The comparison here is the Windows client/server model vs. the terminal/server Unix model.
Where's the comparison between Windows TERMINAL/server model vs. terminal/server Unix model? Aren't Terminal Server and Citrix options any longer on the Wintel platform?
Many mortgage companies now require first-time home buyers to study for and take a test that proves they understand the details of their new home loan.
Why, you ask? So that if push comes to shove, they can demonstrate that, because of your passing test score, that you understood the contract.
I represent a company with 30,000 PCs, most of the Dells.
Dell has a couple of problems with their new line. First and foremost the new LAPTOP line is a complete departure from the old C-series. The new D-series uses NO parts from the C-series. Your entire stockpile of replacement C-series parts (floppy, CD, battery, etc.) is useless for the D-series.
The Desktop line, just to make things worse, now uses the C-series (yes, the C, not D) floppy and CD-ROM bays for their SX versions of the desktop machines. And while I guess you have a source of replacement CD-ROM drives, you still only get one notebook style bay in their new SX machines. [The SX is the "Slim" GX version.] Between you and me, the SX is only smaller because they took out the power supply and put it on a brick on the power cord. YIPEE!/shrug
So, back to the REAL business desktop, the GX line. Most of you have seen an Optiplex desktop. You can get GX1/GXa machines at ComputerSurplusOutlet for $99 most days of the week. They're solid, easy to support machines with a huge number of replacement parts, interchangable pieces, and a great deal of familiarity with the people who support them. And while the new GX machines have gotten "tighter" to work in (ever since the 240 when the footprint got smaller), they're still easy to work on, have easy replacement parts, and everyone understands how to work on them.
They're ahead of the power-curve too, with serial ATA coming standard on the next round of GX machines on the roadmap..
Just stay away from the D-series laptops and the SX slimline machines. It's time to get a new RFQ from your other vendors. Your new machines are incompatable anyway, might as well shop around.
The missing "killer app" for MAME isn't a box that lets you play on the TV. Tons of us dream of building a nice full console, but we're never going to get it finished. We want a joystick, better than the HotRod, that has a full suite of buttons (incuding ESCAPE, ~ and TAB) and a coin-mech, or buttons and wires to emulate it.
And you know what? We want it to be the same size as the one that's going to go in the cabinet that we're not going to build, so we can take the first step and feel good about not wasting cash on a "quality" joystick that's never going to mesh into our END product.
JAMMA headers optional. I know that Ultimarc will sell me all the conversion gear I need.
Not everyone is a carpenter. We want someone to make useful stand-alone pieces that later fit into our dream machine.
Star Control 3 was so awful, and such a let-down from the highly-rated, universally-loved Star Control 2, that it's been reverse engineered and ported to Linux, and a similar open source project exists in Highlander-like fashion to forget that 3 ever existed, by making Star Control: TimeWarp http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/timewarp/
Let me be one of the first hundred people or so to say, "GOOD!" For far too long every post where anyone dares say anything that even remotely links P2P and piracy is instantly modded down and disagreed with under the guise of freedom.
Well, it's not about freedom. It's mostly about stealing music and movies.
People stole stuff, or at a minimum, engaged in the redistribution of it. Those people should pay.
Break the law, get in trouble. Oh, and don't explain why it shouldn't be against the law, and how it's better for record companies for us to share music. That's a rationalisation of the sickest kind. It's still illegal, and if the people who do it could spent one tenth the time they spend stealing things actually trying to change the law and they'd get it changed.
Nah, I'll keep stealing stuff until someone busts me.
I pay for a measured amount of electricity. If I use more than I'm paying for - because I circumvent the device that does the measuring, that's theft.
The milage on your car is reported (among other things) for leases, for rentals, and in some places for registration. Since you pay for a set number of miles, disconnecting your odometer is theft.
For Christ's sake I hope I don't have to explain stealing cable to you people.
The problem is not that Slashdot is picking and choosing bug reports in an attempt to make M$FT look bad. They're reporting bugs from all the "major" OSs. The problem is the bias in the reporting and by the upwards modded comentators. Take this example from the article (and the note which it closes on):
The 'solution' from MS in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-065 recommends that you remove MS from the list of Trusted Publishers."
