I worked software technical support for a company that decided to add this type of business. Their existing business was packaging software on assembly lines. I worked next to a giant garage door where trucks would back into loading materials. The assembly line workers were mostly illegal immigrants and very bitter people.
There were two bathrooms - the executive bathroom, and the "other" one. There was a war for a while where the white-collar tech support dweebs felt they deserved a proper office bathroom. At one point, they stopped letting us use the nice one and made us share with the assembly line workers. I have never seen such a disgusting bathroom, and I have travelled the country by motorcycle. At one point, it was so bad that someone crapped on the floor - either in protest, or because they couldn't bring themselves to sit on the disgusting seats.
When they pull all the employees aside and threaten to fire whoever they catch crapping on the bathroom floor, you know you've got it bad.
Since this thread is likely to degenerate into a "my first PC is older than yours" competition, I'll try to win right away:
My first PC was a block of wood with keys etched into it using a sharp rock. We had to press the keys and draw pictures really fast into the dirt with sticks.
I meant you have to deal with the shipping process itself, instead of having the convenience of picking it up at your local store.
We all know how much it sucks to order something and then realize you won't get to play with it for a week.:)
Also, if there's a problem with whatever you buy, sometimes it's a lot less hassle to just take it back to the store, yell at a clerk and get a replacement (sometimes even a free upgrade.)
I actually convinced a local store to give me a free Athlon 2000+ when a $25 cpu cooler siezed up and fried my existing chip. A friend bet me and swore up and down that they wouldn't do it, heh heh.
Additionally, I recently ordered from tufshop.com via PriceWatch. After 4 days they still hadn't shipped my order and I got an email saying it would be shipped "soon". I called, talked to "this one guy", and was told I would I would get a call back in 10 minutes. An hour later nobody called, so I called again. Got the same guy, got told the same thing. I got my call 10 minutes later - SAME GUY. I couldn't understand him due to his thick accent. He appeared to spend 15 minutes trying to upsell me some sort of warranty. I screamed and yelled (nicely) that I just wanted my frickin order shipped as-is. I'm still not sure if he understood. He said something about how the warranty option I chose wasn't available for this item and that I had to choose something else. He claimed they tried to call me, but I had no messages and no emails. I said screw the warranty, just ship it. I was assured it would be shipped soon.
I called back three days later (this is 7 days total, 5 working days) and it still hadn't shipped. Utterly disgusted at this point, I cancelled my order. I bought it at my local retailer for $154 instead of $134, and wish I would have done that in the first place. A lousy $20 isn't worth the hassle.
Obviously when comparing system buildouts, overclocking is not factored in since it throws a wrench into everything. But your comments are useful. I chose the 2800 not knowing it was just an "idiot tax".:) For the price of these class of Athlons, you can't really make any mistakes. I wasn't even aware of the overclocking capabilities of the 2500. I'm usually on a budget so I prefer to never overclock, the risk is too great. Too much hassle to monitor the temp, and one slip while mucking with the cooling and you break your board/cpu, etc. I am an enthusaist, but I like to use my computer, not tweak it all the time.
I chose the Abit NF7 after reading a Tom's review of all the latest NForce3/Ultra400 boards. They're all very similar in performance (almost identical) and I was lazy when I bought it - they had it at my store, so I bought it. Would have got the Asus too if they had it. I also would have bought the Shuttle board because it's only about $60 ($110 for the Abit), but the Shuttle didn't have SATA.
I own dozens of Asus boards and do prefer them in general. One problem I've had with Asus, which I could demonstrate on at least four or five boards, is that it doesn't detect the keyboard reliably on boot. Seen this problem across many generations of Asus. Never had this problem with an Abit. It's been annoying me a lot lately so I've decided to give other manufacturers a shot at my wallet.
Here's example systems you could build, with the best possible motherboards. Each assumes you need to buy some DDR400 RAM so that is not included, since it's all the same:
My Athlon XP system:
Athlon XP 2800+: $150
Abit NF7: $100
Total: $250
I'm quite happy with it. Best price/performance choice (last week, anyway.)
