If you are looking for a Distance Education school, look no further than Athabasca University.
This used to be a farmer's university, which gave rural Albertans in Canada a way to plough the fields during the day and study for school at night. From the get go, it was set up to be for Distance Education.
This core principle of the university has not changed, although it now takes students from all over the world, and it has many different degrees.
Essentially, once you register for a course, Athabasca University will mail you your textbooks, your lesson plan, and the contact information for your tutor who will provide advice and grade assignments. You work at your own pace over the six months you are given to complete the course. At the end, you go to a recognized university or college near you and write your final exam there, under the supervision of someone trusted by Athabasca U.
I personally have taken two courses there (one on object oriented programming, the other on relational databases) and they have both helped me immensely at work. I imagine a student more motivated than I could do a whole degree this way.
In addition to Orca, you might need one more file, a DLL called gdiplus.dll.
I added it to the
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Code Named Acrylic root directory of the Acrylic installation, and now it loads just fine.
I do not have Adobe Illustrator, so I am delighted with Acrylic. Finally, I have a free (as in beer) way of loading those pesky.ai files that people keep sending me!
The choice of languages used to demo the new translation tool seem to point to something interesting.
In the only four slides where translations are shown, these are the original languages which are translated into English: Slide 137 - Chinese Slide 138 - Arabic Slide 139 - Arabic Slide 140 - Arabic
As accidental as these choices may be, is Google trying to sell the new translation tool to some arm of the U.S. Federal Government?
Consider that the previous two U.S. wars were fought against enemies whose holy text is considered definitive only in Arabic.
Consider that the only nation challenging the U.S. as a global superpower is China.
no more pulling out a drive to virus-scan it then replacing it or replacing a drive on an OEM machine - that won't allow it to boot
Exactly. From the description of Secure Startup, it sounds like the only purpose of this feature is to frustrate Sys Admins and their minions.
Improved security is an easy sell to executives in large corporations, so expect to see mandates sent to the MIS or IT departments instructing them to only buy TPM-enabled motherboards.
Of course, these same executives will later fire their Sys Admins just as quickly as they can walk into their offices and explain how all the data in their expensive laptops is now unrecoverable.
The security platform depends on a TPM chip being present in the system. The chip is an industry standard governed by the Trusted Computing Group, a non-profit organization which develops security standards.
Why should users trust the Trusted Computing Group?
Who backs them? What is their official reason for existing? What is their real reason for existing? (This last question cannot be answered by merely reading this groups home page; you need to consider the motives of those directing or controlling this group.)
My guess is that their official reason this group exists is "to promote safe environments by protecting users from various malicious computer exploits" or similar sounding goodness.
In contrast, my guess is that their real reason for existing is "to strip users of their existing rights to use the programs and data on their computers so that copyright holders can dictate if, when, and how users may access them".
Am I the only person here who intentionally stopped upgrading Microsoft operating systems at Windows 2000?
Admittedly, I love three features that I have experienced on XP machines:
Having the ability to monitor network traffic in the task monitor
Running multiple users simultaneously
ClearType
Despite these nice features, well, there just seems to be some deep, overall suckiness with Windows XP. It doesn't seem right: It's like Microsoft forgot why it was in business.
Has anyone else experienced this feeling? Is anyone else worried about the day when drivers for new hardware no longer work in Win2K?
If DRM was ever to become the dominant means of distributing content, recorded history would disappear. We would enter a new dark age.
Imagine historians trying to learn something of our society, our culture, a thousand years from now if all they had to go on were encrypted data files.
The copyright holders would be long gone, but the useless, unreadable files would remain.
The Universal Postal Union has been around since 1874, ensuring that post can be mailed around the world without issue.
The UPU has 190 member countries, and those countries submit mailing information to the UPU, making it the most extensive repository of postal information on earth.
If you are looking for information on addresses, I would start (and probably stop) with the UPU.
Watch as the illusion of reality that your brain creates for you breaks down as it hits an edge-case of monitor refresh + head vibration that a few hundred thousand years of hunter-gathering never equipped you for.
Of course, once you start here, you might want to explore other mind hacks that are also available to you.
Real research is dead for the company I work for too. We have an R&D department, but everyone is involved in product development.
Essentially, what this means is that the products we are selling now are fundamentally the sames ones that we sold in the 1970s when ICs swept the market.
Only the details are different now: Instead of using 74xx DIP packages, we use big integrated ICs with SMT. The actual inputs, outputs, control lines, and logic are more or less the same.
