Re:About 5 years ago I was robbed
on
Free Geek Robbed
·
· Score: 1
Knowing my barber and her husband...I'm sure they brought their own guns and knives to the party just in case. Some people just don't seem to understand how that can level the playing field with criminals...
Re:About 5 years ago I was robbed
on
Free Geek Robbed
·
· Score: 1
Just as good as a Walmart parking lot...
Important sidenote: I live in a rural community.
A while back my barber started complaining to me about stupid criminals. the story goes that she was walking out of the local Walmart and got mugged by a couple guys. they grabbed her cell phone and bag of stuff she bought and ran. She was quite upset but when she got home she decided to call the cell phone and see what would happen. The dummies answered and she managed to convince them that she knew where they lived and she wouldn't call the police on them if they just gave her stuff back. So an hour later she met them at the place of the original crime and got her stuff back. Then told them they had best give up the life of crime and her and her husband beat the crap out of them. She never bothered to call the cops but I would say justice was well served.
Yes, I'm thinking the guy's real motive is a pre-emptive strike on the machines. But then we would have to dig in close to the center of the earth to keep warm. I prefer the surface thank you very much.
Actually, a significant percentage of Australians were already made instant-criminals when they very suddenly passed that big anti-gun law over there given that most of them didn't have much opportunity to turn in their guns. Now they are netting pretty much everybody else with this one. I would say its basically legislating martial law. you just pass a couple laws that take away freedoms people have been used to for years and suddenly between one or the other everyone is a criminal. Now the state can go take down anybody they choose citing the fact that technically they are a criminal. Of course these laws are selectively enforced on whomever they want to pick on. Sorry Australia, but you have just become a police state! (I'm assuming the law is passed as I'm sure it will be given the current Australians in power)
Sadly, the US appears to be not far behind on this trend these days...were it not for the NRA watching our backs, I'm sure we would be there too already.
At that rate my allotment of fuel will be used up in 15 years. And I drive a fuel-efficient car. There are alot of SUV drivers burning more then me. Take into account that planes, train, and trucks take take up alot more. And they are making it(oil) into plastics to pollute landfills with like crazy, I figure the peak theorist must be right. Good thing two places near me started selling E-85 last month. Now all we need is fuel-efficient E-85 cars sold in the US. (US car companies still won't sell us smaller cars that are E-85 certified...only trucks, vans and bigger cars).
I would ask how long it might take for someone to debunk the debunker-debunker. But really there is little in TFA to address. The guy seems to not say much more then "that guy is a big poo-poo head" in scientific terms. I was very dissapointed with the length and lack of countering facts.
Hmmm, big focus on online gaming... Am I the only one that misses the days of single player games??? Seems like almost all the games now are built for online multiplayer and single player mode is just an afterthought, if included at all. I don't really want to deal with a bunch of punks online, just want to go head to head with a good smart computer that isn't going to talk back to me. I guess it must be the influence of the increasing female gamer contingent wanting to be "social" and all that. Darn estrogen excreeting humans...get off my lawn!
Good to know the same company that built my hard drive is also behind such high-tech hardware as this! Hopefully my hard drive will be just as reliable as well:)
OK, somebody please explain to me how an OS taking up at least "twice the resources of XP" while only adding a flashy UI makeover and not much else (as far as I can tell) is in ANY way acceptable?
If an OS is going to take up twice the resources of the current breed. It better damn well do something very significantly better then the current breed to justify that performance handicap. Given that.NET 3.0 seems to be nothing more then additional bloat on top of.NET 2.0. And while the new office seems to have lots of new and interesting features, I don't see anything significant that couldn't have been implimented on XP. Where is the justification???
I used to like burger king a few years ago when Whoppers were a buck. But then they started rasing the price of the whopper. Then they changed their fries and then went on this huge ad campaign trying to brainwash everybody into thinking the new fries were better. I liked their old fries better the McD fries, but the new ones taste bad and have this weird texture to them that weirds me out. And then they changed how they make the whopper slightly so it doesn't even taste as good as the $1 days. Now they have those commercials featuring "the king", which actually looks to be like a highly perverted and psycopathic clown. I wouldn't be surprised if kids get nightmares from watching the commercials. There was a time when BK was my place of choice for fast food any time. Now I would rather go hungry then eat at a BK.
I am neither teenage or a hacker...but I still find the "challenge" somewhat unchallenging.
Simply filter their existing result set to exclude titles that are in a genre that the user has NEVER rented anything from and that would be a huge improvement!
For the love of pete, SOMEBODY mod the parent insightful! Vista is a hog, everybody knows it, no "power management optimization" is going to change that. Nothing to see here and please move along.
