but in case anyone points out that this isn't true - I KNOW.
Depends what you call POS, doesn't it? Let's define POS as computers you will find readily in the dumpster. I'm a computer dumpster diver and if the people at the recycling centre don't catch me, I take computers and try to refurbish them for the lesser lucky.
I've found a P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM (Rambus, so not very upgradable) with a dual-head graphics card. I've found several AMD XP 2400+ machines, usually with 256Meg DDR RAM, but find a few of these machine and you've got one capable machine and tons of spare parts. I recently refurbished such a machine, gave it 1GB RAM and it's now in use by the daughter of an acquaintance. She's even very proud of not running Windows, perhaps it is a good idea to indoctrinate 12 year olds *grin*.
Best thing I've found is a AMD64 3000+ (socket 939). Sure it also had only a meager 256Meg RAM, but that's hell of a machine to find in a dumpster.
To make a long story short: Usually I don't even bother taking P-III class machines anymore because there is way better stuff in the dumpsters and I don't have a massive amount of storage room.
A P-III with sufficient RAM (About 512Meg) running XP Home (dumpster diven machines often still have their license stickers! If they don't, I use Ubuntu) is a more than capable office/surfing machine.
Well, yes, but people will remember the products they had before and frankly, I've never been a happy camper with ATI. I've seen high-end cards (when they were already bought by AMD) fail to deliver: flakey drivers under Windows, not working at all under Linux.
I just can be freaking glad that I didn't have an Intel chip in that machine, because I just can't imagine any worse performing card. Heck, the Intel graphics chip on my Asus EEE performs better! (Might have to do with the small resolution of the screen of course)
Just playing Devils advocate: How good is the PS3s BlueRay playback interface? Back in the PS2 days, I bought one and said "swell, a DVD player and a console". It didn't last long as a DVD player, because the interface was horrible. (Perhaps buying the remote would have been a good solution). So, unless the PS3 is actually usable as a BlueRay player, I'd bet that those PS3s never saw a movie-blueray in their lifetime.
(I do not own a PS3, HD-DVD or BlueRay and do not intend buying one at all)
My ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 begs to differ.... That card sucks on both Windows and Linux. Yes, surely because it has no dedicated memory, but you did say "on board video" which pretty much never got memory of its own.
I think I know what your problem is: disk I/O. Why? Because between 2005 and 2007, my primary laptop was a second-hand purchased 600MHz P-III with 256Meg RAM and a 4GB harddisk. Got it for 100€ and I immediately added 256Meg to "speed it up". I installed Windows XP SP2 and it ran just fine (Okay, browsing back then was Firefox 1.5.x) One day, the 4Gig started to fill up (4Gig is fine for the OS + Applications, but once you start gathering a bit data....) and I thought "let's replace the disk". I bought the cheapest 2.5" harddisk I could find (which was a 80Gig disk, more than enough for my needs) and..... to my surprise the machine was suddenly feeling much faster. I wouldn't have ever guessed that the bottleneck at this state would be the disk I/O.
Now, with those specs, you might be talking about a Netbook. I also happen to have an Asus EEE PC 701 4G and with it's 670MHz (can't keep it on 900MHz, even on Debian), 2Gig RAM it does feel slow. Why? I highly suspect that those 4Gig SSD in there aren't all that hot. It runs Debian 5.0 with LXDE, but starting Iceweasel or Icedove takes forever. Once they're running, it's completely fine: they're in RAM and I've got plenty of that.
I don't expect XP to run better than Debian. The original Xandros was faster though. I don't really know what to do to optimize it.
Wow, someone needs her humour detector to be fixed. You foed me over this?!? There are a lot of reasons to foe me, but making a joke like this isn't a good reason.
George Eliot lived in a society whom women were simply not taken seriously. She circumvented that by posing as a man.
This here is something completely different. She's a geek and a pretty good one too: she'll get her code accepted in the Linux kernel and works for Intel. It's hard to beat that.... So respect there is.
However, geek girls are so rare that we surely want to know how attractive she is (and she is!). Note the word attractive: it comes from "to attract", meaning we're evaluating her "potential mate" status. We're all still cavemen (and cavewomen... you do know that women check out men all the time, don't you?) in that regard. "potential mate" implies sex. USB comes in male and female variant. She is attractive. Add those three together and you get a comment like the one I made. It is just meant funny and on top of that I added a winkie-smile, indicating that one should just take it as a joke.
