"Installing Vista Beta 2 was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered."
and NOT
"for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered."
This is intentionally misleading at best, and arguably litigious in nature at worst.
He is implying the Operatign System Experience was the worst, when it applies only to an installation - which, on a laptop for a beta OS is hardly rocket surgery to figure out is going to be a problem.
Frankly, the article seems like shit to me: written by a moron, no details provided, except that he owns two useless other laptops. He even sounds surprised that formatting C: and then installing windows from scratch "removed every device driver that I needed to run the laptop" OMG - LOL - PONIES! Is this guy for real?
Why the fuck didn't you install the drivers from the CD-ROM that came with the laptop? Or more importantly, why did you not back them up at some stage during your ownership of the device?
He then bitches that built in (proprietary) audio didn't work and he has an ADD-IN WiFi PCMCIA card which also doesn't work! SHOCK HORROR: I bet it wouldn't work when you installed Windows XP either - fuck-knuckle! That is why device manufacturers include a DRIVER DISK when you buy a product!
How the fuck did this article end up published on/. ?
What I'm saying, is that if intelligent alien life ever gets to see American Idol, then they most DEFINITELY will come here to wipe us out, because we obviously need to be put out of our misery.
Kinda like shooting a lame horse. Or putting down a sick dog.
That limit is 6 solar masses. Think about it: 6 times the mass of our sun. Made of rocks.
Why the limit? Because that is the mass of an object, after which it will collapse in on itself to form a black hole. I don't know enough of the science to be able to state at what point the center of the planet begins to form neutronium, but the surface at least, will remain rocky, until the object does completely collapse.
Rocky is just "rocks" and rocks are happy to sit in a very high level of gravity. Your 5 solar mass rocky world might have mountains that reach as high as 3 or even 4 millimetres, and fantastically deep trenches up to 2 mm deep might form during "earthquakes".
The only questions in my mind are:
1) How long after the thing stops accreting material does it take to form a rocky surface?
2) What is the surface gravity of a 5 solar mass rocky world?
3) At what point does the interior begin to form Neutronium.
I always have to laugh whenever someone says somehting along the lines of "A single Shuttle launch could feed a million people for a year."
My answer: yeah - if you could get them all to the Cape, and have them all eat Aluminum and LH2 and LOX!
You need to understand that governments do NOT work on the principle of monetary equity: if they saved 500 Million dollars here, NO ONE says "OH, that means we can send 500 Million to the staving people in _________ (place country name here)!"
There is no political will in any nation to EVER do this kind of thing. Also, money spent on this kind of "research" invariably tends to spin off into all sorts of other areas. The benefits to mankind of non-obvious-payoff research is incalculable (and no, not because the number is "0"!) and humans are curious by nature.
So, it is entirely disingenuous to try and match X dollars spent on "space" to X dollars NOT spent somewhere else. The world just does not work like that.
Tree-huggers and people-feeders still don't seem to understand this though - and thank fuck none of them are in power anywhere on the planet!
Remember: give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. But teach a man to fish, and he will spend all day in a boat drinking beer.
I agree that aliens finding US, by way of travelling through our radiosphere is far more likely than us finding the aliens, and I even expect that to happen well before my hundredth birthday, in 2065. It's easy to see why this is likely: plot a sphere 150 light years in radius against the size of the milky way galaxy, and you will see it is a non-trivial portion of the entire thing. (i.e. our radiosphere is actually easily visible when viewing the entire galaxy.)
However, I can not for the life of me figure out why you say the chances are 50/50 of them being more advanced than us.
I think that it is almost impossible any radio-using aliens exist within a hundred light years of Earth - as SETI would already have picked up those signals.
So, given it is 41 light years away - it is easy to say that no inteliigent life forms which use radio waves exist there.
Of course, us looking for radio waves might be like Sioux Indians trying to intercept telegrapgh signals by looking for smoke signals on the horizon...
It's likely that no self respecting civilisation would ever THINK about using the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate with, and it seems likely (to me at least) that all emerging civilisations will go through an electromagnetic "phase" until they find gravity waves, or FTL comms. This being the case, we'll never intercept ANY radio waves at all from aliens.
Mostly because, if we lean towards Drake, then the number of space-faring civilisations in our galaxy is at best, 40, and at worst 1 (That's if you actually DO count Earth as "civilised"!). If it's one, the answer is easy - if it's 40, then the likelyhood of us finding them is exceedingly low. 40 civilisations spread randomly through the "blue donut" of habitable areas in our galaxy would mean being separated by many many hundreds (and probably thousands) of light years - I haven't done the math.
Drake boils down to "Number of alien space-faring civilisations in galaxy = number of years those civilisations last". Ours has lasted 40 years... and that's giving us a HUGE benefit-of-the-doubt.