NO! The 'solution' from Microsoft is that you just patch your MDAC to include the component from 2.7 or that you just update your MDAC to 2.7
For Christ's sake people, if this were a *nix bug, you'd all be beating your "we know how to update our machines" drum complaining that only stupid Windows users don't use updates.
Or perhaps it would be the "at least fixes are available immediately for *nix" argument. MDAC 2.7 isn't new, kids.
Until I get full functionality from Outlook Web Access (OWA) or FREE (as in beer) functionality from something like Ximian, I'm tethered to my Exchange server.
$69 a seat for Ximian's Exchange 2000 connector doesn't help me justify not spending $130 for Windows 2000/XP upgrade licenses.
On the home front, the truth is WINE still doesn't have full Everquest support. That's why half a million of us aren't changing anytime soon.
I've heard it said (many times recently!) that the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as that for "opportunity." I find it difficult to believe, but is it really true? --Alison Raouf, via the Internet
Cecil replies:
Alison, I like your skeptical attitude, but we'd better get the story straight before we start acting all superior. The standard rap is that the Chinese ideogram for "crisis" is made up of two characters signifying "opportunity" and "danger." To Westerners, this exemplifies the ancient wisdom of the East and is cited frequently by motivational speakers, self-help books, and the like, e.g., "A crisis provides an opportunity for change and growth as well as a danger of regression or stagnation," etc.
I tell ya, it's deep. But deep what? Here are my initial findings:
In pinyin (romanized Chinese), the term for crisis is wei ji. Native Chinese speakers tend to think the crisis = danger/opportunity connection is complete bullshit. Maybe it isn't. In Chinese, the word for danger is wei xian and opportunity is ji huay. These are obviously two different words, native Chinese speakers note, so it's not literally true that crisis in Chinese is a combination of danger and opportunity. The fact that wei ji (crisis) contains elements of both terms is happenstance, they say, just as in English multiply and multifunctional aren't synonymous even though they share a prefix. (This example provided by Alison, who has been doing some more research on her own.)
Maybe so. On the other hand, maybe what we've got here is a lot of people who don't understand their own language. Let's inquire more closely. Ji, taken by itself, means moment, chance, or opportunity (also machine, but let's disregard that), as in zhuan ji (change opportunity), shi ji (time opportunity), qi ji (cutting-in opportunity), or tou ji (plunge-into opportunity). Wei, on the other hand, means dangerous, precarious, high, as in wei xian (danger risk), wei shi (danger time), or wei hai (danger damage).
So the danger/opportunity interpretation isn't completely baseless. But let's stop kidding ourselves. The simplest explanation is that wei ji literally means precarious moment--a pretty close approximation of crisis, and not necessarily one meant to suggest a paradox. No doubt the rendering of ji as opportunity is the work of a nonnative speaker who naively added the optimistic twist this word implies to speakers of English. Wu Hung, a Chinese scholar at the University of Chicago, says that originally wei ji didn't even mean crisis. "Ji has a range of meanings, including opportunity but also danger," he says. "When the third-century Chinese began to use the word wei ji, they simply meant danger--a meaning emphasized by both characters."
Still, if I were Chinese and a bunch of foreigners wanted to impute timeless insight to my ancestors, I don't know that I could find it in my heart to object.
"mythosaz has confirmed reports that he is working to create a cable television channel dedicated to Anime. Currently am I releasing very few details about the channel itself."
To clarify a few things: By "working" I mean "daydreaming", and by "create a cable television channel dedicated to Anime" I mean "about spending the lottery when I win it."
Does anyone else want to confirm reports that they're working on something on which they have no details?
OK, no problem. Here's my second plan. Back in the Sixties I had a weather changing machine that was in essence a sophisticated heat beam which we called a "laser."
