I have a T3 and I know a dozen people with palm pilots. If there is ONE thing we can all agree on, it's that palm's support for their product is next to nonexistent. If you have a problem with your palm pilot, you'd better start looking in the various independent forums for help from other palm users. If they can't help you, you're just plain screwed.
I don't care if palm DOES come up with a better product than the iphone, I won't touch it with a 10 ft pole. Right now I am trying to decide whether to ditch my T3 for a touch or for an iPhone, so I can keep notes and have my addressbook on the go. Syncing on my T3 has been iffy at best, and is currently totally nonfunctional unless I want it to breed duplicates and erase data every time I sync, and the palm desktop software hasn't been updated in years.
I know that the touch and iphone will sync flawlessly with my computer, and I won't get that sickening feeling every time I sync it, wondering what it's going to erase this time. I get asked from time to time for help with others' palm pilots, and I hate to give them help because I feel so totally helpless in trying to prevent the thing from self-destructing their contacts. All I can do is make backups continuously throughout the process. The inability to make a backup of the PP directly into its SD card makes initial syncing one of the most dangerous computer tasks I ever have to deal with. I've seen palm desktop sync from an empty computer TO the palm, totally erasing it, on numerous occasions, despite following directions carefully. It's almost random. And once the computer and the palm get sufficiently out of sync, it creates such a mess that you have to wipe one and pray it syncs from the non-empty one to the one you wiped. I can't stand that.
The apple disc controller was for discs only. My//c had an internal 5.25, and an external 5.25, and chained through that was an external 3.5". (800k) It had a chain-through as well and I could have added another I think.
I needed a copy of a check I wrote several YEARS ago from my bank. I found I could get online and download scans of every check I'd written for the past 18 months or so since they went all electronic internally, but for that one they had to get out the microfilm and mail me a photocopy. (I needed proof of the cashed check)
Banks keep that stuff for at least the 7-8 years the IRS requires people to keep the same sorts of things.
But as for businesses, I'd be my personal opinion that "e-statements" are part of the service you are paying for monthly from them, and the day you are no longer their customer, they should be under no obligation to continue to provide you with e-statements.
a place I used to work for got a new IT manager out of retirement, he used to work at a bank. We upgraded the server and a few of the desktop's HDs one week, and next week we held a "HD smashing party" after work. We tore the hard drives apart, removed the platters and beat them with hammers. I don't know what they're made of - some composite, I've heard glass, aluminum, and ceramic tossed around for terms, but they do behave oddly when smashed. They don't shatter, but the surface does splinter when the platter is bent. Possibly glass / ceramic surface on an aluminum disc?
Overkill for us, we didn't have any really sensitive information on them, but good practice to learn I suppose, and I bet manditory where he came from.
I'm a little surprised they haven't added macs to reviews like that. This one was apparently not too intelligent, they look like they went shopping to see how much money they could spend on a system, not really looking to make sure they got the best hardware configuration possible. Macs do tend to be more expensive on the average, and there's a lot more shiny expensive options available at their store, so this would have probably helped them with the direction they were headed.
Lets play...
- 8 core (dual quad) xenon at 3.2 ghz - 32gb PC6400 (800mhz) RAM - hardware raid card (we don't want software raid to slow the monster down!) - 4 x 1tb SATA drives to feed to that raid card - NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB VRAM - dual 16x superdrives (or you can aftermarket a pair of BR drives from mcetech.com) - pair of 30" cinema displays of course - wireless keyboard and mouse (tho you'll need to find some $250 controller too I'm sure) (I think we'll skip the modem option) (also even for this I think we can skip the fiber channel card and xsan, I can't justify it here) - may as well install server on it, you're going to be pushing game updates to your lan buddies right? - at this point the 2 yrs of added warranty is a great value since it doesn't price based on config
$22,195. But that doesn't cover the controller.