Anyway, the chances of any other civilisation being more advanced than us (if we believe Drake) is almost zero. If he is correct, then WE are the most advanced race, and are close to self destruction, while the others still attempt space travel.
The longer we survive, the more likely it becomes, that we will discover other races, and the longer we survive, the more likely it is that we will encounter them at levels BELOW where we are today. That's if we find THEM.
Of course, I'm convinced that THEY will find US, and they'll be far more advanced than us. The only question is - when?
Imagine if all the energy required to maintain all the censorship in China was directed towards productive goals. Economically, I think the USA wouldn't stand a chance against China. Pray it doesn't happen any time soon.
"BOOHOOS! The bad nasty manses don't wants me twos save teh muzak I listen 2 online. OH NOS!"
Look, it's not exactly rocket surgery:
Use a simple application to record the sound output of your PC sound card. Click "record" just before playback starts and click "stop" when the song ends.
Most of these apps let you name the file after you click STOP. You can usually set the quality to your preference - but if it's dished out at 192Kb/s then you'd obviously want to record at no greater than 192Kb/s.
This would be just the same as recording from the radio - sans the stupid cassette tapes. It takes like an additional 5 seconds to name the song, and specify where to save it.
Nothiong pisses me off more than giant corporations who are afraid to say the name of "our competitor". FOR FUCK'S SAKE, THEY HAVE A NAME, AND THAT NAME IS "AMD".
When I hear a company fuckwit wank on and on about this shit, it really gets up my goat. I mean, why wouldn't you just come out and say their name? If you can admit they're stealing your market share, building better chips, and taking the technological high ground from you, the very least you can do is dignify them with their correct name.
I think AMD are almost as guilty here, although I have heard their executives utter "The I word" from time to time.
Come on Intel, AMD aren't just a blip on your horizon, they're a 300 lb gorilla bending you over and fucking you up the arse. The fact you are a 3000 (Three Thousand) pound gorilla should just make you feel even more embarassed than you already are!
I agree: not worth throwing good money after bad once you have purchased a PC - with one noteable exception: It pays to jam as much RAM into it as you can, before retiring it.
RAM prices are volatile enough, and crash a period after the market leader changes its memory type, such that it is dirt cheap to fill old boxes up with maximum RAM.
It's teh cheapest upgrade, and conicidentally, also the most performance enhancing. Users really appreciate it, and it does extend the lifetime of the product again.
However, replacing a CPU? The labour in swapping them makes it uneconomic in my view. I have certainly never upgraded a computer CPU and have built over 200 computers and owned 'em non-stop since 1977.
It's just not worth it: kinda like putting $1000 tyres on a VW Beetle. The new CPU is invariably starved of data, and is significantly held back by the aged form factor.
How is it you can organise this lengthy list of bullshit - err - I mean academic stuff - and yet you are utterly unable to spell the word "definitely" correctly?
You seem to have a brain - so why make people think you're a fool by adopting a 13-year old's spelling of "definitely"?
Try thinking about the actual words you use - and where they come from. I think you'll find there is no word "finate", or "definate" for you to draw on.
If you think spelling isn't important, please note, that hundreds of job application letters cross my desk throughout the year, and any letter containing spelling mistakes goes straight into the rubbish bin - no exceptions. Those who spell "definitely" wrong actually *do* get a reply, stating they won't be interviewed because they can't spell. I enclose their original letter, with red ink added, too.
Anyone applying for a job which pays better than twice the average wage should be spelling correctly, using a different word, or looking elsewhere for employment.
I have LOST a job I held as a direct result of these type of tests - but it was a few years ago.
I was hired as a salesman, in New Zealand's biggest appliance store - there were 15 sales "men" there (no women at the time!) and I was head-hunted from the competition. I was on a great salary, plus commission, and I had achieved all my sales target except 2 (and they were artificially high, it would have ranked me at #4 in the store after 4 months there!).
Did I mention that the head office, was directly across the alleyway from the store?
In the 6th month I was required to take some kind of test like this - which I dutifully did.
Anyway, I took the test, and two days later was involved in a stand-up shouting match with the sales manager and the marketing manager, who accused me of "failing to achieve your sales targets, and your profile brands you as 'not a salesman'" (which was pretty funny, seeing as I was ranked at #7 for that month.
The short version is that they gave me notice right there and then.
I was only 22 years old, and crushed! I cried for about an hour as I cleared out my gear.
The #1 sales guy found me sobbing in the warehouse and asked what was going on. I told him what'd happened, and he said "Shit, sorry Chris, I should have told you that was coming, because I figured you'd be gone this month."
I asked why, and his response was that it was obvious to him, that despite being a fine salesman, I wasn't going to be happy there 5 years from now, and would want one of the management positions in thehead office - less than 50 metres away.
