They also use unsupported generic versions of some parts. For instance, I ordered my Alienware with a Sound Blaster Audigy 2. It came with some kind of a Audigy 1 that had been modified to be recognized as an Audigy 2. Official Creative drivers do not work; I've had to resort to alternatives.
Did you talk to them about it? File a complaint with the BBB?
I would have filed a complaint, then threatened to sue in small claims court if they didn't completely refund the purchase price.
As for prepositions isn't this style rather than grammar? This is a genuine question, honestly.
I think it mostly is. You'll probably find a few staunchy English teachers who want you to abide by that rule, but I think most people are pretty accepting of it even in formal writing, at least if not overused. (Like split infinitives.)
But one thing I'll point out is that I'm not sure that "by" in the poster's comment was really being used as a preposition. I would say that "influenced by" is acting more as a compound noun.
(And I hope you're OK with my use of the abbreviation 'OK').
Actually this is very interesting. Firefox's spellchecker marks the work "okay" wrong, so I put up an away message complaining about it. Someone replied saying that apparently OK was the original spelling. From the usage note at dictionary.com:
OK is a quintessentially American term that has spread from English to many other languages. Its origin was the subject of scholarly debate for many years until Allen Walker Read showed that OK is based on a joke of sorts. OK is first recorded in 1839 but was probably in circulation before that date. During the 1830s there was a humoristic fashion in Boston newspapers to reduce a phrase to initials and supply an explanation in parentheses. Sometimes the abbreviations were misspelled to add to the humor. OK was used in March 1839 as an abbreviation for all correct, the joke being that neither the O nor the K was correct. Originally spelled with periods, this term outlived most similar abbreviations owing to its use in President Martin Van Buren's 1840 campaign for reelection.
"Okay" apparently showed up in the 1860s.
(BTW, on further research, it appears there's some controversy on the origin of OK, but does seem to be pretty well accepted.)
The 39 cent stamp won't be charged if you can take the DVD somewhere (e.g. the office), and you didn't take into account bandwidth charges with Amazon.
Also, you need to take into account time. It's possible to do incremental writing to the DVD, so if you generate less than 4.3 GB of data/month the 25 cents/DVD (which is actually probably a bit low) should be reduced by the frequency you have to buy a new disc, or the 15 cents for Amazon should be increased to cover that period.
(This is one reason not mailing it away makes sense, so you can continue writing. Also, if you'd need to restore and you've mailed it away, you're at the whim of the person you sent it to and the USPS for when you get it back.)
It's still easier and, in the long term, cheaper to get an extra hard drive (or really two, so that you can rotate) and back up to that. If you're talking about doing a full hard drive back up, Amazon would be way too slow and cost-prohibitive. Even ignoring bandwidth charges, it'd take under a year to recoup the extra initial investment in getting a hard drive. Bandwidth would be unmatched. Just do, say, weekly rotations of two drives. Back up to one drive, at the end of the week move it offsite and get the hard drive that is offsite and bring it back to back up to the next week.
If you're talking small quantities of data, CD-R would be still be cheaper and easier but, as I said in a reply to my first post, Amazon's service would work pretty well.
I know it's lame to reply to yourself, but I want to amend this by saying that I think it would work great for small backups, like if you just want to backup the documents you've written. But doing that has little impact on the hard drive situation anyway, because you'll still need to get a new one before the current one dies or face a LOT of time reinstalling stuff (at which point you'll wish you spent the money now). Putting stuff on Amazon might let you delay a bit more though and still keep the peace of mind that your truely irreplacable data is still okay.
Anyways, back on topic, at $0.15 a gig, it would take a long time before buying a hdd would be more affordable for me. (my hdd is 250g, I use about 100g, 100g = 15$, so after 10 months thats 150$... Still cheaper than this HDD that I didn't even get a year ago, on sale, for 200$)
Um, you should look at hard drive prices of today if you're going to be comparing server prices of today. Even retail prices put a 160 GB hard drive at $120. If you are willing to count the rebate price of that drive (it was at the top of the list; I didn't choose it because of the rebate explicitly), it's $50. That's 80 cents and 31 cents per gig respectively. Even if you count just the 100 GB, with rebate that's only 50 cents/gig. In under 4 months that way you'll break even.
