You missed the point. I'm not a gamer. I just wanted a card that would make mozilla on X run faster than the on board video options. Obviously, I wasted my money because I didn't get any better performance with the Nvidia card because I couldn't get the colosed source driver to load on my system. I blame Nvidia and the lesson I learned is to never buy hardware on the promise that a closed source Linux driver will actually work.
Since I'm not using it for high performance games, I don't consider $50 to be cheap, and spending $150 is out of the question. I'm now convinced that the "middle range" video is worthless, buy the cheapest possible video option unless you need the performance for a game, then buy top of the line and consider it part of the cost of the games.
Thanks for your response anyway, if I was trying to play games, your advice would certainly be correct.
I'm very comfortable spec'ing the rest of a system, but I can't seem to keep up with the video market - maybe because I'm not a gamer. The last system I built I bought a $50 Nvidia card in the hopes that it would be better/faster than the cheap on-board video I've used before. I could not get the Nvidia drivers to work right in FC3 or FC4, despite reading howtos and forum postings for hours. Finally, I decided I would just use it in the regular mode that FC4 had built in drivers for. Needless to say, I see no benefit for the moeny I spent, so that will be the last Nvidia-based video I pay extra for, if they open-source their drivers and get in included in major distributions, I will buy more of their product, but not until then. I understand they want to protect their IP, but that doesn't get me an easily installed 3D video card, so I won't send them my money.
Will 2006 be the year that clean energy becomes more the vogue than cool computer gadgets?"
No, no, no! 2006 will be the year that Linux takes over the desktop, 2007 will be the year that Duke Nukem Forever is released and 2008 will be the year that clean energy comes into vogue!
Also, I think somewhere in there they discover the cure to the common cold, but that part of my crystal ball is still a bit fuzzy (probably due to that cheap antenna from Walmart).
that the weeds are stealing. We need to sic the corporate lawyers on them. As a crucial part of the discovery process, the lawyers and paralegals will be out collecting all the weeds with this resistance and storing them as evidence. They will (obviously) be quite dead by the time the trial is over, so the problem will be solved.
This is the only time when I think having a lot of lawyers might be a good idea!
...and what exactly is a 'tax season' anyway? I can only assume it is some kind of US-centric thing
You must live under one of those oppressive regimes that prohibit gun ownership.
Here in the good ol' USA, we assign "seasons" to the various varmits we want to kill (mostly to prevent killing all the breeding stock, but also to provide jobs for the game wardens). In duck season, you can shoot ducks, and in buck season, you can shoot bucks (the male deer, not money). Similarly, in tax season, the well equiped hunters of the land set out to kill and maim the local tax population. It's really sort of odd that we don't just let them shoot them all, I for one would be happy if all the taxes in America became extinct.
You forgot Oracle Advanced Replication (or maybe you just didn't know it existed). It's ideal for running across a (relatively) slow WAN and allows for 100% database uptime, even if an entire site is lost.
It was not trivial to setup back then (probably much better now), but that's what DBA are for. If you're a highly compensated admin, complexity is not necessarily your enemy.
That ignores the fact that 25% of the population have IQ scores below 89. For someone with an IQ of 75, farm work may be very fulfilling. Take that away from them and they may be unable to find other work.
That's a very nice sentiment. And there is some value to your observations from a high level view, but my sister and her husband run a small dairy farm and getting decent help is a continual struggle. It seems like many of the "underpriviliged" youth of the area would much rather work with their friends at a fast food restaurant for $6 an hour, than get up close and personal with a bunch of large smelly bovines for $5 an hour. Raising the salary would be a nice option, if they could raise the price they sell their milk for, but they are told how much they are going to get and there are very few options if they don't like it.
As a result, most farm families get their kids doing a lot of the work for a lot less than that child could earn off the farm, but at least they are reliable workers! What robotic milkers really do for the small farmer is to raise the quality of life for the family. Labor will inevitably price itself out of this market unless the government somehow subsidizes the wages (a bad idea for any industry), leaving the small farms to use internal labor or robotics.
Since when did scientists start behaving like fundies?
