How many 5v or 12v wall warts do you have? How many have the same connector?
Every time you toss a broken small electronic device, a perfectly good power adapter goes with it. (Or you wind up with a big box of unused ones, like I have.)
If there were a standard 5v (12+5 would be even better) connector, you wouldn't need a power adapter with every purchase and a mountain of e-waste could be avoided. Convenience is a bonus.
I get all the local Baltimore HD channels fine with a single telescoping radio antenna located in my basement. Does need a bit of tweaking when you switch channels, but it's awfully easy to tweak.
...every few days, I get IMAP errors, usually along the lines of, "Cannot open mailbox," and occasionally a login failure (despite the fact that my username and password are stored and reused by my email client).
Same here. Must say however, that the web interface works rather consistently. Wish they'd fix the IMAP problems though.
"Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation)
And since they have a loud (the loudest?) voice in our government, I'm happy to see one take a stand for human rights for a change.
To all you faithful, this has nothing to do with faith. Get over it.
The thing really is though is that the Core2 and the X2 really are still "good enough". Most people really are not dieing for a faster PC
Hear hear...
There's no such thing as "future proof". Something better will always come along but right now, there's very little software aimed at consumers that doesn't run acceptably well on on ANY 2-3 Ghz CPU.
If you care about future competition in the CPU market, you should be recommending AMD to your family and friends. They are cheaper and more than adequate.
I recently picked up a 65nm, 3.1 Ghz Athlon X2 + Mobo for $166.00. I can run every FPS on the market at 1920x1200, most at max detail. Hell... if you're running at 1280x1024, a single core Athlon and a $100.00 video card (Think geforce 9600..) will work fine for most games. Why do I need a faster CPU right now? Bragging rights?
I imagine it could be a real bitch if you have no practical networking experience. I only took mine, after figuring out on my own how to implement a Cisco layer 3 switch in the real world. After that, it only took a week or so of cramming and I passed on the first try. (Actually, I believe I took one basic Cisco inter-networking course at some point... I think that was after the test though; a freebie from work)
Disclaimer for contextual reading of this comment: I am pro-Israel, anti-terrorism, and I really do think Israel wants peace and Hamas wants no-live-Jew-on-face-of-earth. This is not an anti-Jew post.
I used to think that but then I read some history and started following current events. I now think it's "Israel wants land (which hasn't belonged to them in >2000 years) and Hamas (who represent people that they took it from) wants it back". At one point I think that the majority of Palistinians would have settled for "Just don't take any more." but that has unfortunately passed.
You don't really buy the no-live-jew-on-the-face of-earth line do you? That's a bunch of rhetoric that you too would probably spout were you and your family evicted from your house/land.
Jews and Arabs (and christians for that matter) have lived peacefully together, in that area, for hundreds of years at a time. There's nothing intrinsic in either religion that can't tolerate the existence of the other.
As F$%#@ed up as Hamas is (and I in no way support their tactics), you simply can't move in, displace millions, and expect peace.
I have sympathy for the innocent victims on both sides but Israel as a nation is reaping what it sows. Sadly, I see no humane solution.
"the file copy and browsing issues were fixed in SP1"
So I've been told, and indeed, raw copy speed seems ok now.
The GUI, however still hangs too frequently, for no apparent reason. There could very well be something wrong with my setup but XP on the same hardware, in the same environment, doesn't have this problem.
I'll take walking around NYC to driving (or walking though they tend not to do that...) around a suburb any day, thank you very much. I enjoy the distractions.
Can it copy files from one place to another in a reasonable amount of time now? Without tweaking?
Does the interface still hang for no apparent reason when browsing for files?
Are they still using hard links for the user profile directories?
I've tried Vista several times and as of a few weeks ago, with the latest beta SP, it's still crap at some of most basic things an operating should be good at.... navigation and pushing data around.
I prefer the national/international coverage but, you're right about AP & Reuters.
When every local paper (in any US city) I pick up has the same AP & Reuters stories as every other paper/website, there's really not much point.
