Just to be clear, last time I checked (six months ago) IBM still made their own notebooks. I think they are still smarting from the deathstar line which was made by either fushitsu or hitachi.
Same thing with NHL2005 for me. I have purchased the NHL series for every year except for 2001. I am a "loyal" customer. However I use cloneCD and Deamontools so I dont have to swap and scratch CD's. NHL2005 wil NOT install due to cloneCD. EA's fix was to uninstall cloneCD. I just downloaded a crack and used my legit key code. The point here is it was easer to pirate the game than to buy it. Guess what I am very tempted to do next year? The path of least resitance.. piracy.
Waiting list, Ha. I have been waiting to see a doctor since I was 18. 10 years with either no insurance or it being phohibitvly expensive (500+ month). I am finaly getting insurnace through my employer in 2 months. I figure I will go through $10000 in the first year. My wife can't carry a pregnancy past 2 months. (0 for 4) She is also oddly fat. We eat two of three meals a day with one snack. We go for walks/bike rides/swimming and dont pig out on food. I weigh 180 and she is over 250. My son could really use braces. I have a bunch of kidney/bladder problems that I dont think we need to go into...
The other thing we do is have 50 wyse terminals running XP embedded. Almost all users start on these as a type of training wheel and can get moved back down to them. If the user screws something up. just have them reboot. All setting are stored in ram. They also learn to save thing on the network pretty quickly too.:)
Get one to five standard images. All PC's get re-imaged when you get around to it. Every 3 to 6 months. It also makes a reinstall much quicker I can do 20 systems in less than an hour. 10 min for the image and 5 minutes per system for post install setup.
No Admin rights! assuming they are running either 2000 or XP give them as little rights as you can. They dont need them. If they absoutly need rights give them local rights Only.
Proxy/Firewall. Even if you block the most obnoxous sites you have saved your self from 1/2 of the work. I use a custom hosts file that has about 1000 entries.
Some of the more simple and cheap things are; firefox, Spybot with TeaTimer, Google toolbar on IE. Remember you cant stop users but the trick is to slow them down.
The best thing I have found is to create a cluture that does not tolerate spyware. It take 2 years but is worth it. Training is a godsend. Even if everyother person knows how not to act they will help out the others.
Inter-office VoIP is great. I can transfer a call from one brance to another. Remote sites call call the help desk by dialing the extention instead of calling an expensive 800 number. Howabout automatic extention forwarding to me when I am working out of office for a week. Even international calls feel like they are right next door.
ASP.net,outlook web access, CRM, sharepoint, and pretty much all other MS web apps will not work on anything other than IE. Firefox activeX plug-in still does not get around this. Forcing Corp. users to stay on IE is a great way to keep people stuck on IE.
Wind in the southwestern deserts and midwest plains away from most everything else. Solar would work in the south in general. Hydro in the north. If you take NYC (niagria falls), SoCal (solar and wind), Boston (from QuebecHydro)Texas (solar and wind), Flordia (solar) you are 25% of the way there. That is a big cut. Should drop existing energy prices and reduce greenhouse emissions as well. Add in some good insulation and, while you dont have the problem licked it is a big step in the right direction.
The B&O tax is the reason I stopped doing 1099 work in washington. I am pretty left of the (US) spectrum and this is the one tax I hate. It basicly taxes everything even if it is a passthrough cost to a customer. I had to add a markup to everything just to pay my B&O. Even if you lose money on a deal you have to pay tax. Asinine..
I have had a fair amout of users just like that. They have a legit CoA (serial) on the case however they lost the media. The serial does not work with either retail or OEM windows is is dell/compaq COA. Just reinstall and user a known serial or XP corp. The COA covers the user. I will however come up as pirated.
Not to say that russia is not worse as it is but.. How come no one mentioned that the protest in NYC had 250,000 protesters but called it tens of thousands. How come mainstream media did not report that protesters were held for 60+ hours either without charges or with ticketable offenses. Or that NYC/NYPD ignored about 10 court rulings. Pens, medic arrests, habeus corpus, comditions of holding cells, etc...
I do belive there is a right wing slant to the media. Not because they want to be right wing but the media does not want to ruffle any feathers. Hard hitting stories (left or right) will always be outsold by paris hilton losing her stupid dog. more sales == more ads. Really do you want to hear about bad/sad news?
I went the used route with my system. As I work in a PC shop many parts were free/cheap.