He said, and I fully believe, that the test I took showed I had "management potential" and that the managers promptly fired me so they wouldn't have to deal with me 5 years down the track, by which time, I would be gunning for their jobs...
Anyway, a word to the wise: be careful how you come across on these things - because if you don't fall into the "right" category according to the tester, even if you are fully qualified for it you probably won't get a job.
Middle and upper management (I know this now!) spend most of their day shitting themselves that someone will find out that they have not a single clue about their job - and the rest of the time they are office politiking to ensure that no one can grab their job.
It mustbe hard work to be such a dirt clod, but there you go.
The individual electrons get hung up on imperfections in the conductor they travel along making them travel considerably slower than the speed of light. Does that matter in today integrated circuits? I'm pretty sure it isn't a problem.
Actually it IS a problem. Getting the clock signal around a modern CPU is actually pretty tricky as I understand it. (Note Disclaimer.)
The problem is that electrons do flow significantly slower than light, and at close to 4,000,000,000 signals a second, it's absolutely vital to have every item in the core marching to the same drummer. To this end, the clock signal is propagated by several "repeaters" throughout the chip.
I seem to recall doing the math at one point, and when considering the distances involved, its obvious you can't just rely on a single clock generator for an entire CPU.
I saw this supposed behaviour on "Discovery Channel". It looked pretty convincing to me. The theory was that only very large prey was subject to this kind of attack. It seemed sound with the addition of the tooth grooves which would provide a safe harbour for the bacteria.
Look, why haven't any of the majors yet realised that if you want me to watch your advertisements, then you have to pay me to watch them?
It's simple really. 6 years ago I developed a "Pay per view" TV-on-demand business model as follows:
Subscribers must fill out a rather lengthy and complex demographic questionaire before joining. Every program has a dollar figure attached to it. You can watch any paid-for program any number of times you like, in the 30 days following the order.
At the end of each month, you are invoiced for the programmes you bought. If you are rich, and lazy, you can simply pay the bill and be done with it: no advertisements watched. (YAY!)
However, if you are poor, or you watched a lot of expensive stuff, then you switch to the "advertising channel":
Here's where you can see adverts listed in several ways: most popular, richest, best, shortest, longest, by manufacturer etc.
The price you see for each advertisement is calculated according to your demographic questionaire. In other words, if you are poor, you might get 25 cents for watching a new Mercedes commercial, but if you earn $100,000 a year, you might get $2.50 to watch it.
After watching a commercial, you must use your remote to answer a simple, multi-choice question about the advert, to prove you watched it. There are say, 5 questions for each advert. A wrong answer results in the advert playing again, followed by a different question, or the same question if you choose. Once they have watched an advert, they get to "rate" it, by another multichoice option - and the current rating of the advert is displayed while you add your own vote.
Here's the beauty: the content provider is ALWAYS paid, because the revenue either comes from the subscribers, or the advertisers, so your income is only limited by the number of subscribers. This enforces high quality content, otherwise no one will watch anything.
A subscriber can choose to watch as many adverts as they like, right up until they have paid for their entire monthly bill by watching adverts. Thus, there is no "barrier to entry" for this service - the provider pays for the delivery (via Internet, or satelite, or whatever) so even the poorest people can "afford" it.
The advertisers are equipped with the most powerful medium of all time: they get to target their adverts 100% - they can decide who gets to see their adverts, how much they'll pay those viewers to watch it, and they know that the advert has been retained amazingly well because of the multichoice question after the advert. Thus, there are no "wasted" adverts, and all this stuff can be analysed statistically quite easily. The advertisers also get to limit their exposure - like Google Adwords does right now - so there is a maximum monthly bill. Advertisers can tweak the amount they pay depending on the way the budget is being consumed throughout the month. (Similar to the way advertisers monitor Adwords expenditure).
Advertisers also get a never-before-opportunity in that they can decide HOW to get people to watch their adverts! They can use money, by offering a bundle to watch their adverts, or they can be smarter, and poorer, by trying to make commercials which get rated highly, while paying bugger all to have them watched. This means an advertiser may spend a fortune on creating an advert, to try and turn it into a "viral" thing, whereby people watch it because it's good - and they don't care that they're being paid only 5 cents to watch it.
Advertisers can also make adds sexy, violent, dramatic, funny - or whatever the hell they like: they could even make R18 adverts especially for adult-targetted campaigns.
Think about it: the face of advertising would be changed forever.
The only real problem with the model, and it's why I never sought 500 Million to get it off the ground, is the delivery system: Internet would work fine, but it requires at least a 15mb/s connection with zero data traffic fees. 6 years ago
Seems like these very large dino-predators were more likely to use the hunting technique of the Komodo Dragon: simply run up and take a bite of your prey, and then follow it for 3 days while it dies of blood poisoning.
The Komodo's teeth are positively filled (in fact there's special grooves to retain the bacteria!) with pathogenic bacteria.
