This isn't the main release, most people won't download SP2 for another couple of days. For now it's just geeks, a lot of them I'm sure, but I doubt it'll make Microsoft's (or rather akamai's) servers break a sweat. Now, when millions of users automatically download it via Windows Update, that's when it's more stressful. But of course they knew that before and might have taken precautions, and also most people will not download anything like the full 250 MB, more like a hundred.
I'd agree if it weren't for: "Don't speak unless you know what you're talking about. KTHXDIE." That's totally inappropriate especially considering the original poster was both knowledgeable and polite.
You'll like this review. Mentioned most of the issues I had with the game. And it's actually more like an editorial on hype than a review of the game, I guess.
What's your point? Are you saying the word product was appropriate in the context? Because none of those definitions seems to fit... Or were you just displaying the "proper" way to nitpick?
But, despite the fact that they're almost certainly libelling ZDNet here, the chances of the Slashdot editors actually doing something about it and changing the story summary are minimal.
The logs prove that he got the mail, which is all the grandparent claims. Grandparent makes no claims of the logs being able to tell whether you read it or whether you delete it manually or have your spam filter do it.
No, it also potentially tells it was received. Received as in transmitted to your email account. After that it's your responsibility to do whatever you want with it. No, nobody can determine whether you've read it or not, but that's true for anything including real letters (including registred mail), but I never claimed that, I replied to the question: "Who's to say I ever got it?"
Except that's not actually true. If you have a paper letter, you tear it up, it's gone. Of course it can be photocopied, but still, those copies can (relatively) easily be found.
Well, for one thing, I think you underestimate the paper trail a document can have in any modern burocracy.:) But you're still right, one peculiarity of electronic documents is that they are often retrievable even after they have been deleted. And as you say it's very difficult to make sure something has actually physically been deleted after the delete command has been given, or even to determine whether it was physically deleted or not.
My point was different - that giving the delete command is a lot easier than having to "manually" (in the true sense of the word) delete paper document. Your point is well taken, though.
After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record. This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that's needed to force Google to produce a copy.
I suspect that if paper records were as easy to store as electronic ones, they would have required just as much to be retained.
Interestingly enough, although electronic records are easier to store than paper ones, they are also far more easily deleted. Deleting email is easier than throwing away a paper letter. And what's more important, deleting a thousand or ten thousand emails isn't a lot more difficult than deleting just one. It's psychologically easier, as well, since paper documents have a more significant, official feel to them.
The people who are against raid 0 are the same who are against dual processor or large amounts of ram etc etc. They can't afford it and therefore it must suck. Ignore or pity such people but never take their advice.
Totally. The reviewers from AnandTech and StorageReview just advised against using RAID-0 in standard PCs because they can't afford to buy it. The mind boggles.
There is such a thing as the price-performance ratio. It's not subjective, since the the price can be looked up and the performance can be measured. Of course the way the measurements are made are up for discussion, as evidenced in this article. Other posts have made the point that the way this site measured is quite inappropriate while AT and SR have a good point.
Of course, you can chose to ignore the "bang for the buck" factor for whatever reasons - personally, I don't think it's very smart, but it's your money, you can throw it out of the window all you want.
Depends. First of all, get brand-name PSUs. It doesn't have to be a super high profile brand like Antec or Enermax, there are equally good/better, cheap PSUs by other manufacturers, but no-name PSUs are horrible. Or at least they used to be - the rule was that any brand-name PSU was more powerful than a no-name PSU of twice the rating. Looking around on the net is a pretty good idea, although most PSU reviews really suck.
That said, most people I know buy way too powerful PSUs. 350W really gets you a long way - as I'm writing this, my 350W hec PSU powers a GF4 Ti4200, an XP 1800+, three hard drives and one optical drive. I'm fairly certain there's still room for more, I think a 300W PSU would be sufficient for this system. I'm curious whether it'd break if I installed a cutting edge graphics card which at some point were claimed to require a 450W PSU.
