I'll take a few "net help"'s over guessing what a command name is anyday.
You can't ask for a man page if you don't even know what command you're trying to use! Though, you're right about that [tab] thing... I can remember at least one time that that would have saved me some time.
Anyway, chances are the old commands will still be there. This just provides an option for everyone who is used to "net" on Windows already.
There are plenty of smaller cases out there. Shuttle has done good business with their mini cases.
Besides, even regular PCs ARE smaller. I've got an old IBM 286 in the corner, it weighs at least twice as much as my current PC, and is probably twice the volume.
It's a bit of a pipe dream really... but I want stuff that just does what it's supposed to do in an intuitive way. When the most basic PC tasks pass the Mom test, I'll be happy. Email, web, printing, letter making. That's it. We're not there yet. Maybe it's time for the Mom Linux distro... strip it down to a handful of applications and add lots and lots of GUI tweaking to make things make sense to people who really don't want to spend time to learn how to send an email.
This mouse wheel question seems to have obvious answers to me. If it's corporate, just buy a new mouse - time is money. For home use, really, how often does one clean their mouse WHEEL?!
Now keyboards, I'd like to know how to clean quickly. Especially laptop keyboards...those are pretty inconvenient to replace at work and at home.
Yeah, I'd agree that Google does produce quite a few garbage results, but let's keep things in perspective. Before Google, I'd be used to 3 PAGES of garbage results on AltaVista and other engines.
You've got to remember that Google is just code. It has a lot of tricks to produce good results, but there are bound to be little things that slip through. As for your example, it appears to be a bit of luck. The site that shows up at #1 lists all its recent queries as links, a neat little feature. One of those recent queries happens to exactly match your Google query of 'convert wmv mpeg'. So Google guesses that it's a specific page about some object called 'convert wmv mpeg' and it gets a good ranking, in this case the top ranking.
It happens on my personal homepage too. For some reason (page design, link text, page header, whatever) this miniscule grep examples page on my personal web database comes up as number 3 for "grep examples" (quotes included). I get a few hits that way...
de Beers monopoly is already threatened
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've got to do my Canadian duty here, and plug Canadian diamonds. Canada is pushing to be one of the largest diamond countries in the world, and it is approaching 10% market share - much if not all of it outside of de Beers' control. Sure it hasn't had much of an impact on pricing, AFAIK, but it wouldn't take much more to ruin de Beers' pricing power.
Also, NVidia did most of the work for their nForce AMD chipsets for the XBox. It was effectively their first shot at ethernet, 5.1 surround (or any audio really), and other bits and pieces. nForce has done well for NVidia, picking up some of the slack from their underperforming GPU sales.
Wonder if this will help or hinder those pipe (track?) dreams to build a rail link from North America to Mainland Asia (And by extension Europe). With global trade and all, so much stuff being transported by ship from China these days. Who knows, maybe, I'll get a chance to ride a train from South America to Britain some day...
I totally agree. I'm surprised that more energy efficiency isn't demanded from PCs in both corporate and home markets.
One of my pet peeves is how "SpeedStep" and "PowerNow!" technologies from Intel and AMD for mobile chips are not used in the desktop chips. These systems do a good job of saving power and probably take neglible amounts of die space and other costs, yet we don't get them on the desktop. I suppose Intel and AMD are scared of desktop chips being used in mobiles, and thereby eating away at the fat mobile CPU margins.
It's a shame. The vast, vast majority of the time the processors on all but the servers in the office are running at less than 10% usage... Granted, the idle thread helps to save a lot of power, but the mobile power features would do so much more.
As an aside, it's worth noting that the price of electricty varies greatly. I get cheap power out here in BC, but elsewhere in North America it is often 2x as much. And, in many other countries, power can cost much more still.
Someone has already mentioned cars, but in the context of a change that happens during different model years. In fact, cars change during a single year as well! It's not uncommon for people to consciously wait for a few months after the latest car model has arrived in dealerships before making an order. This gives the manufacturer time to "debug" the current model. Little things get fixed or changed here and there. So, on average, the later cars of the same model year are a little bit more reliable.
It's amazing to flip through the project Gutenburg list of books. Pretty much any English (and increasingly other languages) classic is available. Completely free because copyrights have long since expired, and legal. Who really wants to pirate "pop fiction" anyway?
Although, I thought they did a lot of this already? Don't folks recycle software and module designs as much as possible when designing new satellites now?
Ha.
I've got to admit that the "Kart Fighter" game looked pretty fun to me.
In Dad's day, they'd walk through 2 m of snow...
on
Cities Create Weather
·
· Score: 1
Oddly, those old stories are partially correct. Snow levels inside most cities are down a lot. With all the energy we use (pretty much all of it ending up as waste heat, in winter), temperatures are at least a couple degrees warmer. In the city of Vancouver, we barely get any snow in the winter... but drive a few miles outside of town and you'll find a whole lot more (relatively).
