a green thumb because I dug a hole and dropped in a shrub.
I know for me, and a lot of people here, things like routers and other hardware are our tools of trade. As with any other profession/hobby/etc, we have to trust our tools.
I suppose you've never purchased a tool such as an ax with a rubber protective cover over the blade... When you purchase a tool, sometimes you are required to properly prepare the tool for use. A wireless router needs to be configured properly before put into use. If you're leaving the settings at default, do not be surprised if you're being shown ads, or if your next-door neighbor tunes in and uses all your bandwidth to download hentai.
Go into the router's setup, set the admin password, set up a WEP key, set a unique SSID and uncheck the "Annoy me with ads" option. Problem solved.
From what I've read, this is something you can opt-out of in the administration settings page of the router. If you're neglecting to configure your wireless router, you SHOULD be informed that you need to set up a secure admin password and set up some type of encryption. To everyone that is complaining that this router is defective, would you REALLY use a wireless router with the default settings and NO encryption? I'm sorry, but if you think that, you deserve to be spammed as much as you deserve to be hacked.
While I think an advertisement is in poor taste, a page along the lines of "Welcome to your new Belkin router! For security purposes, you should set up a unique SSID, a WEP encryption key and a password for the adminstrator account." would do wonders for getting people to stop leaving their access points wide open.
"Low Carb" is the new "Low Fat"
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Remember when "Low Fat" products were all the rage? The only problem with "low fat" is low fat usually doesn't mean low calories... Take Snackwell cookies for example, low fat doesn't mean shit if you're planning on eating the entire box in one sitting. Low carb is just another trend that is totally meaningless if you think it keeps you from counting calories.
The only reason diets like Atkins work at all is simple: just about everything has carbohydrates in it! There's so few things you can eat if you strictly adhere to the diet that you inevitably end up eating LESS CALORIES.
Howstuffworks has an excellent article on dieting and the gist of it is, you guessed it - limiting your calories consumed.
If you are willing to tolerate counting calories and figure out exactly what you need to maintain your desired weight, you can pretty much eat whatever you want. 100 calories of carbs = 100 calories of fat. If you're the type of person that needs a "banned foods"-type list to really feel like you're on a diet, Atkins probably is for you. If you're the type that can push away from the table - you probably don't need to do anything more than watch your calories.
...software pirates just shrugged and mentioned that they'll continue to provide you with the Adobe software you know and love, for a price you can afford with none of the annoying activation features.
"Up in arms" must mean "I'm getting the next version on Kazaa", no doubt.
Well to me it seems that if Sun isn't careful it could end up going a similar path to Sun.
If it's not careful, it will do exactly what it will end up doing? Gee, let's hope they avoid that by doing something different than what they will do.
I'm gonna be perfectly honest, free is still better than 99. iTunes has a great selection of current airplay singles and that's why I'm not ignoring them altogether... A good copy of a new song is notoriously hard to get due to OverPeer and the like releasing fscked up copies with skips, loops, beeps and swooshes.
There's still a much greater selection of older stuff on Kazaa, not to mention parodies, amature remixes and other crazy home-made stuff that shows up on Kazaa. (Eminem vs Brittany Spears, Ghostbusters vs Michael Jackson's Bad, MMMBurp, Hummer Girls, all the Budwiser American hero ads, etc.)
Photoshop is an (expensive, usually pirated) paint program most people use to crop/resize photos and play tricks with a transparent background to put porn star heads on famous people. For the majority of things an average user does with Photoshop, it's fast enough. Having Photoshop is a lot like owning an SUV. Most people just like knowing they have all these capabilities they'll never really use.
As I've said in another post, the only time I really ever end up looking at a status bar is waiting the hours it takes for a XviD movie to compress. Photoshop is pretty much instant gratification.
You know, the only thing that really goes slow on my PC is XviD encoding from MPEG2...
Granted, ripping DVDs isn't as popular as making MP3s, but I am surprised how little coverage it gets as an aspect of Mac performence. Is this a PC-only phenomenon?
