System Restore sucks! My sister had me look at her Win ME machine, which was crashing and rebooting randomly. An antivirus scan revealed a virus in the System Restore directory. Files in this directory cannot be deleted normally; you have to disable System Restore and reboot, then re-enable it to automatically delete the saved Restore files-- not something a normal computer user would figure out. Heck, it took me a good twenty minutes to diagnose and fix. One would think that Windows would restrict what apps can write to the special, undeleteable restore directory, though I guess that would be expecting a bit much. I guess that's why they call them Viruses, rather than Happy Fun Programs That Give You Sexual Pleasure and Sugary Easter Candy. (I like candy.)
This week I took a look at my sister's chronicly gimpy machine. It had Gateway's "GoBack" software on it, which lets the OS return to a bootable state if it gets completely hosed (the "system restore" option on newer versions of Windows are similar, but GoBack loads right after the BIOS POST, before the machine tries to boot the OS).
The problem is that GoBack interprets easily recoverable errors as catastrophic. The machine didn't shutdown properly? GoBack to previously saved state. BSOD lockup? GoBack to previously saved state. The end result was that files were written to the hard disk but the system didn't keep track of them. The files were still there, and I could access them from a DOS prompt, but Windows Explorer had no clue where they were. The same thing happened with recently-installed programs, which utterly cocked things up. Windows only "knew" about them subconsciously, or something.
Of course, this (and the installers you mentioned) are cheap consumer grade products, and the server grade ones these people are researching would be much better. Because GoBack exists mainly as a "why buy Gateway over Dell" marketing tool, while real ROC would exist on mission critical servers. I just felt like ranting about Gateway GoBack for a while. (Finally I just uninstalled it rather than troubleshoot the thing. I still have some "hidden" directories, though. If I ever need a place to hide my porno stash, now I have an option. Shrug.)
the other white meat
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 4, Funny
D'Oh! I clicked "Read More..." before I realized that the article was not about sweet, sweet pork. A Hamvention like that I could really get into. Stupid radios.
A few months ago I got a Radeon 9100 for $70, and I'm happy with it. In a year or 18 months when DX9 features get used more, I'll grab a 9700 Pro (or GeForce 5600 or whatever) for a hundred bucks. That makes more sense to me than spending $300 - $400 for a card that might run the games I want in 2004. I learned my lesson five years back, when I got a just released 12 meg Voodoo2 for three hundred bucks. Eighteen months later I traded it to my roommate for the $50 I owed in utility bills*.
*$50 was the Pricewatch price, so we agreed upon that.
if you are going to be buying Maya in the first place, you might as well get the high-end Quadro, since it only costs a few hundred dollars as opposed to Maya at $2000 or $7000.
I am setting up a l33t Maya workstation on my parent's Compaq Presario, but performance sux0rs. Where can I download teh warez version of this "Quadro"?
Back when I was in college, a guy I knew visited his girl at her school for the weekend. While there, he FTP'ed into his dormroom machine to get a paper he was working on. Her graphical FTP client had a "remember password" checkbox he didn't see... When he got home and checked his logs, he realized that she had logged back in after he left and found his secret porno stash. I still remember him running through the hall, his eyes bugging out. "Oh shit, guys! She's gonna break up with me for sure: she downloaded dripping.mpeg!"
It isn't just/., etc. I read a number of political blogs every day, and I found out about all of them through other sites I frequently visit. This isn't so much a complex social phenomenon of "20% have 80% of the wealth/traffic," but a more simple word-of-mouth phenomenon. In my case, I read National Review Online's a lot, and, after 9/11, they linked to Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan quite a bit. Since NRO is a large site, I expect many other people were exposed to the excellent content of those sites as well. From the two blogs, I found links to blogs those authors find interesting, like James Lileks.
I used to run a frequently updated humor website, and most of my traffic were people I knew from the Badassmofo.com forums and people they knew (this was a few years back, before "blogs" as such). This whole deal is really a word-of-mouth phenomenon based on people who trust the opinion of friends, a popular website, etc.
On the bright side, Microsoft Word 2004 will replace Clippy The Office Assistant with Griswold the Blacksmith.