It is just a mere comment which was mostly meant to entertain. I'm married, but not as lucky to be married to a geek girl (she's pretty much the exact opposite and that causes some problems).
This is nothing more than the geek equivalent of a construction worker whistling after a pretty girl. Or someone saying that they wouldn't kick $ACTOR/$ACTRESS out of their bed.
So lighten up a bit.... You're a woman in a male-dominated world, but we don't persecute you. When I attended Computer Science, we had five girls in the whole course (100 people at the beginning). All of them were treated with respect and they could manage the occasional sexual innuendo. They knew it was for fun, so why can't you?
Keep me foed, I don't care... However, you seriously need to reevaluate your sensitivities as a female in the male-dominated-geek world.
Oh, I got your point.... However, the comparison to Apple is not fair in the sense that Apple is not a convicted monopolist. Just for the record, I'm not an Apple fanboy. Getting rid of IE is a godsend.
My experience with dropped internet connections is that usually something broke on the ISP side.
Mine is that it rarely is on the ISP side. In the 6 years (wow, 6 years already!) I have had exactly one "drop" of connectivity which was the ISPs fault. That's not bad for residential ADSL. Companies should demand better uptimes than that.
You make it sound like backups are really complex.
No, I did not.... However, I do know that small and medium businesses usually don't have inhouse IT people and actually don't know how to do it. Don't forget that in many SMBs, it's Secretary Sallys who knows Word that does all IT. No, I'm not kidding.
You mean "anything as long as you don't have to make backups"?
No, that's not what I said at all. Large corporations should have their data in-house and have offsite backup. However, having an ISP that fucks up days of connectivity is a no-no. At that point you search another IT crew who actually negotiates correctly with ISPs. Meaning: give them hell if the Internet drops a whole day.
I'm not talking about a dialup line that's dropped. I'm talking about a corporate ISP that's crap.
Don't you think the problem is somewhere else? Like having a crap corporate ISP? Switch! It's that simple...
Apart from that, in a corporate setup, there should not be local storage at all. "My Documents" should be pointing to a network accessible share and those should have nightly backups and offsite backups. Technically they pretty much already have their "cloud", even if it is implemented in a different way.
I was indeed thinking more of home users (dial-up, are you kidding me? Nobody uses dialup anymore... not on my continent). Corporations require other solutions, one of which I described above. I'd expect only small and medium businesses to rely on services on the Internet and believe me, those do not have the infrastructure and backup facilities Corporations have. (Also, they are mostly on ADSL, which is restartable as I said... For them, it means rebooting the router, but that's not hard)
Still, doesn't change the fact a Corporation having a bad ISP should take action and not sit there like a lame duck. Actually, I'd blame the IT guys of that corporation for failing to provide adequate service to the company.... Sorry, that's just the way it is.
Actually even my 67 year old clueless dad has a USB external with one touch backup.
I would argue that your dad is not clueless. Do you know why he does this? I know: He got burned before and that's how he learned he got to make backups. Since he learned he is by definition not clueless
Give your old man some credit, okay?
Oh, and as for a final remark... People have only started doing this the last few years (only those that got burned before, mind you) Before ubiquitous cheap USB harddisks, backup simply was too expensive for the average home user. (I'm someone who backed up on Iomega Dittos... don't ask... it was not cheap, but cheap enough, but a fucking pain!)
my internet connection drops more often than my harddrive.
While true that harddisks fail rarely (except from pretty much all 160Gig HDs I have owned, even from different brands), a failed harddisk will bring you down hard. An internet connection that goes down? That's as much work as reconnecting.... Many modern routers even do that for you if they sense a disconnection.
My Internet is down maximum 2 times a year, and I have a old (from 2003) ADSL Modem with a OpenBSD router behind it. Restarting the Internet is as much work as running a script which I called "restartdsl". (Kills existing connection, puts tun0 down, flushes routes and reconnects... easy peasy)
Oh, come on! Giving access to your machine is no big deal... I have no problem with anyone using my computer in a guest account. Obviously they won't get Admin/root[1] rights on it and obviously they won't get access to your files. Running an (installed) app, reading their own data (from USB/CD) is not a problem in a "Limited User" account (to use the retarded Windows lingo... a "user" to me is by definition "limited") . There is no risk to your data (inaccessible folder), no risk of a trojan/worm/virus to hose your system: worst case something nasty might get installed running as that user, but I haven't seen such a thing yet.