I wonder if these new dino's have similar grooves in their teeth?
We know from the math, that a predator of this size can't take too many falls, as their own weight is more than enough to crack ribs, and it'd be very easy for them to break a leg. I think I recall some T-Rex's having ribs which show healed breaks. It seems unlikely an 8-ton predator would have enough fat reserves to survive a broken leg bone, unless that is, they were fed by their family.
Show me how man is responsible for global warming when clouds make up over 60% of all global warming gasses.
Now, if you can (which of course you can't), show me how we can change the climate by changing the 1% of global warming gasses which we emit into the atmosphere.
Now, even if you could show that we COULD change the climate (which, remember NO ONE knows!) can you show that spending a dollar on preventing global warming EVER pays more than 1 dollar in return?
No - of course you can't, but what you ARE suggesting, is that the earth should spend TRILLIONS of dollars to stop something we can't stop, or affect in any knowable way. All on a "hunch" that it's our fault?
Jesus, I suppose you'd vote for a clairvoyant for president!
I am NOT saying global warming doesn't exist - clearly it does!
The big questions are:
1) Is it us that is causing it? 2) What percentage of the climate change is atributable to us? 3) Is it POSSIBLE for us to slow or reverse the trend? 4) is it FEASIBLE for us to try? 5) Is there a benefit to man by attempting to try?
See - no one has ANY of those answers - and until we do, it is silly to throw a significant percentage of the Global Domestic Product into this bottomless pit.
We simply have very little idea what the past climate has been like. Human record keeping is a joke: inaccurate at best, hopelessly flawed at worst. "Weather Stations" which were in open country, are now within suburbia, and the measurements taken have done nothing except record the predictable changes inmicroclimate (NOT CLIMATE!!) due to urbanisation.
Also, please note: WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE. Ipso facto, all "weather stations" record is a tiny bunch of data which has almost nothing to do with climate, but quite a bit to do with weather.
Note also: to date, NO ONE has made an accurate prediction about what will happen to our climate, OR long term weather. In fact, all (bar none!) predictions to date have been incredibly wrong.
Sheeit - we can't predict the weather more than 10 days in advance - and that's with an incredible array of weather satelites, ground stations, weather balloons, observers and hostorical records, all plugged into super computers, and the results interpreted by specially trained weather people!
Given this fact, it's weather predicters who must have the only job on the planet where they can get their job wrong 50% (or more) of the time, AND STILL HAVE A JOB TO GO TO NEXT WEEK!
How on earth can you have any faith in any of these fools when they can;t make a single accurate prediction about ANYTHING? Oooops, sorry, they can predict their funding levels for the next 10 years pretty accurately, but beyond that? NOTHING.
"Global Warming" must be approaching a trillion dollar a year industry - and boy, I wish I could get my hands on some of that cash too!
1. Spurious Global Warming Predictions 2. FUD 3....... 3. Profit!
No one gives a flying fuck if you splatter your brains all over the road in a 15mph fall (And 15 mph is more than adequate BTW - forget about the 100 mph falls I've survived from racing bikes with a full face helmet) but what we DO care about is the $200,000 it costs to CLEAN UP YOUR FUCKING BRAINS and the couple of MILLION dollars of lost productivity to the economy.
Let's get one thing straight: helmet laws have NOTHING to do with "personal freedom" it's all about what it costs the state when you FUCK IT UP ROYALLY.
Oh, and for reference, even wearing a full face helmet, the statistic I always recall about riding bikes is this:
Every minute you spend on the road, on a motorcycle is the EXACT same risk of being killed or maimed as spending a minute on the Western Front in World War One.
That either tells you how dangerous it is to ride a bike (because of idiot car drivers) or how amazingly safe it was to go to war in 1909.
So, take your stupid fucking ideas about "personal freedom" (Puh-lease - this coming from someone living in the most over-regulated, and over-litigated country on the planet) and shove them up your ass. F00.
This is so funny: plugging information that is just wrong, into computer models that are nothing but guesses, and massaging the results until they meet your "OMG PONIES!!!11 We're all going to fry" scenario.
Not only dot we not understand our climate, we can't measure it properly, can't even tell what it was like in the past (with accuracy) and so far can't MAKE EVEN A SINGLE ACCURATE FUTURE PREDICTION. Oh but wait, that's right, 3 Degrees C will kill us all.
Slashdot Mirror
And YOU shall be known by your atrocious spelling!
Given a brick weighs less than 20lbs - how do you propse doing that? o_O
The article actually states:
/. ?
"Installing Vista Beta 2 was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered."
and NOT
"for me [it] was one of the worst operating system experiences that I've ever encountered."
This is intentionally misleading at best, and arguably litigious in nature at worst.