Windows 2000 WAS a very nice operating system IMHO. I continued to run it as long as I could and still have it on a couple machines. There was nothing in XP that I needed that Win2K didn't have. The only reason I was forced to upgrade is software makers (especially Microsoft themselves) started writing software that specifically dropped support for Win2K and I had to support the new versions for my work. There are many annoyances in XP that I would be happier to not have to deal with. But I am locked into XP now. I forsee the same thing happening with Vista... Nobody will have a compelling reason to upgrade till Microsoft and their partner vendors (especially the game vendors) start dropping support for XP. The boycott will be wildly successful untill SQL server 2007 or Ultimate First Person shooter 2007 (or whatever) comes out arbitrarilly written to only work on Vista and people are forced to upgrade to Vista et al in order to use it. Microsoft will collect the (now even higher priced) licensing fees and grow that "emergency fund" to even more Billions. Oh well, as long as I work for a partner and reap the fringe benefits including free licenses and lots of work that pays well I guess I should shut up and not complain.
...That malware writers will start writing fun stuff to trick or otherwise use the "filter" for their own devices. On a very simple level...how about code within code? So you take a script that does something evil and split it up by inserting whole older known scripts and dumping them in the middle. The "filter" then yanks all the older malware while unknowingly "stiching" the code they really wanted to execute back together to hit the client.
Knowing microsoft though, the "filter" probably has some sort of execution capability and someone will find a way to use the filter to take control of your system. Simple is safer boys and girls. Try to remember that.
I dunno man. First of all, asking people to mod you up is kinda lame.
Secondly, to say the computers that Cray sells is not "off the shelf" can be argued depending on how you look at it. Today's Crays are not the fully proprietary machines of yesteryear. They all use AMD Opteron processors and leverage the onboard memory controller and hypertransport bus to make a processor fabric simple. The main custom items in the system are the "interconnect routers" that tie all the hypertransport busses together. Even the FGPA components that facilitates handling specific custom tasks on hardware are somewhat "off the shelf" and just woven into the greater hypertransport happiness fabric.
Sure, the average person is not going to be able to build a "supercomputer" like this with stuff they bought off the frys shelf. But are we talking about "off the shelf" as in the average electronics store? Or "off the shelf" as in parts that are pre-existing and available on some shelf somewhere and have published documenation?
Benchmarks of any multiuse system are never universal. They best they can do for a large list like that is to use a benchmark that can reasonably represent a common use of such systems. Cray has been good about having systems that can be configured to perform exceptionally for very specific applications. Modern offerings like the XD1 are no different in that respect as they offer that in the FPGAs. To say they are not in the same market space as custers is like saying MySQL isn't in the same market space as PostGreSQL. They both have their strong points but there is many instances where a user has to decide which to go with.
Yes, but that would be blatently illegal should a "friend" decide to "borrow" said disk in lieu of renting it himself. If I wanted to go to the trouble of dealing with DVD files and burning them and such, why would I pay the monthly rental fee instead of simply downloading them in the first place?
I'm not going to say if I rent and burn or not on here. But for me there is an ethical line there. I firmly believe our copyrite laws are hopelessly broken and am a supporter of the Pirate Party though not a member. But in absense of laws that make any sense whatsoever, I have to turn to ethics to determine what the right thing is to do. I believe the movie makers deserve to be compensated and must be compensated if there are to be any more movies made. But quality is poor of movies overall and I don't think DVD retail prices are fair. A happy ethical medium to me (note I said "ethical", not "legal"...they are not always the same thing.) is to rent and copy. Compensation is made for getting the material, but at a rate fairer to the customer. It is "price negotiation" through economics (as opposed to directly speaking with the "seller").
Yes, most of us remember laserdisks. They were expensive when they came out and never really went down the price. the players got cheaper but they were always something that only the elite home theatre people had/used. And eventually they went away because a newer technology that made more sense came along to knock them out. I predict a new packaging that makes more sense (maybe something less scratch prone and smaller) will come along in a year or two and both HD-DVD and Bluray will find their way to garage sale bargain bins everywhere. Just like Laserdisk, 8 track tapes, and lawn dart games.
not sure how lawn darts relate exactly but it sounded good:)
I agree with the parent on the bullet points, but I think the conclusion "death to webmail" is barking up the wrong tree. The real issue goes back to point number two: rendered in too powerful an environment. If e-mail was ALWAYS treated as text, instead of trying to support HTML and mime types blah blah then having a safe webmail interface would simply mean a control that shows the text as text only with no possible execution. Simple and what e-mail was always meant to be. If you need to send "pretty" stuff then send it as an attachment and let that be what it is.
