Why Windows indeed. I used to use Linux as my primary OS. That was years ago, when linux could allow me to remotely login to computer (386dx40) but my CGA monitor wouldn't handle Windows.
I first upgraded and installed Windows 95 so I could play Red Alert. I migrated to Windows as my primary OS when I got a CD burner. Sure, Linux would have support for it soon, but who knows if decent CD burning software would ever arrive. I had to use multiple programs in Windows to do various types of CD burning, but I couldn't get linux to do any of them.
Currently I have a linux web server and a win2k home machine. Win2k is remarkably stable for the amount of torture I put that machine through. To this day I'm still tortured with obnoxiously simple tasks like getting the firewall working on my linux machine. With Windows, I just install Norton and block everything. With linux, I have to go looking for instructions.
The instructions are out there, but they're outdated. That FIREWALL FAQ I keep running into, it's for kernel 1.2. They don't tell you that anywhere. Now it's IPCHAINS, oh wait, did it just change to IPTABLES? By the time someone writes instructions to help me get my firewall up and running, I'll be on a different kernel that uses an entirely new type of firewall. I had the same problem with bandwidth throttling - nightmare.
Why don't I use Linux now? Because half the apps I've grown up with don't work on Linux. If something breaks in Linux, I poke around for a while and usually get frustrated. If something breaks in Windows, I've been playing with it for so many years that I can fix what's wrong.
At work my boss likes to buy some of the latest hardware for me. I don't want to wait 6 months for someone to figure out how to make this video card work. I want to be working on my Pro/E models within 15 minutes of opening the box.
It isn't fear of textual prompts, because I still do quite a bit at a DOS prompt. My linux machine still has no monitor, I telnet in to do any maintenance.
I believe Linux is on its way, but it's just not there yet. For some tasks, such as most server tasks, I will gladly accept Linux as the ideal choice. However, for the desktop environment, Windows still has my attention.
No, but I've often thought it would be nice to have a way to easily donate to artists (considering music here.) A method to indicate, "I downloaded this song therefore I wish to send a quarter to this artist." A quarter isn't much to us, but it's probably more than the artist would have gotten for selling the album.
Sending a check for $0.25 to Alanis with, "I downloaded your song and want to properly thank you for your music" would probably get the RIAA at my door with a swat team backing them up.
> So, what have YOU done? Obviously quite a few of you went to see Spider Man.
Well, quite a few of us SAW Spiderman. I watched Spiderman a few days before it was released in theatres, from my living room projector. I can assure you the MPAA didn't get squat from me.
But as for Spiderman not receiving any profits, that could be partially due to the deal Blockbuster had here in Florida. If you buy a spiderman card, you get 10 rentals for $30 (which saves you $10 right there) plus they give you a free copy of the spiderman DVD.
Speaking of logitech, I just bought the elite duo wireless mouse and keyboard. The keybaord has you go through some sort of securing process where it transmits a code to the keyboard then shows the code on the screen and asks me to enter it.
Now, I really have no clue whether this is just for show of if it actually does something. Does anyone know?
> Anyone had experience cancelling AOL service? Is it hard?
Very. Jon Katz already had one article about it.
Here's my story:
--
I called AOL to cancel my free subscription today. Being out in BFE stuck in a hotel room, it was nice to be able to get some sort of internet connection. However, now that I'm home I don't need it anymore.
When I called AOL to cancel my account, I had to choose the "press 3 to try and cancel your subscription with us." I pressed three and sat on hold listening to advertisements until I got hung up on. After a second call and a second volley of advertisements I got a salesman that was eager to help me. He got my personal information and verified that I was the owner of the account I was trying to cancel.
At that point the salesman began to ask me why I was canceling my AOL service. I don't mind answering a few minor questions, they have to ask them to better suit their service to customers. He asked about my home service. "Oh, you have DSL at home? So that highspeed is important to you? Have you looked into AOL's DSL service?" *insert sales pitch* "What do you use your home internet connection for?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you use the keyword feature of AOL?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you know that AOL allows you to create your own homepage?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you know that you can get music and videos through AOL by going to..." *insert sales pitch* "Have you tried using AOL at home?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you know that AOL offers a special section for broadband users..."
At this point, just over 20 minutes on the phone with this guy, I finally hung up because I felt that I wasn't going to get the cancellation confirmation.
--
I finally faxed a request to AOL and then called the credit card company and reported the card lost so they'd cancel it. I got a call at work about a month later from AOL trying to get me to sign back up. Sheesh.
So they paid back about 5% of the money they made from doing this. How is this fair?
> Previously, the companies said that MAP was needed to protect independent music retailers from rising competition from discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Best Buy. They had slashed CD prices, below cost in some cases, in the hope that once consumers were in their stores they would buy other, more expensive products.
CDs below cost? I have yet to see Best Buy selling music CDs for less than $0.74.
Come on people. There's over 400 comments and I didn't see any of the 100+ above my threashold that even hit on getting this fact right.
I can't read the article because the server is crying, but there is a minor fact that many people on here are missing. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. There are other mediums through which objects can travel faster than light.