Buying a PSU that is too powerful for your system isn't a big deal, though. PSUs run most efficient when they're being used close to their maximum rating, but I don't think the efficiency difference is that great. So you can't go wrong if you buy a 400W PSU - you'll just spend more than you have to, for one thing.
There are passively cooled heatsinks, but they aren't very well suited for standard issue PCs. Basically, in a standard PC, if your PSU cooling is passive, you have to install an additional internal case fan. Apart from that, passively cooled PSUs are quite expensive and the lifetime estimates are dubious.
There are decent silent PSUs, though, their fans typically aren't louder than ~18 to 22 db at their maximum speed. Coupled with perhabs a silent case fan and a silent CPU HSF a mid-range system doesn't have to be very loud. Graphics card cooling sucks, though. You can use 8 and 10 cm fans on mostly everything - case fans can even be 12 cm - but graphics cards and mainboard coolers often are of the 4 to 6 cm variety, which has to spin a lot faster to get equal airflow and as such is very loud. Note that although Shuttle PCs often are really loud, their way of cooling is great: the whole system is cooled by one relatively large (8 cm?) fan, including the CPU which has a heat pipe attached to it transferring the heat to the fan. This is something they should do with graphics cards in PC - and I'm sure they already do, but only in special models at a significant price premium. Oh well, I guess it'll trickle down to the sane price segment eventually.
I wonder if there'd be any point to removing the side of a case to install a fan with a diameter of ~30 cm in it's place...
Making backups each night is a waist of energy and time that could be prevented by staying with one reliable disk instead of an unreliable raid array with 2 or 4 the unreliableness goes up exponentially.
Most places that have a significant IT infrastructure make a daily backup anyway because it's a Really Good Thing to have when your work centers on what you've got on the hard drives. Even the most reliable HD can fail at some inconvenient point, and of course even if all the hard- and software works flawless there is always the significant risk of human error.
That said, most private PCs I know don't get backed up with any kind of regularity.
Companies don't do "nice" things-- companies return revenue for shareholders.
Yes, that's what I said. Thanks for rephrasing it. It still doesn't make it any nicer, or the company any more morally justified. The fact that they don't care about moral justificationis insignificant. If I don't give a shit about who I hurt because I'm only interested in making a profit, I'm pretty much an asshole. The same goes for companies.
And as for the question whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know. I agree that it ought to make them predictable, and it does, but only to a certain degree. And it doesn't translate to a very good world view. But I'm rambling.
And how much energy does it take to produce a single square foot.
Actually, the question should probably be: How much energy does it take to produce a square foot compared to a square foot of glass? But the question probably isn't even relevant, I'm sure the price will be prohibitive anyway, at least for mass adoption. In general, you're right, of course: this "ecological backpack" is an important issue the public really isn't aware of.
How do your "friends" making poor business decisions and signing a contract that made them unable to work turn into the record company being a "bastard".
It clearly is not a nice thing to do by the record company, therefore they are bastards. It might be legal and something the company "had to do" given its sole goal of profiting, it's still not nice. And that goes no matter if the people who lose are "idiots" or not.
*shrug* does anyone read my comments to end? i'm not saying it's uncommon for there to be a direct linear plot in a game, or that a game would be bad because of that. only thing i'm just saying is that half-life itself isn't the "oh so very goddamn free" experience the guy i replied to said it was("you can go back to beginning from halfway through the game omg it's so free how does anyone dare to compare it being so simplistic").
Dude I think everybody agrees with you in that regard - including, actually, the guy you replied to in the first place. He said:
In Half Life you at least have freedom to walk around as you want, look at the environment as you want, tackle problems in different ways, go back to earlier locations (you can go back to the big escalator from nearly halfway through the game!). And although the locations can only be visited in, effectively, on order, it gives a damn fine impression that you have absolute freedom.
So everybody says that Half Life only gives you limited freedom, or an impression of absolute freedom. That's still infinitely more than Dragon's Lair does (apparently - I never played it). Even though it's a lot less than other games may.