Top-End Athlon XP system:
Athlon XP 3200+: $289
Abit NF7: $100
Total: $389
A complete waste of money, especially after today.
P4 3.2 system for comparison:
P4 3.2 CPU: $366
Asus P4C800-E: $164
Total: $530
Better than both of the above, but only by a few percent for most things.
That was the situation last week. Including an Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, or P4Extreme in the examples would have been useless since they're insanely expensive.
However:
Athlon 64 system you can build now:
Athlon 64 3000+ 512k cache: $230
Gigabyte GAK8VT800M: $106
Total: $336
Yowza.
So, to jump from the top-end Athlon XP to an entry level Athlon 64 actually saves you $53. I could have spent an extra $86 and got all this. The Athlon 64 system will now save you $194 over the best P4 Intel has to offer, and it will beat it (for virtually all applications.) Of course, if $336 is too much, you can still build a good Athlon XP system and cut costs dramatically, but $336 is very reasonable for building a brand new system. It'll be interesting when Intel gets it's P4Extreme down to a reasonable price, and AMD starts ratcheting up the Athlon 64 speeds.
Proves it's always better to wait just one more week. I should have known that there would be major cuts in the 64-bit world soon after the processor debut.
Hope all this is useful to anyone considering building a system. Keep in mind that 1gb of dual-channel DDR400 RAM is gonna run at least $150.
All prices are PriceWatch.com and the Athlon 64 CPU price is from a link on AnandTech. I know PriceWatch prices are hard to get and you have to deal with shipping and all that.
You misunderstand. It's all relative. Nothing cancels anything out - certain things are simply more or less nerdy than the next. I'm not trying to classify anyone here - I'm trying to help you understand how and why other people classify you as a nerd, and to what degree, in social situations.
When you're only talking about yourself, it's useless, because with relativity you need something to compare yourself against. After all, what meaning does "nerd" have when you're in a room all by yourself? It is meaningless - because it is relative.
When you discuss only yourself in that way, you appear to be trying to assign yourself a sort of "nerd score" that you can use to compare yourself against some other virtual person with a score you don't know. If that's your goal, I'd suggest searching google for "Nerdity Test", I saw one and it was quite amusing.
In reality, the scores are assigned quickly in everyone's heads through a mere glance and a short conversation with the nerd in question. Your nerd rating with them will evolve over time as they know you better and refine their position about you. The person, or people, evaluating you will consider all of your nerdy qualities and place you on a social ladder relative to themselves - and nerds tend to get put pretty low on the ladder.
I hate to be the one to say this, but this is such a load. I see a story like this every few months. It's the product of nerds trying to validate their existence.
I am a nerd myself. I'm a programmer, computer enthusiast, video gamer, star trek fan, and lanky white guy whose social skills are always in question.
However, I have no illusions about what I am.
Nerds are relative to non-nerds. You can call them Jocks, but that's not the whole of it - Nerds are compared against anyone who is not a nerd. Yes, Geeks count. You are not special just because you change the word.
I'm sure everyone is wondering what a non-nerd is. It's easy to say someone who is jock-ish, works out and is well built, good with the ladies, has some fashion and hygiene sense, works a blue-collar job that makes them dirty every day, and doesn't flinch at loud noises. Add a general lack of intelligence, and you've got yourself a non-nerd, right?
That is an insufficient description of a non-nerd, however. Some nerds work out (usually in a martial arts class) and have good fashion sense. It's simpler to define it as someone who exhibits fewer nerd-like properties than the nerd they are comparing themselves against.
Take two seemingly identical nerds. When they argue, whoever wins by pounding the other with logic and refusing to stop arguing is the bigger nerd. Whichever one has less muscle, and/or is less tan than the other guy is the bigger nerd. Whichever one likes Star Trek more is the bigger nerd. See how simple it is?
And the funny thing is, whichever one considers himself "less" nerdy than the other guy, no matter how nerdy he is, is still a big nerd - however, he does get bragging rights to call the other guy a nerd and proclaim that he is not one himself.
