www.bigwords.com is my favorite. It searches a ton of different used book sites for the best prices.
Re:Don't get it
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For LAN gaming, nothing beats a Shuttle + LCD combo. While slightly less portable than a laptop, you can actually upgrade them - unlike laptops - and they're far less costly. My current shuttle setup - SN45G w/ 3200+ athlon XP, Radeon 9700 pro, and the other essentials - would cost about $1200 including my Viewsonic VP171B 17" LCD (which is perfect for gaming, btw). It's far more portable than a regular desktop, and costs half as much as any of these new gaming laptops. Plus i can throw in a new CPU or video card (or even a new motherboard with some work) and get a noticable speed increase. With these laptops you need to buy a new one to upgrade, or send it in to the company and have them upgrade it for you.
Agreed. Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio here in the states) has some of the best music in any game i've ever played. In fact, i found a couple new groups i really liked because of the music in it.
I know perfectly well what config files are. I use Linux and BSD systems, and my Powerbook with OS X, on a daily basis. I was talking about how i had no clue what editing config files had to do with your system detecting a problem and rebooting. Your example made no sense.
STaying up to date with autoupdates is easy. Just have it sync your source tree, or grab the latest binaries, and auto-update (or provide simple dialog box asking if you want to update, then do all of the above). With the way that most distros keep most of their applications organized (gentoo's system, for example) this shouldn't be too hard to do.
Blocking harmful sites should all be easily configurable, and isn't hard to implement from the programmer's die. Automatically enabling it would be distro-suicide, duh. But as part of the initial setup it should be available.
Why can't the computer boot into a safe mode to check if anything got borked, and then boot back into normal mode once everything is OK? I don't even know what you're talking about with editing config files. And auto-encrypting data would require a user-set password. Good encryption implementation should be completely transparent to the user. No trouble accessing that config file to fix whatever the hell you're talking about.
Automatic anti-virus updating and scanning, once again, is pretty brainless.
You seem to think that this hypothetical install would completely neuter the user and give them no power at all. That's totally anti-user friendly. User friendly is a nice GUI interface that lets you customize what you want. Or even (gasp) wizards that walk you through setting up to automation.
They haven't sold the original-style iMacs for at least 3 years. I'd say 3 years on a hard drive is pretty good - most HD manufacturers don't have warranties beyond 1 year. Fried network cards, i can't account for, other than the general statement that computers in schools are abused severely, and often under-maintained. And if they aren't in a well ventilated room, iMacs have overheating troubles - they're fanless.
As far as the eMacs, i don't know what to say. Might have been a bad batch.
Re:Yomega yoyos rock too, at a much better price
on
Extreme Yo-Yoing
·
· Score: 1
My favorite yo-yo was one from an R/C Car manufacturer of all places. Team Losi made it, for those that are into the hobby. It had a high-quality sealed ball-bearing taken right from their cars. The sleep time was amazing compared to any other yo-yo i owned. It's still kicking around at home somewhere.
I was hoping they'd have a most-unwireless list, just to see if my school was on there. The study lounge in each of 3 dorm buildings, the "campus cafe," and a communal lounge area are the only ones equipped with wifi. AND you have to pay extra for it.
My last two motherboards have been NForce2 powered, and i haven't had any problems at all, save for some RAM timings that were causing instability - but that was the fault of the BIOS setup from the factory.
Are you using an installer, or the registry patch? You need to do one of those so that the flash installer knows that Mozilla/firefox is installed. The same goes for Java and a few other plugins i think.
I called apple to arrange sending in my 15" Aluminum Powerbook to have the infamous white-spot problem fixed. Also my PCMCIA was DOA.
The next day i had a box to ship my Powerbook to them in. I sent it off that night - Wednesday. I had my machine back Friday morning, everything working perfectly. It's been three and a half months, no problems at all.
To keep this slightly on topic, this IPM problem is disconcerting. One of the reasons i support Apple so much, and defend their seemingly higher price, is that they go the extra mile to do a good job. No tech support in India, no cheap plastic cases that fall apart after 3 months... only good, solid products that "just work."
Unless you were there, anything you "know" about the war means jack.
Any major TV news outlet is going to blow something like that out of proportion. It creates a sensation. I wouldn't trust them for the time of day, much less accurate news about the war - especially foreign news agencies. We all know how fashionable it is to hate the dumb, fat Americans.