What does Microsoft have to do with Symantec/Norton's problems? The Symantec/Norton line of products have not offered an acceptable level of virus protection since mid-2001 or so and have suffered from bloat and incompatabilities for much longer then that. I can remember telling more clients then I can even count to "uninstall Norton" in order for them to be able to install or even run some other program back in the '90s. There are probably a whole lot of software companies out there that deserve to have about 60% of their support costs charged back to Symantec. These products have been suffering from poor development and general code bloat for years. I'm guessing it's not the developer's fault, they have probably been downsized and overworked for years to match. The only surprise to me is that it's taken this long for the serious issues with these products to actually make the headlines.
The parent post is quite correct. The company I work for just got through purchasing a set of new servers so we can scale up an application. I was the one who spec'd the hardware and shopped around for it. I really wanted to go with an AMD setup as the processors are cooler, draw ALOT less power and are a bit more powerful for the number crunching we do. But in the end, none of those things mattered enough to make the difference. The Dell boxes were relatively inexpensive (after we were given a substantial discount), were purchased on a nice business-friendly financing option, came with decent management software, and were redundant enough for us. While I have more then a few gripes about how hot, power hungry and oddly designed the servers are, the fact remains that nobody really comes close to being as business-ready as Dell for the same price ballpark. I briefly looked at IBM but their starting price wasn't even close. They would need a half off sale before things would even be in the ballpark.
You don't watch Battlestar Galactica do you? I don't know if the writers meant to make this point in the show, but there is a VERY valuable lesson to be learned from it: If you rely too heavilly on your technology, inevitably someone will come along and crack your technology and wipe the floor with you. Fly by wire, automated ships, and battlefield networks are all very cool until someone cracks the computer and you are FUBAR. And dont be arrogant enough to think you are too smart for someone to crack your stuff. Even if that is true at the point in time you say it, it's likely to not be true when it really counts. I'm not saying that the military shouldn't have high-tech stuff, I'm just saying they better have a backup plan involving something simple and reliable if the high tech stuff gets trashed or compromised.
I agree. The Portland Free Geek guys taught my mother how to use and build a computer in a few months. A feat which I can only stand in awe of as I tried unsuccessfully to teach her over the prior 10 years. How ever they have their teaching programs structured, it works well.
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Knowing my barber and her husband...I'm sure they brought their own guns and knives to the party just in case. Some people just don't seem to understand how that can level the playing field with criminals...
Just as good as a Walmart parking lot...
Important sidenote: I live in a rural community.
A while back my barber started complaining to me about stupid criminals. the story goes that she was walking out of the local Walmart and got mugged by a couple guys. they grabbed her cell phone and bag of stuff she bought and ran. She was quite upset but when she got home she decided to call the cell phone and see what would happen. The dummies answered and she managed to convince them that she knew where they lived and she wouldn't call the police on them if they just gave her stuff back. So an hour later she met them at the place of the original crime and got her stuff back. Then told them they had best give up the life of crime and her and her husband beat the crap out of them. She never bothered to call the cops but I would say justice was well served.
Yes, I'm thinking the guy's real motive is a pre-emptive strike on the machines. But then we would have to dig in close to the center of the earth to keep warm. I prefer the surface thank you very much.
Actually, a significant percentage of Australians were already made instant-criminals when they very suddenly passed that big anti-gun law over there given that most of them didn't have much opportunity to turn in their guns. Now they are netting pretty much everybody else with this one. I would say its basically legislating martial law. you just pass a couple laws that take away freedoms people have been used to for years and suddenly between one or the other everyone is a criminal. Now the state can go take down anybody they choose citing the fact that technically they are a criminal. Of course these laws are selectively enforced on whomever they want to pick on. Sorry Australia, but you have just become a police state! (I'm assuming the law is passed as I'm sure it will be given the current Australians in power)
Sadly, the US appears to be not far behind on this trend these days...were it not for the NRA watching our backs, I'm sure we would be there too already.
At that rate my allotment of fuel will be used up in 15 years. And I drive a fuel-efficient car. There are alot of SUV drivers burning more then me. Take into account that planes, train, and trucks take take up alot more. And they are making it(oil) into plastics to pollute landfills with like crazy, I figure the peak theorist must be right. Good thing two places near me started selling E-85 last month. Now all we need is fuel-efficient E-85 cars sold in the US. (US car companies still won't sell us smaller cars that are E-85 certified...only trucks, vans and bigger cars).
I would ask how long it might take for someone to debunk the debunker-debunker. But really there is little in TFA to address. The guy seems to not say much more then "that guy is a big poo-poo head" in scientific terms. I was very dissapointed with the length and lack of countering facts.