You use/etc/hosts to set up a manual IP? Manual IP as in assigning the computer's NIC a certain IP? I thought/etc/hosts was a way to manually associate names with IPs, in place of or overriding DNS. Doesn't ifconfig set up manual NIC IPs or something? I admit, it's been a while. =)
Which Windows? Windows ME? Windows 2000? Windows XP Home? Windows XP Professional?
There's significantly less of a difference between all versions of Windows than between the various Linux desktop. I mean, not internally, and not from an admin point of view, but from that of a user. Specifically, in the versions you mention there are only two flavors of GUI: the Windows 9x look, and the XP look. Note that XP can be set to look like Win 9x, and many of the folks where I work have done that. Also, your comparison is unfair, because the versions you mention span several years. Currently, there is only Windows XP Pro and Home available for the desktop, Win 2000 and ME are obsolete. Or conversely, there have been a multitude of versions of every distribution mentioned.
If it's any more complicated than that then you don't have dhcp from a LAN router and Windows would've been just as hellish.
It's not hellish at all. Setting a manual IP takes about 20 seconds and is available from the standard network connection GUI. It's extremely straightforward. Granted, non-technical users maybe would have trouble, but I suppose Windows has some sort of GUI/Wizard for them. Note that grandparent is a technical user since he posts on Slashdot, I'm sure he'd be able to set a manual IP without any issues.
I've had lots of problems with Windows networking over the years, but the TCP/IP setup has always been a breeze. We'd often resort to using FTP over LAN because Windows file sharing didn't work like we wanted it to.
Further note that creating a DHCP server in Windows isn't exactly difficult either, it's done automatically if you enable Internet sharing. Administrating that DHCP server seems to be more difficult though, I've never stumbled upon it, and can't be assed to look for it, either. Setting up a HTTPD is easy enough if you use one of the many Apache/Win32 setup apps which basically do most of the work - again, administrating it is, well, as hard as administrating Apache is. The initial setup certainly was easier for me on Windows than on Linux, but that's partly because the Linux system didn't have APT or anything installed. I never used IIS, so I can't comment on how easy it is to set up.
The tagline is "It is what IT is." and it's either bad as you say, or it's a reference to a hilarious Monty Python sketch in which case the tagline totally rules.
Hm. It isn't acknowledged in the IE About window - but the libpng license doesn't require them to do that, anyway. But I guess the half-baked PNG support in IE is a sure sign that it doesn't use libpng...
Not really... as begging the question means something else.
Now I'm in a tough spot. Is what you link to the actual meaning (that is, the way the word is typically understood and used) or is it the original meaning? If it's the former, I was wrong, if it's the latter, than you'd be a purist* for correcting me since the way I used it is widely accepted. Since you seem to be a purist as evidenced by your nitpicking wrt democracy, I could assume it's the latter - but I won't.;) Either way, thanks for the interesting link.
There are a few very good arguments for representative democracies.
All good points. However the issue at hand is not whether representative democracies are a good thing or not. The USA (and Germany, and most western democracies for that matter) are mostly representative since laws get passed by a parliament of voted representatives - the individual voter never gets a choice whether (s)he is for or against a certain law. In fact, the presidential elections as I understand it, are not an example of representative but rather the opposite, direct democracy: the voters decide directly on who gets to be the new head of state. There are those intermediaries (whatever they're called), but since they're bound to vote for a specific person, they're not really relevant. In contrast to that, here in Germany the head of state is elected by parliament, e.g. by the voted representatives, not directly. Note that I don't really have a strong opinion on which of both is better - the important thing in any election should be that every vote is ideally equal. I say ideally because it's usually not, in some way or another, and that seems to be very much the case for the USA. (Again, maybe I'm wrong - it's not like I spend hours every day examining your political system!:)
* Sometimes also referred to as a Language Nazi on Slashdot.;) Going on a tangent here, but anyway, I'm not sure whether I like language purism or not. On the one hand, I very much am a purist in some aspects of (at least my native) language, on the other hand I'm studying linguistics and have been taught that language is what people speak and prescriptive linguistics don't work very well. Those institutions having dedicated to "language preservation" certainly seem easy to mock.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't the main release, most people won't download SP2 for another couple of days. For now it's just geeks, a lot of them I'm sure, but I doubt it'll make Microsoft's (or rather akamai's) servers break a sweat. Now, when millions of users automatically download it via Windows Update, that's when it's more stressful. But of course they knew that before and might have taken precautions, and also most people will not download anything like the full 250 MB, more like a hundred.