Case - MATX athenatech A100 $50 retail Mobo - Asrock socket A K7S41 ?? cheap 42ish Ram - 256 PC 2100 very cheap these days as everyone wants 2700 or 3200. CPU - Moble XP 1400 FREE (found it in the shop) with a Volcano 11 set to minimum noise (38-41 C) HD - 160 Seagate 8meg cache drive (the 8 vs. 2 meg helps a lot) Media - DVD drive I dont burn so who cares. Sound - SB live value. FREE Customer wanted an Audigy, so I kept the old sound card. Video - Geforce 3 500. FREE Oh, baby so sweet. Some guy went from this to a radeon 9700. You better belive I kept the Geforce. MPEG - 2 Haughpup 250's. 150-175 for the pair. With these I can run two streams and still be under 50% load.
Now this box took me a bit over a year to get the needed parts for but my point is you do not need a screaming system to do PVR. this one box does; p2p, mp3 storage, pvr, mame, and shell services. Remember boys and girls, slightly used is our friend.
when Scorpius joined the crew. I could go along with Crais, a bit of a stretch but who knows. Since then the show has gotten bigger. Bigger effects, bigger story arc, more extreme characters, every thing but better writing. Sorry guys you lost me somewhere around mid season 3..
I do the same thing and it is great. I do also have a nice water-resistant 512Mb Flash that I have around a chain. It holds PGP keys and other quick use items. 20 USB 2.0 laptop HD holds all my common storage. Only other thing I have is 200 gig at the office that has everything. VPN in grab the file I need and I am all set.
No offense to the soviets but I would not think of them as the shining beacon of how to run a nation. They were cash and tech strapped. Perhaps a better example would be Europe. They are more our equal.
I agree that strong regulation is essential. It's just that every business is complaining that regulation is hurting their bottom line. Two quick examples for regulation and one against that spring to mind. Airlines, energy, and telco.
Airline: 50/50 Over the last twenty years or so airlines have become increasingly deregulated. On one hand prices have dropped, which is good. OTOH, service has been cut to many places, saftey has slipped, and flights are increasingly late. Also how many times has one airline or another asked for Govt interference when they need a bailout.
Energy; Pretty much all bad. Since deregulation prices have gone up, a lot. Service has gone down, and everyone is getting ripped off. Enviromental rules have been loosend, resulting in increased polutants.
Telco: Mostly for the good. Sure we get slammed some times and customer service of CLEC's is down right crappy, however the growth in the last twenty years I dont belive would have happened if there was just Ma Bell.
One last thought as I ramble. Canada has many of the same geographic problems the US does. Why is their broadband/phone/power so much cheaper? Regulation. People in the sticks in alberta can get broadband, yet here (US) you always hear about some town that had to create their own broadband solution. Good for the town and I congratulate their spirit but it should not have to be that way.
I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and running a plant, it should be OK.
Nuclear power will never work in the US for that very reason. Power is a private enterprise. Don't ask me why that is just the way this country thinks. Private industry will never put safty as number one priority. It's number one priority is profit. Companies will skimp on safety to maximize profit. Yes I know that we do have nuclear reactors in this country now. They are extremly regulated. They are being deregulated every day. When they are de-regulated enough for the companies, a disaster will soon follow. (5-10 years)
First off, I think it was only one hour. More importantly, I remember a confrence I was at and someone said I can break this key for 5 million in computing power. Most people did not appear to care however some of us went "Oh Shit". 5 mil is trivial amount of money to even a small nation (iraq, iran, syria, brazil, etc..) 500 mil is still nothing to a major power (US, NATO, China) scary times.
Not really, but I would not be at all suprised if someone did. I spent a year on a small community island. Nobody locked their doors day or night. It was very frequent to just walk in to a neighbors house. No knocking.
Some times I think we forget the way the internet was orignaly planned to work. Just like a small town. Most services we set to be somewhat open. Just because ten thousand jack-offs are screwing it up does not mean that whe should automaticly assume malice. Some people just want to poke around like we did when we were kids.
Why an Audigy? Other than $100 what is the diffrence between an Audigy and a Live 4.1? I never have and never will buy top end hardware. Better to get white-box that is two years old. Driver are already out (and stable!) and you can pick up that old $150 card for 30. Plus if it does die you can grab another for a song.
XP 2500 ($80), FX5700 or Radeon 9800 ($200), SB Live 4.1 ($30), 1 gig DDR ($200), 160 gig Seagate SATA ($120), ASUS MATX MoBo ($100), CD-RW/DVD Combo drive ($75) and a nice case ($75).
This comes in at just under $700. It's a very nice system that can play any game out there. Really who needs more than that for your current gaming needs? Sure you can shell out another grand for the bleeding edge but I would rather spend another 700 in two years and kick my old box down to the wife.
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Just to be clear, last time I checked (six months ago) IBM still made their own notebooks. I think they are still smarting from the deathstar line which was made by either fushitsu or hitachi.
