Pages in 2000 render realatively nicely in 2003. (no, not identically) It appears pages in 2003 render nicely in 2007. A resume in office 97 may not be right on, but It'll still be readable in 2007. I've had 2 page 2003 based resume's printing out double spaced across 8 paqes in OOv2. I run Linux on the desktop at work and I can say from experience, the cross platform word doc formatting stinks.
I rarely deal with any companies out there running more than one version behind on office. They stay current because they want things to display appropriately to their business partners. As soon as 2007 starts shipping with Dell, we'll no doubt pick it up and users will start a campaign to get 2003 upgraded.
I'm not saying it's not a M$ racket. I'm just saying the latest version of OO should render to a very close degree of the latest release of the product that's used by 85% of the market. (If they want to procure a chance of taking over the market) You can say "well Microsoft doesn't do it", but they don't have to. That's one of thier ways to get people to upgrade. If OO intends to catch up or take over, they're going to need to play really nice with the current office rev.
Bottom line is that I can't integrate OO at a workplace that has people on anything newer than 10 yr old MS Office applications. That's bad for OO.
Take a slightly complex word document from a client. (bulleted lists, block indents, embedded objects) View it in word, view it in writer. Both are readable, but they do not look exactly the same. Margins are off, wrap doesn't line up, linespacing is slightly off. You can fiddle with the document to make it look the same, but it needs to be identical by default. It's pretty darned important for people to see the page as it was intended. And no PDF isn't really an option of you want to edit the content and use it elsewhere.
First off, I'd like to say this isn't a personal attack pointed at you. What you've said just sparked me to dump out my opinion on the subject.
I look at them more like McDonalds. They're not trying to be evil for a profit, they're just trying to profit without paying much attention to anything else. People don't have to eat at McDonalds. They choose to ignore what they know damn well is an unhealthy way of life and do it anyway. Is it McDonalds fault? Should we make sure that we have laws on health consciousness to protect us from ourselves? Too much like DRM I think.
If people didn't want to use G- mail/websearch/desksearch they don't have to. It's not like Google is quiet about collecting statistics. Indexing your thoughts and giving you really relevant adds is how they exist. I for one, and truly glad that someone has internet indexing working marginally well and that I don't have to pay for it.
The fact is, Google is just another place tracking your data. The government has been tracking all this stuff for years. Monitoring the key points on the net and taking notes down on everything. Given, Google's information about you is more easily indexed. But you can at least be picky about just what you allow through Google. Privacy has been out the window for a long time. If your neighbor really wants to know what kind of stuff you're in to, they just need check out your junkmail. Farming for information is definitely not new.
Everyone needs to stop treating the net as this ambiguous medium and use it for what it really is. You know not to eat three square meals from Mc'ds every day, you know not to use Google/gmail for things you shouldn't be doing. It is the individuals responsibility to keep what they see as their "personal data" safe, not a corporation's role to stop them every five minutes and to "STOP STOP TMI!!!!".
What you put unsecured on the net, is a public proclamation. For better or worse it is track able by so many entities in so many ways that you needn't waste your time trying to figure out who might be looking at you. It's the equivalency of sitting in a crowded cafeteria. You can't whack off and yell at anyone that might be looking at you.
Take a minute, make sure that the index https is off in your search settings. Don't send truly private data unencrypted over Google transports. If you're really worried that what you're doing can be seen: set up another browser, perhaps proxy, go test out http://www.metropipe.net/ or another pay, end to end anonymizer.
I don't believe it was style that popularized the IPOD. It was marketing.
They wedged their way to the mac users community, (media centric people to begin with) then started the mother of all add campaigns once the product was out there. Getting it in the creative community in a way made it stylish, but it was really a very successful marketing trick.
Before the Ipod, the majority of the MP3 players out there were erronious and from companies that most (non-tech) people had never heard of. "Creative Labs" "Archos".
Style is important, It's a tool to garner interest. Which is all Wired is doing. Even though style is choice, would the Ipod sell as well if it had poor audio quality? People want stuff that does things, they'll buy in to that. If that thing happens to also be more fashionable, they woun't buy from the competition.
Really, I'm not completely sure better is even a problem per se. I'm not working on the shuttle project or anything, but I don't really thing that the things aren't getting brought to the attention of people in charge.