There are still a few national papers worth reading but they're pricey at the news stand on a daily basis.
Pricier yet is The Economist, which, IMO, is the best source of international news available in the printed English language.... worth every penny though.
The internet for local/daily news and The Economist for a weekly/in depth print fix is where I'm at.
I do miss my daily lunch time ritual with a quality newspaper though.
And that may be the best education they get from this program.
I was the lead Sys Admin for a school district not too long ago so I feel somewhat qualified to chime in here. This particular district, while stopping short of providing every kid a laptop, did have about a 3:1 student to computer ratio. Even the elementary school classes each had at least 2 or 3 PCs in each classroom.
From a security point of view I'll say this:
1.) Don't bother trying to control usage at the PC level. It's mostly futile. You should set them up in a way that makes maintenance easy and recovery even easier but you shouldn't be trying to control what the children can do. Some local web filtering and access control is probably appropriate, especially if young children will be using these laptops but always remember that your main goal is supporting the curriculum and not protecting yourself from extra maintenance. Don't be annoyed or surprised when the clever ones circumvent local security. (be proud!)
2.) If you want to protect the kids from the internet, do it at the firewall. Again, some local filtering may be appropriate for primary school school kids, especially if they're using the laptops at home and at the public library, but it's almost completely useless and counter productive at the high school level. Try to make your administration understand this. BTW, access control is ultimately the administration problem/decision, not yours. Don't take it personally.
3.) Your biggest headache, security wise, will be from the very small minority of (generally high school) kids who attempt to hack their grades. This would happen at least once per semester in our high schools. There's a whole moral lesson here that the educators will have to deal with, but you should accept that some very bright kids are going to take this on as a challenge and throw everything they can at your network. You need to make sure that the grading system is locked down/backed up, that teachers aren't writing their passwords down in the classroom, and that they aren't walking away from unlocked administrative PCs with access to tests/grades. At the same time, you really shouldn't get too upset when they don't. Good luck there. Expect the occasional breach.
4.) Your second biggest headache will be controlling vandals. Again, just expect it and be prepared to recover.
From a maintenance point of view I can tell you this:
1.) The kids (and teachers for that matter) will break the computers. Constantly. Don't even get annoyed. Just re-image/repair/replace the computer(s) and move on. This is what you're getting paid to do.
2.) The kids, at least some of them (and they will help the others) will eventually get around any controls you care to place on the machines. While I'm not an educator, per se, I feel they should be congratulated for this except when it directly affects the ability of the teachers and other students to do their work. For the brightest, this type of hacking may be the best computer education they get in school.
3.) Don't get annoyed with the kids at all. That's the teachers job. You'll just give yourself heartburn. (you are already a hero to some of them, act that way)
From an education standpoint, and again IANAE, I have a few more opinions:
1.) Throwing computers at students is no substitute for a decent curriculum and effective teachers.
2.) If your goal is teaching computer science, Macs (and to a slightly lesser degree, Windows PCs) are NOT the way to go. Both MS and Apple hide the workings of a computer from the user to a degree that makes it almost useless for this purpose. Kids( and teachers for that matter) will not learn how computers work through osmosis. Of course it is fairly unrealistic to expect US publi
Moonshell, which most M3/R4 cards come with, has a perfectly reasonable.txt reader built in. So does homebrew DSOrganize.
It's not the best hardware to read on but better than an old Palm Pilot on which I've read many books. Pretty much all the all the public domain/classic stuff is easily available in txt format (www.gutenberg.org) and most everything else (that is primarily txt) is easily convertable.
Forget.pdfs and reference material in general. Most PDFs are formatted for letter size displays and the current state/speed of e-books reader interfaces make them nearly impossible to use for reference. I
IANAL but, let's assume for a moment that the the Nigerian offer was legit. Isn't it illegal to essentially launder money for these people? Aren't the 'victims' attempting to break the law? That would make them gullible, greedy, and criminal. No sympathy here.
How about instead Comcast actually do what they were supposed to do and build capable infrastructure that has enough bandwidth...
Comcast is just protecting their cable tv business.
