It's probably just me, but I really don't understand the 'need' to 'smoke' another car at the stop lights !? What's the f-ing accomplishment here ????
I used to drive a red Citroen Xantia years ago, nothing spectacular (85Hp?) but could easily keep up with traffic and was a blast to cruise on the high-way; a shame they stopped producing it. Anyway, presumably because of its colour people 'like you' would come up next to me, try to impress I-don't-know-who by revving their engine and then burn away once the light turned green. Couple of hundred meters down the road they would start swerving as they were searching were my car could be assuming I was in their blind spot while in fact I probably only just had passed the crossroads while shifting to second and shaking my head.
How do you get any satisfaction out of the fact you 'can prove' you are driving something that can accelerate from this to that in just a couple seconds ? Is it some testosterone thing ? A difficult youth ? Never had the opportunity to accomplish anything real ? Let's be honest, all you did was push down a pedal and let the car do its work. Now, if you are the guy who designed/built that car THEN I can understand... but.... meh indeed.
I haven't read the reports / blogs / etc... yet, but I can come up with plenty of reasons to have a list of email addresses on my system. It might be I work for marketing and need to send out some kind of mailing. I bet there are many tools out there that will take simple text-files as input for the emails. Another reason might be that they were using the list to transfer data to some test-environment and rather extracted it once into a text-file and then many times into the dev-environments rather than doing some ETL from the live system over and over.... etc.. etc.. Assuming I had virtual dropbox space (and a LAN connection to the server), I too would have EVERYTHING I work on in my dropbox enabled folders.
I actually have 2 old A4000's in a closet somewhere that I've been willing to revive but have been postponing because I'm not sure I have a monitor that can handle the signal, plus I very much doubt the disks will spin up anyway : they've not been powered since the year 2000. That said, the longer I keep putting this off, the bigger the chances I'll never get to my (then) beloved.mod collection / Fidonet archive.
I've been holding some 1.2 GB disks in storage in the hope they'll be recognized by the A4000 and actually hope to copy the data from the old disks (200Mb-ish) to the new disks. I'm a bit wary about doing so on the Amiga directly fearing that any malfunction on behalf of the disk might fry the motherboard/disk controller of the Amiga.
The most logical approach thus seems to be to start up my old trusted PIII and do the operation on that one. The question that comes to mind is though : what software is out there that can reliably copy a FFS partition from one drive to a (much larger) drive ? From what I've read ( http://linux.about.com/od/fsy_howto/a/hwtfsy10t02.htm ) Linux can do R/W on FFS partitions so in theory simply installing Ubuntu should do, but I'm wondering if anyone has ever done this and if so, how well does it handle (potentially) corrupted data ? Maybe I should start out with ddrescue ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Data_recovery ) to create a file-image and see how far I can get using the tips found in this topic... and worry about getting it actual use later on... (I should have my Workbench disks around somewhere (if readable!) and could probably simply re-install the OS on the 'new' disks and then copy everything across from the PIII (linux) to the Amiga using some ArcNet cards I have... again, if they still work... lot's of if's here =P
Actually, you CAN change your face... you just probably don't want too. But say that you happen to have an accident and it caused irreversible damage to your face, would that than also mean you no longer can open any locked files on your computer ? Sounds like we'll always need a back-door somehow to catch those situations... but OTOH we started using biometrics to close that back-door in the first place.... (disclaimer, I did not read the article)
On a side note, every time I see something about biometrics come by I have to think about GATTACA (great movie btw) and how 'easily' the protagonist circumvented those biometric checks only to have been 'discovered' all along because he peed using the wrong hand.
Personally I have a 2"5 500Gb external disk that I use to do the occasional stuff that won't fit on the internal disk (database stuff mostly). Thanks to the eSATA connection it's just as fast as the internal one although I admit the cabling is a bit annoying to set up as it needs a 'dummy' USB connection for power although both my laptop and the external casing claim they support powering the drive over the eSATA. That said, my previous laptop didn't have eSATA and although USB 2.0 indeed is slower it still is very workable!
If you want something a bit more 'practical' (e.g. watching a movie on the train/plane/...) : get a 32 or 64Gb USB stick and you're set...
Actually, I'm not entirely sure about this. => Isn't a (war)ship 'by law' an extension of the country whose flag it flies ? (bit similar to e.g. an embassy)
As counter-everything as it may sound there have been 'stories' around that come down to the fact that the burglar outranks you in terms of 'rights'. Although I'm sure some of those are simply sensationalism, given their sheer number there (probably) is some truth in them. * burglar hurts himself while robbing your house => owner gets sued for neglect & involuntary injuries. * burglar threatens family, shop-owner shoots first => shop-owner gets arrested for manslaughter * people now actively seek advice on whether they should get some insurance for the situation where the dog might hurt someone breaking in !?! * etc etc... (simply google for 'burglar sues' and there's plenty of examples)
I consider myself rather non-extremist, but going by supra I often think it wouldn't be all that bad to abandon all current law and start over again because current legislation has missed the mark by quite a distance. Sadly the 'new' law would probably be written entirely by big corp (cf the golden rule : he who owns the gold rules) and 'stealing' music would get you life while stealing someone's phone actually would be good for the economy as the victim will have to buy a new one.