Whoa! What cann'ah do for yah? -Get started Using Microsoft Word -Create a document -Insert a document as an embedded object -Run a macro -Destroy the soul-sucking evil that has invaded Tristram, then drive a jagged rock into your forehead
This is all part of a brilliant war strategy against Iraq. Remember a few years ago when Saddam Hussein was buying Sony Playstation 2s to reassemble into military computing devices? This is pretty much the same deal, only his top lieutenants will pass out from lack of oxygen when they have to blow on the Nintendos to get them to work. With them incapacitated, the U.S./Japan coalition easily prevails. For Great Justice!
Most of the popular blogs deal with politics and current events, and are created by lawyers or professional writers, not techies. The Silicon Valley connection seems to relate more to blogs that descend from the E/N webpages that were popular a few years back.
E/N stood for Everything and Nothing, a "timewaster" page about silly news articles, bizarre Flash movies from Japan, and other amusing stuff the author finds on the web, plus commentary and rants that put them in context. badassmofo.com is a good example, as he's a tech worker who has time to kill scrounging the 'Net. His page used to be considered E/N a few years back, but now would be thought of as a blog.
Higher price does not always equal higher quality. Sometimes all you're paying for is a name.
This reminds me of a story a teacher of mine told us in a Media course. Chivas Regal (IIRC) was a mediocre, bar-grade scotch and initially sold poorly in the U.S. The marketing geniuses, however, decided to put it in a nicer bottle and triple the price, and suddenly people-- assuming the price indicated that it was a "premium" whisky-- started buying it like hotcakes.
The thing is, the consumer does make a fairly safe bet -- at a certain price level, the difference usually IS features.
The economics term for this is willful ignorance. Joe Consumer makes the decision that fully educating himself about the range of features will cost a certain amount of time and effort. He then makes the (rational) decision that saving this time is worth paying a bit more in money/minor annoyance with an inferior product.
I got started several years ago with a SAMS' Teach Yourself Linux book and included RedHat CD, and then changed to Slackware later on once I determined Linux was something I liked. One advantage of the How-To books is the CD that some include; it is easier to spend $15 for the newbie distro de jour than to download an ISO on a 56k connection. Also, there's something psychologically calming about flipping through a physical book rather than hunting through an unknown file system structure for the info you need.
I agree with your main point, though. I learned most of what I know about Linux on slack; Red Hat 5.0 seemed like my blindly clicking a bunch of dialogue boxes that masked the internal operations of the machine. However, I didn't switch until I felt confident in my ability to navigate man pages and the web to find what I needed.
By the way, after Bond kills the Lone Gunmen, the audience discovers that Halle Berry is a man. Moreover, Kaiser Soze is both her sister AND her daughter. Rosebud, a sled, is also prominently involved.
Last winter I used Amtrak and Greyhound to tool around the West Coast visiting friends and relatives. I was told that Amtrak's passenger service is expensive and inefficient because its mostly an afterthought; they make most of their money out West by shipping light cargo (and mail, I think) between the big cities. IIRC, the only profitable passenger travel area they have is from D.C. to Boston (with presumably better service than the Sticks, North Dakotah to Bumwad, Iowa route), and get heavy government subsidies because East Coast politicians and their constituents use it to commute, Gregory Peck style.
OMG! Do to a lack of sleep/coffee, I read the end of the third paragraph as "Let Boba Fett get up there in a black turtleneck and coat himself in butter." Random, disturbing images abound. Sci-fi geek porno, alt.sex.fetish.boba-fett. And the random artsy black turtleneck sweater!!! As if Boba sits on Slave One all day sipping cappuccino and reading The Collected Works of Franz Kafka while smoking little clove cigarettes and musing on how supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the workers, not by being the best at shooting Force Lightning from your fingertips.
Have you ever seen the (original) BBC version, Changing Rooms? Maybe it's a cultural thing, but the people on that show are very outspoken about how pissed off they are. "It's utter crap; I'm going to repaint it tomorrow" -type of conversations.
Oh, and does anyone remember the slightly surreal episode of Trading Spaces with Chris Wylde, a quasi-celebrity who had a short-lived run on a Comedy Central talk show? He and his buddy were completely bonkers, mocking the designers, hitting on the host when their wives weren't around, and swearing like sailors (beeped out, of course). My favorite part of the episode was when they saw the completed rooms, they slapped each other five and one said, "dude, you guys are the fucking shit!"