I take anything said about the war with a handful of salt, everyone is pushing their own political agenda these days, and there are certainly many things not being published that should be, and many things given a ton of time that are minor, isolated incidentes.
Why would people attack the hospitals filled with their own citizens? Ok, museums might have been a good idea to stop looting, but they had other priorities. I could very easily see someone going after the oil offices BECAUSE they thought we were there for the oil, they'd want to stick it to us and get us out. Nobody has accused us of conquering Baghdad's hospitals.
That won't make a difference to the warez community. I can get just about any movie i want on bittorrent/overnet/edonkey/irc the day it's released in dvd format, and the more popular ones are available well before home release as dvd-screener rips. Cracking the DRM would serve no purpose, other than letting the people who actually paid enjoy their movie to the fullest.
Of course, that's all moot if anyone can download the movies but they're only viewable if you pay for a license. It'll be interesting to see how they handle this - pay before you download is susceptable to connection interruptions, which are a much bigger problem with 600+ meg files vs. 3 meg songs.
Re:How about the article itself?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
These days, if someone remotely involved with computers can't figure out how to check their email, then they probably are stupid.
No. Not true. They're afraid of the computer, especially if it hasn't been set up properly. Many people have no clue what POP3, SMTP, SSL, etc. are, and couldn't configure them without a step by step tutorial. They're just too afraid of breaking something to try it. Why do companies need large tech support divisions? Because people can't fix things themselves. The computer is a mystery box that everyone knows will break/screw up, and they're scared that they'll cause some horrible catastrophe by messing around in the preferences. I have tried numerous times to ingrane the "if you mess it up, it can be fixed" way of thinking into my mother's head, but she still just can't bring herself to explore. True, she's less afraid of her Mac than her Windows machine at work, but she still doesn't want to break anything.
Although if you by "remotvely involved" you mean "does some sort of work in the IT industry" I'll agree with you.;)
From people i've talked to in the industry, MTU CS majors are some of the best out there, and are usually snapped up very quickly. It seems that the ones that make it out are exceptional CS people.
I'm only a first year, but some of stuff I've done so far has been an amazing learning experience. And I haven't even taken one of the first "hard" classes - Data Structures - that many friends of mine are struggling with at the moment.
I graduated from highschool last year, and really wanted a job doing computer stuff. Almost any computer work is enjoyable to me - save for data entry. I stumbled upon a company that was contracted by Dell to do workstation installations in hundreds of school districts across the US.
When i went in for the interview, i felt like I was really out of place - everyone there was a college graduate at least. During the interview i was told that i would be reconfiguring software on current machines and doing the initial setup on freshly installed hardware. The dress code was best described as a step up from casual - khakis, polo shirt, etc. Nothin too bad, and i might learn something.
However, once i got to the job, i learned that myself and my coworkers were the ones who would be unpacking all of the machines, CRT monitors, and other parts. In office attire. In 90+ degree humid heat (this is summer, the schools are not air conditioned). Each school had at least 150 machines to be installed; some had over 500. Remember how much fun it was taking your TV/VCR/Monitor out of its box was? Having to deal with the styrofoam that refuses to slide out of the box? Imagine doing that for 8 hours straight all summer long. TONS of fun. Getting down on your knees/back to plug it all in isn't too bad, but doing it for 400 machines in a row?
My favorite job sites were the ones under heavy construction. There was one in particular where the main service elevator was broken, so i had to take an overhead cart with maybe 8 machines, or 4 monitors, to the other end of the school, up a flight of stairs that wasn't being worked on, and back through the school. Every foot was under heavy construction with the floor covered in debris. And we all know how well carts with office chair wheels handle uneven surfaces. Remember, i'm in office attire with shoes that were not meant for 8+ hours of standing.
I felt most sorry for the people who graduated college years ago with kids older than me, who were working along side me and obviously weren't in the best shape of their lives - I was the only one out of anyone that i worked with who went to the gym on a regular basis.
Eventually i was put on a project where the lead was very laidback. I wore my gym clothes and things were much easier. Then i quit two days before i headed off for college.
Oh, and the configuration consisted of running Norton Ghost on every machine in the lab.
There is a video floating around on the internet showing stun guns used on people - it's a purely volunteer exercise, not some faces of death thing. The cheapies based on 30 year old tech were useless and could be overcome easily. But most of them made it pretty impossible for the "attacker" to do anything - and the modern ones completely paralyzed them, they were incapable of doing anything at all.