Hmmm, big focus on online gaming... Am I the only one that misses the days of single player games??? Seems like almost all the games now are built for online multiplayer and single player mode is just an afterthought, if included at all. I don't really want to deal with a bunch of punks online, just want to go head to head with a good smart computer that isn't going to talk back to me. I guess it must be the influence of the increasing female gamer contingent wanting to be "social" and all that. Darn estrogen excreeting humans...get off my lawn!
Good to know the same company that built my hard drive is also behind such high-tech hardware as this! Hopefully my hard drive will be just as reliable as well:)
OK, somebody please explain to me how an OS taking up at least "twice the resources of XP" while only adding a flashy UI makeover and not much else (as far as I can tell) is in ANY way acceptable?
.NET 3.0 seems to be nothing more then additional bloat on top of .NET 2.0. And while the new office seems to have lots of new and interesting features, I don't see anything significant that couldn't have been implimented on XP. Where is the justification???
If an OS is going to take up twice the resources of the current breed. It better damn well do something very significantly better then the current breed to justify that performance handicap. Given that
I used to like burger king a few years ago when Whoppers were a buck. But then they started rasing the price of the whopper. Then they changed their fries and then went on this huge ad campaign trying to brainwash everybody into thinking the new fries were better. I liked their old fries better the McD fries, but the new ones taste bad and have this weird texture to them that weirds me out. And then they changed how they make the whopper slightly so it doesn't even taste as good as the $1 days. Now they have those commercials featuring "the king", which actually looks to be like a highly perverted and psycopathic clown. I wouldn't be surprised if kids get nightmares from watching the commercials. There was a time when BK was my place of choice for fast food any time. Now I would rather go hungry then eat at a BK.
I am neither teenage or a hacker...but I still find the "challenge" somewhat unchallenging.
Simply filter their existing result set to exclude titles that are in a genre that the user has NEVER rented anything from and that would be a huge improvement!
For the love of pete, SOMEBODY mod the parent insightful! Vista is a hog, everybody knows it, no "power management optimization" is going to change that. Nothing to see here and please move along.
Windows 2000 WAS a very nice operating system IMHO. I continued to run it as long as I could and still have it on a couple machines. There was nothing in XP that I needed that Win2K didn't have. The only reason I was forced to upgrade is software makers (especially Microsoft themselves) started writing software that specifically dropped support for Win2K and I had to support the new versions for my work. There are many annoyances in XP that I would be happier to not have to deal with. But I am locked into XP now. I forsee the same thing happening with Vista... Nobody will have a compelling reason to upgrade till Microsoft and their partner vendors (especially the game vendors) start dropping support for XP. The boycott will be wildly successful untill SQL server 2007 or Ultimate First Person shooter 2007 (or whatever) comes out arbitrarilly written to only work on Vista and people are forced to upgrade to Vista et al in order to use it. Microsoft will collect the (now even higher priced) licensing fees and grow that "emergency fund" to even more Billions. Oh well, as long as I work for a partner and reap the fringe benefits including free licenses and lots of work that pays well I guess I should shut up and not complain.
...That malware writers will start writing fun stuff to trick or otherwise use the "filter" for their own devices. On a very simple level...how about code within code? So you take a script that does something evil and split it up by inserting whole older known scripts and dumping them in the middle. The "filter" then yanks all the older malware while unknowingly "stiching" the code they really wanted to execute back together to hit the client.
Knowing microsoft though, the "filter" probably has some sort of execution capability and someone will find a way to use the filter to take control of your system. Simple is safer boys and girls. Try to remember that.
...and I'll say it again.
640K should be enough for anyone.
And I'll just say Bah! for good measure.
I dunno man. First of all, asking people to mod you up is kinda lame.
Secondly, to say the computers that Cray sells is not "off the shelf" can be argued depending on how you look at it. Today's Crays are not the fully proprietary machines of yesteryear. They all use AMD Opteron processors and leverage the onboard memory controller and hypertransport bus to make a processor fabric simple. The main custom items in the system are the "interconnect routers" that tie all the hypertransport busses together. Even the FGPA components that facilitates handling specific custom tasks on hardware are somewhat "off the shelf" and just woven into the greater hypertransport happiness fabric.
Sure, the average person is not going to be able to build a "supercomputer" like this with stuff they bought off the frys shelf. But are we talking about "off the shelf" as in the average electronics store? Or "off the shelf" as in parts that are pre-existing and available on some shelf somewhere and have published documenation?
