There are a lot of things you can do to improve your image and worth to your customers.
- Listen to them. You may have heard it all before, but if you let them babble for several minutes they might divulge some critical little factoid that suddenly clears up the problem and makes a solution apparent. Interrupting or cutting a customer short on their description of the problem can make it very difficult to pry the necessary information from their head once they're in "ok I'll shut up now" mode.
- Be patient. They wouldn't be calling on your help if they had anywhere near the skills and knowledge that you do. Expect them to be noobs in every meaning of the word. Explaining the difference between an application and a disk image is no less helpful for a new guy than laying out the finer points of DNS to the techie. Both people need your help and are equally greatful, even when you are supplying what appears to be trivial information.
- Be proactive. If you're fixing a problem for a customer and you notice another issue, bring it to their attention. (don't just quietly fix it and let them discover it on their own!) Sometimes it'll be an issue they didn't even realize could be fixed, or was something that had been bothering them for some time but they forgot to ask you about. Little adjustments and tweaks to the user's experience can have a dramatic impact on how they view and value your help, and strongly encourage return business.
- Explain things to them at an appropriate level. This is probably one of the most challenging things for an IT service provider. Strike up a dialog with the customer for a good two minutes or more, to get a feel for what technical level they are at. Keep in mind some of these people are PhDs and literally don't understand you have to plug in the power cord to make it go. Listen carefully for feedback from them, for clues that you may have confused them or may be talking benieth their abilities, and adjust your technical level accordingly. Use examples and comparisons if needed to explain a foreign concept to them. Do not ever leave without being convinced they understand and remember what you have told them. When in doubt, briefly review what you've discussed to make sure they really do understand what you've said. Keep in mind that many customers will "nod and smile" and give you the impression they "get it" when in reality you lost them five minutes ago. If possible, show the customer how you fixed their problem, and if appropriate, explain to them why it happened, and how they can fix it themselves if it happens again. Most customers won't pay much attention to you when you fix their problem, even though they'd really like to be able to fix it themselves in the future.
I usually see uptimes of 2 weeks or more with my powerbook. I've had an uptime in excess of a month several times. Sleep it in the morning for the trip to work, sleep it for the trip back, leave it run all night with the display dimmed down. I only restart for the occasional software update that requires it. (minor nit: Apple was the one that said we should never have to restart for a minor software update, yet it seems like 90% of the restarting I do is not from 3rd parties, but from Apple updates... *sigh*)
But more to topic, I use a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 1gb USB flash drive quite a lot at work, and I have to say that the write speed is nowhere near what you get with a hard drive. The read speed is faster, but still slower than the hard drive by a wide margin. Now this will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, as there are varying speeds of flash memory and flash-to-usb controller chips, but a hard drive will always run rings around a flash, even comparing read speeds. It's going to be a few more years before we see solid state hard drives in common use. It will be nice though - we'll look back at hard drives and say how barbaric of a technology that was, a bit like we do now with the 5.25" floppies of yesteryear.
"...for one's own proffit". This is for the streetcorner venders with burns of photoshop for $5. This person is making a proffit. If I copy photoshop to play around with on my computer, I'm not proffiting.
The RIAA and gang would like to make you believe that every single copy of copyrighted software deprives the copyright holder of the full retail price of the product. Ignoring the small percentage of retail the artist actually sees, it would not be unreasonable to say that 90% or more of pirated copies of software are copied not as a substitute for a purchase, but for curiosity or just plain unwillingness to pay retail. Then just try to return a piece of software that dosn't live up to the hype. Software companies want special treatment in that respect, but won't budge an inch in any other direction or trade-off.
There is considerable time and effort invested to make media, but once that's done, my god, the rest is cake. It's not like manufacturing a desk, where you have to invest time developing the product, and THEN invest significant materials and labor into each unit produced... a single desktop duplicator can kick out over 7,000 discs a month for pennies per. Need more? No need to repeat the expensive overhead, just dup some more. Expensive software titles that retail for $1000, after a few thousand of them it's break-even for the most extravagant software. After that, break out the champaign, it's like minting money. And they cry when a few people copy it. I wish I had such troubles to worry about.