[man, Monday 10:05 and I'm already cynical... it's going to be a hard week...]
You're missing the ball here on several points : * In the real world a Momentus XT 500 Gb will easily outperform a normal HDD. I have one, I can compare with identical machines running identical software. I'm sure that for users that limit their use to mail/browsing/media-playing the difference will be astounding. (**) * For all I care, a 4-8Gb of Linux cache may be gigantically smarter than the one implemented by Seagate; in practice it's still connected to the pc/laptop by means of a (slow) network connection instead of a SATA connection. * The bytes you store on the file-server are most likely going to be data, not programs etc. The hybrid disks aim at speeding up programs, not data.
I do agree that a 120-250Gb SSD will easily outperform the Momentus XT, but you'd have to trade in a lot of space for the extra speed and be willing to pay the higher price tag too.
(**: Personally I use way too much and too large programs to make even a fraction of it fit in the SSD cache but the effect is still noticeable)
My dad's PC had this, although apparently the creators didn't do their homework very well. Belgium having 2 (main) languages the scareware used the wrong language for this part of the country so he hardly understood what needed doing (not everybody speaks both languages). Off course the police logo etc made it look kind of daunting and -although it started up ridiculously slow- once it took over the pc became completely unusable.
It was rather easy to get rid of (safe mode, regedit, hijack-this and then a full scan with Security Essentials -which seemingly had missed it originally!)
The part I don't get is : how do the scammers get to their money (assuming some people are silly enough to pay) without the possibility of being traced back ? => shouldn't there be ridiculously easy traces to follow via paysafecard.com ?? => worst case it should be easy enough to have these -at least!- blocked
And no, I don't think its unrealistic to have a parent or other guardian (babysitter, responsible older sibling, etc) keeping an eye on your kid at all times, online or offline.
Welcome to the real world Neo, it simply isn't. That said, it's not for lack of wanting or trying, it's a simple fact of only having two eyes/ears/hands... Try preparing a meal (no kids allowed near the hot stuff) and keeping an eye on them playing in the garden. Regardless of the big window they still manage to end up bruised etc in that time frame. And that's OK. So far the worst we've had was having to take the eldest to the hospital once because she bumped her head rather hard and appeared a bit confused an hour later (false alarm in retrospect) and that was with me and my wife standing about 3m further on; you simply can't save them each time; Murphy I guess.
I'll try to give them as much (controlled) leeway as possible
The controlled there was implied 'by me' indeed; I wouldn't dream of leaving them unsupervised (by me) in a mall... it probably will end up OK, but just maybe I'd have to max out my credit-card in damages =P
having some backup-systems at hand that help me out when I'm not there surely is a good thing!
It surely is, up until it starts impeding my life. Children would be a lot safer if the speed limit around the world was 5mph too. But much as we all like to think of the children, there comes a point where your desire to let your kid run around the yard unsupervised (risking an unnoticed trip into the street) starts impacting my desire to get where I'm going in a reasonable amount of time
Hence my push for 'optional', preferably opt-in. Having an option that helps me here is just as useful as that cap on the bottle of bleach. Sure it is stored away in such a way that they can't get to it easily but I have no hope that they never will. They know they should steer clear of those things too; I'm actually pretty sure I managed to convey the reasons why they shouldn't touch it and most probably they never will... but again having 100% confidence in that would be stupid. IF it ever comes to it I just hope that safety-cap will stop them just a bit longer; long enough for someone else to interfere or them to lose interest. Anyway, as for the 5mph-everywhere comparison. I don't have a wall around my garden and in theory they could wander of onto the street. In this case I'm quite certain I did a good job teaching them not to. It's quite simple : back of house = good, front of house = bad. That said, in the case of clicking stuff on a website like wikipedia things are A LOT more complicated. Worse, it's quite easy to stumble on things unwantedwithout much warning; the search on wikipedia for toothbrush pictures as mentioned above comes to mind but I'll agree I still need to hit anything worth worrying about on that site and I've been using it quite often. But as unlikely as it is, it's bound to happen someday that clicking on [Random Page] will end up on goatse or whatever. Having that 'NSFW' option might prevent that. I don't see how me using it would deteriorate your experience ?
PS: I can see a LOT of discussion coming up on which pages should be NSFW and which not, cultural differences et all, but what should someone who doesn't use the option anyway care ? Has the internet become a worse place for you because some people installed NetNanny ?