I'd agree if it weren't for: "Don't speak unless you know what you're talking about. KTHXDIE." That's totally inappropriate especially considering the original poster was both knowledgeable and polite.
You'll like this review. Mentioned most of the issues I had with the game. And it's actually more like an editorial on hype than a review of the game, I guess.
What's your point? Are you saying the word product was appropriate in the context? Because none of those definitions seems to fit... Or were you just displaying the "proper" way to nitpick?
But, despite the fact that they're almost certainly libelling ZDNet here, the chances of the Slashdot editors actually doing something about it and changing the story summary are minimal.
;)
I guess you just provoked them into it.
The logs prove that he got the mail, which is all the grandparent claims. Grandparent makes no claims of the logs being able to tell whether you read it or whether you delete it manually or have your spam filter do it.
All that says is that it was sent.
No, it also potentially tells it was received. Received as in transmitted to your email account. After that it's your responsibility to do whatever you want with it. No, nobody can determine whether you've read it or not, but that's true for anything including real letters (including registred mail), but I never claimed that, I replied to the question: "Who's to say I ever got it?"
Except that's not actually true. If you have a paper letter, you tear it up, it's gone. Of course it can be photocopied, but still, those copies can (relatively) easily be found.
:) But you're still right, one peculiarity of electronic documents is that they are often retrievable even after they have been deleted. And as you say it's very difficult to make sure something has actually physically been deleted after the delete command has been given, or even to determine whether it was physically deleted or not.
Well, for one thing, I think you underestimate the paper trail a document can have in any modern burocracy.
My point was different - that giving the delete command is a lot easier than having to "manually" (in the true sense of the word) delete paper document. Your point is well taken, though.
After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record. This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that's needed to force Google to produce a copy.
Man, that is some crappy legislation.
I suspect that if paper records were as easy to store as electronic ones, they would have required just as much to be retained.
Interestingly enough, although electronic records are easier to store than paper ones, they are also far more easily deleted. Deleting email is easier than throwing away a paper letter. And what's more important, deleting a thousand or ten thousand emails isn't a lot more difficult than deleting just one. It's psychologically easier, as well, since paper documents have a more significant, official feel to them.
Who's to say I ever got it?
:)
The Sendmail log file?
The people who are against raid 0 are the same who are against dual processor or large amounts of ram etc etc. They can't afford it and therefore it must suck. Ignore or pity such people but never take their advice.
Totally. The reviewers from AnandTech and StorageReview just advised against using RAID-0 in standard PCs because they can't afford to buy it. The mind boggles.
There is such a thing as the price-performance ratio. It's not subjective, since the the price can be looked up and the performance can be measured. Of course the way the measurements are made are up for discussion, as evidenced in this article. Other posts have made the point that the way this site measured is quite inappropriate while AT and SR have a good point.
Of course, you can chose to ignore the "bang for the buck" factor for whatever reasons - personally, I don't think it's very smart, but it's your money, you can throw it out of the window all you want.
Depends. First of all, get brand-name PSUs. It doesn't have to be a super high profile brand like Antec or Enermax, there are equally good/better, cheap PSUs by other manufacturers, but no-name PSUs are horrible. Or at least they used to be - the rule was that any brand-name PSU was more powerful than a no-name PSU of twice the rating. Looking around on the net is a pretty good idea, although most PSU reviews really suck.