So let's just stop already. We're all nerds, if you want to get technical about it (and if you do, you're a big nerd) but some of us are far less nerdy than others. Those people have every right to call the nerds nerds, beat them up, laugh at them, and assault their self-esteem.
It's your job as a nerd to either accept your place in the pecking order as a nerd and forget about it, dealing with the occasional wedgie or insult now and then, or try to make as many other people as possible look more nerdy than you.
Sure they could bug your car anyway, but you could sweep for bugs (if you were a criminal, anyway).
The difference is that they're turning something that is a harmless, useful commercial service and remotely exploiting it for monitoring.
Then again, I suppose a long-range camera exploits "harmless photons" for the same purpose, which is why it would have been allowed, and the safety issues are the only reason the court rules against the FBI.
Other than revealing that the FBI actively pursues these kinds of tactics, which most of us already knew (perhaps not to this extent), this article only discusses one rare exception to that policy and laws which govern it.
I really can't understand this. Anyone who toyed with javascript and the DOMs years ago noticed that you could effectively do pop-unders with two lines of code:
I think the funniest part of all this is how MS sales reps used the new Licensing programs to browbeat people into signing up to "subscribe" to Microsoft software - where you'd pay them a yearly subscription fee and get whatever OS they released, if they released one. If you didn't, well, you'd still pay, and you'd maybe get one next year.
Not surprising that as soon as a ton of people are on this licensing scam^H^Hscheme, they can now make everyone wait 3 years for anything new.
Oh, that's great. Thanks. Can you give me back the 10 hours we wasted trying to figure out if and how it could integrate before we realized it was hopeless pending the all-solving future version?
If it was a Linux office being integrated, the poster wouldn't have referred to the IT staff as ignorant.
Not all IT staff who run Windows networks are ignorant. Try integrating your hot new mac onto a Windows 2003 AD network without using "Classic". Good luck.
The ignorant people are the zealot workers who love thier flavor of the year OS and disrupt a homogeneous network with a components that make it heterogeneous, and wind up costing the company money.
Use Macromedia Fireworks. Perfect WYSIWYG with Photoshop-like input. Never touch HTML again unless you're writing some sort of webapp, in which case you should be using a templating system and the HTML should be separate, and you can still use Fireworks.
Three words: NON RECTANGULAR SLICES (part of FWMX2004). God's gift to the Internet, Fireworks is Moses.
Hey, I'm outraged and mad too, like all of you.. but, I'm not seeing this. Maybe my ISPs have taken a stand with their DNS, but both my work and home ISPs? Unlikely. Why aren't I seeing this?
The bike isn't to fully replace the car. You can't carry a mattress on a bike. But when you have a bike, you don't need a $40,000 Lexus to feel good. You're perfectly happy with a beater from the 70's.
I happen to also have a loaded 97 Trans Am as well. I never drive it, except to carry stuff. Plan to sell it asap and buy a beat up 76 Maverick or something. And I don't live in my parents basement or go to high school. But I also don't have kids and don't have to haul mattresses around on a daily basis.
Hey man, I totally agree, I said I have a jap cruiser. Cheaper, better. Harley people are different from the rest - they treat their bikes like priceless statues and keep them in their living room and wipe them with a diaper every day - and are afraid to put miles on them. Jap bikers ride cheap bikes that last forever and ride them like there's no tomorrow without hesitation.
I'd love to OWN a Harley, but not for the money. I like to ride too much.
Slashdot Mirror
With a small perl script
I will obsolete your job
Silence infidel!
I worked software technical support for a company that decided to add this type of business. Their existing business was packaging software on assembly lines. I worked next to a giant garage door where trucks would back into loading materials. The assembly line workers were mostly illegal immigrants and very bitter people.
There were two bathrooms - the executive bathroom, and the "other" one. There was a war for a while where the white-collar tech support dweebs felt they deserved a proper office bathroom. At one point, they stopped letting us use the nice one and made us share with the assembly line workers. I have never seen such a disgusting bathroom, and I have travelled the country by motorcycle. At one point, it was so bad that someone crapped on the floor - either in protest, or because they couldn't bring themselves to sit on the disgusting seats.