If you really don't trust them enough, watch over their shoulder. They shouldn't object to that.
Oh, and he's in art school... Lots of horny sexy chicks... Don't want to close down your options there because you don't let them access your computer...
[1] I don't even run Admin/root myself... Not on Windows XP and not on Linux.
Yep.... Exactly, that kind of stuff is true. My wife is a kindergarten teacher and in the last job she had the teachers themselves were responsible to put the kids on the right buses (they had a quite efficient system, but sometimes a kid needed another bus and that's when problems started).
Anyway, some kids aren't scheduled for a bus when parents say they come to pick them up.
Now what happens when a parent fails to show up? A logical person would say, ah I know where the kid is supposed to go to (grandma, home, whatever...), I'll just drive them there, it's on my way home anyway. That is not allowed, and the reason is.... insurance... yup...
That was my first reaction too, but since I'm on Debian with ext3, I tried it to be sure. The bug report is correct (IceDove 2.0.0.19). What this is most likely is (I don't know for sure), is a check added to accomodate those non-case sensitive filesystems, but it does so silently and it should at least report an error. Try doing the described behaviour manually on Windows in explorer (the file explorer) and it will give you an error (well, that's what I remember, I can't test it right now).
I'm not really sure if the developers can find out if the underlying file system[1] is or is not case sensitive, so the behaviour is understandable. However, what should be done is a clear error or at least disable the "Ok" button. (Or do the described workaround if you detect this, quite exotic case)
[1] What I can tell is that you can't rely on the operating system. The Thunderbird profile may reside on an NFS share an the software runs on Windows accessing the profile. Which could thus mean that Windows has access to a case-insensitive file system. The inverse is perfectly imaginable too.
Okay, makes sense... but do admit that you're working in a niche. Most webdevs could go with an underpowered server for their testing needs. I know that last when I did webdev (LAMP stack), it was in a VM running Debian Lenny and with 256Meg RAM the thing had plenty resources.
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Depends what you call POS, doesn't it? Let's define POS as computers you will find readily in the dumpster. I'm a computer dumpster diver and if the people at the recycling centre don't catch me, I take computers and try to refurbish them for the lesser lucky.
I've found a P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM (Rambus, so not very upgradable) with a dual-head graphics card. I've found several AMD XP 2400+ machines, usually with 256Meg DDR RAM, but find a few of these machine and you've got one capable machine and tons of spare parts. I recently refurbished such a machine, gave it 1GB RAM and it's now in use by the daughter of an acquaintance. She's even very proud of not running Windows, perhaps it is a good idea to indoctrinate 12 year olds *grin*.
Best thing I've found is a AMD64 3000+ (socket 939). Sure it also had only a meager 256Meg RAM, but that's hell of a machine to find in a dumpster.
To make a long story short: Usually I don't even bother taking P-III class machines anymore because there is way better stuff in the dumpsters and I don't have a massive amount of storage room.
A P-III with sufficient RAM (About 512Meg) running XP Home (dumpster diven machines often still have their license stickers! If they don't, I use Ubuntu) is a more than capable office/surfing machine.
Well, yes, but people will remember the products they had before and frankly, I've never been a happy camper with ATI. I've seen high-end cards (when they were already bought by AMD) fail to deliver: flakey drivers under Windows, not working at all under Linux.
I just can be freaking glad that I didn't have an Intel chip in that machine, because I just can't imagine any worse performing card. Heck, the Intel graphics chip on my Asus EEE performs better! (Might have to do with the small resolution of the screen of course)
Just playing Devils advocate: How good is the PS3s BlueRay playback interface? Back in the PS2 days, I bought one and said "swell, a DVD player and a console". It didn't last long as a DVD player, because the interface was horrible. (Perhaps buying the remote would have been a good solution). So, unless the PS3 is actually usable as a BlueRay player, I'd bet that those PS3s never saw a movie-blueray in their lifetime.
(I do not own a PS3, HD-DVD or BlueRay and do not intend buying one at all)
They do?
My ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 begs to differ.... That card sucks on both Windows and Linux. Yes, surely because it has no dedicated memory, but you did say "on board video" which pretty much never got memory of its own.