Downloaded the torrent, just out of intense curiosity. I was quite sure it was a fake, and I was right. Torrents contain checksums of chunks of the file, usually around 1000 chunks for an iso. This one had patterns - groups of like 50 chunks in a row with the same checksum. This means that sets of 50 chunks of the 'iso' had the exact same data in them. These chunks are several MB apiece. The entire torrent is patterend like this.
There's a reason it's rar'd and not zipped/stuffed... it's a rar'd file full of zeros. (or some other byte) The checksum patterns change only because of the occasional break between rar files, otherwise it'd be nothing but the same checksum end to end. If they'd have zipped it, it'd be oh, about 3k.
Makes ya wonder though, there were 500+ ppl in that swarm when I checked it, that's a lot of zeros getting traded around... heh.
If he's into thermodynamics he should realize the reason this is appearing to be a cheap way to AC is he's ignoring the need for the supply of cold water. (ice) Wouldn't he cut out the middleman here (and thus, theoretically increase efficiency of the system) by simply leaving his freezer door open with a fan in front of it?
I suppose it might still work running on cold tap-water, but then that could make for an expensive water bill. Although not nearly as much as running your freezer with its compressor all day long...
in a communist government... whatever the government wants, that's what the law is. That stuff that's scribbled down somewhere, that's just a courtesy, it's most certainly not required. We'll just call those "rough guidelines" to what is "legal", and maybe be real nice and tack on a and anything else we think of later if we're in a real generous mood.
Of course here in the USA we just have a variation on that theme, with our new "anti terrorism" laws that are secret. (secret laws? WTF?)
"Ignorance of the law is no defense". "But you said it was illegal for me to know what the law is!" "What does that matter?"
I mean really... what's the difference? Is there a difference? I don't see any...
When setting up something like a router, I place the password on a piece of paper, taped to the bottom of the unit.
Basically turning it into a physical security issue. More than once I've been thankful for said password being on the bottom of the unit. After all, it's already a well-known and acepted security fact that physical access = 0wn3d, so you can't really make matters worse by doing this, but you can prevent the "forgot the password" scenario.
We have one customer that has called us several times because she's having problems accessing her router. Each time the conversation goes "I've forgotten my password, how do I reset my password on my airport?" "Ma'am, your password is taped to the bottom of your airport." "It is? Oh look there it is. When did I do that?"
*sigh* At least it saves us from having to remember the password itself for her.
Someone's going to point out this looks like the "leave the key under the mat" scenario, but if they have physical access to your router, they're already inside your door - if you can't control who has access to the router, there's little point of even bothering wiith a password other than to keep the wal-mark kiddies from playing with it.
Anyone using someone else's communications technology should not expect their communications to be private from the owner of the technology. This includes phone, email, SMS, etc. I take it for granted that if I'm on the phone with someone there may be a lineman down the block testing the phone lines and may overhear part of my conversation. I don't believe my employer is currently reading my email, but I totally believe in their right to do so.
The only reason there aren't more employers monitoring email is simply due to a lack of manower to do it.
Bottom line: never assume privacy. Only assume better privacy by actively employing measures yourself. (pgp etc) And of course if you're using pgp on on your employer's computer, isn't that a major false sense of security? (if it's not owned by you, consider it 0wn3d)
They don't benefit directly, but they most certainly benefit indirectly. The studios can charge the theatres more for the rental of the movie reels because the theatres are charging you and me $2.99 for a 3 cent bag of popcorn.
The standard reply to similar points is usually "well then bring your own, it's not like anyone's forcing you to buy their product", but oh ya, that's right, you're not allowed to bring in your own food and drink... Handy racket they have going there.
Intel is CISC, PowerPC is RISC. It's a heck of a lot easier (and faster) to emulate CISC on a RISC (building complex instructions by using a huge pile of really fast, really simple instructions and tons of registers) than it is to do the opposite. Some magical new technology won't do much to change this fundamental problem. Emulating the PPC on an Intel chip is god-awful slow. Look at things like PearPC, taking hours to boot OS X. Emulating XP on a mac takes about a 50% speed hit. HUUUUGE difference. Emulation is an option for both camps, but emulating PPC is not a practical option.