Besides, whatcha gonna do? Run your programs remotely? Run your OS over the internet? I don't think so. You'd need a local mirror anyway, so you'd need that new hard drive.
This service has a lot of use, but from a backup standpoint I do NOT think it's at all a good option. Too expensive and too much hassle transferring that much data to make it worth it. (Are you really going to upload 100 gig? Even at a sustained rate of 150 KB/s upload (quite good from my experience over cable) that'd take over a week.)
I find the *side* of the arm the most comfortable, then the top (as a watch). Palm up for me at least requires constant muscle tension to maintain, unlike the others.
My idea is to have one wall in each major room be essentally two walls which you can walk betweeen. The inside wouldn't be drywalled, so you could replace/add wiring with ease.
Barring every room, at least have access from above or below a wall (from one of these intra-wall spaces) where it wouln't be too difficult to access wall jacks.
It would also make a good place to put thin clients with VGA and other jacks in the wall so that you don't see the computer at all. (My plan is to have several thin clients but one central server. And another gaming machine probably.)
It'd also be awesome for playing in if you were a kid. Wouldn't you have liked secret passages in your house?
I regularily see the amount of memory allocated to Firefox alone over 500 MB...
Currently Windows reports 920 MB pagefile usage. I think that's probably total memory use, not the amount that's swapped out, but I can almost guarantee that there's something on disk. Windows seems to be very bad with swapping; before I added another GB of RAM (for a total of 1.5) it paged fairly frequently. After coming back from work and unlocking it, it would take probably 10 seconds to page everything in from disk.
A laptop (with 512MB) I used at work was much worse; it could barely keep the applications I used regularily (Eclipse for development + Javac for compilation + Tomcat for serving + Firefox for testing) in memory at once. If I opened pretty much anything else, it would go page-happy, and would frequently take 30 seconds to do something I hadn't done in a while in Eclipse as it paged it in.
(That said, I've only seen Linux use my swap a couple times, one of which was when I was doing image editing in the Gimp on a couple multi-hundred meg files.)
Unless you can present a reasonable explanation supported by at least a good amount of evidence out there for how being more environmentally sound will hurt us, I think that you have it backwards. When one approach has a potential to be environmentally damaging -- even a small potential -- then we should NOT DO THAT. If we invest in being more environmentally sound and it's not needed, we're a bit poorer than we would be otherwise. If, however, we continue without regard to the environment, it could cause FAR more damage then the first case.
There are a couple good replies to you already, but I'll add one more place the OS might be able to improve its performance if it knew about the hybridness of the disk.
I have a hunch (this is unsupported by data; you'd want to do some profiling before making a decision to do this) that you would want swap reads and writes to go right to the platter rather than flash. One reason is that flash does "wear out" after a while, and moving swap so that it doesn't use the flash would likely increase its lifetime substantially. From a performance point of view, I suspect it'd hurt a little compared to writing to the cache, but I doubt much.
This could IMPROVE the situation you're talking about.
First of all, you know that right now your writes are cached in your computer's memory for up to 30 seconds before they are flushed to disk. This is done so that synchronous read calls are less disrupted by writes.
It's possible that this new technology would allow the OS to commit writes to disk immediately (or at least much sooner). The disk writes to NVRAM or flash, at which point it should be stable through power loss or crash. The disk doesn't need to commit it to the actual platter right away for it to be safely stored.