And there's the meat of it. You want to give your kid the internet, but you don't trust him (rightfully so) to judge content.. but you also can't be bothered to do it yourself. So you want everyone else on the internet to spend their time and resources essentially babysitting your kid for you.
If I'm going to sit next to my kids 24/7 to make sure they don't 'do' anything out of order I'm most certainly NOT helping them grow up into healthy individuals ! What you are suggesting is that we should remove the child-locks from our cars or heck any type of device that's meant to keep children from doing something (eg. that annoying cap on the bottle of bleach) because -according to your unrealistic vision- parents should be able to just be there, all the time.
Probably having more practical experience with the subject, children
* need at least SOME time on their own and enough freedom in that time to discover their world
* sometimes make bad decisions regardless of how many times you warned them before
In practice this means I'll try to give them as much (controlled) leeway as possible by trying to offer them a world where they can stroll around safely on their own. I know upfront I'll fail doing so at some point, I can only hope that they've either built up enough experience by the time to be able to cope with it and/or that we as parents have prepared them sufficiently to do so. 'Being there' and 'explaining things' are important but having some backup-systems at hand that help me out when I'm not there surely is a good thing!
with evidence of sexual activity that was unusual at the time.
Probably due to the ubiquity of all-things-sex on the internet (and in media in general) we seem to have shifted our view on 'unusual'. While at the time oral sex might have been 'outlandish' it now seems that gang-banging is getting the norm.
As for the discussion in general here, I too wouldn't mind having an OPTIONAL filter that blocks out the 'worst parts'; then again I'd be more in favor of a 'slider' where one could 'introduce'' kids to 'reality' in little steps... I don't mind them seeing nude, male or female; really can't see what's wrong with that. Given their age (4&7) I'd rather not have them see people 'doing it' yet and I'd really, really, reaaallyy not expose them to weird kinds of sex until they are well past 15 and have built up a firm scale of values.
IMHO it would be very wrong to go back to Victorian Times, but the current situation leaves me wondering too...
Man, I read your first line as 'the little buggers' = the school-children... as apparently the UK has a bit of a problem with pupils skipping school. That made reading the second line kind of weird !
Ah, you're missing the big picture : thanks to the power of google's MapReduce algorithms those 100 teachers can easily spread the (home) work over those 4000-ish schools !
Weird. Mine came with a WD Black 320Gb, works as expected.
I might be biased as I've had mostly good experiences with Dell in the past 15 years and as such never really looked at other brands. It works, it's not (too) pricey and -holding wood- support has been 'decent' so far. (It has come down A LOT though compared with 10 years ago.. they force you to go through a checklist even though you already tried all those things they want you to do again. So far I've had a defective screen replaced once and a keyboard with a sticky key, not too bad given the time-span and wear & tear I put these things through)
I'll agree they might not be the best when it comes to drivers : at times installing the reference drivers actually makes things faster compared to their 'optimized' drivers. And to add insult to injury, the website to download updated drivers is far from user-friendly : they track all kinds of stuff, why can't they simply tell me which versions I've already downloaded/installed and which not ? Using their current system I usually have to download them all again only to notice I had done so in the past already...
That said, being 'the IT-guy' in the family I've had to "fix" all kinds of laptops (Acer, MSI, Medion,...) and as far as ease of servicing goes Dell wins out from all them : they've got nicely documented (dis)assembly-manuals on-line and simply are well thought through build-wise. (Medion is spectacular as far as cramming everything together in the smallest box possible, but they use eleventy billion screws to keep it all together =)
And while complaining : if any laptop-engineer ever reads this, please, Please, PLEASE design a frame where one can easily access the space between the fan and the heat-sink; a simple trapdoor should do I guess. In 90% of the cases where people complained about their computer being slow or crashing randomly this space was completely clogged up; causing overheating and panicky CPU's. In ALL machines I've worked on it requires a complete disassembly of the machine to get there ! Why ?!?
To be entirely honest, I feared my latest 'upgrade' for the very same reason. I have a bit of say in what I want in a laptop, but in the end internal-IT decides what machines are bought. In our case it was a crate of Dell E6520's which come with an embedded numeric keypad. Took me about a week to get used to and actually enjoy the fact it has this keypad whenever I have to do things like home-banking, excel-inputting, etc... The fact my hands are now slightly off-centre to the left of the body of the laptop really isn't all that bad.
That said, the locations of the Home/End/Insert/Delete are just atrocious. There really is no getting used to it, I've worked daily with this machine the past 10 months and still I can't reliably use them without actually looking. On top of that the PgUp & PgDown keys have been placed adjacent to the arrows causing me to jump up and down code/documents/.. in the most unpleasant ways =(
Maybe this is only for the UK-QWERTY versions, dunno...
Conclusion : never mind the 'off-centre' effect, it's not as bad as you think it is; just pay attention to the location of the rest of the 'extra keys'.