People tend to side with one specific cause for things like this, thought I think you've hit on all the major contributing reasons.
Macs have traditionally been more expensive, although they also tend to come with more bells and whistles than PCs. I believe this is a dual driving force for mac sales to be slower - not only is the machine more expensive and therefore less attractive to upgrade frequently, but since stock macs come with many high end features, they can continue to be used for several years before becoming obsolete.
In that respect, PCs are somewhat easier to classify as "disposable computers". Not to say if this is a good thing or a bad thing, it depends on how you like to play the Upgrade Game. Going purely on your ugprade strategy, if you prefer to upgrade every year or two, a PC is clearly a better choice. For a more long-term investment, a Mac would seem to be more economical.
A couple years ago I was pricing computers, looking to get a new laptop. I'm usually the mac-type, but I shocked a few PC-using friends by asking for their advice on PC laptops. I already had a mac picked out that I liked, so I knew the price and the feature set the PC would have to meet or beat. In the end we settled on a compaq, and went to their web site to start checking boxes to upgrade the laptop to the same level as the stock powerbook. When the smoke cleared and the Calculate Total button was pressed, we had a compaq that was a scant $300 less than the powerbook, had less vram, lacked built-in wireless, was 2 lbs heavier, and had much shorter battery life. (this was about 2 yrs ago, both camps have upgraded their offering since then) For $300 less that seemed like about a wash.
Lesson learned: neither is a particularly better hardware value... you get what you pay for.
The black powerbooks are arguably the most upgradeable laptops ever built. The wallstreet, with its dual cardbus bays and dual media bays, was exceptional. I ugpraded mine to a g3/500 which not only increased CPU speed by 66% but also almost doubled battery life. A CD burner was another nice ugprade for it. (I think they have superdrives for them now?) I don't know if the G4 upgrade works with the wallstreet, but I've recently seen a "G4 pismo", upgraded something like this:
Not only is that G4/550, but check out the memory. It's not a new laptop, but it's still not too shabby.
Upgrading a PC, you usually replace the CPU, the logic board, power supply, memory, and the optical drive. That means you're keeping... the case? heh, what's the point?
While I don't have any hard numbers to provide, from what I've seen working in a mac/PC repair shop is that we see a lot more old macs come in for service than old PCs. People are still bringing in old grey powerpc laptops and performas. They use them every day. When we suggest they upgrade, they say no, this machine does everything I need it to. And that's a machine that's 10 years old. It won't do everything I would personally want, but for these grandmothers and soforth, it's still operational and useful.
We do see PCs come in that are getting near 10 years old, very very rarely, and it's almost always to do a data transfer to a new machine. You just don't see someone with a 10 year old PC that says "this machine still does everything I need it to." Now that might be a statement about the user or about the computer, but I tend to think it's a mix of both.
For that reason I would expect the install base for macs to be surprisingly large. All said and counted, I might go as far as to say that 30% of all macs manufactured, ever, are still in use today. If I had to guess wildly on PCs, I'd place that number at somewhere closer to 10%.
Cassini carried roughly 72 pounds of plutonium in generators needed to power the giant probe on its voyage to Saturn, where it will arrive July 2004. Each rover will carry an ounce of the radioactive element in eight penny-sized pellets to keep them warm during the Martian nights, which can reach minus 157 degrees Fahrenheit. They will also carry even smaller amounts of the radioactive elements, cobalt-57 and curium-244, to calibrate two science instruments.
No mentions of half-lifes for these elements. Maybe a physics expert can enlighten us. There was also no mention of how much over-engineering Nasa did in the quantities of radioactive material, so I can't say for sure if half-life is the critical point where the rovers will become incapacitated, or if this will occur at an earlier time in the decay cycle. (most likely earlier) Even if not incapacitating, time will definitely cool them down and thus slow them down, and could compound with other issues to put an end to their usefulness.