A batteries? In what alternative universe did you guys find A batteries? Virtually no one makes them today, or B batteries either. The letters are part of a standard for single-cell batteries devised by the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI, beginning in the 1920s. (I realize that, strictly speaking, a battery consists of two or more cells, but let's not get picky.) Today the standard sizes range from AAAA to G, and for some reason there's also J, N, and 6. AAA, AA, C, and D were the only sizes that caught on in a big way commercially, but the others haven't totally disappeared. If you pry apart one of those big 6-volt lantern batteries, you'll find four F cells inside.
The decline of arcades is not because of "the man" keeping the violent game-playing kids out of trouble in the malls, it's because arcade games just aren't the profitable business they were 15 years ago
And while it might be a case of chicken/egg, there aren't any new video games anyway. With the exception of a handful of pizza-parlor specials (racing games and Golden Tee) updates they simply aren't making new arcade games (or pinball machines) for that matter anyway. Nearly 4,000 games available for MAME over the span of a decade, and now a trickle of 10 games a year.
Your old arcade has either become a pool hall, packed itself with ticket redemption games, or packed up shop closed it's doors.
The Packet Shaper has destroyed the ability of students to use the internet from their rooms as it causes huge latency, in the order of 4.7 seconds at most (that I've seen) and averaging around 2 seconds (yes, seconds).
NO. The students who need to steal MP3s and VCDs have destroyed the ability for students to use the internet from their rooms.
IIRC, IDIV (signed divide) was nearly 200 clock cycles on an 8088. It was down to the 30-40 cycle range by the time we hit the Pentium. Even the most basic ADD and MOV took 2 (or more) cycles until the 80486.
Three orders of magnitude faster clock, multiple instructions per cycle, many instuctions needing only a single cycle, and most "tricky" stuff farmed off to add-in cards.
Slashdot Mirror
The comparison here is the Windows client/server model vs. the terminal/server Unix model.
Where's the comparison between Windows TERMINAL/server model vs. terminal/server Unix model? Aren't Terminal Server and Citrix options any longer on the Wintel platform?
Many mortgage companies now require first-time home buyers to study for and take a test that proves they understand the details of their new home loan.
Why, you ask? So that if push comes to shove, they can demonstrate that, because of your passing test score, that you understood the contract.
I represent a company with 30,000 PCs, most of the Dells.
/shrug
Dell has a couple of problems with their new line. First and foremost the new LAPTOP line is a complete departure from the old C-series. The new D-series uses NO parts from the C-series. Your entire stockpile of replacement C-series parts (floppy, CD, battery, etc.) is useless for the D-series.
The Desktop line, just to make things worse, now uses the C-series (yes, the C, not D) floppy and CD-ROM bays for their SX versions of the desktop machines. And while I guess you have a source of replacement CD-ROM drives, you still only get one notebook style bay in their new SX machines. [The SX is the "Slim" GX version.] Between you and me, the SX is only smaller because they took out the power supply and put it on a brick on the power cord. YIPEE!
So, back to the REAL business desktop, the GX line. Most of you have seen an Optiplex desktop. You can get GX1/GXa machines at ComputerSurplusOutlet for $99 most days of the week. They're solid, easy to support machines with a huge number of replacement parts, interchangable pieces, and a great deal of familiarity with the people who support them. And while the new GX machines have gotten "tighter" to work in (ever since the 240 when the footprint got smaller), they're still easy to work on, have easy replacement parts, and everyone understands how to work on them.
They're ahead of the power-curve too, with serial ATA coming standard on the next round of GX machines on the roadmap..
Just stay away from the D-series laptops and the SX slimline machines. It's time to get a new RFQ from your other vendors. Your new machines are incompatable anyway, might as well shop around.
"I have an odd little connection to the Columbia: It once carried a book of mine into space."
To which I say...
"What do you call one Dave Barry book sent into space?"
Perhaps you need a gym with equipment newer than 1990. Rowing machines and exercise bicycles have had games integrated into them for a long time.
Are they available at home? Sure. Go to any good exercise equipment store and buy one.
People have been powering their TV with exercise bicycles for a long time now. Wanna watch Friends or wanna play Gran Turisimo? Start peddlin...