There are a wide variety of ways to cut corners. Sony displays instead of apple's, buy your own memory and hard drives since apple's markup on them is insane, forego server, you can drop it down to about $7500, but you'll have to get the displays and ram separately. But this was just to see how much you could drop on a system.
Lately that's meant that industry heavies are busy trying to stuff the panel with their own 'experts', doesn't it?
And then three months after this is all done with, we'll start seeing stories about how a quarter of the panelists have been discovered as previously employed by one of the RIAA's shadow groups, in addition to several other panelists receipt of airline tickets to hong kong (as well as an all-expenses paid week there for a meeting) as well as other weakly disguised "gifts" being scrutinized.
What amazes me is they continue to get away with this same old game, time and time again. This wouldn't be a problem if the followup had some teeth to it. What do you do when this all comes to light after the event? Remove them from the panel? Fat lot of good that does after they've "made their recommendations" etc.
It's a sort of a seti-at-home kind of thing when you look at it that way... I wonder if in the future we'll start seeing more of that, where there are more than just a small handful of distributed computing projects that you can pick from as to where you want to donate your cycles to.
Wouldn't it be wild to see advertisements for this once it becomes a commodity? Or even to have a management app on your computer to decide what percentage of cycles you are donating to what projects. You get a list, and can fill in boxes or drag sliders to show how much you are donating to protein folding, DRM hacking, pharmaceutical research, global cooking simulations, star scanning, etc. Have a list of hundreds or even thousands of different causes you can easily select and join.
I don't see any reason why this won't come to pass in the next 10 yrs. I'm saving a copy of this post and going to see if I made a good call...
But the "early termination fee" is going to be ugly. Add that to the cost of the phone to begin with, and either it won't sell cheap, or if it does, it's hot.
I can't imagine the odds of someone selling their new iphone 3g while still under contract. Wouldn't the odds of such a thing for sale being hot be incredibly high? Those things have serial numbers (SSIDs) that they will need to activate the phone wherever so if you do get a hot iphone you probably won't have it for long.
I have a 1500/3k inverter in my truck and have a similar solution that I've tested twice during brief power failures. Takes me about 10 minutes to swap over, half of which is spent turning off things that would draw too much. (heat pump, fridge, UPS's, server, etc) Freaks out the neighbors to see your porch light come back on when the rest of the block is dark.
FYI, UPS's don't often like inverter/genny power and will usually refuse to cut back due to the poor line noise / regulation they are getting. Also a charging UPS can be as big a draw as a compressor.
Thinking more on this, I wonder how well that would even work with to begin with? Lets say the line that cut power to my area was up the block, and my isolated segment is say.... one block. If I backfeed into that grid, it will attempt to power the entire block.
Now I realize any worker on my block up on the pole is going to get nailed, but is it going to work that way? My little genny is going to attempt to start maybe 25 refridgerators, a dozen or more heat pumps, and maybe 500 more miscillaneous appliances up and down my block.
My betting is that doesn't work very well and my genny's breaker almost instantly trips.
Now still, I wouldn't want to be a worker up on the pole trying to reconnect the downed feed at that time, but the window of opportunity to hurt a worker is not nearly as big as you might initially imagine. It's not like I'm going to light up that line for hours at a time, just waiting for some hapless worker to grab a live wire up there. In any case it'd be a very short-lived experiment.
And this is assuming I'm on an isolated feed, isolated to ONE block. If a primary feed is down several blocks from here, my genny is going to be starting 900 compressors all at once. NOT.
And this is all assuming I don't trip some other breaker up on a pole somewhere that is set to go if my local segment draws too much power. (since fuses work both ways) Even if my feed and genny could handle the load, it'd trip the first breaker it hit up on the poles.
This issue is a lot more complicated when you look closer. Not only would there be a time-zero window to hurt someone (since the genny would shut down immediately and you would hopefully not be stupid enough to try to restart it) but given the draw vs the supply anyone caught with a wire in their hand would be subject to a lot smaller hit than they would otherwise with a properly supplied line.