Every day the rovers are sitting on Mars their solar panels are degrading, getting covered with dust, parts are being caked with sand and grit, radioactive materials used to keep bearing grease soft are decaying, battery capacity is dropping. They have a very limited lifespan, but thanks to Nasa's over-engineering in the extreme, they are both still functional, long beyond their minimum expected lifespan.
For how long is anyone's guess. The rovers may only have a month of time left to live. Who knows what's just over the next dune to check out. To waste the rover's last hours just because a few people will have to work a little O.T. is, well... wasting a valuable Opportunity.
True... though if you make the consumer pay for it when he buys it, (as a tax or other addition to the purchase price) then that's manditory, and guarantees the recycling costs of all hardware is paid for, because it's paid for in advance. By the time it's ready to be recycled, the consumer has forgotten they already paid for recycling, and hapily brings it into the center to drop off, at no additional charge to them.
Now on the other hand, if we charge for recycling when you bring it into the center, then we get people like an earlier poster that just dumps it in a ditch (to avoid paying the recycling fee?) then we have the system breaking down.
The basic rule goes something like this: if you want to squeeze a few extra nickels out of someone, put out your hand when they've already got their wallet out, not when it's back in their pocket. It's basic human nature to be more accepting of paying a little extra when shelling out some money than to make a separate extra payment they can concieve of a way to avoid.
unfortunately, the spammers are not benieth attacking focal points of anti-spam activity. dnsrbl.com is down because it was hammered by a coordinated DDOS for an extended period of time, burning up their funds with bandwidth charges. The spammers may be cutthroat self-centered lowlifes, but they can recognize and coordinate against a threat very effectively when they have a few hunderd thousand zombies each to do their bidding.
of how many planets there are in the universe, even though the conditions for life are probably quite rare, there's almost certainly other life out there somewhere.
This is rather unimportant though because the odds of said life being anywhere near us, close enough that we could communicate or even notice eachother's existance, is virtually zero. That's assuming they were even capable of communication with us in the first place, and were eccentric enough to make an attempt to begin with.
So we shall have to be content in accepting that while there probably are "little green men" out there somewhere right now, we almost certainly will never get to see them, or even know of their existance.
I would count earth incredibly fortunate to ever discover evidence of life not originating from earth. And if it ever happens, it'll probably be of a culture that disappeared eons ago, that we very likely will be so far away from as to make it impossible to take a trip there to investigate.
You don't give a loaded gun to someone unless you want them to be able to shoot someone. Conversely, you don't carry a loaded gun unless you have the resolve to use it should the need arise.
Anyone telling you they want to carry a loaded gun around just because they want to brandish it or "just because", is either lying to you or is a fool. Since decisions like this are made by lawyers, it's very unlikely they are playing the fool. That leaves only one alternative.
Companies will take their actions and determination as far as they possibly can, "to the full extent of the law" is the usual phrase used. If you give them a foot, don't expect them to stop at 10 inches just because they say they will. They have absolutely every intention of using the full foot when push comes to shove and they want something bad enough. If they had no intention of using the full foot, they wouldn't be even slightly concerned about you trying to limit them to 10 inches.
Laws are there to STOP people from taking things too far. If the law places the line anywhere besides where it belongs, the law is broken.
but to say it's a bad idea to fight injustice because the criminals will just get better, that's a blanket justification that could be applied to all crime. The result of widespread adoption of that mindset would be "anarchy".
If you don't fight back, you are perceived as weak. Criminals prefer to prey on the weak. So by not fighting back, you are making yourself an attractive target, and will be exploited.
Vigilante justice occurs when a group is doing something that the general public can openly agree is wrong, but for which there is no formal law or rule forbidding. The populace takes action independently to protect themselves until which time the appropriate laws are passed.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of things you can do to improve your image and worth to your customers.
- Listen to them. You may have heard it all before, but if you let them babble for several minutes they might divulge some critical little factoid that suddenly clears up the problem and makes a solution apparent. Interrupting or cutting a customer short on their description of the problem can make it very difficult to pry the necessary information from their head once they're in "ok I'll shut up now" mode.