He is implying the Operatign System Experience was the worst, when it applies only to an installation - which, on a laptop for a beta OS is hardly rocket surgery to figure out is going to be a problem.
Frankly, the article seems like shit to me: written by a moron, no details provided, except that he owns two useless other laptops. He even sounds surprised that formatting C: and then installing windows from scratch "removed every device driver that I needed to run the laptop" OMG - LOL - PONIES! Is this guy for real?
Why the fuck didn't you install the drivers from the CD-ROM that came with the laptop? Or more importantly, why did you not back them up at some stage during your ownership of the device?
He then bitches that built in (proprietary) audio didn't work and he has an ADD-IN WiFi PCMCIA card which also doesn't work! SHOCK HORROR: I bet it wouldn't work when you installed Windows XP either - fuck-knuckle! That is why device manufacturers include a DRIVER DISK when you buy a product!
How the fuck did this article end up published on
No No - you misunderstand.
What I'm saying, is that if intelligent alien life ever gets to see American Idol, then they most DEFINITELY will come here to wipe us out, because we obviously need to be put out of our misery.
Kinda like shooting a lame horse. Or putting down a sick dog.
Yes, there is a limit.
That limit is 6 solar masses. Think about it: 6 times the mass of our sun. Made of rocks.
Why the limit? Because that is the mass of an object, after which it will collapse in on itself to form a black hole. I don't know enough of the science to be able to state at what point the center of the planet begins to form neutronium, but the surface at least, will remain rocky, until the object does completely collapse.
Rocky is just "rocks" and rocks are happy to sit in a very high level of gravity. Your 5 solar mass rocky world might have mountains that reach as high as 3 or even 4 millimetres, and fantastically deep trenches up to 2 mm deep might form during "earthquakes".
The only questions in my mind are:
1) How long after the thing stops accreting material does it take to form a rocky surface?
2) What is the surface gravity of a 5 solar mass rocky world?
3) At what point does the interior begin to form Neutronium.
You made a typo there:
So sooner or later one of these folks going to pick up American Idol on their receivers and come to WIPE us out.
I always have to laugh whenever someone says somehting along the lines of "A single Shuttle launch could feed a million people for a year."
My answer: yeah - if you could get them all to the Cape, and have them all eat Aluminum and LH2 and LOX!
You need to understand that governments do NOT work on the principle of monetary equity: if they saved 500 Million dollars here, NO ONE says "OH, that means we can send 500 Million to the staving people in _________ (place country name here)!"
There is no political will in any nation to EVER do this kind of thing. Also, money spent on this kind of "research" invariably tends to spin off into all sorts of other areas. The benefits to mankind of non-obvious-payoff research is incalculable (and no, not because the number is "0"!) and humans are curious by nature.
So, it is entirely disingenuous to try and match X dollars spent on "space" to X dollars NOT spent somewhere else. The world just does not work like that.
Tree-huggers and people-feeders still don't seem to understand this though - and thank fuck none of them are in power anywhere on the planet!
Remember: give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. But teach a man to fish, and he will spend all day in a boat drinking beer.
I agree that aliens finding US, by way of travelling through our radiosphere is far more likely than us finding the aliens, and I even expect that to happen well before my hundredth birthday, in 2065. It's easy to see why this is likely: plot a sphere 150 light years in radius against the size of the milky way galaxy, and you will see it is a non-trivial portion of the entire thing. (i.e. our radiosphere is actually easily visible when viewing the entire galaxy.)
However, I can not for the life of me figure out why you say the chances are 50/50 of them being more advanced than us.
I think that it is almost impossible any radio-using aliens exist within a hundred light years of Earth - as SETI would already have picked up those signals.
So, given it is 41 light years away - it is easy to say that no inteliigent life forms which use radio waves exist there.
Of course, us looking for radio waves might be like Sioux Indians trying to intercept telegrapgh signals by looking for smoke signals on the horizon...
It's likely that no self respecting civilisation would ever THINK about using the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate with, and it seems likely (to me at least) that all emerging civilisations will go through an electromagnetic "phase" until they find gravity waves, or FTL comms. This being the case, we'll never intercept ANY radio waves at all from aliens.
Mostly because, if we lean towards Drake, then the number of space-faring civilisations in our galaxy is at best, 40, and at worst 1 (That's if you actually DO count Earth as "civilised"!). If it's one, the answer is easy - if it's 40, then the likelyhood of us finding them is exceedingly low. 40 civilisations spread randomly through the "blue donut" of habitable areas in our galaxy would mean being separated by many many hundreds (and probably thousands) of light years - I haven't done the math.
Drake boils down to "Number of alien space-faring civilisations in galaxy = number of years those civilisations last". Ours has lasted 40 years... and that's giving us a HUGE benefit-of-the-doubt.
Anyway, the chances of any other civilisation being more advanced than us (if we believe Drake) is almost zero. If he is correct, then WE are the most advanced race, and are close to self destruction, while the others still attempt space travel.