Same thing with NHL2005 for me. I have purchased the NHL series for every year except for 2001. I am a "loyal" customer. However I use cloneCD and Deamontools so I dont have to swap and scratch CD's. NHL2005 wil NOT install due to cloneCD. EA's fix was to uninstall cloneCD. I just downloaded a crack and used my legit key code. The point here is it was easer to pirate the game than to buy it. Guess what I am very tempted to do next year? The path of least resitance.. piracy.
fark you ea and safedisk
Waiting list, Ha. I have been waiting to see a doctor since I was 18. 10 years with either no insurance or it being phohibitvly expensive (500+ month). I am finaly getting insurnace through my employer in 2 months. I figure I will go through $10000 in the first year. My wife can't carry a pregnancy past 2 months. (0 for 4) She is also oddly fat. We eat two of three meals a day with one snack. We go for walks/bike rides/swimming and dont pig out on food. I weigh 180 and she is over 250. My son could really use braces. I have a bunch of kidney/bladder problems that I dont think we need to go into...
The other thing we do is have 50 wyse terminals running XP embedded. Almost all users start on these as a type of training wheel and can get moved back down to them. If the user screws something up. just have them reboot. All setting are stored in ram. They also learn to save thing on the network pretty quickly too. :)
Get one to five standard images. All PC's get re-imaged when you get around to it. Every 3 to 6 months. It also makes a reinstall much quicker I can do 20 systems in less than an hour. 10 min for the image and 5 minutes per system for post install setup.
No Admin rights! assuming they are running either 2000 or XP give them as little rights as you can. They dont need them. If they absoutly need rights give them local rights Only.
Proxy/Firewall. Even if you block the most obnoxous sites you have saved your self from 1/2 of the work. I use a custom hosts file that has about 1000 entries.
Some of the more simple and cheap things are; firefox, Spybot with TeaTimer, Google toolbar on IE. Remember you cant stop users but the trick is to slow them down.
The best thing I have found is to create a cluture that does not tolerate spyware. It take 2 years but is worth it. Training is a godsend. Even if everyother person knows how not to act they will help out the others.
Inter-office VoIP is great. I can transfer a call from one brance to another. Remote sites call call the help desk by dialing the extention instead of calling an expensive 800 number. Howabout automatic extention forwarding to me when I am working out of office for a week. Even international calls feel like they are right next door.
ASP.net,outlook web access, CRM, sharepoint, and pretty much all other MS web apps will not work on anything other than IE. Firefox activeX plug-in still does not get around this. Forcing Corp. users to stay on IE is a great way to keep people stuck on IE.
Wind in the southwestern deserts and midwest plains away from most everything else. Solar would work in the south in general. Hydro in the north. If you take NYC (niagria falls), SoCal (solar and wind), Boston (from QuebecHydro)Texas (solar and wind), Flordia (solar) you are 25% of the way there. That is a big cut. Should drop existing energy prices and reduce greenhouse emissions as well. Add in some good insulation and, while you dont have the problem licked it is a big step in the right direction.
The B&O tax is the reason I stopped doing 1099 work in washington. I am pretty left of the (US) spectrum and this is the one tax I hate. It basicly taxes everything even if it is a passthrough cost to a customer. I had to add a markup to everything just to pay my B&O. Even if you lose money on a deal you have to pay tax. Asinine..
I have had a fair amout of users just like that. They have a legit CoA (serial) on the case however they lost the media. The serial does not work with either retail or OEM windows is is dell/compaq COA. Just reinstall and user a known serial or XP corp. The COA covers the user. I will however come up as pirated.
Not to say that russia is not worse as it is but.. How come no one mentioned that the protest in NYC had 250,000 protesters but called it tens of thousands. How come mainstream media did not report that protesters were held for 60+ hours either without charges or with ticketable offenses. Or that NYC/NYPD ignored about 10 court rulings. Pens, medic arrests, habeus corpus, comditions of holding cells, etc...
I do belive there is a right wing slant to the media. Not because they want to be right wing but the media does not want to ruffle any feathers. Hard hitting stories (left or right) will always be outsold by paris hilton losing her stupid dog. more sales == more ads. Really do you want to hear about bad/sad news?
I went the used route with my system. As I work in a PC shop many parts were free/cheap.
Case - MATX athenatech A100 $50 retail
Mobo - Asrock socket A K7S41 ?? cheap 42ish
Ram - 256 PC 2100 very cheap these days as everyone wants 2700 or 3200.
CPU - Moble XP 1400 FREE (found it in the shop) with a Volcano 11 set to minimum noise (38-41 C)
HD - 160 Seagate 8meg cache drive (the 8 vs. 2 meg helps a lot)
Media - DVD drive I dont burn so who cares.
Sound - SB live value. FREE Customer wanted an Audigy, so I kept the old sound card.
Video - Geforce 3 500. FREE Oh, baby so sweet. Some guy went from this to a radeon 9700. You better belive I kept the Geforce.