Otherwise I'm quite happy with this machine... really =)
PS: Another weird thing about this keyboard is that it has no 'context-menu' key, luckily shift-F10 works in most of the cases in windows. PS: And really, how hard would it have been to have a Num-Lock indicator ?
I'm not arguing with anything of that, on the contrary.
I was merely replying to the statement saying:
"If you can remember enough to reproduce every step of someone else's work without referring to the original paper, but can't remember the paper you read it in, then you've got a very unusual mind."
Maybe I read to much in it, or took it a bit too far out of context; but methodology != mind.
Weird. I'd rather think that if you can remember the source of everything you know YOU got a very unusual mind.
In my case I tend to remember the gist of things, usually just enough to (somewhat) reconstruct the entire subject, but fluff like where it came from, who wrote it, what form or language it was in etc. gets filtered out over time... That said, sometimes I can link two items knowing they came from the same source but I'd still have no clue what that source might have been...
YMMV, but I'd be careful about generalising how peoples mind work and/or how they use it.
I remember copying files from one laptop to another via the IR ports. There was an option in the BIOS (Dell) to chose between 'Normal IR' and 'Fast IR' and the latter gave something like 6Mbit I seem to remember, not sure, but it surely was fast enough to copy setups and iso's etc. Sure we were not allowed to move the laptops around in the meanwhile, but copying things was much faster over that link than using the 10Mbit network that was shared with the entire floor. Eventually we found out about using a direct FireWire connection whenever we need to transfer large stuff and didn't want to hog the network; used to be the fastest link one could think of between 2 computers until 1Gbps Ethernet came out... In fact, I still use it [FireWire] for that very purpose from time to time as it doesn't require me to modify the Ethernet adapter settings (fixed IP etc) when I want to do poin-to-point
Although I like all of those, I doubt a 3-year old will get much out of it. In fact, my 6-year old daughter who has always been very interested in books and has gotten quite proficient in reading since last summer has picked up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jommeke and is going through them all in a remarkable pace... From the article there are some 'failed attempts' at official translations, although I seem to remember some remarks about fan-translated versions in.cbr format somewhere... (from a a friend, who heard it from another friend who...).
I have no issues with my kids reading comics, I've read thousands of them when I grew up, but at 3 years (= my youngest daughter's age) I'd stick to story-telling books and/or picture books. Comics simply don't have the right text/picture ratio for that age. (IMHO & Experience). Also, at that age they rather read (or have read) the same story 100x over than being offered a bunch of new stories to digest every week.
PS: another 'under-appreciated' series IMHO : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Tuniques_Bleues (again, English translations might be hard to get by), always got my mood up when I was a teenager.
PPS: while at it : my all-time favourite remains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tsuno, I can read & re-read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Forge_de_Vulcain over and over again and it never gets boring. Something which is true for most of the books involving the Vineans; those not involving Vinea are a bit of a mixed bag but still well worth reading !
Also, they differ A LOT for everyone, so yes, they might just be made up. We tested once at work who would get the most hits for 5 'common' search words. Not sure who won, but none of us had the same amount of results for any of the searches, sometimes the difference would be staggering. That was while doing those searches quasi simultaneous and from the same LAN.
In my experience, CFL's cost a lot less, but you need to replace much more often than anticipated.
I'm guessing this is not because of the number of hours they're supposed to last, but rather a 'side-effect' of the limited times of on/off switching they can deal with. In a living room they'll probably get switched on/off twice a day on average, but in the hall for instance -where individuals tend to only have the light on while passing through (eg. to the toilet)- they probably get switched on/off well over 5 times a day. After roughly 3 years this amounts to ca over 5000 cycles at which point the electronics seem to give in =(
As a result I now only pay attention to this specification [number of cycles] (if mentioned on the box) and simply ignore the 'lasts 8 years' balloons printed on their box. Coming back to the 60$ lamp, assuming I need to replace CFL every 4 years (optimistic), the price of the 5 CFL's comes pretty close to the price of this LED bulb. Adding the savings from the improved efficiency should make the balance tip in favor of the 'expensive' LED bulb.
PS: Off course, maybe we'll have OLED wallpaper 'next year' which is 95% efficient and super-cheap.
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Doesn't ammo expire and/or become 'less trustworthy' over time ?
It's probably just me, but I really don't understand the 'need' to 'smoke' another car at the stop lights !? What's the f-ing accomplishment here ????
I used to drive a red Citroen Xantia years ago, nothing spectacular (85Hp?) but could easily keep up with traffic and was a blast to cruise on the high-way; a shame they stopped producing it. Anyway, presumably because of its colour people 'like you' would come up next to me, try to impress I-don't-know-who by revving their engine and then burn away once the light turned green. Couple of hundred meters down the road they would start swerving as they were searching were my car could be assuming I was in their blind spot while in fact I probably only just had passed the crossroads while shifting to second and shaking my head.