The missing "killer app" for MAME isn't a box that lets you play on the TV. Tons of us dream of building a nice full console, but we're never going to get it finished. We want a joystick, better than the HotRod, that has a full suite of buttons (incuding ESCAPE, ~ and TAB) and a coin-mech, or buttons and wires to emulate it. And you know what? We want it to be the same size as the one that's going to go in the cabinet that we're not going to build, so we can take the first step and feel good about not wasting cash on a "quality" joystick that's never going to mesh into our END product. JAMMA headers optional. I know that Ultimarc will sell me all the conversion gear I need. Not everyone is a carpenter. We want someone to make useful stand-alone pieces that later fit into our dream machine.
Or, you can pay $299 new and in the box direct.
/ my hd.asp
http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video
Star Control 3 was so awful, and such a let-down from the highly-rated, universally-loved Star Control 2, that it's been reverse engineered and ported to Linux, and a similar open source project exists in Highlander-like fashion to forget that 3 ever existed, by making Star Control: TimeWarp http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/timewarp/
The CHiPs spacecraft will be ground controlled by Officers 'Ponch' Poncherello and Jon Baker.
Let me be one of the first hundred people or so to say, "GOOD!" For far too long every post where anyone dares say anything that even remotely links P2P and piracy is instantly modded down and disagreed with under the guise of freedom.
Well, it's not about freedom. It's mostly about stealing music and movies.
People stole stuff, or at a minimum, engaged in the redistribution of it. Those people should pay.
Break the law, get in trouble. Oh, and don't explain why it shouldn't be against the law, and how it's better for record companies for us to share music. That's a rationalisation of the sickest kind. It's still illegal, and if the people who do it could spent one tenth the time they spend stealing things actually trying to change the law and they'd get it changed.
Nah, I'll keep stealing stuff until someone busts me.
Endoboy already got it right.
I pay for a measured amount of electricity. If I use more than I'm paying for - because I circumvent the device that does the measuring, that's theft.
The milage on your car is reported (among other things) for leases, for rentals, and in some places for registration. Since you pay for a set number of miles, disconnecting your odometer is theft.
For Christ's sake I hope I don't have to explain stealing cable to you people.
Later tonight, I'm gonna "uncap" my cable box, my electrical meter, and the odometer in my car.
Thank goodness Slashdot will be here to cry out on my behalf when those evil nazi stormtrooper "law enforcement agents" show up at my house.
The problem is not that Slashdot is picking and choosing bug reports in an attempt to make M$FT look bad. They're reporting bugs from all the "major" OSs. The problem is the bias in the reporting and by the upwards modded comentators. Take this example from the article (and the note which it closes on):
The 'solution' from MS in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS02-065 recommends that you remove MS from the list of Trusted Publishers."
NO! The 'solution' from Microsoft is that you just patch your MDAC to include the component from 2.7 or that you just update your MDAC to 2.7
For Christ's sake people, if this were a *nix bug, you'd all be beating your "we know how to update our machines" drum complaining that only stupid Windows users don't use updates.
Or perhaps it would be the "at least fixes are available immediately for *nix" argument. MDAC 2.7 isn't new, kids.
Just report the bug, and report the CORRECT fix.
You disagree with me. Mod me down.
Until I get full functionality from Outlook Web Access (OWA) or FREE (as in beer) functionality from something like Ximian, I'm tethered to my Exchange server.
$69 a seat for Ximian's Exchange 2000 connector doesn't help me justify not spending $130 for Windows 2000/XP upgrade licenses.
On the home front, the truth is WINE still doesn't have full Everquest support. That's why half a million of us aren't changing anytime soon.
Yes, the master himself (Cecil) did cover this:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/001103.html
Dear Cecil:
I've heard it said (many times recently!) that the Chinese word for "crisis" is the same as that for "opportunity." I find it difficult to believe, but is it really true? --Alison Raouf, via the Internet
Cecil replies:
Alison, I like your skeptical attitude, but we'd better get the story straight before we start acting all superior. The standard rap is that the Chinese ideogram for "crisis" is made up of two characters signifying "opportunity" and "danger." To Westerners, this exemplifies the ancient wisdom of the East and is cited frequently by motivational speakers, self-help books, and the like, e.g., "A crisis provides an opportunity for change and growth as well as a danger of regression or stagnation," etc.