That said, most people I know buy way too powerful PSUs. 350W really gets you a long way - as I'm writing this, my 350W hec PSU powers a GF4 Ti4200, an XP 1800+, three hard drives and one optical drive. I'm fairly certain there's still room for more, I think a 300W PSU would be sufficient for this system. I'm curious whether it'd break if I installed a cutting edge graphics card which at some point were claimed to require a 450W PSU.
Buying a PSU that is too powerful for your system isn't a big deal, though. PSUs run most efficient when they're being used close to their maximum rating, but I don't think the efficiency difference is that great. So you can't go wrong if you buy a 400W PSU - you'll just spend more than you have to, for one thing.
There are passively cooled heatsinks, but they aren't very well suited for standard issue PCs. Basically, in a standard PC, if your PSU cooling is passive, you have to install an additional internal case fan. Apart from that, passively cooled PSUs are quite expensive and the lifetime estimates are dubious.
There are decent silent PSUs, though, their fans typically aren't louder than ~18 to 22 db at their maximum speed. Coupled with perhabs a silent case fan and a silent CPU HSF a mid-range system doesn't have to be very loud. Graphics card cooling sucks, though. You can use 8 and 10 cm fans on mostly everything - case fans can even be 12 cm - but graphics cards and mainboard coolers often are of the 4 to 6 cm variety, which has to spin a lot faster to get equal airflow and as such is very loud.
Note that although Shuttle PCs often are really loud, their way of cooling is great: the whole system is cooled by one relatively large (8 cm?) fan, including the CPU which has a heat pipe attached to it transferring the heat to the fan. This is something they should do with graphics cards in PC - and I'm sure they already do, but only in special models at a significant price premium. Oh well, I guess it'll trickle down to the sane price segment eventually.
I wonder if there'd be any point to removing the side of a case to install a fan with a diameter of ~30 cm in it's place...
Making backups each night is a waist of energy and time that could be prevented by staying with one reliable disk instead of an unreliable raid array with 2 or 4 the unreliableness goes up exponentially.
Most places that have a significant IT infrastructure make a daily backup anyway because it's a Really Good Thing to have when your work centers on what you've got on the hard drives. Even the most reliable HD can fail at some inconvenient point, and of course even if all the hard- and software works flawless there is always the significant risk of human error.
That said, most private PCs I know don't get backed up with any kind of regularity.
Companies don't do "nice" things-- companies return revenue for shareholders.
Yes, that's what I said. Thanks for rephrasing it. It still doesn't make it any nicer, or the company any more morally justified. The fact that they don't care about moral justificationis insignificant. If I don't give a shit about who I hurt because I'm only interested in making a profit, I'm pretty much an asshole. The same goes for companies.
And as for the question whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know. I agree that it ought to make them predictable, and it does, but only to a certain degree. And it doesn't translate to a very good world view. But I'm rambling.
And how much energy does it take to produce a single square foot.
Actually, the question should probably be: How much energy does it take to produce a square foot compared to a square foot of glass? But the question probably isn't even relevant, I'm sure the price will be prohibitive anyway, at least for mass adoption. In general, you're right, of course: this "ecological backpack" is an important issue the public really isn't aware of.
How do your "friends" making poor business decisions and signing a contract that made them unable to work turn into the record company being a "bastard".
It clearly is not a nice thing to do by the record company, therefore they are bastards. It might be legal and something the company "had to do" given its sole goal of profiting, it's still not nice. And that goes no matter if the people who lose are "idiots" or not.
Dude I think everybody agrees with you in that regard - including, actually, the guy you replied to in the first place. He said:So everybody says that Half Life only gives you limited freedom, or an impression of absolute freedom. That's still infinitely more than Dragon's Lair does (apparently - I never played it). Even though it's a lot less than other games may.
You use /etc/hosts to set up a manual IP? Manual IP as in assigning the computer's NIC a certain IP? I thought /etc/hosts was a way to manually associate names with IPs, in place of or overriding DNS. Doesn't ifconfig set up manual NIC IPs or something? I admit, it's been a while. =)
Which Windows? Windows ME? Windows 2000? Windows XP Home? Windows XP Professional?