How do you get any satisfaction out of the fact you 'can prove' you are driving something that can accelerate from this to that in just a couple seconds ? Is it some testosterone thing ? A difficult youth ? Never had the opportunity to accomplish anything real ? Let's be honest, all you did was push down a pedal and let the car do its work. Now, if you are the guy who designed/built that car THEN I can understand... but.... meh indeed.
I haven't read the reports / blogs / etc... yet, but I can come up with plenty of reasons to have a list of email addresses on my system. It might be I work for marketing and need to send out some kind of mailing. I bet there are many tools out there that will take simple text-files as input for the emails. Another reason might be that they were using the list to transfer data to some test-environment and rather extracted it once into a text-file and then many times into the dev-environments rather than doing some ETL from the live system over and over.... etc.. etc..
Assuming I had virtual dropbox space (and a LAN connection to the server), I too would have EVERYTHING I work on in my dropbox enabled folders.
I actually have 2 old A4000's in a closet somewhere that I've been willing to revive but have been postponing because I'm not sure I have a monitor that can handle the signal, plus I very much doubt the disks will spin up anyway : they've not been powered since the year 2000. That said, the longer I keep putting this off, the bigger the chances I'll never get to my (then) beloved .mod collection / Fidonet archive.
I've been holding some 1.2 GB disks in storage in the hope they'll be recognized by the A4000 and actually hope to copy the data from the old disks (200Mb-ish) to the new disks. I'm a bit wary about doing so on the Amiga directly fearing that any malfunction on behalf of the disk might fry the motherboard/disk controller of the Amiga.
The most logical approach thus seems to be to start up my old trusted PIII and do the operation on that one. The question that comes to mind is though : what software is out there that can reliably copy a FFS partition from one drive to a (much larger) drive ? From what I've read ( http://linux.about.com/od/fsy_howto/a/hwtfsy10t02.htm ) Linux can do R/W on FFS partitions so in theory simply installing Ubuntu should do, but I'm wondering if anyone has ever done this and if so, how well does it handle (potentially) corrupted data ? Maybe I should start out with ddrescue ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Data_recovery ) to create a file-image and see how far I can get using the tips found in this topic... and worry about getting it actual use later on... (I should have my Workbench disks around somewhere (if readable!) and could probably simply re-install the OS on the 'new' disks and then copy everything across from the PIII (linux) to the Amiga using some ArcNet cards I have... again, if they still work ... lot's of if's here =P
Actually, you CAN change your face... you just probably don't want too. ....
But say that you happen to have an accident and it caused irreversible damage to your face, would that than also mean you no longer can open any locked files on your computer ?
Sounds like we'll always need a back-door somehow to catch those situations... but OTOH we started using biometrics to close that back-door in the first place
(disclaimer, I did not read the article)
On a side note, every time I see something about biometrics come by I have to think about GATTACA (great movie btw) and how 'easily' the protagonist circumvented those biometric checks only to have been 'discovered' all along because he peed using the wrong hand.
Personally I have a 2"5 500Gb external disk that I use to do the occasional stuff that won't fit on the internal disk (database stuff mostly). Thanks to the eSATA connection it's just as fast as the internal one although I admit the cabling is a bit annoying to set up as it needs a 'dummy' USB connection for power although both my laptop and the external casing claim they support powering the drive over the eSATA.
That said, my previous laptop didn't have eSATA and although USB 2.0 indeed is slower it still is very workable!
If you want something a bit more 'practical' (e.g. watching a movie on the train/plane/...) : get a 32 or 64Gb USB stick and you're set...
Actually, I'm not entirely sure about this.
=> Isn't a (war)ship 'by law' an extension of the country whose flag it flies ? (bit similar to e.g. an embassy)
Update : well, seems wikipedia already debunked my 'knowledge' about embassies : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy#Extraterritoriality
Update : wikipedia does brush the possibility of 'ships in foreign waters' though : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritoriality
Clicking further through the information quickly brings me in the 'looks boring' sections of wikipedia ...
As counter-everything as it may sound there have been 'stories' around that come down to the fact that the burglar outranks you in terms of 'rights'. Although I'm sure some of those are simply sensationalism, given their sheer number there (probably) is some truth in them.
* burglar hurts himself while robbing your house => owner gets sued for neglect & involuntary injuries.
* burglar threatens family, shop-owner shoots first => shop-owner gets arrested for manslaughter
* people now actively seek advice on whether they should get some insurance for the situation where the dog might hurt someone breaking in !?!
* etc etc...
(simply google for 'burglar sues' and there's plenty of examples)
I consider myself rather non-extremist, but going by supra I often think it wouldn't be all that bad to abandon all current law and start over again because current legislation has missed the mark by quite a distance. Sadly the 'new' law would probably be written entirely by big corp (cf the golden rule : he who owns the gold rules) and 'stealing' music would get you life while stealing someone's phone actually would be good for the economy as the victim will have to buy a new one.