Compared to its competetors, the iPod mini is priced very well. There was an article linked on slashdot a while back that compared the prices of all the similar-capacity mp3 players, and the Mini was right in the middle of them.
Last summer (i'm a full time college student) I decided to start charging a modest amount - $10-$15/hour depending on the job - for my computer services. Some of the people who were used to getting their stuff fixed for free were incensed that i would actually expect money for my time, and told me they'll find someone else to do it.
Typically it only took a few days before they called me back, more than happy to pay me the money i asked for - compared to Best Buy and Comp USA my rates were nothing. And joe-12-year-old down the street did more harm than good when they asked him to fix it. I could probably charge $20/hour and get people to pay. Hmmm...
Why oh why does slashdot prevent me from moderating any and all posts in a story, instead of just ones in a thread i posted in? IOW - i would mod this up if i could. The forums at www.intellectualwhores.com (the home of Ladder Theory, laddertheory.com is just a mirror of sorts) are the ones i talk about in this post, located elsewhere in this story. And ladder theory has more than just a ring of truth - it is the truth.
First off, social skills are vital in life. You can be a genius who'd make any company billions of dollars within 2 days of hiring you, but you won't get the job in the first place if you can't carry on a normal conversation and present/sell yourself well.
And also, what's wrong with realizing you're inadequate? That's just identifying a problem that can be fixed. If anything, he knows he's inadequate right now - he's certainly knows he's being picked on. Instead of being confused, this kid will know why he's being teased. Not to mention people who can't see their own faults and assume they're perfect are the cause of quite a few problems in this world.
I was pretty socially awkward up until my Senior year in highschool. I had friends, but was really nervous outside that circle of friends.
Then i started to figure out that confidence was everything. How? I actually found some message boards based on social interaction, and one of the sections was dating. The people there essentially taught me that other people really don't criticise you like you think, and if anyone does they're a worthless piece of shit. There were more lessons, yes, but self confidence was the foundation for everything.
I just wish i had learned all that when i was in middle, or even elementary school. I would have enjoyed school even more.
Slashdot Mirror
www.bigwords.com is my favorite. It searches a ton of different used book sites for the best prices.
For LAN gaming, nothing beats a Shuttle + LCD combo. While slightly less portable than a laptop, you can actually upgrade them - unlike laptops - and they're far less costly. My current shuttle setup - SN45G w/ 3200+ athlon XP, Radeon 9700 pro, and the other essentials - would cost about $1200 including my Viewsonic VP171B 17" LCD (which is perfect for gaming, btw). It's far more portable than a regular desktop, and costs half as much as any of these new gaming laptops. Plus i can throw in a new CPU or video card (or even a new motherboard with some work) and get a noticable speed increase. With these laptops you need to buy a new one to upgrade, or send it in to the company and have them upgrade it for you.
Agreed. Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio here in the states) has some of the best music in any game i've ever played. In fact, i found a couple new groups i really liked because of the music in it.
I know perfectly well what config files are. I use Linux and BSD systems, and my Powerbook with OS X, on a daily basis. I was talking about how i had no clue what editing config files had to do with your system detecting a problem and rebooting. Your example made no sense.
You're just being ridiculous.
STaying up to date with autoupdates is easy. Just have it sync your source tree, or grab the latest binaries, and auto-update (or provide simple dialog box asking if you want to update, then do all of the above). With the way that most distros keep most of their applications organized (gentoo's system, for example) this shouldn't be too hard to do.
Blocking harmful sites should all be easily configurable, and isn't hard to implement from the programmer's die. Automatically enabling it would be distro-suicide, duh. But as part of the initial setup it should be available.
Why can't the computer boot into a safe mode to check if anything got borked, and then boot back into normal mode once everything is OK? I don't even know what you're talking about with editing config files. And auto-encrypting data would require a user-set password. Good encryption implementation should be completely transparent to the user. No trouble accessing that config file to fix whatever the hell you're talking about.
Automatic anti-virus updating and scanning, once again, is pretty brainless.
You seem to think that this hypothetical install would completely neuter the user and give them no power at all. That's totally anti-user friendly. User friendly is a nice GUI interface that lets you customize what you want. Or even (gasp) wizards that walk you through setting up to automation.