A good generator work like say, a snowblower, in fuel consumption. Snowblowers purr until you push them into a big pile of snow, then they bog down and accellerate and dig in. When you don't have a lot of things on the genny, the load is low, and the engine runs slow and loafs along, consuming little fuel beyond idle. When your fridge turns on the compressor, the genny will bog down immediately due to the load (causing a dip in power also) and will throttle up the engine to bring it back up to rpm's and output. Then it's drawing more gas of course, but will fall back again when your fridge shuts off the compressor.
There IS a difference in efficiency, but it's not a big one if you have even marginal quality genny.
I just got a new heat pump furnace, and this thread reminds me that I need to call the installers and ask them how to force it to run in "emergency heat" mode. (no heat pump, gas only) Since there's NO way the heat pump will work on a reasonable genny, and certainly not on my 1500w inverter.
the big risk here is to fry OTHER people. If you don't unplug from the mains, and try to turn on a generator and backfeed your house, you will feed 110 up to the pole. The cans up there will ramp that back UP to 12,500 or whatever they use at that point, (transformers work BOTH ways) and that can FRY workers that are up on the poles trying to restore your service.
since the firmware (EFI) update is a lot more effort than the normal updates.
please elaborate? Here, they are functionally identical. Both download, both state they need a restart, both restart, install, and restart again. Nowadays you don't even have to hold the power button to unlock the firmware.
I would amend this by saying Apple probably shouldn't have let him do this. There is a firmware update required to update to mac os 9 (from 8.6) and another on some machines before upgrading from 9.1 to 9.2. (imacs only I think?) Apple will not ALLOW those OS's to install until the firmware update is applied. Some machines also required a firmware update before installing OS X.
Hooray, my MacBook Pro is working again. And this seems to confirm for me that the 10.5.6 update breaks some systems if you are running older firmware.
Sorry but if you're skipping a firmware update, and running a major OS update on old firmware, you deserve a headache.
The Software Update presents updates in the order Apple recommends you install them. Skipping one update to run another is a stupid thing to do. The worst combination I can imagine is a firmware and an os update being installed out of order.
can someone explain why this is hard to do? It seems like a straghtforward process since the number of primes is essentially fixed. (there are quite a few of them but we keep hearing announcements about a new ONE being found, so there can't be that many of them that are known, someone's got a book I'm sure)
Just a matter of looping through all known primes, seeing if x divides by it. That's order 1 since the number of primes is "fixed". If you don't find anything it divides by, it's a new prime (add it to your list) or its smallest factor is larger than your biggest known prime. Otherwise remember that factor, and start working on the dividend.
Why is this always considered such a hard thing to do? It looks like something that should go quick.
Heck with modern day processors I'd imagine you could fab a specialized chip that determines which of the "known primes" the provided number has as one of its divisors as a one-step (parallel) operation. Just hardcode it to those primes.
just getting a static IP for the parent's Windows box so you can remote in for periodic maintenance would also be a decent way to go.
Or set up a cron job on their computer to push their current IP address to your server. Set that up when you're installing the periodic backup script. Works great here.
Or if you are purely mac and don't want to deal with firewalls and non static ips on both ends, you can use the "back to my mac" feature of mobileme to remote into it anytime from anywhere.
I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though? Or will you have to buy the full retail for 7, in which case they've as good as sold you a vista upgrade (plus a windows 7 upgrade) even though you didn't want anything to do with vista?
I personally find it hilarious that they keep extending xp as the consumer mass keeps threatening to make a "true" upgrade to another os...
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I have a T3 and I know a dozen people with palm pilots. If there is ONE thing we can all agree on, it's that palm's support for their product is next to nonexistent. If you have a problem with your palm pilot, you'd better start looking in the various independent forums for help from other palm users. If they can't help you, you're just plain screwed.