Giving them money and expecting them to spend it on becoming just a fast pipe to the internet was naive at best.
I get all my video from the net. I currently download 150 to 200 GB per month of mostly mediocre quality video... 2 or 3 shows or movies per day. (Though, admittedly, with a growing backlog of unwatched stuff) It's cheaper than cable and much cheaper than cable+internet.
A 250 GB basically cap means no HD from the net which I'm sure suits Comcast just fine. The cap will likely remain until they lose their local monopolies on bandwidth. Currently, I have no realistic alternative in my major metropolitan area.
But yeah.... Now I mainly use it for binaries.
Web based forums have taken over most of USENET's intended usefullness... Too bad there isn't a central repository/interface for them.
It's the same amount of bytes downloaded, but I'm going to be really annoyed if/when it takes 2 hours to download a movie instead of the current 15 minutes. (approx 4mb connection, downloading 750 MB files from Usenet)
Streaming should be able to survive throttling of up to 1/4 - 1/2 my current max speed as it plays in realtime.
Not sure streaming is the target. I can download 4 movies while someone else streams one. It's me they're after!
MOD parent up. This is one of the easiest way to solve the problem. A better but more complex way is mucking around with the L7filter in dd-wrt which is tricky.
An easier way, if you've got the set up, is to do what I do; my vonage box gets the highest priority, my PC gets next highest and my home server, which does all the downloading as well as email is third along with everything else.
I can game, talk on the phone and download at 3-4mbps at the same time with no hiccups.
Slashdot Mirror
How many 5v or 12v wall warts do you have? How many have the same connector? Every time you toss a broken small electronic device, a perfectly good power adapter goes with it. (Or you wind up with a big box of unused ones, like I have.) If there were a standard 5v (12+5 would be even better) connector, you wouldn't need a power adapter with every purchase and a mountain of e-waste could be avoided. Convenience is a bonus.
I get all the local Baltimore HD channels fine with a single telescoping radio antenna located in my basement. Does need a bit of tweaking when you switch channels, but it's awfully easy to tweak.
It's a freaking toy for christ's sake. The sky is not falling.
Or better yet, intelligence suppositories.
...every few days, I get IMAP errors, usually along the lines of, "Cannot open mailbox," and occasionally a login failure (despite the fact that my username and password are stored and reused by my email client).
Same here. Must say however, that the web interface works rather consistently. Wish they'd fix the IMAP problems though.
We need a "paranoid" tag.
Like it or not:
"Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation)
And since they have a loud (the loudest?) voice in our government, I'm happy to see one take a stand for human rights for a change.
To all you faithful, this has nothing to do with faith. Get over it.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1153609,00.asp
That should account for some of the difference, though not all.
Google my name...
http://www.google.com/search?q=anonymous+coward Wow, prolific doesn't begin to describe Anonymous Coward.
The thing really is though is that the Core2 and the X2 really are still "good enough". Most people really are not dieing for a faster PC
Hear hear...
There's no such thing as "future proof". Something better will always come along but right now, there's very little software aimed at consumers that doesn't run acceptably well on on ANY 2-3 Ghz CPU.
If you care about future competition in the CPU market, you should be recommending AMD to your family and friends. They are cheaper and more than adequate.
I recently picked up a 65nm, 3.1 Ghz Athlon X2 + Mobo for $166.00. I can run every FPS on the market at 1920x1200, most at max detail. Hell... if you're running at 1280x1024, a single core Athlon and a $100.00 video card (Think geforce 9600..) will work fine for most games. Why do I need a faster CPU right now? Bragging rights?
I imagine it could be a real bitch if you have no practical networking experience. I only took mine, after figuring out on my own how to implement a Cisco layer 3 switch in the real world. After that, it only took a week or so of cramming and I passed on the first try. (Actually, I believe I took one basic Cisco inter-networking course at some point... I think that was after the test though; a freebie from work)
Disclaimer for contextual reading of this comment: I am pro-Israel, anti-terrorism, and I really do think Israel wants peace and Hamas wants no-live-Jew-on-face-of-earth. This is not an anti-Jew post.