When they pull all the employees aside and threaten to fire whoever they catch crapping on the bathroom floor, you know you've got it bad.
Since this thread is likely to degenerate into a "my first PC is older than yours" competition, I'll try to win right away:
My first PC was a block of wood with keys etched into it using a sharp rock. We had to press the keys and draw pictures really fast into the dirt with sticks.
We were very poor.
I meant you have to deal with the shipping process itself, instead of having the convenience of picking it up at your local store.
:)
We all know how much it sucks to order something and then realize you won't get to play with it for a week.
Also, if there's a problem with whatever you buy, sometimes it's a lot less hassle to just take it back to the store, yell at a clerk and get a replacement (sometimes even a free upgrade.)
I actually convinced a local store to give me a free Athlon 2000+ when a $25 cpu cooler siezed up and fried my existing chip. A friend bet me and swore up and down that they wouldn't do it, heh heh.
Additionally, I recently ordered from tufshop.com via PriceWatch. After 4 days they still hadn't shipped my order and I got an email saying it would be shipped "soon". I called, talked to "this one guy", and was told I would I would get a call back in 10 minutes. An hour later nobody called, so I called again. Got the same guy, got told the same thing. I got my call 10 minutes later - SAME GUY. I couldn't understand him due to his thick accent. He appeared to spend 15 minutes trying to upsell me some sort of warranty. I screamed and yelled (nicely) that I just wanted my frickin order shipped as-is. I'm still not sure if he understood. He said something about how the warranty option I chose wasn't available for this item and that I had to choose something else. He claimed they tried to call me, but I had no messages and no emails. I said screw the warranty, just ship it. I was assured it would be shipped soon.
I called back three days later (this is 7 days total, 5 working days) and it still hadn't shipped. Utterly disgusted at this point, I cancelled my order. I bought it at my local retailer for $154 instead of $134, and wish I would have done that in the first place. A lousy $20 isn't worth the hassle.
Obviously when comparing system buildouts, overclocking is not factored in since it throws a wrench into everything. But your comments are useful. I chose the 2800 not knowing it was just an "idiot tax". :) For the price of these class of Athlons, you can't really make any mistakes. I wasn't even aware of the overclocking capabilities of the 2500. I'm usually on a budget so I prefer to never overclock, the risk is too great. Too much hassle to monitor the temp, and one slip while mucking with the cooling and you break your board/cpu, etc. I am an enthusaist, but I like to use my computer, not tweak it all the time.
I chose the Abit NF7 after reading a Tom's review of all the latest NForce3/Ultra400 boards. They're all very similar in performance (almost identical) and I was lazy when I bought it - they had it at my store, so I bought it. Would have got the Asus too if they had it. I also would have bought the Shuttle board because it's only about $60 ($110 for the Abit), but the Shuttle didn't have SATA.
I own dozens of Asus boards and do prefer them in general. One problem I've had with Asus, which I could demonstrate on at least four or five boards, is that it doesn't detect the keyboard reliably on boot. Seen this problem across many generations of Asus. Never had this problem with an Abit. It's been annoying me a lot lately so I've decided to give other manufacturers a shot at my wallet.
Enthusiast gamers are what is selling that chip, not Linux. PC Gamers have always been the driving force behind adoption of new technology.
Here's example systems you could build, with the best possible motherboards. Each assumes you need to buy some DDR400 RAM so that is not included, since it's all the same:
My Athlon XP system:
Athlon XP 2800+: $150
Abit NF7: $100
Total: $250
I'm quite happy with it. Best price/performance choice (last week, anyway.)
Top-End Athlon XP system:
Athlon XP 3200+: $289
Abit NF7: $100
Total: $389
A complete waste of money, especially after today.
P4 3.2 system for comparison:
P4 3.2 CPU: $366
Asus P4C800-E: $164
Total: $530
Better than both of the above, but only by a few percent for most things.