The longer we survive, the more likely it becomes, that we will discover other races, and the longer we survive, the more likely it is that we will encounter them at levels BELOW where we are today. That's if we find THEM.
Of course, I'm convinced that THEY will find US, and they'll be far more advanced than us. The only question is - when?
What makes you think a monolith has NOT been discovered? ;)
Imagine if all the energy required to maintain all the censorship in China was directed towards productive goals. Economically, I think the USA wouldn't stand a chance against China. Pray it doesn't happen any time soon.
"BOOHOOS! The bad nasty manses don't wants me twos save teh muzak I listen 2 online. OH NOS!"
Look, it's not exactly rocket surgery:
Use a simple application to record the sound output of your PC sound card. Click "record" just before playback starts and click "stop" when the song ends.
Most of these apps let you name the file after you click STOP. You can usually set the quality to your preference - but if it's dished out at 192Kb/s then you'd obviously want to record at no greater than 192Kb/s.
This would be just the same as recording from the radio - sans the stupid cassette tapes. It takes like an additional 5 seconds to name the song, and specify where to save it.
Good Lord - stop bitching!
Nothiong pisses me off more than giant corporations who are afraid to say the name of "our competitor". FOR FUCK'S SAKE, THEY HAVE A NAME, AND THAT NAME IS "AMD".
When I hear a company fuckwit wank on and on about this shit, it really gets up my goat. I mean, why wouldn't you just come out and say their name? If you can admit they're stealing your market share, building better chips, and taking the technological high ground from you, the very least you can do is dignify them with their correct name.
I think AMD are almost as guilty here, although I have heard their executives utter "The I word" from time to time.
Come on Intel, AMD aren't just a blip on your horizon, they're a 300 lb gorilla bending you over and fucking you up the arse. The fact you are a 3000 (Three Thousand) pound gorilla should just make you feel even more embarassed than you already are!
As far as usability goes, there's only one reason to use XP: ClearType font smoothing.
That's it.
I agree: not worth throwing good money after bad once you have purchased a PC - with one noteable exception: It pays to jam as much RAM into it as you can, before retiring it.
RAM prices are volatile enough, and crash a period after the market leader changes its memory type, such that it is dirt cheap to fill old boxes up with maximum RAM.
It's teh cheapest upgrade, and conicidentally, also the most performance enhancing. Users really appreciate it, and it does extend the lifetime of the product again.
However, replacing a CPU? The labour in swapping them makes it uneconomic in my view. I have certainly never upgraded a computer CPU and have built over 200 computers and owned 'em non-stop since 1977.
It's just not worth it: kinda like putting $1000 tyres on a VW Beetle. The new CPU is invariably starved of data, and is significantly held back by the aged form factor.
How is it you can organise this lengthy list of bullshit - err - I mean academic stuff - and yet you are utterly unable to spell the word "definitely" correctly?
You seem to have a brain - so why make people think you're a fool by adopting a 13-year old's spelling of "definitely"?
Try thinking about the actual words you use - and where they come from. I think you'll find there is no word "finate", or "definate" for you to draw on.
If you think spelling isn't important, please note, that hundreds of job application letters cross my desk throughout the year, and any letter containing spelling mistakes goes straight into the rubbish bin - no exceptions. Those who spell "definitely" wrong actually *do* get a reply, stating they won't be interviewed because they can't spell. I enclose their original letter, with red ink added, too.
Anyone applying for a job which pays better than twice the average wage should be spelling correctly, using a different word, or looking elsewhere for employment.
Thanks for your attention.
I have LOST a job I held as a direct result of these type of tests - but it was a few years ago.
I was hired as a salesman, in New Zealand's biggest appliance store - there were 15 sales "men" there (no women at the time!) and I was head-hunted from the competition. I was on a great salary, plus commission, and I had achieved all my sales target except 2 (and they were artificially high, it would have ranked me at #4 in the store after 4 months there!).
Did I mention that the head office, was directly across the alleyway from the store?
In the 6th month I was required to take some kind of test like this - which I dutifully did.
Anyway, I took the test, and two days later was involved in a stand-up shouting match with the sales manager and the marketing manager, who accused me of "failing to achieve your sales targets, and your profile brands you as 'not a salesman'" (which was pretty funny, seeing as I was ranked at #7 for that month.
The short version is that they gave me notice right there and then.
I was only 22 years old, and crushed! I cried for about an hour as I cleared out my gear.
The #1 sales guy found me sobbing in the warehouse and asked what was going on. I told him what'd happened, and he said "Shit, sorry Chris, I should have told you that was coming, because I figured you'd be gone this month."
I asked why, and his response was that it was obvious to him, that despite being a fine salesman, I wasn't going to be happy there 5 years from now, and would want one of the management positions in thehead office - less than 50 metres away.