I used to think that but then I read some history and started following current events. I now think it's "Israel wants land (which hasn't belonged to them in >2000 years) and Hamas (who represent people that they took it from) wants it back". At one point I think that the majority of Palistinians would have settled for "Just don't take any more." but that has unfortunately passed.
You don't really buy the no-live-jew-on-the-face of-earth line do you? That's a bunch of rhetoric that you too would probably spout were you and your family evicted from your house/land.
Jews and Arabs (and christians for that matter) have lived peacefully together, in that area, for hundreds of years at a time. There's nothing intrinsic in either religion that can't tolerate the existence of the other.
As F$%#@ed up as Hamas is (and I in no way support their tactics), you simply can't move in, displace millions, and expect peace.
I have sympathy for the innocent victims on both sides but Israel as a nation is reaping what it sows.
Sadly, I see no humane solution.
"the file copy and browsing issues were fixed in SP1" So I've been told, and indeed, raw copy speed seems ok now. The GUI, however still hangs too frequently, for no apparent reason. There could very well be something wrong with my setup but XP on the same hardware, in the same environment, doesn't have this problem.
I'll take walking around NYC to driving (or walking though they tend not to do that...) around a suburb any day, thank you very much. I enjoy the distractions.
Can it copy files from one place to another in a reasonable amount of time now? Without tweaking?
Does the interface still hang for no apparent reason when browsing for files?
Are they still using hard links for the user profile directories?
I've tried Vista several times and as of a few weeks ago, with the latest beta SP, it's still crap at some of most basic things an operating should be good at.... navigation and pushing data around.
I prefer the national/international coverage but, you're right about AP & Reuters.
When every local paper (in any US city) I pick up has the same AP & Reuters stories as every other paper/website, there's really not much point.
There are still a few national papers worth reading but they're pricey at the news stand on a daily basis.
Pricier yet is The Economist, which, IMO, is the best source of international news available in the printed English language.... worth every penny though.
The internet for local/daily news and The Economist for a weekly/in depth print fix is where I'm at.
I do miss my daily lunch time ritual with a quality newspaper though.
Then 11+ year olds will tell each other how.
And that may be the best education they get from this program.
I was the lead Sys Admin for a school district not too long ago so I feel somewhat qualified to chime in here. This particular district, while stopping short of providing every kid a laptop, did have about a 3:1 student to computer ratio. Even the elementary school classes each had at least 2 or 3 PCs in each classroom.
From a security point of view I'll say this:
1.) Don't bother trying to control usage at the PC level. It's mostly futile. You should set them up in a way that makes maintenance easy and recovery even easier but you shouldn't be trying to control what the children can do. Some local web filtering and access control is probably appropriate, especially if young children will be using these laptops but always remember that your main goal is supporting the curriculum and not protecting yourself from extra maintenance. Don't be annoyed or surprised when the clever ones circumvent local security. (be proud!)
2.) If you want to protect the kids from the internet, do it at the firewall. Again, some local filtering may be appropriate for primary school school kids, especially if they're using the laptops at home and at the public library, but it's almost completely useless and counter productive at the high school level. Try to make your administration understand this. BTW, access control is ultimately the administration problem/decision, not yours. Don't take it personally.
3.) Your biggest headache, security wise, will be from the very small minority of (generally high school) kids who attempt to hack their grades. This would happen at least once per semester in our high schools. There's a whole moral lesson here that the educators will have to deal with, but you should accept that some very bright kids are going to take this on as a challenge and throw everything they can at your network. You need to make sure that the grading system is locked down/backed up, that teachers aren't writing their passwords down in the classroom, and that they aren't walking away from unlocked administrative PCs with access to tests/grades. At the same time, you really shouldn't get too upset when they don't. Good luck there. Expect the occasional breach.
4.) Your second biggest headache will be controlling vandals. Again, just expect it and be prepared to recover.