- Be patient. They wouldn't be calling on your help if they had anywhere near the skills and knowledge that you do. Expect them to be noobs in every meaning of the word. Explaining the difference between an application and a disk image is no less helpful for a new guy than laying out the finer points of DNS to the techie. Both people need your help and are equally greatful, even when you are supplying what appears to be trivial information.
- Be proactive. If you're fixing a problem for a customer and you notice another issue, bring it to their attention. (don't just quietly fix it and let them discover it on their own!) Sometimes it'll be an issue they didn't even realize could be fixed, or was something that had been bothering them for some time but they forgot to ask you about. Little adjustments and tweaks to the user's experience can have a dramatic impact on how they view and value your help, and strongly encourage return business.
- Explain things to them at an appropriate level. This is probably one of the most challenging things for an IT service provider. Strike up a dialog with the customer for a good two minutes or more, to get a feel for what technical level they are at. Keep in mind some of these people are PhDs and literally don't understand you have to plug in the power cord to make it go. Listen carefully for feedback from them, for clues that you may have confused them or may be talking benieth their abilities, and adjust your technical level accordingly. Use examples and comparisons if needed to explain a foreign concept to them. Do not ever leave without being convinced they understand and remember what you have told them. When in doubt, briefly review what you've discussed to make sure they really do understand what you've said. Keep in mind that many customers will "nod and smile" and give you the impression they "get it" when in reality you lost them five minutes ago. If possible, show the customer how you fixed their problem, and if appropriate, explain to them why it happened, and how they can fix it themselves if it happens again. Most customers won't pay much attention to you when you fix their problem, even though they'd really like to be able to fix it themselves in the future.
I usually see uptimes of 2 weeks or more with my powerbook. I've had an uptime in excess of a month several times. Sleep it in the morning for the trip to work, sleep it for the trip back, leave it run all night with the display dimmed down. I only restart for the occasional software update that requires it. (minor nit: Apple was the one that said we should never have to restart for a minor software update, yet it seems like 90% of the restarting I do is not from 3rd parties, but from Apple updates... *sigh*)
But more to topic, I use a SanDisk Cruzer Mini 1gb USB flash drive quite a lot at work, and I have to say that the write speed is nowhere near what you get with a hard drive. The read speed is faster, but still slower than the hard drive by a wide margin. Now this will vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, as there are varying speeds of flash memory and flash-to-usb controller chips, but a hard drive will always run rings around a flash, even comparing read speeds. It's going to be a few more years before we see solid state hard drives in common use. It will be nice though - we'll look back at hard drives and say how barbaric of a technology that was, a bit like we do now with the 5.25" floppies of yesteryear.
"...for one's own proffit". This is for the streetcorner venders with burns of photoshop for $5. This person is making a proffit. If I copy photoshop to play around with on my computer, I'm not proffiting.
The RIAA and gang would like to make you believe that every single copy of copyrighted software deprives the copyright holder of the full retail price of the product. Ignoring the small percentage of retail the artist actually sees, it would not be unreasonable to say that 90% or more of pirated copies of software are copied not as a substitute for a purchase, but for curiosity or just plain unwillingness to pay retail. Then just try to return a piece of software that dosn't live up to the hype. Software companies want special treatment in that respect, but won't budge an inch in any other direction or trade-off.
There is considerable time and effort invested to make media, but once that's done, my god, the rest is cake. It's not like manufacturing a desk, where you have to invest time developing the product, and THEN invest significant materials and labor into each unit produced... a single desktop duplicator can kick out over 7,000 discs a month for pennies per. Need more? No need to repeat the expensive overhead, just dup some more. Expensive software titles that retail for $1000, after a few thousand of them it's break-even for the most extravagant software. After that, break out the champaign, it's like minting money. And they cry when a few people copy it. I wish I had such troubles to worry about.
Downloaded the torrent, just out of intense curiosity. I was quite sure it was a fake, and I was right. Torrents contain checksums of chunks of the file, usually around 1000 chunks for an iso. This one had patterns - groups of like 50 chunks in a row with the same checksum. This means that sets of 50 chunks of the 'iso' had the exact same data in them. These chunks are several MB apiece. The entire torrent is patterend like this.