"I've heard the screams of the vegetables, (scream scream scream) Watching their skins being peeled, (having their insides revealed) Grated and steamed with no mercy, (burning off calories) How do you think that feels, (bet it hurts really bad) Carrot juice constitutes murder, (and that's a real crime) Greenhouses prisons for slaves, (let my vegetables grow) It's time to stop all this gardening, (it's dirty as hell below) Let's call a spade a spade, (it's a spade it's a spade it's a spade)"
Yes and no. I doubt it would have a big effect on the types of sentences here since they'd probably be short. But more generally, English literacy levels among people born deaf are actually pretty low. ASL constructions are entirely different from English (in fact, ALS supposedly has more gramattical structures in common with French than English, though there are still probably more differences than similarities) and there definitely isn't a one-to-one correspondence of words.
(This is what we were taught in an ASL course, and I have no idea how well it agrees with reality.)
And that the actual Napster client itself is far-and-away the most frustratingly poorly designed and poorly coded piece of software that I use on anywhere close to a regular basis. (Yay for "free" subscriptions though...)
For a bit of interesting irony, the first (truly) seven-million series patent (700000001) was granted to Research In Motion -- the Blackberry people who are (of course) currently in the lawsuit with NTP over patents...
One possible way you can use it is if you have a water cooling system for the rest of the computer. I haven't seen any water cooled PSUs, so even if you go all-out and replace all the normal fans with water blocks, without a fanless PSU you'll still have a fan. If you can replace it, it'll make things ever so slightly quieter...
(Though I question whether in most environments it'd matter above a good, quiet fan-based PSU which you can get for 1/3 the price...)
The apps weren't the big problem though, it was the stupid Windows updates which it insisted on downloading, installing, rebooting then downloading the ones from the next month.
Still, if it took a couple days, you must not have been very responsive. 'couple hours...
Macs don't have to look for floppy disks either.
So let me ask (because I don't really know) what would happen if you have to install a version of MacOS released before SATA (so w/o drivers) on a machine with a SATA HDD?
Last time I installed OS X (wow, that was a LONG time ago!) it took about forty minutes. Last time I installed XP (not so long ago) it took two days (installing drivers, updates, reboot, apps, reboot some more).
Wait, you're counting app install time for the OS?
I installed XP a couple months ago after my hard drive went to see the great head of light entertainment in the sky, and it took two or three hours. That includes time looking for a floppy disk onto which I put drivers for a SATA controller.
It was a couple days before I had all my programs installed and whatnot, but I really don't see how a Mac would help there.
If software is copyrighted, and eventually the copyright expires, does that put the source code in the public domain, or just the binaries? If the binaries are the only thing published, they are all that is copyrighted. If source code were held as a trade secret, not published, then the law would probably never require it to be revealed. I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that trade secrets can be protected forever.
I think you're right insofar as they wouldn't be required to release source.
I don't know if the source itself would constitute a trade secret.
In any case, you'd be free to disassemble, modify, etc. the exe.
Another twist in the copyright vs. patent for software debate is that source code would probably be part of what would be patented if software patents become the norm, and would then have to be revealed when a patent expired. The software industry may end up screwing themselves by pushing software patents over copyrights, as patents expire a lot sooner.
This you don't really understand though. You don't patent a specific program. You can patent a technique or an algorithm, but not an implementation of it. For example, for a while the RSA algorithm was patented. That meant that you couldn't make a program that used it (PGP notwithstanding... Zimmerman I believe got into legal trouble for it, and its continued existance was only courtesy of the patent holders) even if you wrote it from scratch. Now look at the situation today. The patent's expired, so you're allowed to use the RSA algorithm unrestrained. However, that still doesn't mean that you can take the commercial versions of PGP and distribute them, because they are under copyright. Conversely, even if Zimmerman had released the source to PGP into the public domain (so it wouldn't have been restricted by copyright), you wouldn't have (technically) been able to do much with it since the patent was still in force.
Copyrights and patents protect different categories of things. Companies cannot choose which one to use; that's dictated by the nature of the thing they want to protect.