Benchmarks of any multiuse system are never universal. They best they can do for a large list like that is to use a benchmark that can reasonably represent a common use of such systems. Cray has been good about having systems that can be configured to perform exceptionally for very specific applications. Modern offerings like the XD1 are no different in that respect as they offer that in the FPGAs. To say they are not in the same market space as custers is like saying MySQL isn't in the same market space as PostGreSQL. They both have their strong points but there is many instances where a user has to decide which to go with.
I'm going to stop there...time for sleep.
Yes, but that would be blatently illegal should a "friend" decide to "borrow" said disk in lieu of renting it himself. If I wanted to go to the trouble of dealing with DVD files and burning them and such, why would I pay the monthly rental fee instead of simply downloading them in the first place?
I'm not going to say if I rent and burn or not on here. But for me there is an ethical line there. I firmly believe our copyrite laws are hopelessly broken and am a supporter of the Pirate Party though not a member. But in absense of laws that make any sense whatsoever, I have to turn to ethics to determine what the right thing is to do. I believe the movie makers deserve to be compensated and must be compensated if there are to be any more movies made. But quality is poor of movies overall and I don't think DVD retail prices are fair. A happy ethical medium to me (note I said "ethical", not "legal"...they are not always the same thing.) is to rent and copy. Compensation is made for getting the material, but at a rate fairer to the customer. It is "price negotiation" through economics (as opposed to directly speaking with the "seller").
My $0.02
Yes, most of us remember laserdisks. They were expensive when they came out and never really went down the price. the players got cheaper but they were always something that only the elite home theatre people had/used. And eventually they went away because a newer technology that made more sense came along to knock them out. I predict a new packaging that makes more sense (maybe something less scratch prone and smaller) will come along in a year or two and both HD-DVD and Bluray will find their way to garage sale bargain bins everywhere. Just like Laserdisk, 8 track tapes, and lawn dart games.
not sure how lawn darts relate exactly but it sounded good:)
I agree with the parent on the bullet points, but I think the conclusion "death to webmail" is barking up the wrong tree. The real issue goes back to point number two: rendered in too powerful an environment. If e-mail was ALWAYS treated as text, instead of trying to support HTML and mime types blah blah then having a safe webmail interface would simply mean a control that shows the text as text only with no possible execution. Simple and what e-mail was always meant to be. If you need to send "pretty" stuff then send it as an attachment and let that be what it is.
What does Microsoft have to do with Symantec/Norton's problems? The Symantec/Norton line of products have not offered an acceptable level of virus protection since mid-2001 or so and have suffered from bloat and incompatabilities for much longer then that. I can remember telling more clients then I can even count to "uninstall Norton" in order for them to be able to install or even run some other program back in the '90s. There are probably a whole lot of software companies out there that deserve to have about 60% of their support costs charged back to Symantec. These products have been suffering from poor development and general code bloat for years. I'm guessing it's not the developer's fault, they have probably been downsized and overworked for years to match. The only surprise to me is that it's taken this long for the serious issues with these products to actually make the headlines.
The parent post is quite correct. The company I work for just got through purchasing a set of new servers so we can scale up an application. I was the one who spec'd the hardware and shopped around for it. I really wanted to go with an AMD setup as the processors are cooler, draw ALOT less power and are a bit more powerful for the number crunching we do. But in the end, none of those things mattered enough to make the difference. The Dell boxes were relatively inexpensive (after we were given a substantial discount), were purchased on a nice business-friendly financing option, came with decent management software, and were redundant enough for us. While I have more then a few gripes about how hot, power hungry and oddly designed the servers are, the fact remains that nobody really comes close to being as business-ready as Dell for the same price ballpark. I briefly looked at IBM but their starting price wasn't even close. They would need a half off sale before things would even be in the ballpark.
HAL and Cyberdyne... I'm curious, does this professor guy have a really sick sense of humor, or does he just like to test fate?
Hahaha! Seriously though... Faye is hottt:)
You don't watch Battlestar Galactica do you? I don't know if the writers meant to make this point in the show, but there is a VERY valuable lesson to be learned from it: If you rely too heavilly on your technology, inevitably someone will come along and crack your technology and wipe the floor with you. Fly by wire, automated ships, and battlefield networks are all very cool until someone cracks the computer and you are FUBAR. And dont be arrogant enough to think you are too smart for someone to crack your stuff. Even if that is true at the point in time you say it, it's likely to not be true when it really counts. I'm not saying that the military shouldn't have high-tech stuff, I'm just saying they better have a backup plan involving something simple and reliable if the high tech stuff gets trashed or compromised.
I agree. The Portland Free Geek guys taught my mother how to use and build a computer in a few months. A feat which I can only stand in awe of as I tried unsuccessfully to teach her over the prior 10 years. How ever they have their teaching programs structured, it works well.