There's a reason it's rar'd and not zipped/stuffed... it's a rar'd file full of zeros. (or some other byte) The checksum patterns change only because of the occasional break between rar files, otherwise it'd be nothing but the same checksum end to end. If they'd have zipped it, it'd be oh, about 3k.
Makes ya wonder though, there were 500+ ppl in that swarm when I checked it, that's a lot of zeros getting traded around... heh.
how MS bashes linux, and yet is trying to become more and more like it...
Probably a very common business tactic, bash the competition and at the same time assimilate its best features, but still, poor style.
If he's into thermodynamics he should realize the reason this is appearing to be a cheap way to AC is he's ignoring the need for the supply of cold water. (ice) Wouldn't he cut out the middleman here (and thus, theoretically increase efficiency of the system) by simply leaving his freezer door open with a fan in front of it?
I suppose it might still work running on cold tap-water, but then that could make for an expensive water bill. Although not nearly as much as running your freezer with its compressor all day long...
in a communist government... whatever the government wants, that's what the law is. That stuff that's scribbled down somewhere, that's just a courtesy, it's most certainly not required. We'll just call those "rough guidelines" to what is "legal", and maybe be real nice and tack on a and anything else we think of later if we're in a real generous mood.
Of course here in the USA we just have a variation on that theme, with our new "anti terrorism" laws that are secret. (secret laws? WTF?)
"Ignorance of the law is no defense". "But you said it was illegal for me to know what the law is!" "What does that matter?"
I mean really... what's the difference? Is there a difference? I don't see any...
When setting up something like a router, I place the password on a piece of paper, taped to the bottom of the unit.
Basically turning it into a physical security issue. More than once I've been thankful for said password being on the bottom of the unit. After all, it's already a well-known and acepted security fact that physical access = 0wn3d, so you can't really make matters worse by doing this, but you can prevent the "forgot the password" scenario.
We have one customer that has called us several times because she's having problems accessing her router. Each time the conversation goes "I've forgotten my password, how do I reset my password on my airport?" "Ma'am, your password is taped to the bottom of your airport." "It is? Oh look there it is. When did I do that?"
*sigh* At least it saves us from having to remember the password itself for her.
Someone's going to point out this looks like the "leave the key under the mat" scenario, but if they have physical access to your router, they're already inside your door - if you can't control who has access to the router, there's little point of even bothering wiith a password other than to keep the wal-mark kiddies from playing with it.
Anyone using someone else's communications technology should not expect their communications to be private from the owner of the technology. This includes phone, email, SMS, etc. I take it for granted that if I'm on the phone with someone there may be a lineman down the block testing the phone lines and may overhear part of my conversation. I don't believe my employer is currently reading my email, but I totally believe in their right to do so.
The only reason there aren't more employers monitoring email is simply due to a lack of manower to do it.
Bottom line: never assume privacy. Only assume better privacy by actively employing measures yourself. (pgp etc) And of course if you're using pgp on on your employer's computer, isn't that a major false sense of security? (if it's not owned by you, consider it 0wn3d)
They don't benefit directly, but they most certainly benefit indirectly. The studios can charge the theatres more for the rental of the movie reels because the theatres are charging you and me $2.99 for a 3 cent bag of popcorn.
The standard reply to similar points is usually "well then bring your own, it's not like anyone's forcing you to buy their product", but oh ya, that's right, you're not allowed to bring in your own food and drink... Handy racket they have going there.
That link says something about missing a refer tag and requests login. Changing mirror from 0 to 1 sends you here:
http://www.logipole.com/download/konvertore.zip
Intel is CISC, PowerPC is RISC. It's a heck of a lot easier (and faster) to emulate CISC on a RISC (building complex instructions by using a huge pile of really fast, really simple instructions and tons of registers) than it is to do the opposite. Some magical new technology won't do much to change this fundamental problem. Emulating the PPC on an Intel chip is god-awful slow. Look at things like PearPC, taking hours to boot OS X. Emulating XP on a mac takes about a 50% speed hit. HUUUUGE difference. Emulation is an option for both camps, but emulating PPC is not a practical option.