[man, Monday 10:05 and I'm already cynical... it's going to be a hard week...]
You're missing the ball here on several points :
* In the real world a Momentus XT 500 Gb will easily outperform a normal HDD. I have one, I can compare with identical machines running identical software. I'm sure that for users that limit their use to mail/browsing/media-playing the difference will be astounding. (**)
* For all I care, a 4-8Gb of Linux cache may be gigantically smarter than the one implemented by Seagate; in practice it's still connected to the pc/laptop by means of a (slow) network connection instead of a SATA connection.
* The bytes you store on the file-server are most likely going to be data, not programs etc. The hybrid disks aim at speeding up programs, not data.
I do agree that a 120-250Gb SSD will easily outperform the Momentus XT, but you'd have to trade in a lot of space for the extra speed and be willing to pay the higher price tag too.
(**: Personally I use way too much and too large programs to make even a fraction of it fit in the SSD cache but the effect is still noticeable)
PS: I had one of the drives that came with firmware SD 26 which (IMHO) had the cache completely disabled! (See my post on http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Momentus-XT-Momentus-Momentus/ANNOUNCEMENT-Firmware-SD28-Now-Available/td-p/122074/page/4 ) Only for that I should be advising everybody to NOT buy Seagate drives. Sadly though they are the only company to sell hybrid drives and I DO think the technology works as advertised.
My dad's PC had this, although apparently the creators didn't do their homework very well. Belgium having 2 (main) languages the scareware used the wrong language for this part of the country so he hardly understood what needed doing (not everybody speaks both languages). Off course the police logo etc made it look kind of daunting and -although it started up ridiculously slow- once it took over the pc became completely unusable.
It was rather easy to get rid of (safe mode, regedit, hijack-this and then a full scan with Security Essentials -which seemingly had missed it originally!)
The part I don't get is : how do the scammers get to their money (assuming some people are silly enough to pay) without the possibility of being traced back ?
=> shouldn't there be ridiculously easy traces to follow via paysafecard.com ??
=> worst case it should be easy enough to have these -at least!- blocked
Hi again,
And no, I don't think its unrealistic to have a parent or other guardian (babysitter, responsible older sibling, etc) keeping an eye on your kid at all times, online or offline.
Welcome to the real world Neo, it simply isn't. That said, it's not for lack of wanting or trying, it's a simple fact of only having two eyes/ears/hands... Try preparing a meal (no kids allowed near the hot stuff) and keeping an eye on them playing in the garden. Regardless of the big window they still manage to end up bruised etc in that time frame. And that's OK.
So far the worst we've had was having to take the eldest to the hospital once because she bumped her head rather hard and appeared a bit confused an hour later (false alarm in retrospect) and that was with me and my wife standing about 3m further on; you simply can't save them each time; Murphy I guess.
I'll try to give them as much (controlled) leeway as possible
The controlled there was implied 'by me' indeed; I wouldn't dream of leaving them unsupervised (by me) in a mall ... it probably will end up OK, but just maybe I'd have to max out my credit-card in damages =P
Hence my push for 'optional', preferably opt-in. Having an option that helps me here is just as useful as that cap on the bottle of bleach. Sure it is stored away in such a way that they can't get to it easily but I have no hope that they never will. They know they should steer clear of those things too; I'm actually pretty sure I managed to convey the reasons why they shouldn't touch it and most probably they never will... but again having 100% confidence in that would be stupid. IF it ever comes to it I just hope that safety-cap will stop them just a bit longer; long enough for someone else to interfere or them to lose interest.
Anyway, as for the 5mph-everywhere comparison. I don't have a wall around my garden and in theory they could wander of onto the street. In this case I'm quite certain I did a good job teaching them not to. It's quite simple : back of house = good, front of house = bad. That said, in the case of clicking stuff on a website like wikipedia things are A LOT more complicated. Worse, it's quite easy to stumble on things unwanted without much warning; the search on wikipedia for toothbrush pictures as mentioned above comes to mind but I'll agree I still need to hit anything worth worrying about on that site and I've been using it quite often. But as unlikely as it is, it's bound to happen someday that clicking on [Random Page] will end up on goatse or whatever. Having that 'NSFW' option might prevent that. I don't see how me using it would deteriorate your experience ?
PS: I can see a LOT of discussion coming up on which pages should be NSFW and which not, cultural differences et all, but what should someone who doesn't use the option anyway care ? Has the internet become a worse place for you because some people installed NetNanny ?
Bullshit.
And there's the meat of it. You want to give your kid the internet, but you don't trust him (rightfully so) to judge content.. but you also can't be bothered to do it yourself. So you want everyone else on the internet to spend their time and resources essentially babysitting your kid for you.