That was the situation last week. Including an Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, or P4Extreme in the examples would have been useless since they're insanely expensive.
However:
Athlon 64 system you can build now:
Athlon 64 3000+ 512k cache: $230
Gigabyte GAK8VT800M: $106
Total: $336
Yowza.
So, to jump from the top-end Athlon XP to an entry level Athlon 64 actually saves you $53. I could have spent an extra $86 and got all this. The Athlon 64 system will now save you $194 over the best P4 Intel has to offer, and it will beat it (for virtually all applications.) Of course, if $336 is too much, you can still build a good Athlon XP system and cut costs dramatically, but $336 is very reasonable for building a brand new system. It'll be interesting when Intel gets it's P4Extreme down to a reasonable price, and AMD starts ratcheting up the Athlon 64 speeds.
Proves it's always better to wait just one more week. I should have known that there would be major cuts in the 64-bit world soon after the processor debut.
Hope all this is useful to anyone considering building a system. Keep in mind that 1gb of dual-channel DDR400 RAM is gonna run at least $150.
All prices are PriceWatch.com and the Athlon 64 CPU price is from a link on AnandTech. I know PriceWatch prices are hard to get and you have to deal with shipping and all that.
You misunderstand. It's all relative. Nothing cancels anything out - certain things are simply more or less nerdy than the next. I'm not trying to classify anyone here - I'm trying to help you understand how and why other people classify you as a nerd, and to what degree, in social situations.
When you're only talking about yourself, it's useless, because with relativity you need something to compare yourself against. After all, what meaning does "nerd" have when you're in a room all by yourself? It is meaningless - because it is relative.
When you discuss only yourself in that way, you appear to be trying to assign yourself a sort of "nerd score" that you can use to compare yourself against some other virtual person with a score you don't know. If that's your goal, I'd suggest searching google for "Nerdity Test", I saw one and it was quite amusing.
In reality, the scores are assigned quickly in everyone's heads through a mere glance and a short conversation with the nerd in question. Your nerd rating with them will evolve over time as they know you better and refine their position about you. The person, or people, evaluating you will consider all of your nerdy qualities and place you on a social ladder relative to themselves - and nerds tend to get put pretty low on the ladder.
Understand now?
I hate to be the one to say this, but this is such a load. I see a story like this every few months. It's the product of nerds trying to validate their existence.
I am a nerd myself. I'm a programmer, computer enthusiast, video gamer, star trek fan, and lanky white guy whose social skills are always in question.
However, I have no illusions about what I am.
Nerds are relative to non-nerds. You can call them Jocks, but that's not the whole of it - Nerds are compared against anyone who is not a nerd. Yes, Geeks count. You are not special just because you change the word.
I'm sure everyone is wondering what a non-nerd is. It's easy to say someone who is jock-ish, works out and is well built, good with the ladies, has some fashion and hygiene sense, works a blue-collar job that makes them dirty every day, and doesn't flinch at loud noises. Add a general lack of intelligence, and you've got yourself a non-nerd, right?
That is an insufficient description of a non-nerd, however. Some nerds work out (usually in a martial arts class) and have good fashion sense. It's simpler to define it as someone who exhibits fewer nerd-like properties than the nerd they are comparing themselves against.
Take two seemingly identical nerds. When they argue, whoever wins by pounding the other with logic and refusing to stop arguing is the bigger nerd. Whichever one has less muscle, and/or is less tan than the other guy is the bigger nerd. Whichever one likes Star Trek more is the bigger nerd. See how simple it is?
And the funny thing is, whichever one considers himself "less" nerdy than the other guy, no matter how nerdy he is, is still a big nerd - however, he does get bragging rights to call the other guy a nerd and proclaim that he is not one himself.
So let's just stop already. We're all nerds, if you want to get technical about it (and if you do, you're a big nerd) but some of us are far less nerdy than others. Those people have every right to call the nerds nerds, beat them up, laugh at them, and assault their self-esteem.