Let's face it... Performence really matters most if the system you're using does what you want it to.
For example, the Xbox version of Halo runs flawlessly and almost perfectly smooth... On a 733MHz x86 processor with 64MB of RAM. The PC port chokes my Athlon XP2000 with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 8500.
Regardless of whether you use a PC or a Mac... If you're buying a system because you think it's the fastest, you're just kidding yourself. Pretty soon it will be outclassed by something better because that's just the way technology progresses. There is no winners circle for people with the biggest baddest rigs and at one point in time that old 486 on eBay for $9.99 Buy It Now was really the shiznit too.
Buy what you can afford that does what you need it to. If it's not the fastest game in town, so what? As long as you're happy with it, that's all that matters.
Incredibly excellent troll, if ever there was one... Shame it didn't get modded up to +5 but hey, you can't win 'em all.
I really like the part about being on a bike being "safer" than being in a "metal death cage". I really feel scared every time I get behind the wheel of my car... There is no way reinforced sheet metal, seatbelts, crumple zones and an airbag can match the life-saving properties of THIN AIR that protects you from a colision on a bicycle.
BTW, if you're serious...
I've been in a wreck where my vehicle was totaled. It wasn't my fault either... I was making a left-hand turn at a 4 way intersection and someone in the oncoming lane ran the red light and crashed into the passenger side of my vehicle at about 40MPH. I sustained NO injuries whatsoever. I wish you the best of luck challenging traffic on a bicycle.
If you ever need that Wang serviced, I was driving down the highway with a friend and happened to have one of those disposable cameras with me... We saw a Wang service van with chineese writing on it and a phone number. Nope, I haven't tried calling it yet.
A Pentium Pro 200MHz....and I'm probably going to chuck a $400 8-port 3ware esclade card into that system soon too. And you know what? It's still gonna be a Pentium Pro 200.
My main system, an Athlon XP2000 space heater is nearly legacy free with the exception of the fact I am still using a Tandy AT/XT switchable keyboard with it from a Tandy 2500SX/25 I no longer own. I *really* like this keyboard... It has no windows keys and a solid feel unlike the cheap rubbish that gets passed for keyboards these days.
My secondary system, used primarially for ShowShifter and nolstalgic gaming is a 1.2GHz Tualatin Celery in a upgradeware slotket on an Asus P2B slot 1 motherboard. Aside from still having ISA (and it can even run Monkey Island 1 with the level 1 and 2 cache disabled and all the wait states cranked in the BIOS, no moslo needed!), it has a genuine Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 (Yup, it's 10 years old) with a Wave Blaster 2 card on it that can do Roland MT-32 emulation. A gravis gamepad connected to the SB-16's joystick port is great for some Star Control 2 action.;)
When I need a MUCH older system to use, I have 2 Tandy 1000 RLX-HD systems that I bought from eBay... While I no longer own the original, the RLX was my 2nd PC I ever owned. 286 at 10MHz, 40MB hard drive, 1MB of RAM and VGA. Okay, I did kinda cheat and connect a parallel port CD-ROM drive to one of them, but that's only cause there's too many classic games to fit on the measly 40MB hard drive. If you ever get an RLX, a neat "stupid Tandy trick" is making your friends think it can play MP3s by playing a 22.05KHz 8bit wave file using the Tandy sound pack from the TVDog archive (google it). Like most of the later Tandy 1000 series, it has DOS in ROM which makes it one of the fastest booting PCs ever made... Your Athlon XP3000 has nothing on it.;)
As for the oldest software I still use, every once in awhile I still use Deskmate for one reason or another... And sometimes I still use Autodesk Animator. Both programs still run just fine in XP...
I'm not as old as you C-64 geeks, you ignorant futz, err, inaccurate stereotyper, umm no wait... insensitive clod! Damn easily confused Slashdot memes.
Not counting a TI 94/a that really didn't hold my attention much (hey, I was a really little kid at the time I was given it), a Tandy 1000 RL that I got when I was about 12 was my first PC.