Really, I say, swap out for better decision makers and let loose anyone that can't be deprogrammed from the don't tell the king bad news, it pisses him off mentality.
If you could take an objective non-engineer and graft them physically to a stone cold righteous logic wielding geek in the know, I think it would all work out in the end. Any engineer in a management position for a succifient period of time will eventually slip down the dark side of bureaucracy .
Not all accidents just "happen". These are by in large very preventable engineering and managerial failures.
Launching a shuttle well below the temperature at which the component manufacturers warn against is no accident. Not running an impromptu check to see if damage occurred during the takeoff after they noticed something wrong isn't much better. Even if they didn't have anything they could really do about it, they could have tried, contemplated a rescue (soviet or otherwise) or had time to make peace. Only the worst of what goes on makes it to the press. These types of problems don't just appear at the top level. You'll find these kind of decisions going on all the time just without the coin landing tails.
You can't leave people in power that put their careers ahead of safety and the lives of their heroes. They need to get more people in there that don't just ignore problems/dangers because they're high risk or could have a negative impact on their job. Yes there is inherent risk in the what they do, but to simply push off serious problems and say FEH, just a little more risk is unconscionable.
Some young blood might be good, headstrong people whose morals still outweigh their lust for their careers. The workforce would still have to be tempered by experience and some neighsayers though.
I'm not saying everyone getting canned is a bad person or just doesn't care, but it would appear there's some bad blood in NASA and I'm very happy to see the administration trying earnestly it getting ousted. (even if they're just trying to keep their jobs)
I figure if 5% of people are geeks, there's at least 2-3 million geeks in any given timezone even at loose standards. (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Pacific Island territories excluded)
Cheap - The combination of operating system, hardware, running software and updates is below or on par with the other choices.
Easy to setup/maintain - You average inept home user can shove a disk in, follow basic directions and expect to end up with working apps, sound and video and peripherals. If any problems arise they might be able to stick in a disk that came with a piece of hardware and remedy that problem without in depth knowledge of system editors. Updates should be easy to find and nearly automatic to install. Choosing and running updates should require little to no knowledge of computers. Joe user should also be able to walk in to the nearest wally world, pick up a slide scanner take it home and get it running without calling their family computer geek.
Stable - Would you want this OS controlling a robot doing eye surgery on you? Well you probably wouldn't want that in any case but you get my drift. Will this system do that it's intended to do without failure? Can the system be easily compromised due to minor operator oversight or ignorance?
On my desk sits a Mac to my left, an XP box to my right and a FC3 box straight ahead.
What the Mac does, it generally does well. Looks are obtained at the cost of speed but not so much that it makes the experience painful. It's very stable but it lacks good apps without a lot of money invested.
The Mac is the business guy in the tailored suit, a professional but he doesn't come cheap. He isn't really any better than anyone else, but he looks the part. He's pleasant to be around and if experience matters more to you than money, he's your man.
The Linux box is Fast, what it does, it generally does well. What it doesn't do by default requires endless toil and RTFM. It's rather stable and you can force it to do just about anything if you have enough time. Once you have all the stuff in the right places it's not hard to use but getting it to that point on all but the most generic hardware/software requires an experienced hand.
The Linux box is the genius teenager, You can dress it up, take it out, it's a cheap date and very able. It lacks refinement and organization but makes up for it with flexibility and low expense. If you can figure out how to motivate it, minimal investment can prove a staggering return.
The Windows box is pretty fast, fairly cheap but it takes a lot to keep it in proper condition. There's a large collection of free software that does a descent job though there's a large collection of expensive software that arguably does the job better. The biggest problem is that it will continue to work if it's not kept up to date. Eventually it will be struck down through it's unpatched insecurities. You can't leave it alone. If novices understood how important patching and not running too much cheesy third party software was, the competition would have a hard time holding on. Windows has great flexibility, unfortunately that usually comes at the cost of stability. It's all in how far you take it.
Windows is that lazy uncle that never seems to get things right. If you keep on him he's ok (if not pretty good) at what he does, just not very trust worthy if left alone. He's pretty cheap to impress and can be dressed up, you can let him house sit, but you don't trust him with your china. Whether it's society that makes him that way or his own shortcomings is irrelevant. If you need to deal with him, keep him in his place everyone will be OK.