He said, and I fully believe, that the test I took showed I had "management potential" and that the managers promptly fired me so they wouldn't have to deal with me 5 years down the track, by which time, I would be gunning for their jobs...
Anyway, a word to the wise: be careful how you come across on these things - because if you don't fall into the "right" category according to the tester, even if you are fully qualified for it you probably won't get a job.
Middle and upper management (I know this now!) spend most of their day shitting themselves that someone will find out that they have not a single clue about their job - and the rest of the time they are office politiking to ensure that no one can grab their job.
It mustbe hard work to be such a dirt clod, but there you go.
The individual electrons get hung up on imperfections in the conductor they travel along making them travel considerably slower than the speed of light. Does that matter in today integrated circuits? I'm pretty sure it isn't a problem.
Actually it IS a problem. Getting the clock signal around a modern CPU is actually pretty tricky as I understand it. (Note Disclaimer.)
The problem is that electrons do flow significantly slower than light, and at close to 4,000,000,000 signals a second, it's absolutely vital to have every item in the core marching to the same drummer. To this end, the clock signal is propagated by several "repeaters" throughout the chip.
I seem to recall doing the math at one point, and when considering the distances involved, its obvious you can't just rely on a single clock generator for an entire CPU.
Cool - thanks for clearing that up for me.
I saw this supposed behaviour on "Discovery Channel". It looked pretty convincing to me. The theory was that only very large prey was subject to this kind of attack. It seemed sound with the addition of the tooth grooves which would provide a safe harbour for the bacteria.
How very 20th century.
Look, why haven't any of the majors yet realised that if you want me to watch your advertisements, then you have to pay me to watch them?
It's simple really. 6 years ago I developed a "Pay per view" TV-on-demand business model as follows:
Subscribers must fill out a rather lengthy and complex demographic questionaire before joining. Every program has a dollar figure attached to it. You can watch any paid-for program any number of times you like, in the 30 days following the order.
At the end of each month, you are invoiced for the programmes you bought. If you are rich, and lazy, you can simply pay the bill and be done with it: no advertisements watched. (YAY!)
However, if you are poor, or you watched a lot of expensive stuff, then you switch to the "advertising channel":
Here's where you can see adverts listed in several ways: most popular, richest, best, shortest, longest, by manufacturer etc.
The price you see for each advertisement is calculated according to your demographic questionaire. In other words, if you are poor, you might get 25 cents for watching a new Mercedes commercial, but if you earn $100,000 a year, you might get $2.50 to watch it.
After watching a commercial, you must use your remote to answer a simple, multi-choice question about the advert, to prove you watched it. There are say, 5 questions for each advert. A wrong answer results in the advert playing again, followed by a different question, or the same question if you choose. Once they have watched an advert, they get to "rate" it, by another multichoice option - and the current rating of the advert is displayed while you add your own vote.
Here's the beauty: the content provider is ALWAYS paid, because the revenue either comes from the subscribers, or the advertisers, so your income is only limited by the number of subscribers. This enforces high quality content, otherwise no one will watch anything.
A subscriber can choose to watch as many adverts as they like, right up until they have paid for their entire monthly bill by watching adverts. Thus, there is no "barrier to entry" for this service - the provider pays for the delivery (via Internet, or satelite, or whatever) so even the poorest people can "afford" it.
The advertisers are equipped with the most powerful medium of all time: they get to target their adverts 100% - they can decide who gets to see their adverts, how much they'll pay those viewers to watch it, and they know that the advert has been retained amazingly well because of the multichoice question after the advert. Thus, there are no "wasted" adverts, and all this stuff can be analysed statistically quite easily. The advertisers also get to limit their exposure - like Google Adwords does right now - so there is a maximum monthly bill. Advertisers can tweak the amount they pay depending on the way the budget is being consumed throughout the month. (Similar to the way advertisers monitor Adwords expenditure).
Advertisers also get a never-before-opportunity in that they can decide HOW to get people to watch their adverts! They can use money, by offering a bundle to watch their adverts, or they can be smarter, and poorer, by trying to make commercials which get rated highly, while paying bugger all to have them watched. This means an advertiser may spend a fortune on creating an advert, to try and turn it into a "viral" thing, whereby people watch it because it's good - and they don't care that they're being paid only 5 cents to watch it.
Advertisers can also make adds sexy, violent, dramatic, funny - or whatever the hell they like: they could even make R18 adverts especially for adult-targetted campaigns.
Think about it: the face of advertising would be changed forever.
The only real problem with the model, and it's why I never sought 500 Million to get it off the ground, is the delivery system: Internet would work fine, but it requires at least a 15mb/s connection with zero data traffic fees. 6 years ago
Seems like these very large dino-predators were more likely to use the hunting technique of the Komodo Dragon: simply run up and take a bite of your prey, and then follow it for 3 days while it dies of blood poisoning.