While I had used Apple computers at school, and the TI 94/a before this Tandy, I still say it was the computer that finally sparked my interest in PCs.
I guess I'll admit, I needed a lot of help seeing the potential computers really had... The beeps and bleeps the Apple II/es at school made wasn't nearly as cool as the Tandy's onboard 3 voice tone generator with DAC. Yes, I tried recording music from the radio on my computer, yes it ran out of memory about 40 or so seconds into the song (must have been some early form of DRM, damn the RIAA).
I guess we can all look back on whichever model of computer was the one that first got us into this expensive, time-consuming hobby... I think it's kinda funny though for the younger generations because if you asked my brother what his first computer was... It was a 286 I put together for him out of spare parts and it ran Windows 3.1. Nothing special, nothing facinating about it and it didn't lead him into computers as a hobby... I wonder if it's the same for kids starting out these days on P4s with WinXP.
Like most other modern cell phones, my Sanyo 6400 has a T9 predictive input mode... Once you get used to it, it's really not so bad.
I really don't think the extra keys are worth it considering how much they'll get in the way, so this is not a feature I'd want my next cell phone to have. Besides, if I need to use a real keyboard, I can just plug the phone into my laptop and use the phone as a wireless Internet connection.
I have seen some phones that have fold-up keyboards they can "dock" with... That seems like a much better idea and it would be nice if more phones supported it. I think adding more buttons is really just another example of cell phone designers forgetting the primary use of the device is a phone. I don't need a full alpha numeric keypad to dial phone numbers.
I dunno, SUV=Resource hog, slow, and bulky. Sounds accurate to me....
While I refuse to try and dispute such an inane analogy as comparing SUVs to Java, I will comment on the SUV aspect.
Where the hell does everyone live that SUVs are moving slowly?! Most SUV drivers I see on the highway go recklessly faster than the speed limit - even in bad weather. Some of the drivers honestly appear to be driving like they believe their SUV has a device under the hood that can modify the laws of physics to give them perfect traction on a slippery road and allow them to stop with the same amount of distance as a car.
Oh sure, there's the Fast and the Furious wannabes in their riced out Type R mobiles driving insane too... But when you see this big Ford Expedition tailgating you and then cutting you off so he can do 80MPH in a 55MPH zone IN THE RAIN, you begin to wonder what these people are thinking.
The vehicles I usually see travelling the slowest are soccer moms in minivans and cars old people seem to like... Crown Vics, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles.
I would love to see Apple become vastly more successful--nothing would keep MS in check better than a serious alternative for mainstream desktop customers.
The problem is Apple does not WANT the mainstream as customers. Apple is afraid that if they lowered their prices, the "we paid a premium price for a premium product" crowd would be pissed and Apple would lose that niche. Even with more realistic prices, the mainstream might just give Apple the collective shrug and keep buying PCs - leaving Apple with less profit.
It's a tight spot Apple is in, but I for one welcome our new Microsoft overlords - same as the old ones.
Slashdot Mirror
The parent poster sounds a lot like a friend of mine who moved out-of-state. He would frequently get fed up with Windows, install Linux, bork it up then reformat and switch back to windows. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sure, he had experience in Windows because he knew how to point and click his way around. He didn't like reading docs and thought he could just wing his way through Linux like he could in Windows.
He claimed he was trying to learn Linux for much the same reason as the parent poster, so he could say he was familiar with it. To borrow and modify a line from Mortal Kombat, "That cannot be your only reason for installing Linux, or you will FAIL!" Linux is fundamentally different than Windows. I ran into the same annoyances when I first tried Macs. "This is different than Windows, therefore it sucks."
Whether you're learning a new OS or a new platform, you have to realize it may work a lot different than what you're familiar with and you'll probably have to RTFM a lot. There's plenty of documentation for Linux and if you're genuinely interested, you can learn all about it. If that requires too much of an investment of your time, just accept the fact that you can't be a master of everything. I don't know much about gardening, myself. I'm not about to think I can tell people I've got a green thumb because I dug a hole and dropped in a shrub.