With the exception of marketing gimics and minor tweaks in the product lines, Mac will continue to make moderately expensive hardware that gets combined with moderately expensive software with the main goal of providing a fantastic user experience to the unknowing public and a fair amount of flexibility to the experienced public that can afford the platform.
Windows will continue to be reactionary to the markets needs. They will continue to create ne
Carrying around a laptop without a warranty is like driving a car with no brakes. You might get away with it for a little while, but it's just a matter of time before you're sorry.
Laptops are far too fragile not to have coverage. Anyone that can't manage a laptop and an extended warranty should reconsider purchasing a laptop.
As chincy as they feel, I'll be continuing to purchase Dell laptops for the $400 four year complete care warranty. I purchased a new laptop three years ago. Took it to work, tripped over the power cord, pulled it off a desk and broke the heck out of the case. I call Dell, theres a box next day. They replace the PIII 1.2Ghz with a PIV 1.4 in just three days. No questions asked. Since then, I've managed to crack a magnet in the CD burner and pop a key off, I send it back, they fix it and I have it back in a week. We have a bunch at work with the same deal, anything goes wrong, they come out and replace it doesn't matter how it happened.
Anyway on to the help you requested.
I've replaced those types of connectors on laptops.
First off lay out a sheet of paper on a sturdy table. (not the one you're working on) Draw a diagram of the underside of the laptop. As you remove screws, place them on the appropriate point on the paper. (or otherwise track them to indicate where they came from) You'll want to do the same after you flip it over with another sheet of paper. Depending on your memory and disassembly skills you might do this for every layer you take apart.
Most laptops it's a matter of unscrewing everything on the bottom and back to lift the top off, then taking everything thing out, top down until you can loosen the mobo. It's a lot of work to get to the mobo generally you have to remove everything as it's on the bottom.
Once you have it out, most power connectors are soldered right on the main board. Unsolder it and start hunting for a replacement. I have a lot of resources for finding these things and once I couldn't locate a close match on it, I had to replace both male and female ends to get a box rolling.
It's obvious you don't have a bunch of money to spend but if you're uncomfortable with small screws and a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, leave it to the shops or send it to Gateway.
Chances are wherever you send it will want to replace the mobo. (sadly, people don't solder things anymore) Then again how much can a mobo cost in an $800 laptop...
Dropping implants in muscles you can fire muscles to move. I understand this is still very rudimentary input, but over time it's not a hard stretch to imagine a quad/tetra being able to do simple motor functions with their arms/hands.
There are already adds on the main menu. If adds get constant stuffed down my throat, I'm gone. That's it.
If enough tech savvy people get fed up with Tivo and focus on MythTV or Freevo they're gonna be in deep doo doo. If people work out a Hi-Def MythTV + 300GB HDD + iMAC mini (or like sized) package Tivo is a gonner.
This would be a great time for a lean mean company to make a tiny network DVR with superior features and blow them out of the water. (high-def, portable, perhaps pc games, webtv...)
I was running on a maxtor 212MB hdd, running MS-DOS 4. The system crashed while playing a cd and running Cthugha. On reboot the drive was very unhappy. I re-sysd the HDD and managed a dos prompt, lots of stuff was missing. I ran recover just for kicks and it made me several hundred 8 character random hex named files. After opening the first 50 or so in edit and finding the text files I really wanted. I started hunting out binary files and running them. One file in particular put me in 40 column text mode then crashed leaving me there. Without the heart to delete it, but being too lazy to rename it, I kept it's name. later on when I needed mid level passwords for things this was it.
I've since started memorizing ISP/shell account default passwords and reusing them randomly as my better secure passwords. Nothing like having Caps, lowercase numbers and punctuation from a string that I wouldn't have picked.
I have mixed feelings on this. That's about 40k/yr.
That's a damn nice chunk of change for say a tech savvy college student, But really not all that much to attract a technical professional which seems to be the standards base to which editors are held.
I guess location matters as well. I'm in the Baltimore cooridor where the 'average' tech salary is closer to 60k. Some places in California 40k would be near povery wouldn't it? If they were smart they'd only employ mid west college students.
