- Microsoft Windows(R) 2000 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later; or Windows XP or later
The total requirements are here. Clearly there are still a lot of people out there without the service packs etc, and
all you lot who still have plenty of old boxes running 98/98SE - you'll have to upgrade of course.
They say 233MHz/128MB RAM minimum, but they must be on crack if they can blithely say that as a minimum for Office 2003 with at least Win2K on the box, unless you have a severe patience overdose.
I just hope antiword can keep up with the format so that I can continue to read.DOCs on any ANSI terminal that I see fit. Antiword is quite simply the most useful command line tool for reading email from all my lusers who think that sending me a.DOC attachment somehow makes my life more wonderful ("Hey, you can print it and it comes out really nice..." - as if I ever freakin' print email, you moron.)
... while studios pay stars big money ... while distribution companies sell rights for millions ... while all three believe different countries should have different access to the product ... while market forces play ... while corporations monopolise and profiteer ... while success is judged not by how much you make, but how much more you make the next time...
... there will be copyright and broadcast "bits" in digital streams, and zones on DVDs. But people will still bootleg, copy, trade, share, burn, rip, lend, but not steal, the product. Because deep down inside they do not believe that what they pay for the legitimate product is either fair or just.
Nobody on this thread mentioned the war on 3rd party media that Iomega waged. That's what killed the ZIP drive. There was some story about laptop ZIP drives being deliberately manufactured to not be able to read third party ZIP media. Can't find a link.
That was already when the rot started to set in... because Iomega effectively dissuaded the competition from making ZIP media and kept prices high for 100Mb of storage. They also seemed to not be able to make backwards compatible an understandable concept when marketing the ZIP 250 drives and so on... and had loads of driver problems.
- Arafat weasel : standing by his people's desire to get back land that Israel annexed from them (note: nobody has proved that Arafat does not support, nor is affiliated with, terrorist organisations... except those which are as elusive as the WMDs)
- Chirac weasel : just happened to be against the war in Iraq, turns out even the US troops out there don't understand why they're there any more, and Chirac was following public opinion. Not exactly weasly
- Moore weasel... never heard of any Moore in the press I'm reading, who is he/she?
The chip's surface is covered in little grooves, where drugs can be loaded.
It is then covered with different types of polymer which slowly biodegrade releasing each dose at a different time.
The different types of polymer degrade at different rates, but what we do not have here is polymers activated by some kind of electronic pulse that is controlled by some mini operating system / timer chip. This is just clever dissolving stuff, not some mini robot or electronic activation of dose release.
They're just using the word 'microchip' in the same way you might advertise microchips as fries that you can cook in your microwave oven. Bah!
Now we finnally know why the British have such horrible teeth.
There I was, thinking that we British have normal teeth, and the Americans have amazing teeth because they spend so much money on adjusting them, and all the time it's us Brits that have horrible teeth, and the American teeth are just normal. Ouch.
How can they compete with mp3's that can be acquired for free, have no restriction AND can play on any platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) or portable device?
Just being able to legally search and immediately download, at a reasonable speed... without headaches... is what 90%+ of the market want. They don't care about format either, if it works on their box that's in front of them.
Nobody moaned too hard when Apple launch iTunes in the US only and for Apple customers only with iPods and all. They sighed a little that they didn't have a cool iPod and would actually like something for their Windows (or Linux) machine.
Now you're (collectively) moaning that this new Canada only service is WMA (and hence windows) only, even though there are workarounds to transcode (yeah lose quality blah blah) to MP3 or OGG good enough for walkmanlike headphones.
Commercial stuff like this will always be led out by simple economic decisions. Like how much the whole infrastructure costs. Even if that means dopey in IT puts WMA because it's already built in to the solution they've already been committed to forever. Or whatever.
Don't forget all the mod chips which have to be hand inserted, plus the other stuff you'll end up having to do, the rackmounts (can get a rack cased PC prebuilt but not an XBox rackmount), etc etc
Did I say he was always working on IBM mainframes? He was mostly at (SPERRY (UNIVAC)|UNISYS) , I just happened to mention some IBM assembler at his current place, which may (or may not) be EBCDIC.
My Dad programs in COBOL and RPG and some IBM mainframe assembly language... and he's due for retirement soonish.