It's your job as a nerd to either accept your place in the pecking order as a nerd and forget about it, dealing with the occasional wedgie or insult now and then, or try to make as many other people as possible look more nerdy than you.
insert into facts (object,property) values ('sky','blue')
There we go.
Sure they could bug your car anyway, but you could sweep for bugs (if you were a criminal, anyway).
The difference is that they're turning something that is a harmless, useful commercial service and remotely exploiting it for monitoring.
Then again, I suppose a long-range camera exploits "harmless photons" for the same purpose, which is why it would have been allowed, and the safety issues are the only reason the court rules against the FBI.
Other than revealing that the FBI actively pursues these kinds of tactics, which most of us already knew (perhaps not to this extent), this article only discusses one rare exception to that policy and laws which govern it.
MS Vizact 2.0. We all know what it is.
I really can't understand this. Anyone who toyed with javascript and the DOMs years ago noticed that you could effectively do pop-unders with two lines of code:
w .focus();
window.open('ad.htm','myAdWindowTitle');
windo
Or something like that. Is "pop-under technology" really more complicated than that?
I think the funniest part of all this is how MS sales reps used the new Licensing programs to browbeat people into signing up to "subscribe" to Microsoft software - where you'd pay them a yearly subscription fee and get whatever OS they released, if they released one. If you didn't, well, you'd still pay, and you'd maybe get one next year.
Not surprising that as soon as a ton of people are on this licensing scam^H^Hscheme, they can now make everyone wait 3 years for anything new.
Oh, that's great. Thanks. Can you give me back the 10 hours we wasted trying to figure out if and how it could integrate before we realized it was hopeless pending the all-solving future version?
If it was a Linux office being integrated, the poster wouldn't have referred to the IT staff as ignorant.
Not all IT staff who run Windows networks are ignorant. Try integrating your hot new mac onto a Windows 2003 AD network without using "Classic". Good luck.
The ignorant people are the zealot workers who love thier flavor of the year OS and disrupt a homogeneous network with a components that make it heterogeneous, and wind up costing the company money.
text_to_speech | send_to_google voice_reader
I'll need $20 million to complete the first and last components. Sure I'll be reusing some existing code, but it's all about IMPLEMENTATION!
This is a bit of a rehashing of (or at least related to) this subject:
Is Google God?
The only honest headhunter would be someone who hates money.
Use Macromedia Fireworks. Perfect WYSIWYG with Photoshop-like input. Never touch HTML again unless you're writing some sort of webapp, in which case you should be using a templating system and the HTML should be separate, and you can still use Fireworks.
Three words: NON RECTANGULAR SLICES (part of FWMX2004). God's gift to the Internet, Fireworks is Moses.
Quit wasting your time and get stuff DONE.
#!perl /g;
:)
$bread = qq(wheatwheatwheat);
$bread =~ s/(\S{5})/$1
#
Hey, I'm outraged and mad too, like all of you.. but, I'm not seeing this. Maybe my ISPs have taken a stand with their DNS, but both my work and home ISPs? Unlikely. Why aren't I seeing this?
The bike isn't to fully replace the car. You can't carry a mattress on a bike. But when you have a bike, you don't need a $40,000 Lexus to feel good. You're perfectly happy with a beater from the 70's.
I happen to also have a loaded 97 Trans Am as well. I never drive it, except to carry stuff. Plan to sell it asap and buy a beat up 76 Maverick or something. And I don't live in my parents basement or go to high school. But I also don't have kids and don't have to haul mattresses around on a daily basis.
Hey man, I totally agree, I said I have a jap cruiser. Cheaper, better. Harley people are different from the rest - they treat their bikes like priceless statues and keep them in their living room and wipe them with a diaper every day - and are afraid to put miles on them. Jap bikers ride cheap bikes that last forever and ride them like there's no tomorrow without hesitation.
I'd love to OWN a Harley, but not for the money. I like to ride too much.
Do you know what they call dead automobile accident victims in the emergency room? Organ donors. What's your point?
:)
Besides, our organs are usually too beat up as a result of the accident to be of any value. So thbbbbbttttt