Given, I've only been in this since the early 386 days, but I've had the chance to work at several big installations, wharehouses, a few pc shops and the occasional help desk. Every time I see a new type of problem, I conduct a post mortem on the drive. (I'm more after magnets these days)
Most common problems I've seen:
#1 Media has an electromagnetic defect that appears over time: (new regular bad sectors without physical signs of dmg on the platters)
Until 1996, I had seen more of this than anything. Some cases might have been heat or one of the next few problems but far too many succombed to this fate for it to be a symptom of another physical problem. I haven't seen this in quite some time.
#2 On drive controller board failure:
This also used to happen quite frequently, I've seen a few cases of this recently, It's the failure I see most often today.
#3 Spindle bearing failure:
I've seen a few handfulls of these only. They generally get replaced when they get noisy before the failure is complete. The best part was removing a siezed drive from the pc and giving it a whack flat on it's back to watch the user in amazement when you put it back in and it spins up.
Armature failure:
I've seen a few cases of this only. Some of the media defects might have been this in disguise. The best armature failure I ever saw was an old full height SCSI drive that probably got too hot, the heads caught on the platter and over the years whittled themselves down to stubs while cutting through the platters. It was a QNX box that was perfectly content to boot from the master server after it's hard drive failed. The platters ended up being razor sharp rings of death. Nice christmas tree ornaments through.
Slashdot Mirror
Pages in 2000 render realatively nicely in 2003. (no, not identically) It appears pages in 2003 render nicely in 2007. A resume in office 97 may not be right on, but It'll still be readable in 2007. I've had 2 page 2003 based resume's printing out double spaced across 8 paqes in OOv2. I run Linux on the desktop at work and I can say from experience, the cross platform word doc formatting stinks.
I rarely deal with any companies out there running more than one version behind on office. They stay current because they want things to display appropriately to their business partners.
As soon as 2007 starts shipping with Dell, we'll no doubt pick it up and users will start a campaign to get 2003 upgraded.
I'm not saying it's not a M$ racket. I'm just saying the latest version of OO should render to a very close degree of the latest release of the product that's used by 85% of the market. (If they want to procure a chance of taking over the market) You can say "well Microsoft doesn't do it", but they don't have to. That's one of thier ways to get people to upgrade. If OO intends to catch up or take over, they're going to need to play really nice with the current office rev.
Bottom line is that I can't integrate OO at a workplace that has people on anything newer than 10 yr old MS Office applications. That's bad for OO.
Open Office has another, more serious downfall.
Take a slightly complex word document from a client. (bulleted lists, block indents, embedded objects)
View it in word, view it in writer.
Both are readable, but they do not look exactly the same.
Margins are off, wrap doesn't line up, linespacing is slightly off.
You can fiddle with the document to make it look the same, but it needs to be identical by default.
It's pretty darned important for people to see the page as it was intended.
And no PDF isn't really an option of you want to edit the content and use it elsewhere.
or make security that requires signed code to hook at that level
There are frequency limitations to the speed at which processors can be run. Something about crossover fields at frequency or some such.
Light would have the ability to be switched much more quickly, but if you're going to switch it with electricity based circuits.....
First off, I'd like to say this isn't a personal attack pointed at you. What you've said just sparked me to dump out my opinion on the subject.
I look at them more like McDonalds. They're not trying to be evil for a profit, they're just trying to profit without paying much attention to anything else. People don't have to eat at McDonalds. They choose to ignore what they know damn well is an unhealthy way of life and do it anyway. Is it McDonalds fault? Should we make sure that we have laws on health consciousness to protect us from ourselves? Too much like DRM I think.
If people didn't want to use G- mail/websearch/desksearch they don't have to. It's not like Google is quiet about collecting statistics. Indexing your thoughts and giving you really relevant adds is how they exist. I for one, and truly glad that someone has internet indexing working marginally well and that I don't have to pay for it.
The fact is, Google is just another place tracking your data. The government has been tracking all this stuff for years. Monitoring the key points on the net and taking notes down on everything. Given, Google's information about you is more easily indexed. But you can at least be picky about just what you allow through Google. Privacy has been out the window for a long time. If your neighbor really wants to know what kind of stuff you're in to, they just need check out your junkmail. Farming for information is definitely not new.