I think I know what your problem is: disk I/O. Why? Because between 2005 and 2007, my primary laptop was a second-hand purchased 600MHz P-III with 256Meg RAM and a 4GB harddisk. Got it for 100€ and I immediately added 256Meg to "speed it up". I installed Windows XP SP2 and it ran just fine (Okay, browsing back then was Firefox 1.5.x) One day, the 4Gig started to fill up (4Gig is fine for the OS + Applications, but once you start gathering a bit data....) and I thought "let's replace the disk". I bought the cheapest 2.5" harddisk I could find (which was a 80Gig disk, more than enough for my needs) and..... to my surprise the machine was suddenly feeling much faster. I wouldn't have ever guessed that the bottleneck at this state would be the disk I/O.
Now, with those specs, you might be talking about a Netbook. I also happen to have an Asus EEE PC 701 4G and with it's 670MHz (can't keep it on 900MHz, even on Debian), 2Gig RAM it does feel slow. Why? I highly suspect that those 4Gig SSD in there aren't all that hot. It runs Debian 5.0 with LXDE, but starting Iceweasel or Icedove takes forever. Once they're running, it's completely fine: they're in RAM and I've got plenty of that.
I don't expect XP to run better than Debian. The original Xandros was faster though. I don't really know what to do to optimize it.
Wow, someone needs her humour detector to be fixed. You foed me over this?!? There are a lot of reasons to foe me, but making a joke like this isn't a good reason.
George Eliot lived in a society whom women were simply not taken seriously. She circumvented that by posing as a man.
This here is something completely different. She's a geek and a pretty good one too: she'll get her code accepted in the Linux kernel and works for Intel. It's hard to beat that.... So respect there is.
However, geek girls are so rare that we surely want to know how attractive she is (and she is!). Note the word attractive: it comes from "to attract", meaning we're evaluating her "potential mate" status. We're all still cavemen (and cavewomen... you do know that women check out men all the time, don't you?) in that regard. "potential mate" implies sex. USB comes in male and female variant. She is attractive. Add those three together and you get a comment like the one I made. It is just meant funny and on top of that I added a winkie-smile, indicating that one should just take it as a joke.
It is just a mere comment which was mostly meant to entertain. I'm married, but not as lucky to be married to a geek girl (she's pretty much the exact opposite and that causes some problems).
This is nothing more than the geek equivalent of a construction worker whistling after a pretty girl. Or someone saying that they wouldn't kick $ACTOR/$ACTRESS out of their bed.
So lighten up a bit.... You're a woman in a male-dominated world, but we don't persecute you. When I attended Computer Science, we had five girls in the whole course (100 people at the beginning). All of them were treated with respect and they could manage the occasional sexual innuendo. They knew it was for fun, so why can't you?
Keep me foed, I don't care... However, you seriously need to reevaluate your sensitivities as a female in the male-dominated-geek world.
and then
So, the system works? You bought from them, that's the whole point...
I'm sure we would all like to interface with her USB..... ;-)
Oh, I got your point.... However, the comparison to Apple is not fair in the sense that Apple is not a convicted monopolist. Just for the record, I'm not an Apple fanboy. Getting rid of IE is a godsend.
That would be great! Imagine that Microsoft supported ext3 out of the box. Dual-boot would become seamless.
Glad you're open-minded enough to understand my point.
I don't support people, family or not, if I didn't setup their computer and if they don't abide by my rules.
Not even in the US....
Enjoy
Mine is that it rarely is on the ISP side. In the 6 years (wow, 6 years already!) I have had exactly one "drop" of connectivity which was the ISPs fault. That's not bad for residential ADSL. Companies should demand better uptimes than that.
No, I did not.... However, I do know that small and medium businesses usually don't have inhouse IT people and actually don't know how to do it. Don't forget that in many SMBs, it's Secretary Sallys who knows Word that does all IT. No, I'm not kidding.
No, that's not what I said at all. Large corporations should have their data in-house and have offsite backup. However, having an ISP that fucks up days of connectivity is a no-no. At that point you search another IT crew who actually negotiates correctly with ISPs. Meaning: give them hell if the Internet drops a whole day.
Don't you think the problem is somewhere else? Like having a crap corporate ISP? Switch! It's that simple...
Apart from that, in a corporate setup, there should not be local storage at all. "My Documents" should be pointing to a network accessible share and those should have nightly backups and offsite backups. Technically they pretty much already have their "cloud", even if it is implemented in a different way.