Of course, nowadays, none of my senior managers could actually do any of the work of those under them. Sure, they all have MBAs, but they don't actually have any conception of what their direct reports need to do.
It's sad. Asian companies don't seem to have been bitten by this kind of stupidity yet, and they will completely steamroll over North America sooner or later.
Well, I for one work at a manufacturing plant that makes refrigerator-sized battery chargers.
We have about 45-thousand parts and assemblies in our master database. Unfortunately, there is no way to create ad-hoc queries on this DB, and I am often forced to print reports to text files. I then take these text files and import them into Excel. After using the "Convert Text to Columns" feature, I can slice and dice the data any way I want.
Although I have minion/errand-runner/peon status in the company, senior managers routinely ask me to create reports that cannot be generated using the system itself. My abilities appear like witchcraft to them.
Come to think of it, I learned to appreciate Excel when I was first slicing and dicing datasets created from our dataloggers which were recording voltages, currents, temperatures, and other values during type testing of new battery charger models.
In that case too, Excel proved to be a very simple, very fast way to get the data into a manipulable form and then actually generate decent reports quickly. The charting feature is rather simple, but it usually gets the job done.
You may sneer, you may turn your head up and sniff with disdain, but guess what? Some people are measured for their productivity, and if they need to get something done both quickly and well, they will routinely turn to decent software like Excel.
Incidentally, I think Microsoft hit the zenith in their software development with Excel 97. I have tried Excel 2000 and Excel XP, but they do not seem to have any significant features worth upgrading for.
I've dated people from both ethnic groups (and others) so I think that qualifies me.
Well, you've just used an appeal to authority, which is one of the fallacies of logical reasoning.
I could explain to you what that means, but forget it. Poor reasoners don't want help. So instead, I'm going to fight fire with fire, and make the same claim to ethnic knowledge you did, yet end up with the exact opposite conclusion. And I'm going to do it better than you too. Watch and learn:
"Both ethnic groups" you say, parent poster? Well, I happen to live in the City of Toronto, home to eighty ethnic groups and speakers of a hundred different languages.
This is a city where I hear Swahili on the subway, Mandarin and Cantonese on the radio, and Dutch at work. My Wal-Mart sells died beans, both in West Indies and East Indies styles. I happened to be the only person in my 400-unit apartment building to actually have been born in the city I live in. No wonder the United Nations has designated Toronto as the World's "most ethnically-diverse city" five times in a row.
Now, even with my day-to-day exposure to a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural experience, my brain screamed but.. but.. Ford Prefect is white! when I saw the movie trailer.
Face it. You can work, shop, play, and learn among people from all over the world and still believe that Ford Prefect is white.
Bow to my superior argumentation skills, parent poster!
Quoting from the book version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, here is a description of Ford Prefect:
He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not conspicuously handsome. His hair was wiry and gingerish and brushed backwards from the temples. His skin seemed to be pulled backwards from the nose. There was something very slightly odd about him, but it was difficult to say what it was. Perhaps it was that his eyes didn't blink often enough and when you talked to him for any length of time your eyes began involuntarily to water on his behalf. Perhaps it was that he smiled slightly too broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he was about to go for their neck.
When you read this description, you sense the frustration that people have when they meet Ford Prefect. He acts and looks just ever so slightly different from his fellow Britons.
If he were black, it would have been mentioned right away. After all, being black would signal that his ancestors were not native Britons, which Ford was assumed to be.
If Ford were meant to be black, I am sure Douglas Adams would have offered it as a possible reason of his strangeness, with another sentence tacked on to the end of the quote I've given above.
Of course, there are more obvious reasons too. Don't black people have curly hair, not wiry? Don't black people usually have black hair, not ginger?
Besides, reread the quote starting at "His skin seemed to be pulled backwards from the nose" with a black person in mind. Don't these sentences now sound racist, as if Douglas Adams was describing black physiology as something freakish?
> Let's all justify a crappy UI because of incompetent old people stereotypes.
These are not stereotypes. In the office I work in, these old people are named Gary, Carl, and Bernie.
They earn at least twice as much money as I do, and yet I find myself standing over their shoulder at least once a week, trouble-shooting their "mysterious" computer problems.
Last week, it was Carl. While in PowerPoint, I told him to hover over a slide and click the right mouse button. He just stared at me like I grew a second head.
Eventually, he did press the right mouse button, and got what he needed done, but then after that, he had to ask "left or right?" after each of my instructions to "click the mouse".