However, don't freakin' laugh. When he does retire, if things continue like they do, there will be no expert left on the old legacy system that has no chance in hell of being ported onto other technology. Too many lines of code, too many live objects (well disk space allocation units, because there aren't any "objects";-) and too many thousands of people's life insurance, pensions and investments all in that system (one of the top 3 insurance houses in the UK...)
So yes, they may be crazy old languages, but a lot of important shit still gets done with them, and nobody's converting it to C, C++, Java or anything else. Heck, my Dad even tried to get everything moved to an SGBD with SQL query access for a big data warehousing project that would aid migration to newer platforms further down the line, help reporting no end (right now reports are 128 column printed directly from COBOL reporting and print output routines), and allow central access to most data as quickly as you can say "SELECT... FROM... INNER JOIN a bit here and there"
He really knows his ASCII (even in HEX) and his memory allocation stuff though. The first machines he used were with boards he had to rewire and then punched cards with a 100 byte buffer! that he was really excited about.
Go ahead and work for an ISP for half a day. Take some support calls. If you manage not to shout, go crazy, and keep call time down (even with interesting clients) then start your own ISP callcenter and use your skills to sell outsourced support for ISPs.
Whenever you have a huge subscriber base, you can bet your life that most of them will say stupid shit all the time, will expect you to support all the software they have, and try to get you to support their printer and scanner, for example:
"I can't use email, it's not working",
"Well - let me see... your POP mailbox is OK, that means I can see your email box is OK from here",
"No, I can't send...",
"Euh... OK our network monitor doesn't show any problems"
"Well when I hit send and receive it takes forever,"
"Is the bar moving?"
"Yes, but really slowly, your server is so slow,"
It starts to dawn on you
"Umm... is it a large email?"
"Just a photo I scanned..."
"What format did you use?"
"The default, TIFF"
"OK... sorry... you need to use smaller files"
Follows the client desperately trying to get you to tell them how to reduce images, how to scan, because they can only ever send the whole scan platter even if it's just a small photo because the autosizing got switched off.
This is just one example among many. Therefore, monkeys with scripts do tend to end up in support. Those "in the know" just never take calls, and support will not help with weird configs because they can't. Jeez, I'm not even sure some ISPs have competent techs. Certainly not in my experience. The good techs all go work as network managers in big companies, stuff like that. ISPs are no longer the artisans they once were, it's all industrialised bullshit. The killer is that most don't even maintain FAQs properly.
"We really don't appreciate being called nazis. We may be fanatics, but we're not fascists."
You're right... Nazi actually stood for national socialists. My mistake. Probably because of that nick GrammarNazi which is there hanging around in my subconscious.
You should say 'link to the first page of the interesting article', since all the articles like this are labelled 'interesting'. I avoid the word 'interesting' deliberately and my story submissions keep getting rejected, but there ya go. If one ever gets accepted, I'll have avoided the 'interesting' infection.
If I could be bothered, I might even keep an 'interesting' log. But I can't. I could get modded 'interesting' though.
Well how about superflat display, papersharp display, screen on a card, etc... especially in the UK, where "paper" is synonymous with newspaper, I would like to see a linguistic separation. But then, I'm just ranting, as I made perfectly clear.
MS Exchange is still hopeless compared to sendmail. Sendmail may have vulnerabilities, but Exchange just has performance issues and licensing costs that tip the scales. Exchange, in fact, suffers from too many features. It has also confused a reasonable proportion of the marketplace, who when asked to name a mail server, say "Exchange" first. I see too much corporate mail coming from Outlook/Exchange combos:'(
These are displays, ultra thin, ultra flat, paperlike. However I suspect that the wood (more accurately cellulose?) content is minimal, and that it does not absorb water, cannot be written on with washable ink or pencils, and cannot be torn easily.
Surely someone can come up with something better than "electronic paper" anyway. People these buzzwords are designed for (those who don't understand, somehow, and have to have things dumbed down) end up just getting alienated anyway. It's MUCH clearer to say "the super flat paperlike thing that your TV will become" rather than saying electronic paper, which the average technophobe will just laugh at?
The memory stick RAID is even worse. With a lot of random access he's going to kill memory sticks pretty fast.