Slashdot Mirror
They also use unsupported generic versions of some parts. For instance, I ordered my Alienware with a Sound Blaster Audigy 2. It came with some kind of a Audigy 1 that had been modified to be recognized as an Audigy 2. Official Creative drivers do not work; I've had to resort to alternatives.
Did you talk to them about it? File a complaint with the BBB?
I would have filed a complaint, then threatened to sue in small claims court if they didn't completely refund the purchase price.
As for prepositions isn't this style rather than grammar? This is a genuine question, honestly.
I think it mostly is. You'll probably find a few staunchy English teachers who want you to abide by that rule, but I think most people are pretty accepting of it even in formal writing, at least if not overused. (Like split infinitives.)
But one thing I'll point out is that I'm not sure that "by" in the poster's comment was really being used as a preposition. I would say that "influenced by" is acting more as a compound noun.
Actually this is very interesting. Firefox's spellchecker marks the work "okay" wrong, so I put up an away message complaining about it. Someone replied saying that apparently OK was the original spelling. From the usage note at dictionary.com:
"Okay" apparently showed up in the 1860s.
(BTW, on further research, it appears there's some controversy on the origin of OK, but does seem to be pretty well accepted.)
The 39 cent stamp won't be charged if you can take the DVD somewhere (e.g. the office), and you didn't take into account bandwidth charges with Amazon.
Also, you need to take into account time. It's possible to do incremental writing to the DVD, so if you generate less than 4.3 GB of data/month the 25 cents/DVD (which is actually probably a bit low) should be reduced by the frequency you have to buy a new disc, or the 15 cents for Amazon should be increased to cover that period.
(This is one reason not mailing it away makes sense, so you can continue writing. Also, if you'd need to restore and you've mailed it away, you're at the whim of the person you sent it to and the USPS for when you get it back.)
It's still easier and, in the long term, cheaper to get an extra hard drive (or really two, so that you can rotate) and back up to that. If you're talking about doing a full hard drive back up, Amazon would be way too slow and cost-prohibitive. Even ignoring bandwidth charges, it'd take under a year to recoup the extra initial investment in getting a hard drive. Bandwidth would be unmatched. Just do, say, weekly rotations of two drives. Back up to one drive, at the end of the week move it offsite and get the hard drive that is offsite and bring it back to back up to the next week.
If you're talking small quantities of data, CD-R would be still be cheaper and easier but, as I said in a reply to my first post, Amazon's service would work pretty well.
I know it's lame to reply to yourself, but I want to amend this by saying that I think it would work great for small backups, like if you just want to backup the documents you've written. But doing that has little impact on the hard drive situation anyway, because you'll still need to get a new one before the current one dies or face a LOT of time reinstalling stuff (at which point you'll wish you spent the money now). Putting stuff on Amazon might let you delay a bit more though and still keep the peace of mind that your truely irreplacable data is still okay.
Anyways, back on topic, at $0.15 a gig, it would take a long time before buying a hdd would be more affordable for me. (my hdd is 250g, I use about 100g, 100g = 15$, so after 10 months thats 150$... Still cheaper than this HDD that I didn't even get a year ago, on sale, for 200$)
Um, you should look at hard drive prices of today if you're going to be comparing server prices of today. Even retail prices put a 160 GB hard drive at $120. If you are willing to count the rebate price of that drive (it was at the top of the list; I didn't choose it because of the rebate explicitly), it's $50. That's 80 cents and 31 cents per gig respectively. Even if you count just the 100 GB, with rebate that's only 50 cents/gig. In under 4 months that way you'll break even.
Besides, whatcha gonna do? Run your programs remotely? Run your OS over the internet? I don't think so. You'd need a local mirror anyway, so you'd need that new hard drive.
This service has a lot of use, but from a backup standpoint I do NOT think it's at all a good option. Too expensive and too much hassle transferring that much data to make it worth it. (Are you really going to upload 100 gig? Even at a sustained rate of 150 KB/s upload (quite good from my experience over cable) that'd take over a week.)