So, on one hand, I can see why Apple decided to go with a single-button mouse. If I had not witnessed such stunning ignorance and stupidity, I would not have believed Apple's argument at all.
On the other hand, Carl has been using a computer with Windows 95 or better since it was released. As a rough estimate, Carl has sat at his PC for eight and a half hours a day, 250 days a year, for nine years. After 19,125 hours of use, why is right-clicking so difficult?
Seriously, if a tradesman did not know how to use his tools he would be fired. A plumber who can't snake? A carpenter who can't saw? They would be gone in short order. An office worker who can't compute? We should expect the same of office incompetents, such as Carl, Gary, and Bernie.
[...] the GPL is harmful. It forces its twisted political agenda upon others, robs individuals of their intellectual property, spreads itself like a virus, and causes the same kind of predatory behaviour that its proponents lament. It must be avoided at all cost.
So there you have it, at least according to Nick Johnson anyway.
Linux users don't need Microsoft viruses, as their entire system serves as one big virus, mercilessly incorporating everything it touches.
There is only one "standard" keyboard (QWERTY) and everything else.
Hear hear!
Once you actually learn how to touch type, it becomes an extension of your hands. Typing moves from your conscious mind into your muscle memory, and there it stays, forever at your beck and call. Typing becomes like breathing, automatic.
Just as you would have to learn to type with a QWERTY keyboard, you would have to learn to type on an alphabetical keyboard.
In fact, I would argue that this keyboard would actually hinder learning to type properly, as it rewards people for row scanning, using the Columbus technique (where every letter is a new discovery).
So, for the benefit of making the first fifteen minutes in front of a keyboard easier for the clueless neophyte, someone wants to inconvenience the rest of us? I don't think so.
Not that it "defeats" piracy, but it's stopping *some* of the piracy from happening.
Exactly. The MPAA could do itself a favor and look at commercial, off-the-shelf software way of doing business.
Is there piracy? Yes. Are companies still in business? Yes.
For sake of argument, ten percent of the population will always steal whatever isn't nailed down, and ten percent will always buy things legitimately. It is the hearts and minds of the other eighty percent that the MPAA has to win over.
Hollywood, awash in money and talent, should be ashamed that Bollywood has bested them in the online distribution market.
Anyone who still uses older 16-bit programs can forget about running them under 64-bit Windows. However, some 32-bit applications use 16-bit code during installation, which means that these programs cannot be installed.
Well, this is disappointing. For the first time ever Microsoft is dropping support for binaries that ran in earlier versions of Windows.
Does Microsoft no longer value older software? Do they presuppose that users no longer want backward compatibility?
Is it too hard to extend the NT Virtual DOS Machine to the 64-bit architecture? Or is the expectation that I only run the new, 64-bit, XP editions of Microsoft Spiffy from now on?
Really, I thought Microsoft's big ace was the mountains of old, existing binaries that just worked without needing the source to recompile on their new OSes. Apparently this does not matter any more.
I think he has egg on his face.. ASP.Net was a revolution
If you scroll down to the bottom of one of Joel's articles from 2004, you will find this quote:
Most.NET developers are ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server. ASP.NET is brilliant. I've been working with web development for ten years and it's really just a generation ahead of everything out there. But it's a server technology [...]
So no, Joel does not have egg on his face. You should give him some credit.
These young kids have computers, or access to computers, and a whole lot of time.
Unlike adults with paying jobs and disposable income, these kids have the motivation to enter the piracy scene: They want a game, a CD, or a movie, but they don't have the funds.
Folding@Home is pretty to watch as the atoms get twisted about. I particularly like when you get some of the largerprojects with 12,000+ atoms in total.
I used to crunch SETI packets, but that project lost me after when they upgraded to BOINC. BOINC managed to crash my otherwise unshakable Win2K machine, which is completely unacceptable.
So here's my question: How pretty is the eye candy on this new IBM client? Does anyone have screenshots?
> Blows my mind people are still wasting cycles over "find ET on my desktop."
This is the beauty of having the choice to run whatever program you want on your computer.
If you want to join IBM's grid, that's fine. If you want to do folding@home, that's fine too. If you what to join seti@home, all power to you.
Instead of airily dismissing people who choose to contribute to projects you disagree with, be happy there is a project you like and can contribute to.
After all, I think we all can agree that it's better that people are contributing at all, rather than wasting their idle clock cycles.