I know for me, and a lot of people here, things like routers and other hardware are our tools of trade. As with any other profession/hobby/etc, we have to trust our tools.
I suppose you've never purchased a tool such as an ax with a rubber protective cover over the blade... When you purchase a tool, sometimes you are required to properly prepare the tool for use. A wireless router needs to be configured properly before put into use. If you're leaving the settings at default, do not be surprised if you're being shown ads, or if your next-door neighbor tunes in and uses all your bandwidth to download hentai.
Go into the router's setup, set the admin password, set up a WEP key, set a unique SSID and uncheck the "Annoy me with ads" option. Problem solved.
From what I've read, this is something you can opt-out of in the administration settings page of the router. If you're neglecting to configure your wireless router, you SHOULD be informed that you need to set up a secure admin password and set up some type of encryption. To everyone that is complaining that this router is defective, would you REALLY use a wireless router with the default settings and NO encryption? I'm sorry, but if you think that, you deserve to be spammed as much as you deserve to be hacked.
While I think an advertisement is in poor taste, a page along the lines of "Welcome to your new Belkin router! For security purposes, you should set up a unique SSID, a WEP encryption key and a password for the adminstrator account." would do wonders for getting people to stop leaving their access points wide open.
Remember when "Low Fat" products were all the rage? The only problem with "low fat" is low fat usually doesn't mean low calories... Take Snackwell cookies for example, low fat doesn't mean shit if you're planning on eating the entire box in one sitting. Low carb is just another trend that is totally meaningless if you think it keeps you from counting calories.
The only reason diets like Atkins work at all is simple: just about everything has carbohydrates in it! There's so few things you can eat if you strictly adhere to the diet that you inevitably end up eating LESS CALORIES.
Howstuffworks has an excellent article on dieting and the gist of it is, you guessed it - limiting your calories consumed.
If you are willing to tolerate counting calories and figure out exactly what you need to maintain your desired weight, you can pretty much eat whatever you want. 100 calories of carbs = 100 calories of fat. If you're the type of person that needs a "banned foods"-type list to really feel like you're on a diet, Atkins probably is for you. If you're the type that can push away from the table - you probably don't need to do anything more than watch your calories.
...software pirates just shrugged and mentioned that they'll continue to provide you with the Adobe software you know and love, for a price you can afford with none of the annoying activation features.
"Up in arms" must mean "I'm getting the next version on Kazaa", no doubt.
Works for me... Must be your rig.
Mine:
Athlon XP2000
512MB PC333 Crucial RAM
Asus A7V333
ATI Retail 128MB Radeon 8500
WinXP SP1
Well to me it seems that if Sun isn't careful it could end up going a similar path to Sun.
If it's not careful, it will do exactly what it will end up doing? Gee, let's hope they avoid that by doing something different than what they will do.
I'm gonna be perfectly honest, free is still better than 99. iTunes has a great selection of current airplay singles and that's why I'm not ignoring them altogether... A good copy of a new song is notoriously hard to get due to OverPeer and the like releasing fscked up copies with skips, loops, beeps and swooshes.
There's still a much greater selection of older stuff on Kazaa, not to mention parodies, amature remixes and other crazy home-made stuff that shows up on Kazaa. (Eminem vs Brittany Spears, Ghostbusters vs Michael Jackson's Bad, MMMBurp, Hummer Girls, all the Budwiser American hero ads, etc.)
I never knew I had it so good with WordPerfect for DOS on my 286. It kept up with my typing just fine...
Photoshop is an (expensive, usually pirated) paint program most people use to crop/resize photos and play tricks with a transparent background to put porn star heads on famous people. For the majority of things an average user does with Photoshop, it's fast enough. Having Photoshop is a lot like owning an SUV. Most people just like knowing they have all these capabilities they'll never really use.
As I've said in another post, the only time I really ever end up looking at a status bar is waiting the hours it takes for a XviD movie to compress. Photoshop is pretty much instant gratification.