I find the *side* of the arm the most comfortable, then the top (as a watch). Palm up for me at least requires constant muscle tension to maintain, unlike the others.
My idea is to have one wall in each major room be essentally two walls which you can walk betweeen. The inside wouldn't be drywalled, so you could replace/add wiring with ease.
Barring every room, at least have access from above or below a wall (from one of these intra-wall spaces) where it wouln't be too difficult to access wall jacks.
It would also make a good place to put thin clients with VGA and other jacks in the wall so that you don't see the computer at all. (My plan is to have several thin clients but one central server. And another gaming machine probably.)
It'd also be awesome for playing in if you were a kid. Wouldn't you have liked secret passages in your house?
I regularily see the amount of memory allocated to Firefox alone over 500 MB...
Currently Windows reports 920 MB pagefile usage. I think that's probably total memory use, not the amount that's swapped out, but I can almost guarantee that there's something on disk. Windows seems to be very bad with swapping; before I added another GB of RAM (for a total of 1.5) it paged fairly frequently. After coming back from work and unlocking it, it would take probably 10 seconds to page everything in from disk.
A laptop (with 512MB) I used at work was much worse; it could barely keep the applications I used regularily (Eclipse for development + Javac for compilation + Tomcat for serving + Firefox for testing) in memory at once. If I opened pretty much anything else, it would go page-happy, and would frequently take 30 seconds to do something I hadn't done in a while in Eclipse as it paged it in.
(That said, I've only seen Linux use my swap a couple times, one of which was when I was doing image editing in the Gimp on a couple multi-hundred meg files.)
Unless you can present a reasonable explanation supported by at least a good amount of evidence out there for how being more environmentally sound will hurt us, I think that you have it backwards. When one approach has a potential to be environmentally damaging -- even a small potential -- then we should NOT DO THAT. If we invest in being more environmentally sound and it's not needed, we're a bit poorer than we would be otherwise. If, however, we continue without regard to the environment, it could cause FAR more damage then the first case.
Fail-safe default, no?
There are a couple good replies to you already, but I'll add one more place the OS might be able to improve its performance if it knew about the hybridness of the disk.
I have a hunch (this is unsupported by data; you'd want to do some profiling before making a decision to do this) that you would want swap reads and writes to go right to the platter rather than flash. One reason is that flash does "wear out" after a while, and moving swap so that it doesn't use the flash would likely increase its lifetime substantially. From a performance point of view, I suspect it'd hurt a little compared to writing to the cache, but I doubt much.
This could IMPROVE the situation you're talking about.
First of all, you know that right now your writes are cached in your computer's memory for up to 30 seconds before they are flushed to disk. This is done so that synchronous read calls are less disrupted by writes.
It's possible that this new technology would allow the OS to commit writes to disk immediately (or at least much sooner). The disk writes to NVRAM or flash, at which point it should be stable through power loss or crash. The disk doesn't need to commit it to the actual platter right away for it to be safely stored.
"I've heard the screams of the vegetables, (scream scream scream)
Watching their skins being peeled, (having their insides revealed)
Grated and steamed with no mercy, (burning off calories)
How do you think that feels, (bet it hurts really bad)
Carrot juice constitutes murder, (and that's a real crime)
Greenhouses prisons for slaves, (let my vegetables grow)
It's time to stop all this gardening, (it's dirty as hell below)
Let's call a spade a spade, (it's a spade it's a spade it's a spade)"
Yes and no. I doubt it would have a big effect on the types of sentences here since they'd probably be short. But more generally, English literacy levels among people born deaf are actually pretty low. ASL constructions are entirely different from English (in fact, ALS supposedly has more gramattical structures in common with French than English, though there are still probably more differences than similarities) and there definitely isn't a one-to-one correspondence of words.
(This is what we were taught in an ASL course, and I have no idea how well it agrees with reality.)