I've been on the client side of a lot of tech support calls. On one hand, finding bugs and fixing broken installations is brutal. On the other hand, more often than not, the bug or problem is from some obscure intraction with 3rd party software. A driver or dll mismatch, file locks, access permissions, problems with middleware... the list goes on.
I guess my point is that no computer network is the same. There are literally millions of combinations of programs, files, and settings possible on a single workstation (never mind a network as a whole). We're bound to have problems every once in a while that are next to impossible to troubleshoot. So, yeah, try and take it easy on your tech support agents... there's only so much they can do.
Oh, weird. I could have sworn I'd read that modern CRT's were immune, something to do with the faster phosphors I think. I'll have to try and see this for myself, maybe I'll look for a machine that's got taskbar burn in or something...
Plus, like the good old days of Stacker, you often gain speed (or at least moderate the lost speed) by saving disk access and transfer time. CPU decompression is often a lot faster than hard disk reading.
This made me think about mules, which as we all should know, are infertile. Suppose you happened to get a super big strong and fast mule... I would probably think that cloning it would be a good idea. Then again, what do I know - do mules actually do anything that horses or donkeys can't?
I thought TV burn in was only relevant for plasma screens. (Which is probably a little over the $1000 budget, unless you Americans get crazy deals compared to us Canucks...)
Traditional CRT's definitely don't need to worry about this. Screen savers have purely for graphical entertainment on computer screens for about a decade now. I'm pretty sure projection screens and LCDs are safe too.
Not so sure about #3, but I love your second idea! Perhaps rather than removing their posts altogether, the posts get automatically modded down so that they don't really bother everyone else. Then if "bozo" happens to use another PC or browser or just log out, they'll at least be able to find their posts if they look hard enough. Much harder to discover that they've been binned this way.
FWIW, WebCT started out at as an in house development for one of UBC's faculties (I think it was Chem.). Anyway, it grew quickly and soon most of the University was on it. I think it's been commercialized by now, but I'm not sure.
China looks about right. Quite bright along the rivers and coastline and reasonably lit throughout the eastern half of the country. It's just that not all parts of the country are equally developed. The west is predominantly mountainous, and generally not a "good" land. In a sense, quite similar to Canada. Very developed in the South, pretty bare in the North where it's a littler colder and more remote.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take a few "net help"'s over guessing what a command name is anyday.
You can't ask for a man page if you don't even know what command you're trying to use! Though, you're right about that [tab] thing... I can remember at least one time that that would have saved me some time.
Anyway, chances are the old commands will still be there. This just provides an option for everyone who is used to "net" on Windows already.
Good idea. I wonder if it's technically possible at this time.
Who knows, maybe years down the road, instead of bringing HST to Earth, we'll move the Smithsonian to space. Now that would be neat. =)
There are plenty of smaller cases out there. Shuttle has done good business with their mini cases.
Besides, even regular PCs ARE smaller. I've got an old IBM 286 in the corner, it weighs at least twice as much as my current PC, and is probably twice the volume.
It's a bit of a pipe dream really... but I want stuff that just does what it's supposed to do in an intuitive way. When the most basic PC tasks pass the Mom test, I'll be happy. Email, web, printing, letter making. That's it. We're not there yet. Maybe it's time for the Mom Linux distro... strip it down to a handful of applications and add lots and lots of GUI tweaking to make things make sense to people who really don't want to spend time to learn how to send an email.
This mouse wheel question seems to have obvious answers to me. If it's corporate, just buy a new mouse - time is money. For home use, really, how often does one clean their mouse WHEEL?!
Now keyboards, I'd like to know how to clean quickly. Especially laptop keyboards...those are pretty inconvenient to replace at work and at home.
Yeah, I'd agree that Google does produce quite a few garbage results, but let's keep things in perspective. Before Google, I'd be used to 3 PAGES of garbage results on AltaVista and other engines.
You've got to remember that Google is just code. It has a lot of tricks to produce good results, but there are bound to be little things that slip through. As for your example, it appears to be a bit of luck. The site that shows up at #1 lists all its recent queries as links, a neat little feature. One of those recent queries happens to exactly match your Google query of 'convert wmv mpeg'. So Google guesses that it's a specific page about some object called 'convert wmv mpeg' and it gets a good ranking, in this case the top ranking.
It happens on my personal homepage too. For some reason (page design, link text, page header, whatever) this miniscule grep examples page on my personal web database comes up as number 3 for "grep examples" (quotes included). I get a few hits that way...
I've got to do my Canadian duty here, and plug Canadian diamonds. Canada is pushing to be one of the largest diamond countries in the world, and it is approaching 10% market share - much if not all of it outside of de Beers' control. Sure it hasn't had much of an impact on pricing, AFAIK, but it wouldn't take much more to ruin de Beers' pricing power.