They've always behaved like this. It's human nature to believe that our understanding is the correct one. We believe this so strongly that any opposing opinions are met with great suspicion, even hostility.
Scientists declare themselves openminded, but then they define "openminded" as accepting of anything that doesn't threaten their existing view and opinions about what they believe. If you want to see a viscious attack on anothers reputation, just look at the scientific world, they put theologins and politicians to shame by comparison. No, if you are a scientist you had better have pretty thick skin if you want to challenge the status quo. There is no room in scientific circle for multiple leading theories, there is "one true religion" and the rest are all crackpot theories.
A perfect case in point is the current debate over teaching evolution in public schools. You'd think that it was a religious debate on both sides, the way they act. Since they currently have the upper hand, they are determined not to give any ground, the mere mention that evolution has some competing theories is completely unacceptable, it must be taught as absolute fact with no questioning allowed. We simply can't allow young impressionable minds access to any facts that might contradict evolution, they might start questioning the "one true religion", and the scientific community can't bear the thought of that.
Regardless of your beliefs regarding evolution, disallowing any mention of other ideas is not education, it's indoctrination. If scientists that believe in evolution wanted to do what's right, they'd insist on a larger discussion about what various cultures historically believed about their origins and how our understanding has evolved and the questions that still exist. It could be done in a way that is not endorsing any particular "religion" and would certainly lead to some interesting class discussions.
The American politicians are running unchecked in the Australian bush?
I think most Americans would appreciate it if you would let them stay there, certainly they can't be doing as much harm there are they would be in Washington. We have plenty of politcians here already.
Why don't we just make "meta domains" or "hyper domains" and give each country one of them to manage themselves, then they could assign all the subdomains themselves, any way they want. We could even make an abbreviated name and just tack it onto the end of the domain names. Something like ".uk" for the domains controlled by the UK, and so forth, you get the idea.
It that a great idea, or what? I can't believe that no one's thought of this before. Maybe I'll get a Nobel Peace Prize for coming up with the idea that brings harmony to the internet.
Have the feds setup a server that accepts a UPC and destination address in XML, then return XML with the tax rate and the jursidiction to submit the tax to. Then each tax jurisdiction would need to create records for each UPC and local address with the desired tax rate. If no rate has been submitted for that combo, then the rate becomes 0.
Imagine how much effort it would take for the local jursidictions to perform all the updates to keep this up. Oh, and they cannot set a "default" rate, each UPC and address much be filed individually as a separate transaction. And they expired every 6 months and have to be resubmitted. If an item doesn't have a UPC, then the vendor would apply for a special code from the fed to be used instead. After assigning the code, the rate would be zero until it was updated by the local taxing jurisdictions.
The local tax authorities would need to hire an army of clerks to deals with this and most would probably just give it up as too little return on investment.
"We are defeating the infidels even as I speak, don't believe their lies - we shall make their sons fatherless and their computers shall all need rebooting!!"
I'm a Sun sysadmin and like their hardware, but Jonathan and Scott both tend to have wacky ideas. Some of their ideas are visionary, but most are just plain stupid. Given the ration of bad to good, I've learned to just ignore them.
BTW, whatever happened to "Bagdad Bob" (the real one) ? Is it true that he got a job at SCO as their information minister?
So, if they fire this at an oncoming missile and it blinds the guys that are hanging onto the missile, would that be a violation?
If an enemy figures this out, they will just strap a PTDLA (Person They Don't Like Anyway) to each missile and the laser defense will be rendered inoperable.
OTOH, if someone is strapped to a missile enroute to it's target, perhaps we really should consider that person an "enemy combatant" and therefore it would be OK to blind them with the laser. It might actually he the humane thing to do in that case, the view for the rest of the ride ain't gonna be that pretty anyway.
Tried that, but they made it too hard to get in and out of my cubicle. Don't bother laying them across the top either. I can barely read my writing when it's in a normal orientation.
On the plus side, I was out sick for 3 days once and no one noticed I was gone because the whiteboards were there.
If volcanoes produce this much CO2, why weren't they include in the Kyoto talks. It seems like they would be adversely affected by having to cut emissions and ought to have some sort of say in the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . that a commercial RFID shielded wallet will make an appearance on Thinkgeek shortly.