Where the hell do you get "charity group spam" out of "other legitimate free mailings lists that people sign up for"?
Signing up for a mailing list makes it, pretty much by definition, not spam...
And that it won't work with all portable devices.
And that the actual Napster client itself is far-and-away the most frustratingly poorly designed and poorly coded piece of software that I use on anywhere close to a regular basis. (Yay for "free" subscriptions though...)
You address Eben Moglen by his full name and then addresses Richard Stallman with much less respect.
Um, it's called an antecedent. (OK, not exactly, but that's the idea.)
The summary referred to Stallman before with his full name. There's no reason to repeat it; "Stallman" is sufficient.
For a bit of interesting irony, the first (truly) seven-million series patent (700000001) was granted to Research In Motion -- the Blackberry people who are (of course) currently in the lawsuit with NTP over patents...
Please explain why this is ironic.
An interesting coincidence, sure. But not ironic.
One possible way you can use it is if you have a water cooling system for the rest of the computer. I haven't seen any water cooled PSUs, so even if you go all-out and replace all the normal fans with water blocks, without a fanless PSU you'll still have a fan. If you can replace it, it'll make things ever so slightly quieter...
(Though I question whether in most environments it'd matter above a good, quiet fan-based PSU which you can get for 1/3 the price...)
The apps weren't the big problem though, it was the stupid Windows updates which it insisted on downloading, installing, rebooting then downloading the ones from the next month.
Still, if it took a couple days, you must not have been very responsive. 'couple hours...
Macs don't have to look for floppy disks either.
So let me ask (because I don't really know) what would happen if you have to install a version of MacOS released before SATA (so w/o drivers) on a machine with a SATA HDD?
There's still a lot of support missing from WINE and, thus, from Darwine
Last time I installed OS X (wow, that was a LONG time ago!) it took about forty minutes. Last time I installed XP (not so long ago) it took two days (installing drivers, updates, reboot, apps, reboot some more).
Wait, you're counting app install time for the OS?
I installed XP a couple months ago after my hard drive went to see the great head of light entertainment in the sky, and it took two or three hours. That includes time looking for a floppy disk onto which I put drivers for a SATA controller.
It was a couple days before I had all my programs installed and whatnot, but I really don't see how a Mac would help there.
There *are* a couple omissions though. ATI's highest-end TV capture card, for instance, doesn't have anything but Windows drivers.
If software is copyrighted, and eventually the copyright expires, does that put the source code in the public domain, or just the binaries? If the binaries are the only thing published, they are all that is copyrighted. If source code were held as a trade secret, not published, then the law would probably never require it to be revealed. I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that trade secrets can be protected forever.
I think you're right insofar as they wouldn't be required to release source.
I don't know if the source itself would constitute a trade secret.
In any case, you'd be free to disassemble, modify, etc. the exe.
Another twist in the copyright vs. patent for software debate is that source code would probably be part of what would be patented if software patents become the norm, and would then have to be revealed when a patent expired. The software industry may end up screwing themselves by pushing software patents over copyrights, as patents expire a lot sooner.
This you don't really understand though. You don't patent a specific program. You can patent a technique or an algorithm, but not an implementation of it. For example, for a while the RSA algorithm was patented. That meant that you couldn't make a program that used it (PGP notwithstanding... Zimmerman I believe got into legal trouble for it, and its continued existance was only courtesy of the patent holders) even if you wrote it from scratch. Now look at the situation today. The patent's expired, so you're allowed to use the RSA algorithm unrestrained. However, that still doesn't mean that you can take the commercial versions of PGP and distribute them, because they are under copyright. Conversely, even if Zimmerman had released the source to PGP into the public domain (so it wouldn't have been restricted by copyright), you wouldn't have (technically) been able to do much with it since the patent was still in force.
Copyrights and patents protect different categories of things. Companies cannot choose which one to use; that's dictated by the nature of the thing they want to protect.