From a maintenance point of view I can tell you this:
1.) The kids (and teachers for that matter) will break the computers. Constantly. Don't even get annoyed. Just re-image/repair/replace the computer(s) and move on. This is what you're getting paid to do.
2.) The kids, at least some of them (and they will help the others) will eventually get around any controls you care to place on the machines. While I'm not an educator, per se, I feel they should be congratulated for this except when it directly affects the ability of the teachers and other students to do their work. For the brightest, this type of hacking may be the best computer education they get in school.
3.) Don't get annoyed with the kids at all. That's the teachers job. You'll just give yourself heartburn. (you are already a hero to some of them, act that way)
From an education standpoint, and again IANAE, I have a few more opinions:
1.) Throwing computers at students is no substitute for a decent curriculum and effective teachers.
2.) If your goal is teaching computer science, Macs (and to a slightly lesser degree, Windows PCs) are NOT the way to go. Both MS and Apple hide the workings of a computer from the user to a degree that makes it almost useless for this purpose. Kids( and teachers for that matter) will not learn how computers work through osmosis. Of course it is fairly unrealistic to expect US publi
Moonshell, which most M3/R4 cards come with, has a perfectly reasonable .txt reader built in. So does homebrew DSOrganize.
It's not the best hardware to read on but better than an old Palm Pilot on which I've read many books. Pretty much all the all the public domain/classic stuff is easily available in txt format (www.gutenberg.org) and most everything else (that is primarily txt) is easily convertable.
Forget .pdfs and reference material in general. Most PDFs are formatted for letter size displays and the current state/speed of e-books reader interfaces make them nearly impossible to use for reference. I
IANAL but, let's assume for a moment that the the Nigerian offer was legit. Isn't it illegal to essentially launder money for these people? Aren't the 'victims' attempting to break the law? That would make them gullible, greedy, and criminal. No sympathy here.
Tell you what, why don't you sell me a key online and let me worry about distribution of the game itself?
I really don't care to drive to Best Buy or pay for shipping when I already have the game ISO from bittorrent.
Just sell me a key. Please... I'll even pay full retail, though you should seriously consider offering a discount for keys only.
yeah... right. The only problem is that it now costs 5000.00 to get a fender bender repaired.
Healthcare costs are likewise inflated.
And while you think you may not be paying for it, WE as a society are.
I blame the insurance companies first, the providers second. They're in collusion.
Insurance isn't a bad idea.... just our implementation of it.
How about instead Comcast actually do what they were supposed to do and build capable infrastructure that has enough bandwidth...
Comcast is just protecting their cable tv business.
Giving them money and expecting them to spend it on becoming just a fast pipe to the internet was naive at best.
I get all my video from the net. I currently download 150 to 200 GB per month of mostly mediocre quality video... 2 or 3 shows or movies per day. (Though, admittedly, with a growing backlog of unwatched stuff) It's cheaper than cable and much cheaper than cable+internet.
A 250 GB basically cap means no HD from the net which I'm sure suits Comcast just fine. The cap will likely remain until they lose their local monopolies on bandwidth. Currently, I have no realistic alternative in my major metropolitan area.
But yeah.... Now I mainly use it for binaries. Web based forums have taken over most of USENET's intended usefullness... Too bad there isn't a central repository/interface for them.
I prefer to download and then watch as well.
It's the same amount of bytes downloaded, but I'm going to be really annoyed if/when it takes 2 hours to download a movie instead of the current 15 minutes. (approx 4mb connection, downloading 750 MB files from Usenet)
Streaming should be able to survive throttling of up to 1/4 - 1/2 my current max speed as it plays in realtime.
Not sure streaming is the target. I can download 4 movies while someone else streams one. It's me they're after!
MOD parent up. This is one of the easiest way to solve the problem. A better but more complex way is mucking around with the L7filter in dd-wrt which is tricky.
An easier way, if you've got the set up, is to do what I do; my vonage box gets the highest priority, my PC gets next highest and my home server, which does all the downloading as well as email is third along with everything else.
I can game, talk on the phone and download at 3-4mbps at the same time with no hiccups.