The references to Tesla are most likely due to the wireless transmission of energy patents. Bascially the use of a resonating transformer to produce an obnoxious magnetic field. The Tesla Coil acts as a transmitter. A properly tuned receiver (another coil) could provide an electric current from the fluxuating magnetic field in the air.
The magnetic field strength would drop off exponentially with distance. This would provide a wireless energy source as long as the distance remains somewhat short.
This perpetual motion trick may work wonders as long as the coil is hidden and the vehicle never travels far from coil. So they take the vehicle to a redneck loop, set up a giant Tesla Coil inside a plastic bust of Dale Earnhardt (since they know that nobody would dare question the bust of Lord #3) and amuse the masses by driving in circles.
They probably blew a transformer or their beer-bottle caps (lossy at high frequencies and tend to explode when used in coils) and had to cancel the event.
Is there anyone who lives near this place that can take a small loop of wire and go check for an existing magnetic field that could cook electronics?
Oh wait, cooking electronics, maybe that's why Ken's cell phone didn't work. Do you really think a cell phone could transmit through the EMF noise caused by ol' sparky? Even afterwards, the phone may not work anymore.
So, this explains the charging of the batteries, the need for a racetrack, and Ken's phone not working.
This just looks like one of the millions of stickered out cars in the world. Claiming to be something it's not.
> They're not putting up fake files of legal music, just fake files of illegal music.
Actually, a more accurate statement is "they're putting up fake files of bad music." I'm sure if I were looking for the latest Britney Spears song, Celine Dion song, or some Backstreet Boys I might find a fake, but I have yet to find some fake Artie Shaw or Helen Kane.
The RIAA is actively trying to kill the number of people listening to Britney Spears while not even putting a dent in us with good tastes in music. How exactly is that bad?
I just used a bootable floppy to run FDISK and recover when the OS I just installed on my newe drive forgot to set an active bit.
Without floppies, I would have been struggling to make a bootable CDROM - from my backup machine that has a floppy drive but no burner.
> couldnt you reverse the polarity on the platter motor of the CD burner to make it spin the opposite way while burning?
The disc itself is a spiral of places to burn bits. The disc is not a perfectly isotropic field of space where the burner decides where to make tracks - it has a specific groove it has to follow.
Interesting. Within two months of getting a new phone number I had daily solicitation calls.
I started answering my phone with "Sheriff's Office..." I do not claim that I'm a police officer, but imply that the caller called the Sheriff's Office. The solicitor would apologize profusely and promise to take me off their list immediately.
I very rarely get any solicitation calls anymore.
Well, I paid my taxes for living in this country. The governemtn decided to spend a fair amount on NASA. NASA chose to spend their money getting that rock.
Slashdot Mirror
"... but that would belittle the name of our moon, which is 'The Moon' "
"Point is, we're at the center, not you."
I first upgraded and installed Windows 95 so I could play Red Alert. I migrated to Windows as my primary OS when I got a CD burner. Sure, Linux would have support for it soon, but who knows if decent CD burning software would ever arrive. I had to use multiple programs in Windows to do various types of CD burning, but I couldn't get linux to do any of them.
Currently I have a linux web server and a win2k home machine. Win2k is remarkably stable for the amount of torture I put that machine through. To this day I'm still tortured with obnoxiously simple tasks like getting the firewall working on my linux machine. With Windows, I just install Norton and block everything. With linux, I have to go looking for instructions.
The instructions are out there, but they're outdated. That FIREWALL FAQ I keep running into, it's for kernel 1.2. They don't tell you that anywhere. Now it's IPCHAINS, oh wait, did it just change to IPTABLES? By the time someone writes instructions to help me get my firewall up and running, I'll be on a different kernel that uses an entirely new type of firewall. I had the same problem with bandwidth throttling - nightmare.
Why don't I use Linux now? Because half the apps I've grown up with don't work on Linux. If something breaks in Linux, I poke around for a while and usually get frustrated. If something breaks in Windows, I've been playing with it for so many years that I can fix what's wrong.
At work my boss likes to buy some of the latest hardware for me. I don't want to wait 6 months for someone to figure out how to make this video card work. I want to be working on my Pro/E models within 15 minutes of opening the box.
It isn't fear of textual prompts, because I still do quite a bit at a DOS prompt. My linux machine still has no monitor, I telnet in to do any maintenance.
I believe Linux is on its way, but it's just not there yet. For some tasks, such as most server tasks, I will gladly accept Linux as the ideal choice. However, for the desktop environment, Windows still has my attention.
Is he by chance related to Mary J. Blige?
No, but I've often thought it would be nice to have a way to easily donate to artists (considering music here.) A method to indicate, "I downloaded this song therefore I wish to send a quarter to this artist." A quarter isn't much to us, but it's probably more than the artist would have gotten for selling the album. Sending a check for $0.25 to Alanis with, "I downloaded your song and want to properly thank you for your music" would probably get the RIAA at my door with a swat team backing them up.