Everyone needs to stop treating the net as this ambiguous medium and use it for what it really is. You know not to eat three square meals from Mc'ds every day, you know not to use Google/gmail for things you shouldn't be doing. It is the individuals responsibility to keep what they see as their "personal data" safe, not a corporation's role to stop them every five minutes and to "STOP STOP TMI!!!!".
What you put unsecured on the net, is a public proclamation. For better or worse it is track able by so many entities in so many ways that you needn't waste your time trying to figure out who might be looking at you. It's the equivalency of sitting in a crowded cafeteria. You can't whack off and yell at anyone that might be looking at you.
Take a minute, make sure that the index https is off in your search settings. Don't send truly private data unencrypted over Google transports. If you're really worried that what you're doing can be seen: set up another browser, perhaps proxy, go test out http://www.metropipe.net/ or another pay, end to end anonymizer.
I don't believe it was style that popularized the IPOD. It was marketing.
They wedged their way to the mac users community, (media centric people to begin with) then started the mother of all add campaigns once the product was out there. Getting it in the creative community in a way made it stylish, but it was really a very successful marketing trick.
Before the Ipod, the majority of the MP3 players out there were erronious and from companies that most (non-tech) people had never heard of. "Creative Labs" "Archos".
Style is important, It's a tool to garner interest. Which is all Wired is doing. Even though style is choice, would the Ipod sell as well if it had poor audio quality? People want stuff that does things, they'll buy in to that. If that thing happens to also be more fashionable, they woun't buy from the competition.
It's an oceanic platform.. just dive in and cut it of at the knees.... :)
Really, I'm not completely sure better is even a problem per se. I'm not working on the shuttle project or anything, but I don't really thing that the things aren't getting brought to the attention of people in charge.
Really, I say, swap out for better decision makers and let loose anyone that can't be deprogrammed from the don't tell the king bad news, it pisses him off mentality.
If you could take an objective non-engineer and graft them physically to a stone cold righteous logic wielding geek in the know, I think it would all work out in the end. Any engineer in a management position for a succifient period of time will eventually slip down the dark side of bureaucracy .
More of a problem in project management.
Not all accidents just "happen". These are by in large very preventable engineering and managerial failures.
Launching a shuttle well below the temperature at which the component manufacturers warn against is no accident. Not running an impromptu check to see if damage occurred during the takeoff after they noticed something wrong isn't much better. Even if they didn't have anything they could really do about it, they could have tried, contemplated a rescue (soviet or otherwise) or had time to make peace. Only the worst of what goes on makes it to the press. These types of problems don't just appear at the top level. You'll find these kind of decisions going on all the time just without the coin landing tails.
You can't leave people in power that put their careers ahead of safety and the lives of their heroes. They need to get more people in there that don't just ignore problems/dangers because they're high risk or could have a negative impact on their job. Yes there is inherent risk in the what they do, but to simply push off serious problems and say FEH, just a little more risk is unconscionable.
Some young blood might be good, headstrong people whose morals still outweigh their lust for their careers. The workforce would still have to be tempered by experience and some neighsayers though.
I'm not saying everyone getting canned is a bad person or just doesn't care, but it would appear there's some bad blood in NASA and I'm very happy to see the administration trying earnestly it getting ousted. (even if they're just trying to keep their jobs)
US Population in 2000:
296,296,953
The bulk of the US runs in 4 time zones.
I figure if 5% of people are geeks, there's at least 2-3 million geeks in any given timezone even at loose standards. (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Pacific Island territories excluded)
Billy!
We're going out for ice cream, do you want to go?
No thanks mom, I just installed a new plugin and I want to play with it for a while.
Keep in mind, every OS has things it's good at.
Most OS's get two of the following:
Cheap - The combination of operating system, hardware, running software and updates is below or on par with the other choices.
Easy to setup/maintain - You average inept home user can shove a disk in, follow basic directions and expect to end up with working apps, sound and video and peripherals. If any problems arise they might be able to stick in a disk that came with a piece of hardware and remedy that problem without in depth knowledge of system editors. Updates should be easy to find and nearly automatic to install. Choosing and running updates should require little to no knowledge of computers. Joe user should also be able to walk in to the nearest wally world, pick up a slide scanner take it home and get it running without calling their family computer geek.