But at least he doesn't take himself too seriously, and has something of a style all to himself
If you want to know if it is RAID 0 or RAID 4 or RAID 5, you are asking the wrong guy, I build floppy disk drive RAIDs none of that fancy shmancy stuff. All I know is that my FDD raid rules! Well, anyway, you drag each volume over to the RAID making thing and then click CREATE. After a very entertaining display of USB FDD flashing lights, whirling drives, and an interesting rhythm of spinning technology sounds, my RAID was complete. At first I thought it was screwed up, but it just took a while for the various units to meld themsleves into a single super duper kalimazooper floppy drive.
Incidentally he got a whopping 115.2KB/s out of his raid array. I can dl off the Internet faster than that via my ADSL connection - I get peaks as high as 200KB/s -> Free DSLAM modems rule (French ISP).
Slashdot Mirror
I can hardly afford the doctor's fee, let alone the lawyer as well. Do you really save that much on insurance because of this?
I find that hard to believe. How long does it take to open a large Word or Excel file, print it, and quit cleanly?
Nobody mentioned system requirements :
- Microsoft Windows(R) 2000 with Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later; or Windows XP or later
The total requirements are here. Clearly there are still a lot of people out there without the service packs etc, and all you lot who still have plenty of old boxes running 98/98SE - you'll have to upgrade of course.
They say 233MHz/128MB RAM minimum, but they must be on crack if they can blithely say that as a minimum for Office 2003 with at least Win2K on the box, unless you have a severe patience overdose.
I just hope antiword can keep up with the format so that I can continue to read .DOCs on any ANSI terminal that I see fit. Antiword is quite simply the most useful command line tool for reading email from all my lusers who think that sending me a .DOC attachment somehow makes my life more wonderful ("Hey, you can print it and it comes out really nice..." - as if I ever freakin' print email, you moron.)
That was already when the rot started to set in... because Iomega effectively dissuaded the competition from making ZIP media and kept prices high for 100Mb of storage. They also seemed to not be able to make backwards compatible an understandable concept when marketing the ZIP 250 drives and so on... and had loads of driver problems.
Let's see...
... never heard of any Moore in the press I'm reading, who is he/she?
- Bush weasel : Invading Iraq
- Arafat weasel : standing by his people's desire to get back land that Israel annexed from them (note: nobody has proved that Arafat does not support, nor is affiliated with, terrorist organisations... except those which are as elusive as the WMDs)
- Chirac weasel : just happened to be against the war in Iraq, turns out even the US troops out there don't understand why they're there any more, and Chirac was following public opinion. Not exactly weasly
- Moore weasel
The different types of polymer degrade at different rates, but what we do not have here is polymers activated by some kind of electronic pulse that is controlled by some mini operating system / timer chip. This is just clever dissolving stuff, not some mini robot or electronic activation of dose release.
They're just using the word 'microchip' in the same way you might advertise microchips as fries that you can cook in your microwave oven. Bah!
There I was, thinking that we British have normal teeth, and the Americans have amazing teeth because they spend so much money on adjusting them, and all the time it's us Brits that have horrible teeth, and the American teeth are just normal. Ouch.
Just being able to legally search and immediately download, at a reasonable speed... without headaches... is what 90%+ of the market want. They don't care about format either, if it works on their box that's in front of them.
You want real quality sound, you buy the CD.
Now you're (collectively) moaning that this new Canada only service is WMA (and hence windows) only, even though there are workarounds to transcode (yeah lose quality blah blah) to MP3 or OGG good enough for walkmanlike headphones.
Commercial stuff like this will always be led out by simple economic decisions. Like how much the whole infrastructure costs. Even if that means dopey in IT puts WMA because it's already built in to the solution they've already been committed to forever. Or whatever.
Don't forget all the mod chips which have to be hand inserted, plus the other stuff you'll end up having to do, the rackmounts (can get a rack cased PC prebuilt but not an XBox rackmount), etc etc
Did I say he was always working on IBM mainframes? He was mostly at (SPERRY (UNIVAC)|UNISYS) , I just happened to mention some IBM assembler at his current place, which may (or may not) be EBCDIC.
However, don't freakin' laugh. When he does retire, if things continue like they do, there will be no expert left on the old legacy system that has no chance in hell of being ported onto other technology. Too many lines of code, too many live objects (well disk space allocation units, because there aren't any "objects" ;-) and too many thousands of people's life insurance, pensions and investments all in that system (one of the top 3 insurance houses in the UK...)