You're barely in the new computer market, much less the Apple market, if you can't drop 500 bucks on a computer.
You are completely and utterly wrong. Before Christmas, I was setting up my co-workers with used computers for $250 a piece.
For this price, they are getting an 866MHz Compaq Deskpro with a legitimate copy of Windows 2000 installed, with a second-hand 17" CRT monitor, with a new, cheap, Chinese-made keyboard and mouse.
If you are buying a PC to surf the web and read e-mail, these machines are great. There are still plenty of companies that replace their computers every three years or so, and the old ones are commonly resold.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are looking for a Distance Education school, look no further than Athabasca University.
This used to be a farmer's university, which gave rural Albertans in Canada a way to plough the fields during the day and study for school at night. From the get go, it was set up to be for Distance Education.
This core principle of the university has not changed, although it now takes students from all over the world, and it has many different degrees.
The one that would be best for your fianceé would be the Bachelor of Science in Computing and Information Systems Degree. This is a four-year degree with serious courses.
Essentially, once you register for a course, Athabasca University will mail you your textbooks, your lesson plan, and the contact information for your tutor who will provide advice and grade assignments. You work at your own pace over the six months you are given to complete the course. At the end, you go to a recognized university or college near you and write your final exam there, under the supervision of someone trusted by Athabasca U.
I personally have taken two courses there (one on object oriented programming, the other on relational databases) and they have both helped me immensely at work. I imagine a student more motivated than I could do a whole degree this way.
I added it to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Code Named Acrylic root directory of the Acrylic installation, and now it loads just fine.
I do not have Adobe Illustrator, so I am delighted with Acrylic. Finally, I have a free (as in beer) way of loading those pesky .ai files that people keep sending me!
The choice of languages used to demo the new translation tool seem to point to something interesting.
In the only four slides where translations are shown, these are the original languages which are translated into English:
Slide 137 - Chinese
Slide 138 - Arabic
Slide 139 - Arabic
Slide 140 - Arabic
As accidental as these choices may be, is Google trying to sell the new translation tool to some arm of the U.S. Federal Government?
Consider that the previous two U.S. wars were fought against enemies whose holy text is considered definitive only in Arabic.
Consider that the only nation challenging the U.S. as a global superpower is China.
no more pulling out a drive to virus-scan it then replacing it or replacing a drive on an OEM machine - that won't allow it to boot
Exactly. From the description of Secure Startup, it sounds like the only purpose of this feature is to frustrate Sys Admins and their minions.
Improved security is an easy sell to executives in large corporations, so expect to see mandates sent to the MIS or IT departments instructing them to only buy TPM-enabled motherboards.
Of course, these same executives will later fire their Sys Admins just as quickly as they can walk into their offices and explain how all the data in their expensive laptops is now unrecoverable.
Who backs them? What is their official reason for existing? What is their real reason for existing? (This last question cannot be answered by merely reading this groups home page; you need to consider the motives of those directing or controlling this group.)
My guess is that their official reason this group exists is "to promote safe environments by protecting users from various malicious computer exploits" or similar sounding goodness.
In contrast, my guess is that their real reason for existing is "to strip users of their existing rights to use the programs and data on their computers so that copyright holders can dictate if, when, and how users may access them".
Admittedly, I love three features that I have experienced on XP machines:
- Having the ability to monitor network traffic in the task monitor
- Running multiple users simultaneously
- ClearType
Despite these nice features, well, there just seems to be some deep, overall suckiness with Windows XP. It doesn't seem right: It's like Microsoft forgot why it was in business.Has anyone else experienced this feeling? Is anyone else worried about the day when drivers for new hardware no longer work in Win2K?
If DRM was ever to become the dominant means of distributing content, recorded history would disappear. We would enter a new dark age.
Imagine historians trying to learn something of our society, our culture, a thousand years from now if all they had to go on were encrypted data files.
The copyright holders would be long gone, but the useless, unreadable files would remain.
The Universal Postal Union has been around since 1874, ensuring that post can be mailed around the world without issue.
The UPU has 190 member countries, and those countries submit mailing information to the UPU, making it the most extensive repository of postal information on earth.
If you are looking for information on addresses, I would start (and probably stop) with the UPU.
If you really want to experience something amusing, bush your teeth with one of those powerful, pulsating electric toothbrushes while trying to read a CRT monitor.
Watch as the illusion of reality that your brain creates for you breaks down as it hits an edge-case of monitor refresh + head vibration that a few hundred thousand years of hunter-gathering never equipped you for.