Stable - Would you want this OS controlling a robot doing eye surgery on you? Well you probably wouldn't want that in any case but you get my drift. Will this system do that it's intended to do without failure? Can the system be easily compromised due to minor operator oversight or ignorance?
On my desk sits a Mac to my left, an XP box to my right and a FC3 box straight ahead.
What the Mac does, it generally does well. Looks are obtained at the cost of speed but not so much that it makes the experience painful. It's very stable but it lacks good apps without a lot of money invested.
The Mac is the business guy in the tailored suit, a professional but he doesn't come cheap. He isn't really any better than anyone else, but he looks the part. He's pleasant to be around and if experience matters more to you than money, he's your man.
The Linux box is Fast, what it does, it generally does well. What it doesn't do by default requires endless toil and RTFM. It's rather stable and you can force it to do just about anything if you have enough time. Once you have all the stuff in the right places it's not hard to use but getting it to that point on all but the most generic hardware/software requires an experienced hand.
The Linux box is the genius teenager, You can dress it up, take it out, it's a cheap date and very able. It lacks refinement and organization but makes up for it with flexibility and low expense. If you can figure out how to motivate it, minimal investment can prove a staggering return.
The Windows box is pretty fast, fairly cheap but it takes a lot to keep it in proper condition. There's a large collection of free software that does a descent job though there's a large collection of expensive software that arguably does the job better. The biggest problem is that it will continue to work if it's not kept up to date. Eventually it will be struck down through it's unpatched insecurities. You can't leave it alone. If novices understood how important patching and not running too much cheesy third party software was, the competition would have a hard time holding on. Windows has great flexibility, unfortunately that usually comes at the cost of stability. It's all in how far you take it.
Windows is that lazy uncle that never seems to get things right. If you keep on him he's ok (if not pretty good) at what he does, just not very trust worthy if left alone. He's pretty cheap to impress and can be dressed up, you can let him house sit, but you don't trust him with your china. Whether it's society that makes him that way or his own shortcomings is irrelevant. If you need to deal with him, keep him in his place everyone will be OK.
With the exception of marketing gimics and minor tweaks in the product lines, Mac will continue to make moderately expensive hardware that gets combined with moderately expensive software with the main goal of providing a fantastic user experience to the unknowing public and a fair amount of flexibility to the experienced public that can afford the platform.
Windows will continue to be reactionary to the markets needs. They will continue to create ne
Would an eratic shuffle just play the songs in order?
If you're going that far, just melt it down ;)
Carrying around a laptop without a warranty is like driving a car with no brakes. You might get away with it for a little while, but it's just a matter of time before you're sorry.
Laptops are far too fragile not to have coverage. Anyone that can't manage a laptop and an extended warranty should reconsider purchasing a laptop.
As chincy as they feel, I'll be continuing to purchase Dell laptops for the $400 four year complete care warranty. I purchased a new laptop three years ago. Took it to work, tripped over the power cord, pulled it off a desk and broke the heck out of the case. I call Dell, theres a box next day. They replace the PIII 1.2Ghz with a PIV 1.4 in just three days. No questions asked. Since then, I've managed to crack a magnet in the CD burner and pop a key off, I send it back, they fix it and I have it back in a week. We have a bunch at work with the same deal, anything goes wrong, they come out and replace it doesn't matter how it happened.
Anyway on to the help you requested.
I've replaced those types of connectors on laptops.
First off lay out a sheet of paper on a sturdy table. (not the one you're working on) Draw a diagram of the underside of the laptop. As you remove screws, place them on the appropriate point on the paper. (or otherwise track them to indicate where they came from) You'll want to do the same after you flip it over with another sheet of paper. Depending on your memory and disassembly skills you might do this for every layer you take apart.
Most laptops it's a matter of unscrewing everything on the bottom and back to lift the top off, then taking everything thing out, top down until you can loosen the mobo. It's a lot of work to get to the mobo generally you have to remove everything as it's on the bottom.
Once you have it out, most power connectors are soldered right on the main board. Unsolder it and start hunting for a replacement. I have a lot of resources for finding these things and once I couldn't locate a close match on it, I had to replace both male and female ends to get a box rolling.
It's obvious you don't have a bunch of money to spend but if you're uncomfortable with small screws and a very complicated jigsaw puzzle, leave it to the shops or send it to Gateway.