I tell ya, it's deep. But deep what? Here are my initial findings:
In pinyin (romanized Chinese), the term for crisis is wei ji.
Native Chinese speakers tend to think the crisis = danger/opportunity connection is complete bullshit.
Maybe it isn't.
In Chinese, the word for danger is wei xian and opportunity is ji huay. These are obviously two different words, native Chinese speakers note, so it's not literally true that crisis in Chinese is a combination of danger and opportunity. The fact that wei ji (crisis) contains elements of both terms is happenstance, they say, just as in English multiply and multifunctional aren't synonymous even though they share a prefix. (This example provided by Alison, who has been doing some more research on her own.)
Maybe so. On the other hand, maybe what we've got here is a lot of people who don't understand their own language. Let's inquire more closely. Ji, taken by itself, means moment, chance, or opportunity (also machine, but let's disregard that), as in zhuan ji (change opportunity), shi ji (time opportunity), qi ji (cutting-in opportunity), or tou ji (plunge-into opportunity). Wei, on the other hand, means dangerous, precarious, high, as in wei xian (danger risk), wei shi (danger time), or wei hai (danger damage).
So the danger/opportunity interpretation isn't completely baseless. But let's stop kidding ourselves. The simplest explanation is that wei ji literally means precarious moment--a pretty close approximation of crisis, and not necessarily one meant to suggest a paradox. No doubt the rendering of ji as opportunity is the work of a nonnative speaker who naively added the optimistic twist this word implies to speakers of English. Wu Hung, a Chinese scholar at the University of Chicago, says that originally wei ji didn't even mean crisis. "Ji has a range of meanings, including opportunity but also danger," he says. "When the third-century Chinese began to use the word wei ji, they simply meant danger--a meaning emphasized by both characters."
Still, if I were Chinese and a bunch of foreigners wanted to impute timeless insight to my ancestors, I don't know that I could find it in my heart to object.
"mythosaz has confirmed reports that he is working to create a cable television channel dedicated to Anime. Currently am I releasing very few details about the channel itself."
To clarify a few things: By "working" I mean "daydreaming", and by "create a cable television channel dedicated to Anime" I mean "about spending the lottery when I win it."
Does anyone else want to confirm reports that they're working on something on which they have no details?
OK, no problem. Here's my second plan. Back in the Sixties I had a weather changing machine that was in essence a sophisticated heat beam which we called a "laser."
Thank goodness Wal-Mart still sells shotguns and rifles in the sporting goods section. (Milage in your state my vary..)
A batteries? In what alternative universe did you guys find A batteries? Virtually no one makes them today, or B batteries either. The letters are part of a standard for single-cell batteries devised by the American National Standards Institute, or ANSI, beginning in the 1920s. (I realize that, strictly speaking, a battery consists of two or more cells, but let's not get picky.) Today the standard sizes range from AAAA to G, and for some reason there's also J, N, and 6. AAA, AA, C, and D were the only sizes that caught on in a big way commercially, but the others haven't totally disappeared. If you pry apart one of those big 6-volt lantern batteries, you'll find four F cells inside.
http://www.batteryholders.com/ansiref.shtml
1. Steal rocket belt.
2. ???
3. Profit
Those of us already in orbit can't wait for the space elevator to be complete. Finally, we can get some cable TV.
It just works(tm)... ...unless you start letting people dork with it.
IIRC, IDIV (signed divide) was nearly 200 clock cycles on an 8088. It was down to the 30-40 cycle range by the time we hit the Pentium. Even the most basic ADD and MOV took 2 (or more) cycles until the 80486.
Three orders of magnitude faster clock, multiple instructions per cycle, many instuctions needing only a single cycle, and most "tricky" stuff farmed off to add-in cards.
Nifty, huh?