Imagine trying to follow a lecture on, say, particle physics given by a soft-spoken (or monotonous) professor. Now imagine trying to concentrate on the lecturer over the clickety-clack of hundreds of keyboards taking notes. When I was in school, some teachers banned laptop use in their classes because of this.
How 'bout an aluminum LEGO desk that acts as one big-ass heatsink, and ducts directly into the office's air conditioner. He could overclock to 5 gHz or something, add some plexiglass windows and a bunch of LEDs and be the l33test casemodder ever!
I think he's talking about non-free Linux programs, like VMWare or WineX. Either that, or he's using the term "pirate" loosely, and is discussing the hardcore Linux people who urge you to buy two hundred dollar boxed copies of RedHat or pre-installed Linux laptops as a message to developers that Linux is popular/profitable enough.
How can we trust anything we see in advertising anymore?
That's why I only buy products endorsed by people who e-mail me "special deals". If it weren't for these fine gentlemen, I never would have found out about Cock-Enlarging Herbal Viagra (guaranteed to make her scream), nor would have believed that Nubile Webcam Wenches would be Sucking and Fondling just for me. I'm not sure what spirit of benevolence caused you to mail me this amazing offer, but thank you, Friend. I mean, if you can't trust getabiggerdick@hotmail.com, who can you trust?
Slashdot Mirror
System Restore sucks! My sister had me look at her Win ME machine, which was crashing and rebooting randomly. An antivirus scan revealed a virus in the System Restore directory. Files in this directory cannot be deleted normally; you have to disable System Restore and reboot, then re-enable it to automatically delete the saved Restore files-- not something a normal computer user would figure out. Heck, it took me a good twenty minutes to diagnose and fix. One would think that Windows would restrict what apps can write to the special, undeleteable restore directory, though I guess that would be expecting a bit much. I guess that's why they call them Viruses, rather than Happy Fun Programs That Give You Sexual Pleasure and Sugary Easter Candy. (I like candy.)
The problem is that GoBack interprets easily recoverable errors as catastrophic. The machine didn't shutdown properly? GoBack to previously saved state. BSOD lockup? GoBack to previously saved state. The end result was that files were written to the hard disk but the system didn't keep track of them. The files were still there, and I could access them from a DOS prompt, but Windows Explorer had no clue where they were. The same thing happened with recently-installed programs, which utterly cocked things up. Windows only "knew" about them subconsciously, or something.
Of course, this (and the installers you mentioned) are cheap consumer grade products, and the server grade ones these people are researching would be much better. Because GoBack exists mainly as a "why buy Gateway over Dell" marketing tool, while real ROC would exist on mission critical servers. I just felt like ranting about Gateway GoBack for a while. (Finally I just uninstalled it rather than troubleshoot the thing. I still have some "hidden" directories, though. If I ever need a place to hide my porno stash, now I have an option. Shrug.)
Perhaps you should use this operating system.
D'Oh! I clicked "Read More..." before I realized that the article was not about sweet, sweet pork. A Hamvention like that I could really get into. Stupid radios.
But a Real Woman doesn't have Linux drivers...
*$50 was the Pricewatch price, so we agreed upon that.
I am setting up a l33t Maya workstation on my parent's Compaq Presario, but performance sux0rs. Where can I download teh warez version of this "Quadro"?
Back when I was in college, a guy I knew visited his girl at her school for the weekend. While there, he FTP'ed into his dormroom machine to get a paper he was working on. Her graphical FTP client had a "remember password" checkbox he didn't see... When he got home and checked his logs, he realized that she had logged back in after he left and found his secret porno stash. I still remember him running through the hall, his eyes bugging out. "Oh shit, guys! She's gonna break up with me for sure: she downloaded dripping.mpeg!"
I used to run a frequently updated humor website, and most of my traffic were people I knew from the Badassmofo.com forums and people they knew (this was a few years back, before "blogs" as such). This whole deal is really a word-of-mouth phenomenon based on people who trust the opinion of friends, a popular website, etc.
Whoa! What cann'ah do for yah?