I don't care if palm DOES come up with a better product than the iphone, I won't touch it with a 10 ft pole. Right now I am trying to decide whether to ditch my T3 for a touch or for an iPhone, so I can keep notes and have my addressbook on the go. Syncing on my T3 has been iffy at best, and is currently totally nonfunctional unless I want it to breed duplicates and erase data every time I sync, and the palm desktop software hasn't been updated in years.
I know that the touch and iphone will sync flawlessly with my computer, and I won't get that sickening feeling every time I sync it, wondering what it's going to erase this time. I get asked from time to time for help with others' palm pilots, and I hate to give them help because I feel so totally helpless in trying to prevent the thing from self-destructing their contacts. All I can do is make backups continuously throughout the process. The inability to make a backup of the PP directly into its SD card makes initial syncing one of the most dangerous computer tasks I ever have to deal with. I've seen palm desktop sync from an empty computer TO the palm, totally erasing it, on numerous occasions, despite following directions carefully. It's almost random. And once the computer and the palm get sufficiently out of sync, it creates such a mess that you have to wipe one and pray it syncs from the non-empty one to the one you wiped. I can't stand that.
Stay away from palm, please.
for a desktop item picture, it'll make a great folder icon for say, Documents. But masked properly please, a black box border looks awful.
The apple disc controller was for discs only. My //c had an internal 5.25, and an external 5.25, and chained through that was an external 3.5". (800k) It had a chain-through as well and I could have added another I think.
I needed a copy of a check I wrote several YEARS ago from my bank. I found I could get online and download scans of every check I'd written for the past 18 months or so since they went all electronic internally, but for that one they had to get out the microfilm and mail me a photocopy. (I needed proof of the cashed check)
Banks keep that stuff for at least the 7-8 years the IRS requires people to keep the same sorts of things.
But as for businesses, I'd be my personal opinion that "e-statements" are part of the service you are paying for monthly from them, and the day you are no longer their customer, they should be under no obligation to continue to provide you with e-statements.
a place I used to work for got a new IT manager out of retirement, he used to work at a bank. We upgraded the server and a few of the desktop's HDs one week, and next week we held a "HD smashing party" after work. We tore the hard drives apart, removed the platters and beat them with hammers. I don't know what they're made of - some composite, I've heard glass, aluminum, and ceramic tossed around for terms, but they do behave oddly when smashed. They don't shatter, but the surface does splinter when the platter is bent. Possibly glass / ceramic surface on an aluminum disc?
Overkill for us, we didn't have any really sensitive information on them, but good practice to learn I suppose, and I bet manditory where he came from.
I'm a little surprised they haven't added macs to reviews like that. This one was apparently not too intelligent, they look like they went shopping to see how much money they could spend on a system, not really looking to make sure they got the best hardware configuration possible. Macs do tend to be more expensive on the average, and there's a lot more shiny expensive options available at their store, so this would have probably helped them with the direction they were headed.
Lets play...
- 8 core (dual quad) xenon at 3.2 ghz
- 32gb PC6400 (800mhz) RAM
- hardware raid card (we don't want software raid to slow the monster down!)
- 4 x 1tb SATA drives to feed to that raid card
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB VRAM
- dual 16x superdrives (or you can aftermarket a pair of BR drives from mcetech.com)
- pair of 30" cinema displays of course
- wireless keyboard and mouse (tho you'll need to find some $250 controller too I'm sure)
(I think we'll skip the modem option)
(also even for this I think we can skip the fiber channel card and xsan, I can't justify it here)
- may as well install server on it, you're going to be pushing game updates to your lan buddies right?
- at this point the 2 yrs of added warranty is a great value since it doesn't price based on config
$22,195. But that doesn't cover the controller.
There are a wide variety of ways to cut corners. Sony displays instead of apple's, buy your own memory and hard drives since apple's markup on them is insane, forego server, you can drop it down to about $7500, but you'll have to get the displays and ram separately. But this was just to see how much you could drop on a system.
Lately that's meant that industry heavies are busy trying to stuff the panel with their own 'experts', doesn't it?