People tend to side with one specific cause for things like this, thought I think you've hit on all the major contributing reasons.
Macs have traditionally been more expensive, although they also tend to come with more bells and whistles than PCs. I believe this is a dual driving force for mac sales to be slower - not only is the machine more expensive and therefore less attractive to upgrade frequently, but since stock macs come with many high end features, they can continue to be used for several years before becoming obsolete.
In that respect, PCs are somewhat easier to classify as "disposable computers". Not to say if this is a good thing or a bad thing, it depends on how you like to play the Upgrade Game. Going purely on your ugprade strategy, if you prefer to upgrade every year or two, a PC is clearly a better choice. For a more long-term investment, a Mac would seem to be more economical.
A couple years ago I was pricing computers, looking to get a new laptop. I'm usually the mac-type, but I shocked a few PC-using friends by asking for their advice on PC laptops. I already had a mac picked out that I liked, so I knew the price and the feature set the PC would have to meet or beat. In the end we settled on a compaq, and went to their web site to start checking boxes to upgrade the laptop to the same level as the stock powerbook. When the smoke cleared and the Calculate Total button was pressed, we had a compaq that was a scant $300 less than the powerbook, had less vram, lacked built-in wireless, was 2 lbs heavier, and had much shorter battery life. (this was about 2 yrs ago, both camps have upgraded their offering since then) For $300 less that seemed like about a wash.
Lesson learned: neither is a particularly better hardware value... you get what you pay for.
The black powerbooks are arguably the most upgradeable laptops ever built. The wallstreet, with its dual cardbus bays and dual media bays, was exceptional. I ugpraded mine to a g3/500 which not only increased CPU speed by 66% but also almost doubled battery life. A CD burner was another nice ugprade for it. (I think they have superdrives for them now?) I don't know if the G4 upgrade works with the wallstreet, but I've recently seen a "G4 pismo", upgraded something like this:
i smo.html
http://www.geekculture.com/blurbs/reviews/XLR8G4P
Not only is that G4/550, but check out the memory. It's not a new laptop, but it's still not too shabby.
Upgrading a PC, you usually replace the CPU, the logic board, power supply, memory, and the optical drive. That means you're keeping... the case? heh, what's the point?
While I don't have any hard numbers to provide, from what I've seen working in a mac/PC repair shop is that we see a lot more old macs come in for service than old PCs. People are still bringing in old grey powerpc laptops and performas. They use them every day. When we suggest they upgrade, they say no, this machine does everything I need it to. And that's a machine that's 10 years old. It won't do everything I would personally want, but for these grandmothers and soforth, it's still operational and useful.
We do see PCs come in that are getting near 10 years old, very very rarely, and it's almost always to do a data transfer to a new machine. You just don't see someone with a 10 year old PC that says "this machine still does everything I need it to." Now that might be a statement about the user or about the computer, but I tend to think it's a mix of both.
For that reason I would expect the install base for macs to be surprisingly large. All said and counted, I might go as far as to say that 30% of all macs manufactured, ever, are still in use today. If I had to guess wildly on PCs, I'd place that number at somewhere closer to 10%.
Cassini carried roughly 72 pounds of plutonium in generators needed to power the giant probe on its voyage to Saturn, where it will arrive July 2004. Each rover will carry an ounce of the radioactive element in eight penny-sized pellets to keep them warm during the Martian nights, which can reach minus 157 degrees Fahrenheit. They will also carry even smaller amounts of the radioactive elements, cobalt-57 and curium-244, to calibrate two science instruments.
Source: www.nuclearpolicy.org/NewsArticle.cfm?NewsID=76
No mentions of half-lifes for these elements. Maybe a physics expert can enlighten us. There was also no mention of how much over-engineering Nasa did in the quantities of radioactive material, so I can't say for sure if half-life is the critical point where the rovers will become incapacitated, or if this will occur at an earlier time in the decay cycle. (most likely earlier) Even if not incapacitating, time will definitely cool them down and thus slow them down, and could compound with other issues to put an end to their usefulness.