Of course, once you start here, you might want to explore other mind hacks that are also available to you.
Real research is dead for the company I work for too. We have an R&D department, but everyone is involved in product development.
Essentially, what this means is that the products we are selling now are fundamentally the sames ones that we sold in the 1970s when ICs swept the market.
Only the details are different now: Instead of using 74xx DIP packages, we use big integrated ICs with SMT. The actual inputs, outputs, control lines, and logic are more or less the same.
Of course, nowadays, none of my senior managers could actually do any of the work of those under them. Sure, they all have MBAs, but they don't actually have any conception of what their direct reports need to do.
It's sad. Asian companies don't seem to have been bitten by this kind of stupidity yet, and they will completely steamroll over North America sooner or later.
Well, I for one work at a manufacturing plant that makes refrigerator-sized battery chargers.
We have about 45-thousand parts and assemblies in our master database. Unfortunately, there is no way to create ad-hoc queries on this DB, and I am often forced to print reports to text files. I then take these text files and import them into Excel. After using the "Convert Text to Columns" feature, I can slice and dice the data any way I want.
Although I have minion/errand-runner/peon status in the company, senior managers routinely ask me to create reports that cannot be generated using the system itself. My abilities appear like witchcraft to them.
Come to think of it, I learned to appreciate Excel when I was first slicing and dicing datasets created from our dataloggers which were recording voltages, currents, temperatures, and other values during type testing of new battery charger models.
In that case too, Excel proved to be a very simple, very fast way to get the data into a manipulable form and then actually generate decent reports quickly. The charting feature is rather simple, but it usually gets the job done.
You may sneer, you may turn your head up and sniff with disdain, but guess what? Some people are measured for their productivity, and if they need to get something done both quickly and well, they will routinely turn to decent software like Excel.
Incidentally, I think Microsoft hit the zenith in their software development with Excel 97. I have tried Excel 2000 and Excel XP, but they do not seem to have any significant features worth upgrading for.
I could explain to you what that means, but forget it. Poor reasoners don't want help. So instead, I'm going to fight fire with fire, and make the same claim to ethnic knowledge you did, yet end up with the exact opposite conclusion. And I'm going to do it better than you too. Watch and learn:
"Both ethnic groups" you say, parent poster? Well, I happen to live in the City of Toronto, home to eighty ethnic groups and speakers of a hundred different languages.
This is a city where I hear Swahili on the subway, Mandarin and Cantonese on the radio, and Dutch at work. My Wal-Mart sells died beans, both in West Indies and East Indies styles. I happened to be the only person in my 400-unit apartment building to actually have been born in the city I live in. No wonder the United Nations has designated Toronto as the World's "most ethnically-diverse city" five times in a row.
Now, even with my day-to-day exposure to a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural experience, my brain screamed but.. but.. Ford Prefect is white! when I saw the movie trailer.
Face it. You can work, shop, play, and learn among people from all over the world and still believe that Ford Prefect is white.
Bow to my superior argumentation skills, parent poster!
When you read this description, you sense the frustration that people have when they meet Ford Prefect. He acts and looks just ever so slightly different from his fellow Britons.
If he were black, it would have been mentioned right away. After all, being black would signal that his ancestors were not native Britons, which Ford was assumed to be.
If Ford were meant to be black, I am sure Douglas Adams would have offered it as a possible reason of his strangeness, with another sentence tacked on to the end of the quote I've given above.
Of course, there are more obvious reasons too. Don't black people have curly hair, not wiry? Don't black people usually have black hair, not ginger?
Besides, reread the quote starting at "His skin seemed to be pulled backwards from the nose" with a black person in mind. Don't these sentences now sound racist, as if Douglas Adams was describing black physiology as something freakish?
They earn at least twice as much money as I do, and yet I find myself standing over their shoulder at least once a week, trouble-shooting their "mysterious" computer problems.
Last week, it was Carl. While in PowerPoint, I told him to hover over a slide and click the right mouse button. He just stared at me like I grew a second head.
Eventually, he did press the right mouse button, and got what he needed done, but then after that, he had to ask "left or right?" after each of my instructions to "click the mouse".
So, on one hand, I can see why Apple decided to go with a single-button mouse. If I had not witnessed such stunning ignorance and stupidity, I would not have believed Apple's argument at all.