They haven't sold the original-style iMacs for at least 3 years. I'd say 3 years on a hard drive is pretty good - most HD manufacturers don't have warranties beyond 1 year. Fried network cards, i can't account for, other than the general statement that computers in schools are abused severely, and often under-maintained. And if they aren't in a well ventilated room, iMacs have overheating troubles - they're fanless.
As far as the eMacs, i don't know what to say. Might have been a bad batch.
My favorite yo-yo was one from an R/C Car manufacturer of all places. Team Losi made it, for those that are into the hobby. It had a high-quality sealed ball-bearing taken right from their cars. The sleep time was amazing compared to any other yo-yo i owned. It's still kicking around at home somewhere.
I was hoping they'd have a most-unwireless list, just to see if my school was on there. The study lounge in each of 3 dorm buildings, the "campus cafe," and a communal lounge area are the only ones equipped with wifi. AND you have to pay extra for it.
My last two motherboards have been NForce2 powered, and i haven't had any problems at all, save for some RAM timings that were causing instability - but that was the fault of the BIOS setup from the factory.
Are you using an installer, or the registry patch? You need to do one of those so that the flash installer knows that Mozilla/firefox is installed. The same goes for Java and a few other plugins i think.
I called apple to arrange sending in my 15" Aluminum Powerbook to have the infamous white-spot problem fixed. Also my PCMCIA was DOA.
The next day i had a box to ship my Powerbook to them in. I sent it off that night - Wednesday. I had my machine back Friday morning, everything working perfectly. It's been three and a half months, no problems at all.
To keep this slightly on topic, this IPM problem is disconcerting. One of the reasons i support Apple so much, and defend their seemingly higher price, is that they go the extra mile to do a good job. No tech support in India, no cheap plastic cases that fall apart after 3 months... only good, solid products that "just work."
How widespread is knowledge of the hardcoded login and password? I haven't run across it yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't floating around.
Unless you were there, anything you "know" about the war means jack.
Any major TV news outlet is going to blow something like that out of proportion. It creates a sensation. I wouldn't trust them for the time of day, much less accurate news about the war - especially foreign news agencies. We all know how fashionable it is to hate the dumb, fat Americans.
I take anything said about the war with a handful of salt, everyone is pushing their own political agenda these days, and there are certainly many things not being published that should be, and many things given a ton of time that are minor, isolated incidentes.
What?! I paid $100 for mine on thinkgeek. Man, did i get ripped :(
Why would people attack the hospitals filled with their own citizens? Ok, museums might have been a good idea to stop looting, but they had other priorities. I could very easily see someone going after the oil offices BECAUSE they thought we were there for the oil, they'd want to stick it to us and get us out. Nobody has accused us of conquering Baghdad's hospitals.
That won't make a difference to the warez community. I can get just about any movie i want on bittorrent/overnet/edonkey/irc the day it's released in dvd format, and the more popular ones are available well before home release as dvd-screener rips. Cracking the DRM would serve no purpose, other than letting the people who actually paid enjoy their movie to the fullest.
Of course, that's all moot if anyone can download the movies but they're only viewable if you pay for a license. It'll be interesting to see how they handle this - pay before you download is susceptable to connection interruptions, which are a much bigger problem with 600+ meg files vs. 3 meg songs.
These days, if someone remotely involved with computers can't figure out how to check their email, then they probably are stupid.
;)
No. Not true. They're afraid of the computer, especially if it hasn't been set up properly. Many people have no clue what POP3, SMTP, SSL, etc. are, and couldn't configure them without a step by step tutorial. They're just too afraid of breaking something to try it. Why do companies need large tech support divisions? Because people can't fix things themselves. The computer is a mystery box that everyone knows will break/screw up, and they're scared that they'll cause some horrible catastrophe by messing around in the preferences. I have tried numerous times to ingrane the "if you mess it up, it can be fixed" way of thinking into my mother's head, but she still just can't bring herself to explore. True, she's less afraid of her Mac than her Windows machine at work, but she still doesn't want to break anything.
Although if you by "remotvely involved" you mean "does some sort of work in the IT industry" I'll agree with you.
Another MTU student here. :wave: CS major, too.
From people i've talked to in the industry, MTU CS majors are some of the best out there, and are usually snapped up very quickly. It seems that the ones that make it out are exceptional CS people.
I'm only a first year, but some of stuff I've done so far has been an amazing learning experience. And I haven't even taken one of the first "hard" classes - Data Structures - that many friends of mine are struggling with at the moment.