If I'm going to sit next to my kids 24/7 to make sure they don't 'do' anything out of order I'm most certainly NOT helping them grow up into healthy individuals !
What you are suggesting is that we should remove the child-locks from our cars or heck any type of device that's meant to keep children from doing something (eg. that annoying cap on the bottle of bleach) because -according to your unrealistic vision- parents should be able to just be there, all the time.
Probably having more practical experience with the subject, children
* need at least SOME time on their own and enough freedom in that time to discover their world
* sometimes make bad decisions regardless of how many times you warned them before
In practice this means I'll try to give them as much (controlled) leeway as possible by trying to offer them a world where they can stroll around safely on their own. I know upfront I'll fail doing so at some point, I can only hope that they've either built up enough experience by the time to be able to cope with it and/or that we as parents have prepared them sufficiently to do so. 'Being there' and 'explaining things' are important but having some backup-systems at hand that help me out when I'm not there surely is a good thing!
Actually pretty interesting what you say there :
Probably due to the ubiquity of all-things-sex on the internet (and in media in general) we seem to have shifted our view on 'unusual'.
While at the time oral sex might have been 'outlandish' it now seems that gang-banging is getting the norm.
I can remember being curious about boobs & stuff starting at the age of 10 or so [those 3 decades ago] and yes I (and pretty much everyone around me I guess) would find a way to get that knowledge out of the 'theory only world' by the age of say 15. Nowadays I hear/read of scouts-camps that get canceled because the 10-years created a (slightly) burned situation ( random related article : http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=DMF20110716_002 ); about boys that stalk a girl in the park and all rape her just for fun ( random related article : http://www.gva.be/nieuws/buitenland/aid916673/vijf-jongeren-opgepakt-na-groepsverkrachting-7-jarig-meisje.aspx ), etc...
As for the discussion in general here, I too wouldn't mind having an OPTIONAL filter that blocks out the 'worst parts'; then again I'd be more in favor of a 'slider' where one could 'introduce'' kids to 'reality' in little steps... I don't mind them seeing nude, male or female; really can't see what's wrong with that. Given their age (4&7) I'd rather not have them see people 'doing it' yet and I'd really, really, reaaallyy not expose them to weird kinds of sex until they are well past 15 and have built up a firm scale of values.
IMHO it would be very wrong to go back to Victorian Times, but the current situation leaves me wondering too...
Man, I read your first line as 'the little buggers' = the school-children ... as apparently the UK has a bit of a problem with pupils skipping school.
That made reading the second line kind of weird !
Ah, you're missing the big picture : thanks to the power of google's MapReduce algorithms those 100 teachers can easily spread the (home) work over those 4000-ish schools !
(I know, I know...)
Maybe because when put elsewhere the engines would fry some other part of the 'package' ?
Weird. Mine came with a WD Black 320Gb, works as expected.
I might be biased as I've had mostly good experiences with Dell in the past 15 years and as such never really looked at other brands. It works, it's not (too) pricey and -holding wood- support has been 'decent' so far. (It has come down A LOT though compared with 10 years ago.. they force you to go through a checklist even though you already tried all those things they want you to do again. So far I've had a defective screen replaced once and a keyboard with a sticky key, not too bad given the time-span and wear & tear I put these things through)
I'll agree they might not be the best when it comes to drivers : at times installing the reference drivers actually makes things faster compared to their 'optimized' drivers. And to add insult to injury, the website to download updated drivers is far from user-friendly : they track all kinds of stuff, why can't they simply tell me which versions I've already downloaded/installed and which not ? Using their current system I usually have to download them all again only to notice I had done so in the past already...
That said, being 'the IT-guy' in the family I've had to "fix" all kinds of laptops (Acer, MSI, Medion, ...) and as far as ease of servicing goes Dell wins out from all them : they've got nicely documented (dis)assembly-manuals on-line and simply are well thought through build-wise. (Medion is spectacular as far as cramming everything together in the smallest box possible, but they use eleventy billion screws to keep it all together =)
And while complaining : if any laptop-engineer ever reads this, please, Please, PLEASE design a frame where one can easily access the space between the fan and the heat-sink; a simple trapdoor should do I guess. In 90% of the cases where people complained about their computer being slow or crashing randomly this space was completely clogged up; causing overheating and panicky CPU's. In ALL machines I've worked on it requires a complete disassembly of the machine to get there ! Why ?!?
To be entirely honest, I feared my latest 'upgrade' for the very same reason. I have a bit of say in what I want in a laptop, but in the end internal-IT decides what machines are bought. In our case it was a crate of Dell E6520's which come with an embedded numeric keypad.
Took me about a week to get used to and actually enjoy the fact it has this keypad whenever I have to do things like home-banking, excel-inputting, etc... The fact my hands are now slightly off-centre to the left of the body of the laptop really isn't all that bad.