MPEG - 2 Haughpup 250's. 150-175 for the pair. With these I can run two streams and still be under 50% load.
Now this box took me a bit over a year to get the needed parts for but my point is you do not need a screaming system to do PVR. this one box does; p2p, mp3 storage, pvr, mame, and shell services. Remember boys and girls, slightly used is our friend.
Yes he was a prisoner then they helped each other then they disliked each other. It was like a soap opera..
when Scorpius joined the crew. I could go along with Crais, a bit of a stretch but who knows. Since then the show has gotten bigger. Bigger effects, bigger story arc, more extreme characters, every thing but better writing. Sorry guys you lost me somewhere around mid season 3..
I do the same thing and it is great. I do also have a nice water-resistant 512Mb Flash that I have around a chain. It holds PGP keys and other quick use items. 20 USB 2.0 laptop HD holds all my common storage. Only other thing I have is 200 gig at the office that has everything. VPN in grab the file I need and I am all set.
No offense to the soviets but I would not think of them as the shining beacon of how to run a nation. They were cash and tech strapped. Perhaps a better example would be Europe. They are more our equal.
I agree that strong regulation is essential. It's just that every business is complaining that regulation is hurting their bottom line. Two quick examples for regulation and one against that spring to mind. Airlines, energy, and telco.
Airline: 50/50 Over the last twenty years or so airlines have become increasingly deregulated. On one hand prices have dropped, which is good. OTOH, service has been cut to many places, saftey has slipped, and flights are increasingly late. Also how many times has one airline or another asked for Govt interference when they need a bailout.
Energy; Pretty much all bad. Since deregulation prices have gone up, a lot. Service has gone down, and everyone is getting ripped off. Enviromental rules have been loosend, resulting in increased polutants.
Telco: Mostly for the good. Sure we get slammed some times and customer service of CLEC's is down right crappy, however the growth in the last twenty years I dont belive would have happened if there was just Ma Bell.
One last thought as I ramble. Canada has many of the same geographic problems the US does. Why is their broadband/phone/power so much cheaper? Regulation. People in the sticks in alberta can get broadband, yet here (US) you always hear about some town that had to create their own broadband solution. Good for the town and I congratulate their spirit but it should not have to be that way.
Quote: What do you think about nuclear power?
I'm fine about it, as long as safety is put head and shoulders above any other concern, financial or whatever. If you keep safety as your number one priority at all stages of planning and running a plant, it should be OK.
Nuclear power will never work in the US for that very reason. Power is a private enterprise. Don't ask me why that is just the way this country thinks. Private industry will never put safty as number one priority. It's number one priority is profit. Companies will skimp on safety to maximize profit. Yes I know that we do have nuclear reactors in this country now. They are extremly regulated. They are being deregulated every day. When they are de-regulated enough for the companies, a disaster will soon follow. (5-10 years)
First off, I think it was only one hour. More importantly, I remember a confrence I was at and someone said I can break this key for 5 million in computing power. Most people did not appear to care however some of us went "Oh Shit". 5 mil is trivial amount of money to even a small nation (iraq, iran, syria, brazil, etc..) 500 mil is still nothing to a major power (US, NATO, China) scary times.
Not really, but I would not be at all suprised if someone did. I spent a year on a small community island. Nobody locked their doors day or night. It was very frequent to just walk in to a neighbors house. No knocking.
Some times I think we forget the way the internet was orignaly planned to work. Just like a small town. Most services we set to be somewhat open. Just because ten thousand jack-offs are screwing it up does not mean that whe should automaticly assume malice. Some people just want to poke around like we did when we were kids.
Why an Audigy? Other than $100 what is the diffrence between an Audigy and a Live 4.1? I never have and never will buy top end hardware. Better to get white-box that is two years old. Driver are already out (and stable!) and you can pick up that old $150 card for 30. Plus if it does die you can grab another for a song.
I really have not looked at building a box in the last three months or so. Looking around it appears you are correct. This just furthers my point.
XP 2500 ($80), FX5700 or Radeon 9800 ($200), SB Live 4.1 ($30), 1 gig DDR ($200), 160 gig Seagate SATA ($120), ASUS MATX MoBo ($100), CD-RW/DVD Combo drive ($75) and a nice case ($75).
This comes in at just under $700. It's a very nice system that can play any game out there. Really who needs more than that for your current gaming needs? Sure you can shell out another grand for the bleeding edge but I would rather spend another 700 in two years and kick my old box down to the wife.
Well right now 2300 PST it is at Firefox 2000, IE 1600, and Safari 500 (rounded).
Also interesting is the hits in July. Single or Double digits untill the end of the month the over 5000. It is nice to see a good slashdotting.
and my paycheck just bounced..
Yes he is unique, just like everyone else..