You know, the only thing that really goes slow on my PC is XviD encoding from MPEG2...
Granted, ripping DVDs isn't as popular as making MP3s, but I am surprised how little coverage it gets as an aspect of Mac performence. Is this a PC-only phenomenon?
Let's face it... Performence really matters most if the system you're using does what you want it to.
For example, the Xbox version of Halo runs flawlessly and almost perfectly smooth... On a 733MHz x86 processor with 64MB of RAM. The PC port chokes my Athlon XP2000 with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 8500.
Regardless of whether you use a PC or a Mac... If you're buying a system because you think it's the fastest, you're just kidding yourself. Pretty soon it will be outclassed by something better because that's just the way technology progresses. There is no winners circle for people with the biggest baddest rigs and at one point in time that old 486 on eBay for $9.99 Buy It Now was really the shiznit too.
Buy what you can afford that does what you need it to. If it's not the fastest game in town, so what? As long as you're happy with it, that's all that matters.
Incredibly excellent troll, if ever there was one... Shame it didn't get modded up to +5 but hey, you can't win 'em all.
I really like the part about being on a bike being "safer" than being in a "metal death cage". I really feel scared every time I get behind the wheel of my car... There is no way reinforced sheet metal, seatbelts, crumple zones and an airbag can match the life-saving properties of THIN AIR that protects you from a colision on a bicycle.
BTW, if you're serious...
I've been in a wreck where my vehicle was totaled. It wasn't my fault either... I was making a left-hand turn at a 4 way intersection and someone in the oncoming lane ran the red light and crashed into the passenger side of my vehicle at about 40MPH. I sustained NO injuries whatsoever. I wish you the best of luck challenging traffic on a bicycle.
...a mouth full of vegatables to me!
Google to avoid joke flybys.
I've never seen one show up on eBay and I'd really like to have one... It was the last model of the 1000 series made and it was discontinued shortly.
It's also the only Tandy 1000 that could actually run Windows 95, albeit very slowly.
Oh well, at least I've got the second-to-last 1000, the RLX.
If you ever need that Wang serviced, I was driving down the highway with a friend and happened to have one of those disposable cameras with me... We saw a Wang service van with chineese writing on it and a phone number. Nope, I haven't tried calling it yet.
Bah, Pentium Pros aren't old...
...and I'm probably going to chuck a $400 8-port 3ware esclade card into that system soon too. And you know what? It's still gonna be a Pentium Pro 200.
www.snotwad.com
Runs on...
A Pentium Pro 200MHz.
The Lucasarts games all had Roland sound... It's really a shame it's so hard to get ahold of a compatible sound device these days.
Sure, the Tandy sound kicks ass on games where it was the best supported sound output, but the 3 voice tone generator has nothing on the MT-32.
My main system, an Athlon XP2000 space heater is nearly legacy free with the exception of the fact I am still using a Tandy AT/XT switchable keyboard with it from a Tandy 2500SX/25 I no longer own. I *really* like this keyboard... It has no windows keys and a solid feel unlike the cheap rubbish that gets passed for keyboards these days.
;)
;)
My secondary system, used primarially for ShowShifter and nolstalgic gaming is a 1.2GHz Tualatin Celery in a upgradeware slotket on an Asus P2B slot 1 motherboard. Aside from still having ISA (and it can even run Monkey Island 1 with the level 1 and 2 cache disabled and all the wait states cranked in the BIOS, no moslo needed!), it has a genuine Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 (Yup, it's 10 years old) with a Wave Blaster 2 card on it that can do Roland MT-32 emulation. A gravis gamepad connected to the SB-16's joystick port is great for some Star Control 2 action.