You missed the point. I'm not a gamer. I just wanted a card that would make mozilla on X run faster than the on board video options. Obviously, I wasted my money because I didn't get any better performance with the Nvidia card because I couldn't get the colosed source driver to load on my system. I blame Nvidia and the lesson I learned is to never buy hardware on the promise that a closed source Linux driver will actually work. Since I'm not using it for high performance games, I don't consider $50 to be cheap, and spending $150 is out of the question. I'm now convinced that the "middle range" video is worthless, buy the cheapest possible video option unless you need the performance for a game, then buy top of the line and consider it part of the cost of the games. Thanks for your response anyway, if I was trying to play games, your advice would certainly be correct.
I'm very comfortable spec'ing the rest of a system, but I can't seem to keep up with the video market - maybe because I'm not a gamer. The last system I built I bought a $50 Nvidia card in the hopes that it would be better/faster than the cheap on-board video I've used before. I could not get the Nvidia drivers to work right in FC3 or FC4, despite reading howtos and forum postings for hours. Finally, I decided I would just use it in the regular mode that FC4 had built in drivers for. Needless to say, I see no benefit for the moeny I spent, so that will be the last Nvidia-based video I pay extra for, if they open-source their drivers and get in included in major distributions, I will buy more of their product, but not until then. I understand they want to protect their IP, but that doesn't get me an easily installed 3D video card, so I won't send them my money.
No, no, no!
2006 will be the year that Linux takes over the desktop, 2007 will be the year that Duke Nukem Forever is released and 2008 will be the year that clean energy comes into vogue!
Also, I think somewhere in there they discover the cure to the common cold, but that part of my crystal ball is still a bit fuzzy (probably due to that cheap antenna from Walmart).
This is the only time when I think having a lot of lawyers might be a good idea!
Umm, what part of "Men were also more likely to use the net for recreation" didn't you understand?
You must live under one of those oppressive regimes that prohibit gun ownership.
Here in the good ol' USA, we assign "seasons" to the various varmits we want to kill (mostly to prevent killing all the breeding stock, but also to provide jobs for the game wardens). In duck season, you can shoot ducks, and in buck season, you can shoot bucks (the male deer, not money). Similarly, in tax season, the well equiped hunters of the land set out to kill and maim the local tax population. It's really sort of odd that we don't just let them shoot them all, I for one would be happy if all the taxes in America became extinct.
someone's pet lemur that they just let out to "do it's business" and it strayed a bit far afield.
Still, the whole "new species of mammal" thing is a lot more exciting and newsworthy. I can't really blame them for making a bit of a fuss about it.
They occasionally sell entire IT teams. loaded and ready to deploy.
Hitting a wall isn't the worst outcome. If you have Windows, you might just crash right on through and go "Splat" on the pavement below.
"In a world without fences and walls, who needs Windows and Gates?"
You forgot Oracle Advanced Replication (or maybe you just didn't know it existed). It's ideal for running across a (relatively) slow WAN and allows for 100% database uptime, even if an entire site is lost.
It was not trivial to setup back then (probably much better now), but that's what DBA are for. If you're a highly compensated admin, complexity is not necessarily your enemy.
That's a very nice sentiment. And there is some value to your observations from a high level view, but my sister and her husband run a small dairy farm and getting decent help is a continual struggle. It seems like many of the "underpriviliged" youth of the area would much rather work with their friends at a fast food restaurant for $6 an hour, than get up close and personal with a bunch of large smelly bovines for $5 an hour. Raising the salary would be a nice option, if they could raise the price they sell their milk for, but they are told how much they are going to get and there are very few options if they don't like it.
As a result, most farm families get their kids doing a lot of the work for a lot less than that child could earn off the farm, but at least they are reliable workers! What robotic milkers really do for the small farmer is to raise the quality of life for the family. Labor will inevitably price itself out of this market unless the government somehow subsidizes the wages (a bad idea for any industry), leaving the small farms to use internal labor or robotics.
Now do you think it's such a bad idea?
Who needs Windows and Gates ?
s/scientists/Christians/g
Your bias is embarassingly obvious also.