> So, what have YOU done? Obviously quite a few of you went to see Spider Man. Well, quite a few of us SAW Spiderman. I watched Spiderman a few days before it was released in theatres, from my living room projector. I can assure you the MPAA didn't get squat from me. But as for Spiderman not receiving any profits, that could be partially due to the deal Blockbuster had here in Florida. If you buy a spiderman card, you get 10 rentals for $30 (which saves you $10 right there) plus they give you a free copy of the spiderman DVD.
A CPU that only runs half as fast as you expect. Wouldn't that be a Cyrix or an AMD k5?
Now, I really have no clue whether this is just for show of if it actually does something. Does anyone know?
I wondered how many people had ever heard that song.
Very. Jon Katz already had one article about it.
Here's my story:
--
I called AOL to cancel my free subscription today. Being out in BFE stuck in a hotel room, it was nice to be able to get some sort of internet connection. However, now that I'm home I don't need it anymore.
When I called AOL to cancel my account, I had to choose the "press 3 to try and cancel your subscription with us." I pressed three and sat on hold listening to advertisements until I got hung up on. After a second call and a second volley of advertisements I got a salesman that was eager to help me. He got my personal information and verified that I was the owner of the account I was trying to cancel.
At that point the salesman began to ask me why I was canceling my AOL service. I don't mind answering a few minor questions, they have to ask them to better suit their service to customers. He asked about my home service. "Oh, you have DSL at home? So that highspeed is important to you? Have you looked into AOL's DSL service?" *insert sales pitch* "What do you use your home internet connection for?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you use the keyword feature of AOL?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you know that AOL allows you to create your own homepage?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you know that you can get music and videos through AOL by going to..." *insert sales pitch* "Have you tried using AOL at home?" *insert sales pitch* "Did you know that AOL offers a special section for broadband users..."
At this point, just over 20 minutes on the phone with this guy, I finally hung up because I felt that I wasn't going to get the cancellation confirmation.
--
I finally faxed a request to AOL and then called the credit card company and reported the card lost so they'd cancel it. I got a call at work about a month later from AOL trying to get me to sign back up. Sheesh.
> Previously, the companies said that MAP was needed to protect independent music retailers from rising competition from discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Best Buy. They had slashed CD prices, below cost in some cases, in the hope that once consumers were in their stores they would buy other, more expensive products.
CDs below cost? I have yet to see Best Buy selling music CDs for less than $0.74.
How many times is this going to be a headline?
I can't read the article because the server is crying, but there is a minor fact that many people on here are missing. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. There are other mediums through which objects can travel faster than light.
The magnetic field strength would drop off exponentially with distance. This would provide a wireless energy source as long as the distance remains somewhat short.
This perpetual motion trick may work wonders as long as the coil is hidden and the vehicle never travels far from coil. So they take the vehicle to a redneck loop, set up a giant Tesla Coil inside a plastic bust of Dale Earnhardt (since they know that nobody would dare question the bust of Lord #3) and amuse the masses by driving in circles.
They probably blew a transformer or their beer-bottle caps (lossy at high frequencies and tend to explode when used in coils) and had to cancel the event.
Is there anyone who lives near this place that can take a small loop of wire and go check for an existing magnetic field that could cook electronics?
Oh wait, cooking electronics, maybe that's why Ken's cell phone didn't work. Do you really think a cell phone could transmit through the EMF noise caused by ol' sparky? Even afterwards, the phone may not work anymore.
So, this explains the charging of the batteries, the need for a racetrack, and Ken's phone not working.
This just looks like one of the millions of stickered out cars in the world. Claiming to be something it's not.
> They're not putting up fake files of legal music, just fake files of illegal music. Actually, a more accurate statement is "they're putting up fake files of bad music." I'm sure if I were looking for the latest Britney Spears song, Celine Dion song, or some Backstreet Boys I might find a fake, but I have yet to find some fake Artie Shaw or Helen Kane. The RIAA is actively trying to kill the number of people listening to Britney Spears while not even putting a dent in us with good tastes in music. How exactly is that bad?
I just used a bootable floppy to run FDISK and recover when the OS I just installed on my newe drive forgot to set an active bit. Without floppies, I would have been struggling to make a bootable CDROM - from my backup machine that has a floppy drive but no burner.
> couldnt you reverse the polarity on the platter motor of the CD burner to make it spin the opposite way while burning? The disc itself is a spiral of places to burn bits. The disc is not a perfectly isotropic field of space where the burner decides where to make tracks - it has a specific groove it has to follow.
Interesting. Within two months of getting a new phone number I had daily solicitation calls. I started answering my phone with "Sheriff's Office..." I do not claim that I'm a police officer, but imply that the caller called the Sheriff's Office. The solicitor would apologize profusely and promise to take me off their list immediately. I very rarely get any solicitation calls anymore.
Well, I paid my taxes for living in this country. The governemtn decided to spend a fair amount on NASA. NASA chose to spend their money getting that rock.
If I paid as much money as NASA did to go get that rock, I'd want it back too.