Every day the rovers are sitting on Mars their solar panels are degrading, getting covered with dust, parts are being caked with sand and grit, radioactive materials used to keep bearing grease soft are decaying, battery capacity is dropping. They have a very limited lifespan, but thanks to Nasa's over-engineering in the extreme, they are both still functional, long beyond their minimum expected lifespan.
For how long is anyone's guess. The rovers may only have a month of time left to live. Who knows what's just over the next dune to check out. To waste the rover's last hours just because a few people will have to work a little O.T. is, well... wasting a valuable Opportunity.
grab the code? but we wrote it!
True... though if you make the consumer pay for it when he buys it, (as a tax or other addition to the purchase price) then that's manditory, and guarantees the recycling costs of all hardware is paid for, because it's paid for in advance. By the time it's ready to be recycled, the consumer has forgotten they already paid for recycling, and hapily brings it into the center to drop off, at no additional charge to them.
Now on the other hand, if we charge for recycling when you bring it into the center, then we get people like an earlier poster that just dumps it in a ditch (to avoid paying the recycling fee?) then we have the system breaking down.
The basic rule goes something like this: if you want to squeeze a few extra nickels out of someone, put out your hand when they've already got their wallet out, not when it's back in their pocket. It's basic human nature to be more accepting of paying a little extra when shelling out some money than to make a separate extra payment they can concieve of a way to avoid.
unfortunately, the spammers are not benieth attacking focal points of anti-spam activity. dnsrbl.com is down because it was hammered by a coordinated DDOS for an extended period of time, burning up their funds with bandwidth charges. The spammers may be cutthroat self-centered lowlifes, but they can recognize and coordinate against a threat very effectively when they have a few hunderd thousand zombies each to do their bidding.
you can sound just like Scotty. (it helps if you hold the mouse up to your mouth when you say it)
of how many planets there are in the universe, even though the conditions for life are probably quite rare, there's almost certainly other life out there somewhere.
This is rather unimportant though because the odds of said life being anywhere near us, close enough that we could communicate or even notice eachother's existance, is virtually zero. That's assuming they were even capable of communication with us in the first place, and were eccentric enough to make an attempt to begin with.
So we shall have to be content in accepting that while there probably are "little green men" out there somewhere right now, we almost certainly will never get to see them, or even know of their existance.
I would count earth incredibly fortunate to ever discover evidence of life not originating from earth. And if it ever happens, it'll probably be of a culture that disappeared eons ago, that we very likely will be so far away from as to make it impossible to take a trip there to investigate.
You don't give a loaded gun to someone unless you want them to be able to shoot someone. Conversely, you don't carry a loaded gun unless you have the resolve to use it should the need arise.
Anyone telling you they want to carry a loaded gun around just because they want to brandish it or "just because", is either lying to you or is a fool. Since decisions like this are made by lawyers, it's very unlikely they are playing the fool. That leaves only one alternative.
Companies will take their actions and determination as far as they possibly can, "to the full extent of the law" is the usual phrase used. If you give them a foot, don't expect them to stop at 10 inches just because they say they will. They have absolutely every intention of using the full foot when push comes to shove and they want something bad enough. If they had no intention of using the full foot, they wouldn't be even slightly concerned about you trying to limit them to 10 inches.
Laws are there to STOP people from taking things too far. If the law places the line anywhere besides where it belongs, the law is broken.
whereas ordinary pop-up windows will open in a new foreground tab
but to say it's a bad idea to fight injustice because the criminals will just get better, that's a blanket justification that could be applied to all crime. The result of widespread adoption of that mindset would be "anarchy".
If you don't fight back, you are perceived as weak. Criminals prefer to prey on the weak. So by not fighting back, you are making yourself an attractive target, and will be exploited.
Vigilante justice occurs when a group is doing something that the general public can openly agree is wrong, but for which there is no formal law or rule forbidding. The populace takes action independently to protect themselves until which time the appropriate laws are passed.