Chances are wherever you send it will want to replace the mobo. (sadly, people don't solder things anymore) Then again how much can a mobo cost in an $800 laptop...
Dropping implants in muscles you can fire muscles to move. I understand this is still very rudimentary input, but over time it's not a hard stretch to imagine a quad/tetra being able to do simple motor functions with their arms/hands.
There are already adds on the main menu. If adds get constant stuffed down my throat, I'm gone. That's it.
If enough tech savvy people get fed up with Tivo and focus on MythTV or Freevo they're gonna be in deep doo doo. If people work out a Hi-Def MythTV + 300GB HDD + iMAC mini (or like sized) package Tivo is a gonner.
This would be a great time for a lean mean company to make a tiny network DVR with superior features and blow them out of the water. (high-def, portable, perhaps pc games, webtv...)
My favorite password came from my 386.
I was running on a maxtor 212MB hdd, running MS-DOS 4. The system crashed while playing a cd and running Cthugha. On reboot the drive was very unhappy. I re-sysd the HDD and managed a dos prompt, lots of stuff was missing. I ran recover just for kicks and it made me several hundred 8 character random hex named files. After opening the first 50 or so in edit and finding the text files I really wanted. I started hunting out binary files and running them. One file in particular put me in 40 column text mode then crashed leaving me there. Without the heart to delete it, but being too lazy to rename it, I kept it's name. later on when I needed mid level passwords for things this was it.
I've since started memorizing ISP/shell account default passwords and reusing them randomly as my better secure passwords. Nothing like having Caps, lowercase numbers and punctuation from a string that I wouldn't have picked.
http://www.overclockersclub.com/?read=7328384
Laser keyboards should be able to take up less room though they're probably a bit delicate yet.
they could be made much smaller than they current keyboard applications.
Indeed I'd hope you would :) No stealing my personal experience!!!!
I have mixed feelings on this. That's about 40k/yr.
That's a damn nice chunk of change for say a tech savvy college student, But really not all that much to attract a technical professional which seems to be the standards base to which editors are held.
I guess location matters as well. I'm in the Baltimore cooridor where the 'average' tech salary is closer to 60k. Some places in California 40k would be near povery wouldn't it? If they were smart they'd only employ mid west college students.
my spelling has a crappy tolerance, thanks for catching that for me, we could really use more people like you out there.
Did you get that memo about the TPS reports?
Given, I've only been in this since the early 386 days, but I've had the chance to work at several big installations, wharehouses, a few pc shops and the occasional help desk. Every time I see a new type of problem, I conduct a post mortem on the drive. (I'm more after magnets these days)
Most common problems I've seen:
#1 Media has an electromagnetic defect that appears over time: (new regular bad sectors without physical signs of dmg on the platters)
Until 1996, I had seen more of this than anything. Some cases might have been heat or one of the next few problems but far too many succombed to this fate for it to be a symptom of another physical problem. I haven't seen this in quite some time.
#2 On drive controller board failure:
This also used to happen quite frequently, I've seen a few cases of this recently, It's the failure I see most often today.
#3 Spindle bearing failure:
I've seen a few handfulls of these only. They generally get replaced when they get noisy before the failure is complete. The best part was removing a siezed drive from the pc and giving it a whack flat on it's back to watch the user in amazement when you put it back in and it spins up.
Armature failure:
I've seen a few cases of this only. Some of the media defects might have been this in disguise. The best armature failure I ever saw was an old full height SCSI drive that probably got too hot, the heads caught on the platter and over the years whittled themselves down to stubs while cutting through the platters. It was a QNX box that was perfectly content to boot from the master server after it's hard drive failed. The platters ended up being razor sharp rings of death. Nice christmas tree ornaments through.
The DFImage Hook is an improvement and is smarter about updating the changed areas but it still works like the original VNC.
VNC is just nasty compared to terminal server. There's a lot of stuff M$ has wrong, licensing that tech was something they did right.
Terminal service forwarded over a compressed SSH connection is reasonably usable over a modem, on broadband it's very, very close to being there.
(i.e. I can develop on my desktop without any noticable lag in typing)
VNC is great for an occasional site or to push a file around, terminal service can actually be used to get work done.