I was indeed thinking more of home users (dial-up, are you kidding me? Nobody uses dialup anymore... not on my continent). Corporations require other solutions, one of which I described above. I'd expect only small and medium businesses to rely on services on the Internet and believe me, those do not have the infrastructure and backup facilities Corporations have. (Also, they are mostly on ADSL, which is restartable as I said... For them, it means rebooting the router, but that's not hard)
Still, doesn't change the fact a Corporation having a bad ISP should take action and not sit there like a lame duck. Actually, I'd blame the IT guys of that corporation for failing to provide adequate service to the company.... Sorry, that's just the way it is.
I would argue that your dad is not clueless. Do you know why he does this? I know: He got burned before and that's how he learned he got to make backups. Since he learned he is by definition not clueless
Give your old man some credit, okay?
Oh, and as for a final remark... People have only started doing this the last few years (only those that got burned before, mind you) Before ubiquitous cheap USB harddisks, backup simply was too expensive for the average home user. (I'm someone who backed up on Iomega Dittos... don't ask... it was not cheap, but cheap enough, but a fucking pain!)
While true that harddisks fail rarely (except from pretty much all 160Gig HDs I have owned, even from different brands), a failed harddisk will bring you down hard. An internet connection that goes down? That's as much work as reconnecting.... Many modern routers even do that for you if they sense a disconnection.
My Internet is down maximum 2 times a year, and I have a old (from 2003) ADSL Modem with a OpenBSD router behind it. Restarting the Internet is as much work as running a script which I called "restartdsl". (Kills existing connection, puts tun0 down, flushes routes and reconnects... easy peasy)
Try fixing a failing harddisk that way....
Not if he wants to live long...
Oh, come on! Giving access to your machine is no big deal... I have no problem with anyone using my computer in a guest account. Obviously they won't get Admin/root[1] rights on it and obviously they won't get access to your files. Running an (installed) app, reading their own data (from USB/CD) is not a problem in a "Limited User" account (to use the retarded Windows lingo... a "user" to me is by definition "limited") . There is no risk to your data (inaccessible folder), no risk of a trojan/worm/virus to hose your system: worst case something nasty might get installed running as that user, but I haven't seen such a thing yet.
If you really don't trust them enough, watch over their shoulder. They shouldn't object to that.
Oh, and he's in art school... Lots of horny sexy chicks... Don't want to close down your options there because you don't let them access your computer...
[1] I don't even run Admin/root myself... Not on Windows XP and not on Linux.
How many of us are there on slashdot anyway?
Haven't seen many coworkers read slashdot. Most of them stick to German or French tech newssources.
Yep.... Exactly, that kind of stuff is true. My wife is a kindergarten teacher and in the last job she had the teachers themselves were responsible to put the kids on the right buses (they had a quite efficient system, but sometimes a kid needed another bus and that's when problems started).
Anyway, some kids aren't scheduled for a bus when parents say they come to pick them up. Now what happens when a parent fails to show up? A logical person would say, ah I know where the kid is supposed to go to (grandma, home, whatever...), I'll just drive them there, it's on my way home anyway. That is not allowed, and the reason is.... insurance... yup...
That was my first reaction too, but since I'm on Debian with ext3, I tried it to be sure. The bug report is correct (IceDove 2.0.0.19). What this is most likely is (I don't know for sure), is a check added to accomodate those non-case sensitive filesystems, but it does so silently and it should at least report an error. Try doing the described behaviour manually on Windows in explorer (the file explorer) and it will give you an error (well, that's what I remember, I can't test it right now).
I'm not really sure if the developers can find out if the underlying file system[1] is or is not case sensitive, so the behaviour is understandable. However, what should be done is a clear error or at least disable the "Ok" button. (Or do the described workaround if you detect this, quite exotic case)
[1] What I can tell is that you can't rely on the operating system. The Thunderbird profile may reside on an NFS share an the software runs on Windows accessing the profile. Which could thus mean that Windows has access to a case-insensitive file system. The inverse is perfectly imaginable too.
Okay, makes sense... but do admit that you're working in a niche. Most webdevs could go with an underpowered server for their testing needs. I know that last when I did webdev (LAMP stack), it was in a VM running Debian Lenny and with 256Meg RAM the thing had plenty resources.
That's not the issue...