I think you just proved my thesis about this being a religious fervor on both sides better than I ever could have alone.
They've always behaved like this. It's human nature to believe that our understanding is the correct one. We believe this so strongly that any opposing opinions are met with great suspicion, even hostility.
Scientists declare themselves openminded, but then they define "openminded" as accepting of anything that doesn't threaten their existing view and opinions about what they believe. If you want to see a viscious attack on anothers reputation, just look at the scientific world, they put theologins and politicians to shame by comparison. No, if you are a scientist you had better have pretty thick skin if you want to challenge the status quo. There is no room in scientific circle for multiple leading theories, there is "one true religion" and the rest are all crackpot theories.
A perfect case in point is the current debate over teaching evolution in public schools. You'd think that it was a religious debate on both sides, the way they act. Since they currently have the upper hand, they are determined not to give any ground, the mere mention that evolution has some competing theories is completely unacceptable, it must be taught as absolute fact with no questioning allowed. We simply can't allow young impressionable minds access to any facts that might contradict evolution, they might start questioning the "one true religion", and the scientific community can't bear the thought of that.
Regardless of your beliefs regarding evolution, disallowing any mention of other ideas is not education, it's indoctrination. If scientists that believe in evolution wanted to do what's right, they'd insist on a larger discussion about what various cultures historically believed about their origins and how our understanding has evolved and the questions that still exist. It could be done in a way that is not endorsing any particular "religion" and would certainly lead to some interesting class discussions.
The American politicians are running unchecked in the Australian bush?
I think most Americans would appreciate it if you would let them stay there, certainly they can't be doing as much harm there are they would be in Washington. We have plenty of politcians here already.
Why don't we just make "meta domains" or "hyper domains" and give each country one of them to manage themselves, then they could assign all the subdomains themselves, any way they want. We could even make an abbreviated name and just tack it onto the end of the domain names. Something like ".uk" for the domains controlled by the UK, and so forth, you get the idea.
It that a great idea, or what? I can't believe that no one's thought of this before. Maybe I'll get a Nobel Peace Prize for coming up with the idea that brings harmony to the internet.
Have the feds setup a server that accepts a UPC and destination address in XML, then return XML with the tax rate and the jursidiction to submit the tax to. Then each tax jurisdiction would need to create records for each UPC and local address with the desired tax rate. If no rate has been submitted for that combo, then the rate becomes 0.
Imagine how much effort it would take for the local jursidictions to perform all the updates to keep this up. Oh, and they cannot set a "default" rate, each UPC and address much be filed individually as a separate transaction. And they expired every 6 months and have to be resubmitted. If an item doesn't have a UPC, then the vendor would apply for a special code from the fed to be used instead. After assigning the code, the rate would be zero until it was updated by the local taxing jurisdictions.
The local tax authorities would need to hire an army of clerks to deals with this and most would probably just give it up as too little return on investment.
"We are defeating the infidels even as I speak, don't believe their lies - we shall make their sons fatherless and their computers shall all need rebooting!!"
I'm a Sun sysadmin and like their hardware, but Jonathan and Scott both tend to have wacky ideas. Some of their ideas are visionary, but most are just plain stupid. Given the ration of bad to good, I've learned to just ignore them.
BTW, whatever happened to "Bagdad Bob" (the real one) ? Is it true that he got a job at SCO as their information minister?
OK, we can now invoke Godwin's law and go browse another thread.
So, if they fire this at an oncoming missile and it blinds the guys that are hanging onto the missile, would that be a violation?
If an enemy figures this out, they will just strap a PTDLA (Person They Don't Like Anyway) to each missile and the laser defense will be rendered inoperable.
OTOH, if someone is strapped to a missile enroute to it's target, perhaps we really should consider that person an "enemy combatant" and therefore it would be OK to blind them with the laser. It might actually he the humane thing to do in that case, the view for the rest of the ride ain't gonna be that pretty anyway.
On the plus side, I was out sick for 3 days once and no one noticed I was gone because the whiteboards were there.
Goodbye, and thanks for the fish!
Equal Rights for Vocanoes !!