It hasn't. :(
I graduated from highschool last year, and really wanted a job doing computer stuff. Almost any computer work is enjoyable to me - save for data entry. I stumbled upon a company that was contracted by Dell to do workstation installations in hundreds of school districts across the US.
When i went in for the interview, i felt like I was really out of place - everyone there was a college graduate at least. During the interview i was told that i would be reconfiguring software on current machines and doing the initial setup on freshly installed hardware. The dress code was best described as a step up from casual - khakis, polo shirt, etc. Nothin too bad, and i might learn something.
However, once i got to the job, i learned that myself and my coworkers were the ones who would be unpacking all of the machines, CRT monitors, and other parts. In office attire. In 90+ degree humid heat (this is summer, the schools are not air conditioned). Each school had at least 150 machines to be installed; some had over 500. Remember how much fun it was taking your TV/VCR/Monitor out of its box was? Having to deal with the styrofoam that refuses to slide out of the box? Imagine doing that for 8 hours straight all summer long. TONS of fun. Getting down on your knees/back to plug it all in isn't too bad, but doing it for 400 machines in a row?
My favorite job sites were the ones under heavy construction. There was one in particular where the main service elevator was broken, so i had to take an overhead cart with maybe 8 machines, or 4 monitors, to the other end of the school, up a flight of stairs that wasn't being worked on, and back through the school. Every foot was under heavy construction with the floor covered in debris. And we all know how well carts with office chair wheels handle uneven surfaces. Remember, i'm in office attire with shoes that were not meant for 8+ hours of standing.
I felt most sorry for the people who graduated college years ago with kids older than me, who were working along side me and obviously weren't in the best shape of their lives - I was the only one out of anyone that i worked with who went to the gym on a regular basis.
Eventually i was put on a project where the lead was very laidback. I wore my gym clothes and things were much easier. Then i quit two days before i headed off for college.
Oh, and the configuration consisted of running Norton Ghost on every machine in the lab.
There is a video floating around on the internet showing stun guns used on people - it's a purely volunteer exercise, not some faces of death thing. The cheapies based on 30 year old tech were useless and could be overcome easily. But most of them made it pretty impossible for the "attacker" to do anything - and the modern ones completely paralyzed them, they were incapable of doing anything at all.
Compared to its competetors, the iPod mini is priced very well. There was an article linked on slashdot a while back that compared the prices of all the similar-capacity mp3 players, and the Mini was right in the middle of them.
Last summer (i'm a full time college student) I decided to start charging a modest amount - $10-$15/hour depending on the job - for my computer services. Some of the people who were used to getting their stuff fixed for free were incensed that i would actually expect money for my time, and told me they'll find someone else to do it.
Typically it only took a few days before they called me back, more than happy to pay me the money i asked for - compared to Best Buy and Comp USA my rates were nothing. And joe-12-year-old down the street did more harm than good when they asked him to fix it. I could probably charge $20/hour and get people to pay. Hmmm...
Why oh why does slashdot prevent me from moderating any and all posts in a story, instead of just ones in a thread i posted in? IOW - i would mod this up if i could. The forums at www.intellectualwhores.com (the home of Ladder Theory, laddertheory.com is just a mirror of sorts) are the ones i talk about in this post, located elsewhere in this story. And ladder theory has more than just a ring of truth - it is the truth.
First off, social skills are vital in life. You can be a genius who'd make any company billions of dollars within 2 days of hiring you, but you won't get the job in the first place if you can't carry on a normal conversation and present/sell yourself well.
And also, what's wrong with realizing you're inadequate? That's just identifying a problem that can be fixed. If anything, he knows he's inadequate right now - he's certainly knows he's being picked on. Instead of being confused, this kid will know why he's being teased. Not to mention people who can't see their own faults and assume they're perfect are the cause of quite a few problems in this world.
I was pretty socially awkward up until my Senior year in highschool. I had friends, but was really nervous outside that circle of friends.
Then i started to figure out that confidence was everything. How? I actually found some message boards based on social interaction, and one of the sections was dating. The people there essentially taught me that other people really don't criticise you like you think, and if anyone does they're a worthless piece of shit. There were more lessons, yes, but self confidence was the foundation for everything.
I just wish i had learned all that when i was in middle, or even elementary school. I would have enjoyed school even more.