Also, NVidia did most of the work for their nForce AMD chipsets for the XBox. It was effectively their first shot at ethernet, 5.1 surround (or any audio really), and other bits and pieces. nForce has done well for NVidia, picking up some of the slack from their underperforming GPU sales.
Wonder if this will help or hinder those pipe (track?) dreams to build a rail link from North America to Mainland Asia (And by extension Europe). With global trade and all, so much stuff being transported by ship from China these days. Who knows, maybe, I'll get a chance to ride a train from South America to Britain some day...
I totally agree. I'm surprised that more energy efficiency isn't demanded from PCs in both corporate and home markets.
One of my pet peeves is how "SpeedStep" and "PowerNow!" technologies from Intel and AMD for mobile chips are not used in the desktop chips. These systems do a good job of saving power and probably take neglible amounts of die space and other costs, yet we don't get them on the desktop. I suppose Intel and AMD are scared of desktop chips being used in mobiles, and thereby eating away at the fat mobile CPU margins.
It's a shame. The vast, vast majority of the time the processors on all but the servers in the office are running at less than 10% usage... Granted, the idle thread helps to save a lot of power, but the mobile power features would do so much more.
As an aside, it's worth noting that the price of electricty varies greatly. I get cheap power out here in BC, but elsewhere in North America it is often 2x as much. And, in many other countries, power can cost much more still.
Someone has already mentioned cars, but in the context of a change that happens during different model years. In fact, cars change during a single year as well! It's not uncommon for people to consciously wait for a few months after the latest car model has arrived in dealerships before making an order. This gives the manufacturer time to "debug" the current model. Little things get fixed or changed here and there. So, on average, the later cars of the same model year are a little bit more reliable.
It's amazing to flip through the project Gutenburg list of books. Pretty much any English (and increasingly other languages) classic is available. Completely free because copyrights have long since expired, and legal. Who really wants to pirate "pop fiction" anyway?
Although, I thought they did a lot of this already? Don't folks recycle software and module designs as much as possible when designing new satellites now?
Ha.
I've got to admit that the "Kart Fighter" game looked pretty fun to me.
Oddly, those old stories are partially correct. Snow levels inside most cities are down a lot. With all the energy we use (pretty much all of it ending up as waste heat, in winter), temperatures are at least a couple degrees warmer. In the city of Vancouver, we barely get any snow in the winter... but drive a few miles outside of town and you'll find a whole lot more (relatively).
Man, if my governments would stop rounding up grants to the nearest dollar, imagine how much money it would save...
=)
I've been on the client side of a lot of tech support calls. On one hand, finding bugs and fixing broken installations is brutal. On the other hand, more often than not, the bug or problem is from some obscure intraction with 3rd party software. A driver or dll mismatch, file locks, access permissions, problems with middleware... the list goes on.
I guess my point is that no computer network is the same. There are literally millions of combinations of programs, files, and settings possible on a single workstation (never mind a network as a whole). We're bound to have problems every once in a while that are next to impossible to troubleshoot. So, yeah, try and take it easy on your tech support agents... there's only so much they can do.
Oh, weird. I could have sworn I'd read that modern CRT's were immune, something to do with the faster phosphors I think. I'll have to try and see this for myself, maybe I'll look for a machine that's got taskbar burn in or something...
Plus, like the good old days of Stacker, you often gain speed (or at least moderate the lost speed) by saving disk access and transfer time. CPU decompression is often a lot faster than hard disk reading.
This made me think about mules, which as we all should know, are infertile. Suppose you happened to get a super big strong and fast mule... I would probably think that cloning it would be a good idea. Then again, what do I know - do mules actually do anything that horses or donkeys can't?
I thought TV burn in was only relevant for plasma screens. (Which is probably a little over the $1000 budget, unless you Americans get crazy deals compared to us Canucks...)
Traditional CRT's definitely don't need to worry about this. Screen savers have purely for graphical entertainment on computer screens for about a decade now. I'm pretty sure projection screens and LCDs are safe too.
Not so sure about #3, but I love your second idea! Perhaps rather than removing their posts altogether, the posts get automatically modded down so that they don't really bother everyone else. Then if "bozo" happens to use another PC or browser or just log out, they'll at least be able to find their posts if they look hard enough. Much harder to discover that they've been binned this way.
FWIW, WebCT started out at as an in house development for one of UBC's faculties (I think it was Chem.). Anyway, it grew quickly and soon most of the University was on it. I think it's been commercialized by now, but I'm not sure.
China looks about right. Quite bright along the rivers and coastline and reasonably lit throughout the eastern half of the country. It's just that not all parts of the country are equally developed. The west is predominantly mountainous, and generally not a "good" land. In a sense, quite similar to Canada. Very developed in the South, pretty bare in the North where it's a littler colder and more remote.
Now all I need is for these to get cheaper. Say, $20? Though, I'd probably cave in at $40.