On the other hand, Carl has been using a computer with Windows 95 or better since it was released. As a rough estimate, Carl has sat at his PC for eight and a half hours a day, 250 days a year, for nine years. After 19,125 hours of use, why is right-clicking so difficult?
Seriously, if a tradesman did not know how to use his tools he would be fired. A plumber who can't snake? A carpenter who can't saw? They would be gone in short order. An office worker who can't compute? We should expect the same of office incompetents, such as Carl, Gary, and Bernie.
Linux users don't need Microsoft viruses, as their entire system serves as one big virus, mercilessly incorporating everything it touches.
Once you actually learn how to touch type, it becomes an extension of your hands. Typing moves from your conscious mind into your muscle memory, and there it stays, forever at your beck and call. Typing becomes like breathing, automatic.
Just as you would have to learn to type with a QWERTY keyboard, you would have to learn to type on an alphabetical keyboard.
In fact, I would argue that this keyboard would actually hinder learning to type properly, as it rewards people for row scanning, using the Columbus technique (where every letter is a new discovery).
So, for the benefit of making the first fifteen minutes in front of a keyboard easier for the clueless neophyte, someone wants to inconvenience the rest of us? I don't think so.
Not that it "defeats" piracy, but it's stopping *some* of the piracy from happening.
Exactly. The MPAA could do itself a favor and look at commercial, off-the-shelf software way of doing business.
Is there piracy? Yes. Are companies still in business? Yes.
For sake of argument, ten percent of the population will always steal whatever isn't nailed down, and ten percent will always buy things legitimately. It is the hearts and minds of the other eighty percent that the MPAA has to win over.
Hollywood, awash in money and talent, should be ashamed that Bollywood has bested them in the online distribution market.
Well, this is disappointing. For the first time ever Microsoft is dropping support for binaries that ran in earlier versions of Windows.
Does Microsoft no longer value older software? Do they presuppose that users no longer want backward compatibility?
Is it too hard to extend the NT Virtual DOS Machine to the 64-bit architecture? Or is the expectation that I only run the new, 64-bit, XP editions of Microsoft Spiffy from now on?
Really, I thought Microsoft's big ace was the mountains of old, existing binaries that just worked without needing the source to recompile on their new OSes. Apparently this does not matter any more.
The quote is from this article:l
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
The moral of the story: Pressing the preview button won't save you if you don't actually READ the preview before hitting submit.
If you scroll down to the bottom of one of Joel's articles from 2004, you will find this quote:
So no, Joel does not have egg on his face. You should give him some credit.
> What's with the very young kids sharing files?
It is simply a question of economics.
These young kids have computers, or access to computers, and a whole lot of time.
Unlike adults with paying jobs and disposable income, these kids have the motivation to enter the piracy scene: They want a game, a CD, or a movie, but they don't have the funds.
In time, that motivation become expertise.
> When they get the Linux client, they'll get 79,000 /.ers.
Well, you don't have to wait.
If you want to contribute to a good project, why not join Slashdot's team over at Folding@Home?
Unlike the IBM project, Folding@Home has its very own Linux console version.
I really like Folding@Home too.
Folding@Home is pretty to watch as the atoms get twisted about. I particularly like when you get some of the larger projects with 12,000+ atoms in total.
I used to crunch SETI packets, but that project lost me after when they upgraded to BOINC. BOINC managed to crash my otherwise unshakable Win2K machine, which is completely unacceptable.
So here's my question: How pretty is the eye candy on this new IBM client? Does anyone have screenshots?
> Blows my mind people are still wasting cycles over "find ET on my desktop."
This is the beauty of having the choice to run whatever program you want on your computer.
If you want to join IBM's grid, that's fine. If you want to do folding@home, that's fine too. If you what to join seti@home, all power to you.
Instead of airily dismissing people who choose to contribute to projects you disagree with, be happy there is a project you like and can contribute to.
After all, I think we all can agree that it's better that people are contributing at all, rather than wasting their idle clock cycles.
You're barely in the new computer market, much less the Apple market, if you can't drop 500 bucks on a computer.
You are completely and utterly wrong. Before Christmas, I was setting up my co-workers with used computers for $250 a piece.
For this price, they are getting an 866MHz Compaq Deskpro with a legitimate copy of Windows 2000 installed, with a second-hand 17" CRT monitor, with a new, cheap, Chinese-made keyboard and mouse.
If you are buying a PC to surf the web and read e-mail, these machines are great. There are still plenty of companies that replace their computers every three years or so, and the old ones are commonly resold.