And then three months after this is all done with, we'll start seeing stories about how a quarter of the panelists have been discovered as previously employed by one of the RIAA's shadow groups, in addition to several other panelists receipt of airline tickets to hong kong (as well as an all-expenses paid week there for a meeting) as well as other weakly disguised "gifts" being scrutinized.
What amazes me is they continue to get away with this same old game, time and time again. This wouldn't be a problem if the followup had some teeth to it. What do you do when this all comes to light after the event? Remove them from the panel? Fat lot of good that does after they've "made their recommendations" etc.
It's a sort of a seti-at-home kind of thing when you look at it that way... I wonder if in the future we'll start seeing more of that, where there are more than just a small handful of distributed computing projects that you can pick from as to where you want to donate your cycles to.
Wouldn't it be wild to see advertisements for this once it becomes a commodity? Or even to have a management app on your computer to decide what percentage of cycles you are donating to what projects. You get a list, and can fill in boxes or drag sliders to show how much you are donating to protein folding, DRM hacking, pharmaceutical research, global cooking simulations, star scanning, etc. Have a list of hundreds or even thousands of different causes you can easily select and join.
I don't see any reason why this won't come to pass in the next 10 yrs. I'm saving a copy of this post and going to see if I made a good call...
since it would be criminal law, i.e. you would be prodecuted.
Or, depending on the state, executed
But the "early termination fee" is going to be ugly. Add that to the cost of the phone to begin with, and either it won't sell cheap, or if it does, it's hot.
I can't imagine the odds of someone selling their new iphone 3g while still under contract. Wouldn't the odds of such a thing for sale being hot be incredibly high? Those things have serial numbers (SSIDs) that they will need to activate the phone wherever so if you do get a hot iphone you probably won't have it for long.
soooo glad I don't have to spend that much time just to keep my system running. why do you put up with it?
I have a 1500/3k inverter in my truck and have a similar solution that I've tested twice during brief power failures. Takes me about 10 minutes to swap over, half of which is spent turning off things that would draw too much. (heat pump, fridge, UPS's, server, etc) Freaks out the neighbors to see your porch light come back on when the rest of the block is dark.
FYI, UPS's don't often like inverter/genny power and will usually refuse to cut back due to the poor line noise / regulation they are getting. Also a charging UPS can be as big a draw as a compressor.
Thinking more on this, I wonder how well that would even work with to begin with? Lets say the line that cut power to my area was up the block, and my isolated segment is say.... one block. If I backfeed into that grid, it will attempt to power the entire block.
Now I realize any worker on my block up on the pole is going to get nailed, but is it going to work that way? My little genny is going to attempt to start maybe 25 refridgerators, a dozen or more heat pumps, and maybe 500 more miscillaneous appliances up and down my block.
My betting is that doesn't work very well and my genny's breaker almost instantly trips.
Now still, I wouldn't want to be a worker up on the pole trying to reconnect the downed feed at that time, but the window of opportunity to hurt a worker is not nearly as big as you might initially imagine. It's not like I'm going to light up that line for hours at a time, just waiting for some hapless worker to grab a live wire up there. In any case it'd be a very short-lived experiment.
And this is assuming I'm on an isolated feed, isolated to ONE block. If a primary feed is down several blocks from here, my genny is going to be starting 900 compressors all at once. NOT.
And this is all assuming I don't trip some other breaker up on a pole somewhere that is set to go if my local segment draws too much power. (since fuses work both ways) Even if my feed and genny could handle the load, it'd trip the first breaker it hit up on the poles.
This issue is a lot more complicated when you look closer. Not only would there be a time-zero window to hurt someone (since the genny would shut down immediately and you would hopefully not be stupid enough to try to restart it) but given the draw vs the supply anyone caught with a wire in their hand would be subject to a lot smaller hit than they would otherwise with a properly supplied line.