So yes, they may be crazy old languages, but a lot of important shit still gets done with them, and nobody's converting it to C, C++, Java or anything else. Heck, my Dad even tried to get everything moved to an SGBD with SQL query access for a big data warehousing project that would aid migration to newer platforms further down the line, help reporting no end (right now reports are 128 column printed directly from COBOL reporting and print output routines), and allow central access to most data as quickly as you can say "SELECT ... FROM ... INNER JOIN a bit here and there"
He really knows his ASCII (even in HEX) and his memory allocation stuff though. The first machines he used were with boards he had to rewire and then punched cards with a 100 byte buffer! that he was really excited about.
What follows is a corrected version of the story that first ran on Sept. 26:
So not exactly news. I dare say Slashdot ran a story on Sep 26 about this too. Can't be bothered to check.
Whenever you have a huge subscriber base, you can bet your life that most of them will say stupid shit all the time, will expect you to support all the software they have, and try to get you to support their printer and scanner, for example:
"I can't use email, it's not working",
"Well - let me see... your POP mailbox is OK, that means I can see your email box is OK from here",
"No, I can't send...",
"Euh... OK our network monitor doesn't show any problems"
"Well when I hit send and receive it takes forever,"
"Is the bar moving?"
"Yes, but really slowly, your server is so slow,"
It starts to dawn on you
"Umm... is it a large email?"
"Just a photo I scanned..."
"What format did you use?"
"The default, TIFF"
"OK... sorry... you need to use smaller files"
Follows the client desperately trying to get you to tell them how to reduce images, how to scan, because they can only ever send the whole scan platter even if it's just a small photo because the autosizing got switched off.
This is just one example among many. Therefore, monkeys with scripts do tend to end up in support. Those "in the know" just never take calls, and support will not help with weird configs because they can't. Jeez, I'm not even sure some ISPs have competent techs. Certainly not in my experience. The good techs all go work as network managers in big companies, stuff like that. ISPs are no longer the artisans they once were, it's all industrialised bullshit. The killer is that most don't even maintain FAQs properly.
You're right... Nazi actually stood for national socialists. My mistake. Probably because of that nick GrammarNazi which is there hanging around in my subconscious.
Cheers,
You are wrong by 207 542 m/s which is quite a large margin for keeping the Slashdot correction nazis at bay.
If I could be bothered, I might even keep an 'interesting' log. But I can't. I could get modded 'interesting' though.
According to the article here the first fossils are from the later cretaceous period...
Class! I had this once, I was an addict, and good at about the first five levels. Then I lost interest, but now I can play it again!
Well how about superflat display, papersharp display, screen on a card, etc... especially in the UK, where "paper" is synonymous with newspaper, I would like to see a linguistic separation. But then, I'm just ranting, as I made perfectly clear.
MS Exchange is still hopeless compared to sendmail. Sendmail may have vulnerabilities, but Exchange just has performance issues and licensing costs that tip the scales. Exchange, in fact, suffers from too many features. It has also confused a reasonable proportion of the marketplace, who when asked to name a mail server, say "Exchange" first. I see too much corporate mail coming from Outlook/Exchange combos :'(
Whatever you say. I use Postfix myself...
These are displays, ultra thin, ultra flat, paperlike. However I suspect that the wood (more accurately cellulose?) content is minimal, and that it does not absorb water, cannot be written on with washable ink or pencils, and cannot be torn easily.
Surely someone can come up with something better than "electronic paper" anyway. People these buzzwords are designed for (those who don't understand, somehow, and have to have things dumbed down) end up just getting alienated anyway. It's MUCH clearer to say "the super flat paperlike thing that your TV will become" rather than saying electronic paper, which the average technophobe will just laugh at?
The memory stick RAID is even worse. With a lot of random access he's going to kill memory sticks pretty fast.
But at least he doesn't take himself too seriously, and has something of a style all to himself
Incidentally he got a whopping 115.2KB/s out of his raid array. I can dl off the Internet faster than that via my ADSL connection - I get peaks as high as 200KB/s -> Free DSLAM modems rule (French ISP).