When I need a MUCH older system to use, I have 2 Tandy 1000 RLX-HD systems that I bought from eBay... While I no longer own the original, the RLX was my 2nd PC I ever owned. 286 at 10MHz, 40MB hard drive, 1MB of RAM and VGA. Okay, I did kinda cheat and connect a parallel port CD-ROM drive to one of them, but that's only cause there's too many classic games to fit on the measly 40MB hard drive. If you ever get an RLX, a neat "stupid Tandy trick" is making your friends think it can play MP3s by playing a 22.05KHz 8bit wave file using the Tandy sound pack from the TVDog archive (google it). Like most of the later Tandy 1000 series, it has DOS in ROM which makes it one of the fastest booting PCs ever made... Your Athlon XP3000 has nothing on it.
As for the oldest software I still use, every once in awhile I still use Deskmate for one reason or another... And sometimes I still use Autodesk Animator. Both programs still run just fine in XP...
I'm not as old as you C-64 geeks, you ignorant futz, err, inaccurate stereotyper, umm no wait... insensitive clod! Damn easily confused Slashdot memes.
Not counting a TI 94/a that really didn't hold my attention much (hey, I was a really little kid at the time I was given it), a Tandy 1000 RL that I got when I was about 12 was my first PC.
While I had used Apple computers at school, and the TI 94/a before this Tandy, I still say it was the computer that finally sparked my interest in PCs.
I guess I'll admit, I needed a lot of help seeing the potential computers really had... The beeps and bleeps the Apple II/es at school made wasn't nearly as cool as the Tandy's onboard 3 voice tone generator with DAC. Yes, I tried recording music from the radio on my computer, yes it ran out of memory about 40 or so seconds into the song (must have been some early form of DRM, damn the RIAA).
I guess we can all look back on whichever model of computer was the one that first got us into this expensive, time-consuming hobby... I think it's kinda funny though for the younger generations because if you asked my brother what his first computer was... It was a 286 I put together for him out of spare parts and it ran Windows 3.1. Nothing special, nothing facinating about it and it didn't lead him into computers as a hobby... I wonder if it's the same for kids starting out these days on P4s with WinXP.
Like most other modern cell phones, my Sanyo 6400 has a T9 predictive input mode... Once you get used to it, it's really not so bad.
I really don't think the extra keys are worth it considering how much they'll get in the way, so this is not a feature I'd want my next cell phone to have. Besides, if I need to use a real keyboard, I can just plug the phone into my laptop and use the phone as a wireless Internet connection.
I have seen some phones that have fold-up keyboards they can "dock" with... That seems like a much better idea and it would be nice if more phones supported it. I think adding more buttons is really just another example of cell phone designers forgetting the primary use of the device is a phone. I don't need a full alpha numeric keypad to dial phone numbers.
I dunno, SUV=Resource hog, slow, and bulky. Sounds accurate to me....
While I refuse to try and dispute such an inane analogy as comparing SUVs to Java, I will comment on the SUV aspect.
Where the hell does everyone live that SUVs are moving slowly?! Most SUV drivers I see on the highway go recklessly faster than the speed limit - even in bad weather. Some of the drivers honestly appear to be driving like they believe their SUV has a device under the hood that can modify the laws of physics to give them perfect traction on a slippery road and allow them to stop with the same amount of distance as a car.
Oh sure, there's the Fast and the Furious wannabes in their riced out Type R mobiles driving insane too... But when you see this big Ford Expedition tailgating you and then cutting you off so he can do 80MPH in a 55MPH zone IN THE RAIN, you begin to wonder what these people are thinking.
The vehicles I usually see travelling the slowest are soccer moms in minivans and cars old people seem to like... Crown Vics, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles.
What's next, articles comparing P2P filesharing to looting and plundering on the high seas?
...sometimes a volt.
I would love to see Apple become vastly more successful--nothing would keep MS in check better than a serious alternative for mainstream desktop customers.
The problem is Apple does not WANT the mainstream as customers. Apple is afraid that if they lowered their prices, the "we paid a premium price for a premium product" crowd would be pissed and Apple would lose that niche. Even with more realistic prices, the mainstream might just give Apple the collective shrug and keep buying PCs - leaving Apple with less profit.
It's a tight spot Apple is in, but I for one welcome our new Microsoft overlords - same as the old ones.