There's significantly less of a difference between all versions of Windows than between the various Linux desktop. I mean, not internally, and not from an admin point of view, but from that of a user. Specifically, in the versions you mention there are only two flavors of GUI: the Windows 9x look, and the XP look. Note that XP can be set to look like Win 9x, and many of the folks where I work have done that.
Also, your comparison is unfair, because the versions you mention span several years. Currently, there is only Windows XP Pro and Home available for the desktop, Win 2000 and ME are obsolete. Or conversely, there have been a multitude of versions of every distribution mentioned.
If it's any more complicated than that then you don't have dhcp from a LAN router and Windows would've been just as hellish.
It's not hellish at all. Setting a manual IP takes about 20 seconds and is available from the standard network connection GUI. It's extremely straightforward. Granted, non-technical users maybe would have trouble, but I suppose Windows has some sort of GUI/Wizard for them. Note that grandparent is a technical user since he posts on Slashdot, I'm sure he'd be able to set a manual IP without any issues.
I've had lots of problems with Windows networking over the years, but the TCP/IP setup has always been a breeze. We'd often resort to using FTP over LAN because Windows file sharing didn't work like we wanted it to.
Further note that creating a DHCP server in Windows isn't exactly difficult either, it's done automatically if you enable Internet sharing. Administrating that DHCP server seems to be more difficult though, I've never stumbled upon it, and can't be assed to look for it, either. Setting up a HTTPD is easy enough if you use one of the many Apache/Win32 setup apps which basically do most of the work - again, administrating it is, well, as hard as administrating Apache is. The initial setup certainly was easier for me on Windows than on Linux, but that's partly because the Linux system didn't have APT or anything installed. I never used IIS, so I can't comment on how easy it is to set up.
The tagline is "It is what IT is." and it's either bad as you say, or it's a reference to a hilarious Monty Python sketch in which case the tagline totally rules.
Hm. It isn't acknowledged in the IE About window - but the libpng license doesn't require them to do that, anyway. But I guess the half-baked PNG support in IE is a sure sign that it doesn't use libpng...
Not really... as begging the question means something else.
;) Either way, thanks for the interesting link.
:)
;) Going on a tangent here, but anyway, I'm not sure whether I like language purism or not. On the one hand, I very much am a purist in some aspects of (at least my native) language, on the other hand I'm studying linguistics and have been taught that language is what people speak and prescriptive linguistics don't work very well. Those institutions having dedicated to "language preservation" certainly seem easy to mock.
Now I'm in a tough spot. Is what you link to the actual meaning (that is, the way the word is typically understood and used) or is it the original meaning?
If it's the former, I was wrong, if it's the latter, than you'd be a purist* for correcting me since the way I used it is widely accepted. Since you seem to be a purist as evidenced by your nitpicking wrt democracy, I could assume it's the latter - but I won't.
There are a few very good arguments for representative democracies.
All good points. However the issue at hand is not whether representative democracies are a good thing or not. The USA (and Germany, and most western democracies for that matter) are mostly representative since laws get passed by a parliament of voted representatives - the individual voter never gets a choice whether (s)he is for or against a certain law.
In fact, the presidential elections as I understand it, are not an example of representative but rather the opposite, direct democracy: the voters decide directly on who gets to be the new head of state. There are those intermediaries (whatever they're called), but since they're bound to vote for a specific person, they're not really relevant. In contrast to that, here in Germany the head of state is elected by parliament, e.g. by the voted representatives, not directly. Note that I don't really have a strong opinion on which of both is better - the important thing in any election should be that every vote is ideally equal. I say ideally because it's usually not, in some way or another, and that seems to be very much the case for the USA. (Again, maybe I'm wrong - it's not like I spend hours every day examining your political system!
* Sometimes also referred to as a Language Nazi on Slashdot.