The Komodo's teeth are positively filled (in fact there's special grooves to retain the bacteria!) with pathogenic bacteria.
I wonder if these new dino's have similar grooves in their teeth?
We know from the math, that a predator of this size can't take too many falls, as their own weight is more than enough to crack ribs, and it'd be very easy for them to break a leg. I think I recall some T-Rex's having ribs which show healed breaks. It seems unlikely an 8-ton predator would have enough fat reserves to survive a broken leg bone, unless that is, they were fed by their family.
I wish I could go back to see the behaviour!
No - you're the idiot.
Show me how man is responsible for global warming when clouds make up over 60% of all global warming gasses.
Now, if you can (which of course you can't), show me how we can change the climate by changing the 1% of global warming gasses which we emit into the atmosphere.
Now, even if you could show that we COULD change the climate (which, remember NO ONE knows!) can you show that spending a dollar on preventing global warming EVER pays more than 1 dollar in return?
No - of course you can't, but what you ARE suggesting, is that the earth should spend TRILLIONS of dollars to stop something we can't stop, or affect in any knowable way. All on a "hunch" that it's our fault?
Jesus, I suppose you'd vote for a clairvoyant for president!
I am NOT saying global warming doesn't exist - clearly it does!
The big questions are:
1) Is it us that is causing it?
2) What percentage of the climate change is atributable to us?
3) Is it POSSIBLE for us to slow or reverse the trend?
4) is it FEASIBLE for us to try?
5) Is there a benefit to man by attempting to try?
See - no one has ANY of those answers - and until we do, it is silly to throw a significant percentage of the Global Domestic Product into this bottomless pit.
IDIOT!
......
We simply have very little idea what the past climate has been like. Human record keeping is a joke: inaccurate at best, hopelessly flawed at worst. "Weather Stations" which were in open country, are now within suburbia, and the measurements taken have done nothing except record the predictable changes inmicroclimate (NOT CLIMATE!!) due to urbanisation.
Also, please note: WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE. Ipso facto, all "weather stations" record is a tiny bunch of data which has almost nothing to do with climate, but quite a bit to do with weather.
Note also: to date, NO ONE has made an accurate prediction about what will happen to our climate, OR long term weather. In fact, all (bar none!) predictions to date have been incredibly wrong.
Sheeit - we can't predict the weather more than 10 days in advance - and that's with an incredible array of weather satelites, ground stations, weather balloons, observers and hostorical records, all plugged into super computers, and the results interpreted by specially trained weather people!
Given this fact, it's weather predicters who must have the only job on the planet where they can get their job wrong 50% (or more) of the time, AND STILL HAVE A JOB TO GO TO NEXT WEEK!
How on earth can you have any faith in any of these fools when they can;t make a single accurate prediction about ANYTHING? Oooops, sorry, they can predict their funding levels for the next 10 years pretty accurately, but beyond that? NOTHING.
"Global Warming" must be approaching a trillion dollar a year industry - and boy, I wish I could get my hands on some of that cash too!
1. Spurious Global Warming Predictions
2. FUD
3.
3. Profit!
You are an absolute IDIOT.
No one gives a flying fuck if you splatter your brains all over the road in a 15mph fall (And 15 mph is more than adequate BTW - forget about the 100 mph falls I've survived from racing bikes with a full face helmet) but what we DO care about is the $200,000 it costs to CLEAN UP YOUR FUCKING BRAINS and the couple of MILLION dollars of lost productivity to the economy.
Let's get one thing straight: helmet laws have NOTHING to do with "personal freedom" it's all about what it costs the state when you FUCK IT UP ROYALLY.
Oh, and for reference, even wearing a full face helmet, the statistic I always recall about riding bikes is this:
Every minute you spend on the road, on a motorcycle is the EXACT same risk of being killed or maimed as spending a minute on the Western Front in World War One.
That either tells you how dangerous it is to ride a bike (because of idiot car drivers) or how amazingly safe it was to go to war in 1909.
So, take your stupid fucking ideas about "personal freedom" (Puh-lease - this coming from someone living in the most over-regulated, and over-litigated country on the planet) and shove them up your ass. F00.
This is so funny: plugging information that is just wrong, into computer models that are nothing but guesses, and massaging the results until they meet your "OMG PONIES!!!11 We're all going to fry" scenario.
Not only dot we not understand our climate, we can't measure it properly, can't even tell what it was like in the past (with accuracy) and so far can't MAKE EVEN A SINGLE ACCURATE FUTURE PREDICTION. Oh but wait, that's right, 3 Degrees C will kill us all.
*SIGH*
Wake me in a hundred years someone please.
Sheeit - you are CORRECT!
;)
I have no idea how that loosed my mind.