That said, the locations of the Home/End/Insert/Delete are just atrocious. There really is no getting used to it, I've worked daily with this machine the past 10 months and still I can't reliably use them without actually looking. On top of that the PgUp & PgDown keys have been placed adjacent to the arrows causing me to jump up and down code/documents/.. in the most unpleasant ways =(
Maybe this is only for the UK-QWERTY versions, dunno...
Conclusion : never mind the 'off-centre' effect, it's not as bad as you think it is; just pay attention to the location of the rest of the 'extra keys'.
Otherwise I'm quite happy with this machine... really =)
PS: Another weird thing about this keyboard is that it has no 'context-menu' key, luckily shift-F10 works in most of the cases in windows.
PS: And really, how hard would it have been to have a Num-Lock indicator ?
I'm not arguing with anything of that, on the contrary.
I was merely replying to the statement saying :
Maybe I read to much in it, or took it a bit too far out of context; but methodology != mind.
Weird.
I'd rather think that if you can remember the source of everything you know YOU got a very unusual mind.
In my case I tend to remember the gist of things, usually just enough to (somewhat) reconstruct the entire subject, but fluff like where it came from, who wrote it, what form or language it was in etc. gets filtered out over time... That said, sometimes I can link two items knowing they came from the same source but I'd still have no clue what that source might have been...
YMMV, but I'd be careful about generalising how peoples mind work and/or how they use it.
I remember copying files from one laptop to another via the IR ports. There was an option in the BIOS (Dell) to chose between 'Normal IR' and 'Fast IR' and the latter gave something like 6Mbit I seem to remember, not sure, but it surely was fast enough to copy setups and iso's etc. Sure we were not allowed to move the laptops around in the meanwhile, but copying things was much faster over that link than using the 10Mbit network that was shared with the entire floor.
Eventually we found out about using a direct FireWire connection whenever we need to transfer large stuff and didn't want to hog the network; used to be the fastest link one could think of between 2 computers until 1Gbps Ethernet came out... In fact, I still use it [FireWire] for that very purpose from time to time as it doesn't require me to modify the Ethernet adapter settings (fixed IP etc) when I want to do poin-to-point
Although I like all of those, I doubt a 3-year old will get much out of it. .cbr format somewhere... (from a a friend, who heard it from another friend who ...).
In fact, my 6-year old daughter who has always been very interested in books and has gotten quite proficient in reading since last summer has picked up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jommeke and is going through them all in a remarkable pace...
From the article there are some 'failed attempts' at official translations, although I seem to remember some remarks about fan-translated versions in
I have no issues with my kids reading comics, I've read thousands of them when I grew up, but at 3 years (= my youngest daughter's age) I'd stick to story-telling books and/or picture books. Comics simply don't have the right text/picture ratio for that age. (IMHO & Experience). Also, at that age they rather read (or have read) the same story 100x over than being offered a bunch of new stories to digest every week.
PS: another 'under-appreciated' series IMHO : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Tuniques_Bleues (again, English translations might be hard to get by), always got my mood up when I was a teenager.
PPS: while at it : my all-time favourite remains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tsuno, I can read & re-read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Forge_de_Vulcain over and over again and it never gets boring. Something which is true for most of the books involving the Vineans; those not involving Vinea are a bit of a mixed bag but still well worth reading !
Also, they differ A LOT for everyone, so yes, they might just be made up.
We tested once at work who would get the most hits for 5 'common' search words. Not sure who won, but none of us had the same amount of results for any of the searches, sometimes the difference would be staggering. That was while doing those searches quasi simultaneous and from the same LAN.
In my experience, CFL's cost a lot less, but you need to replace much more often than anticipated.
I'm guessing this is not because of the number of hours they're supposed to last, but rather a 'side-effect' of the limited times of on/off switching they can deal with.
In a living room they'll probably get switched on/off twice a day on average, but in the hall for instance -where individuals tend to only have the light on while passing through (eg. to the toilet)- they probably get switched on/off well over 5 times a day. After roughly 3 years this amounts to ca over 5000 cycles at which point the electronics seem to give in =(
As a result I now only pay attention to this specification [number of cycles] (if mentioned on the box) and simply ignore the 'lasts 8 years' balloons printed on their box.
Coming back to the 60$ lamp, assuming I need to replace CFL every 4 years (optimistic), the price of the 5 CFL's comes pretty close to the price of this LED bulb. Adding the savings from the improved efficiency should make the balance tip in favor of the 'expensive' LED bulb.
PS: Off course, maybe we'll have OLED wallpaper 'next year' which is 95% efficient and super-cheap.
...or, IMHO, some people have such egos that they don't realize how utterly invaluable their data is.
(if 'the man' wants to 'catch' you, it's probably a lot easier for them to simply make up some bogus info rather than going after your smartphone)