-Get started Using Microsoft Word
-Create a document
-Insert a document as an embedded object
-Run a macro
-Destroy the soul-sucking evil that has invaded Tristram, then drive a jagged rock into your forehead
=)
This is all part of a brilliant war strategy against Iraq. Remember a few years ago when Saddam Hussein was buying Sony Playstation 2s to reassemble into military computing devices? This is pretty much the same deal, only his top lieutenants will pass out from lack of oxygen when they have to blow on the Nintendos to get them to work. With them incapacitated, the U.S./Japan coalition easily prevails. For Great Justice!
E/N stood for Everything and Nothing, a "timewaster" page about silly news articles, bizarre Flash movies from Japan, and other amusing stuff the author finds on the web, plus commentary and rants that put them in context. badassmofo.com is a good example, as he's a tech worker who has time to kill scrounging the 'Net. His page used to be considered E/N a few years back, but now would be thought of as a blog.
This reminds me of a story a teacher of mine told us in a Media course. Chivas Regal (IIRC) was a mediocre, bar-grade scotch and initially sold poorly in the U.S. The marketing geniuses, however, decided to put it in a nicer bottle and triple the price, and suddenly people-- assuming the price indicated that it was a "premium" whisky-- started buying it like hotcakes.
The economics term for this is willful ignorance. Joe Consumer makes the decision that fully educating himself about the range of features will cost a certain amount of time and effort. He then makes the (rational) decision that saving this time is worth paying a bit more in money/minor annoyance with an inferior product.
I agree with your main point, though. I learned most of what I know about Linux on slack; Red Hat 5.0 seemed like my blindly clicking a bunch of dialogue boxes that masked the internal operations of the machine. However, I didn't switch until I felt confident in my ability to navigate man pages and the web to find what I needed.
By the way, after Bond kills the Lone Gunmen, the audience discovers that Halle Berry is a man. Moreover, Kaiser Soze is both her sister AND her daughter. Rosebud, a sled, is also prominently involved.
Last winter I used Amtrak and Greyhound to tool around the West Coast visiting friends and relatives. I was told that Amtrak's passenger service is expensive and inefficient because its mostly an afterthought; they make most of their money out West by shipping light cargo (and mail, I think) between the big cities. IIRC, the only profitable passenger travel area they have is from D.C. to Boston (with presumably better service than the Sticks, North Dakotah to Bumwad, Iowa route), and get heavy government subsidies because East Coast politicians and their constituents use it to commute, Gregory Peck style.
OMG! Do to a lack of sleep/coffee, I read the end of the third paragraph as "Let Boba Fett get up there in a black turtleneck and coat himself in butter." Random, disturbing images abound. Sci-fi geek porno, alt.sex.fetish.boba-fett. And the random artsy black turtleneck sweater!!! As if Boba sits on Slave One all day sipping cappuccino and reading The Collected Works of Franz Kafka while smoking little clove cigarettes and musing on how supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the workers, not by being the best at shooting Force Lightning from your fingertips.
Oh, and does anyone remember the slightly surreal episode of Trading Spaces with Chris Wylde, a quasi-celebrity who had a short-lived run on a Comedy Central talk show? He and his buddy were completely bonkers, mocking the designers, hitting on the host when their wives weren't around, and swearing like sailors (beeped out, of course). My favorite part of the episode was when they saw the completed rooms, they slapped each other five and one said, "dude, you guys are the fucking shit!"
And besides, I can't type for shit.
On reboot, try: /dev/etch0
fsck -y
Dude, you're gettin' a blue screen!
How 'bout an aluminum LEGO desk that acts as one big-ass heatsink, and ducts directly into the office's air conditioner. He could overclock to 5 gHz or something, add some plexiglass windows and a bunch of LEDs and be the l33test casemodder ever!
I think he's talking about non-free Linux programs, like VMWare or WineX. Either that, or he's using the term "pirate" loosely, and is discussing the hardcore Linux people who urge you to buy two hundred dollar boxed copies of RedHat or pre-installed Linux laptops as a message to developers that Linux is popular/profitable enough.
That's why I only buy products endorsed by people who e-mail me "special deals". If it weren't for these fine gentlemen, I never would have found out about Cock-Enlarging Herbal Viagra (guaranteed to make her scream), nor would have believed that Nubile Webcam Wenches would be Sucking and Fondling just for me. I'm not sure what spirit of benevolence caused you to mail me this amazing offer, but thank you, Friend. I mean, if you can't trust getabiggerdick@hotmail.com, who can you trust?