A good generator work like say, a snowblower, in fuel consumption. Snowblowers purr until you push them into a big pile of snow, then they bog down and accellerate and dig in. When you don't have a lot of things on the genny, the load is low, and the engine runs slow and loafs along, consuming little fuel beyond idle. When your fridge turns on the compressor, the genny will bog down immediately due to the load (causing a dip in power also) and will throttle up the engine to bring it back up to rpm's and output. Then it's drawing more gas of course, but will fall back again when your fridge shuts off the compressor.
There IS a difference in efficiency, but it's not a big one if you have even marginal quality genny.
I just got a new heat pump furnace, and this thread reminds me that I need to call the installers and ask them how to force it to run in "emergency heat" mode. (no heat pump, gas only) Since there's NO way the heat pump will work on a reasonable genny, and certainly not on my 1500w inverter.
the big risk here is to fry OTHER people. If you don't unplug from the mains, and try to turn on a generator and backfeed your house, you will feed 110 up to the pole. The cans up there will ramp that back UP to 12,500 or whatever they use at that point, (transformers work BOTH ways) and that can FRY workers that are up on the poles trying to restore your service.
since the firmware (EFI) update is a lot more effort than the normal updates.
please elaborate? Here, they are functionally identical. Both download, both state they need a restart, both restart, install, and restart again. Nowadays you don't even have to hold the power button to unlock the firmware.
I would amend this by saying Apple probably shouldn't have let him do this. There is a firmware update required to update to mac os 9 (from 8.6) and another on some machines before upgrading from 9.1 to 9.2. (imacs only I think?) Apple will not ALLOW those OS's to install until the firmware update is applied. Some machines also required a firmware update before installing OS X.
Hooray, my MacBook Pro is working again. And this seems to confirm for me that the 10.5.6 update breaks some systems if you are running older firmware.
Sorry but if you're skipping a firmware update, and running a major OS update on old firmware, you deserve a headache.
The Software Update presents updates in the order Apple recommends you install them. Skipping one update to run another is a stupid thing to do. The worst combination I can imagine is a firmware and an os update being installed out of order.
electrical resistance is the big problem there I think. long distances cause power transmission issues.
So, how DO you factor large semiprimes fast?
can someone explain why this is hard to do? It seems like a straghtforward process since the number of primes is essentially fixed. (there are quite a few of them but we keep hearing announcements about a new ONE being found, so there can't be that many of them that are known, someone's got a book I'm sure)
Just a matter of looping through all known primes, seeing if x divides by it. That's order 1 since the number of primes is "fixed". If you don't find anything it divides by, it's a new prime (add it to your list) or its smallest factor is larger than your biggest known prime. Otherwise remember that factor, and start working on the dividend.
Why is this always considered such a hard thing to do? It looks like something that should go quick.
Heck with modern day processors I'd imagine you could fab a specialized chip that determines which of the "known primes" the provided number has as one of its divisors as a one-step (parallel) operation. Just hardcode it to those primes.
Updates don't take all that long and are applied by typing
It's not fair to quote SP2 etc install times for windows and not mention it for the comparison, even if it's not very long.
Is there a speed difference in using the GUI? Most windows comparisons would be vs a user using the gui in ubuntu.
reinstall ubuntu 1-2 hours
does that include updates?
I assume there are also some custom apps you will need to reinstall such as staroffice and thunderbird? Bare bones ubuntu won't get much done?
just getting a static IP for the parent's Windows box so you can remote in for periodic maintenance would also be a decent way to go.
Or set up a cron job on their computer to push their current IP address to your server. Set that up when you're installing the periodic backup script. Works great here.
Or if you are purely mac and don't want to deal with firewalls and non static ips on both ends, you can use the "back to my mac" feature of mobileme to remote into it anytime from anywhere.
I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though? Or will you have to buy the full retail for 7, in which case they've as good as sold you a vista upgrade (plus a windows 7 upgrade) even though you didn't want anything to do with vista?
I personally find it hilarious that they keep extending xp as the consumer mass keeps threatening to make a "true" upgrade to another os...