Sure we can, just unplug the main computers and presto, the internet is no more.:)
You are right it'll probably be a second, third or even fourth network. I can see the banks wanting a private network as well as diplomats, and the military, there is no reason why this couldn't be done.
I think the whole 911/999 VOIP "crisis" is overblown, it would be simpler just to make local emergency only cell phones for the home or just have a emergency registration site for the VOIP providers I don't know why so many people are getting worked up over it.
Now as far as setting up a new internet, the trick is to keep quite a few countries outside of the US and the majority of the EU from having a say how things are set up because far too many of them want way too much control over what people can do.
Yeah they do laugh at me on occassion, it's when they're not laughing is when I know they're about to ask me to move some furniture for them. Which funny enough is where I just got back from.;)
Re:US fuel efficiency figures seem incredibly poor
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Japanese Mileage Maniacs
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· Score: 4, Informative
:) With exchange rate it's more like $2.00 a liter. Ouch! I can tell you why it's such a big deal in the US, all those little cars that you all drive here in the UK, well they don't exist in the US. The few little cars that are available are all petrol rather than diesel and are usually tuned for performance rather than fuel efficiency. The reason for that is usually kids are the ones buying them, so rarely do they go for the eco-box models. So pretty much the best thing you are going to find is something in the low 40's until you you make the jump to hybrid. That may be changing here soon once the govenment gets done arguing over the polution standards for diesels. Right now they are only allowed in trucks.
And yes gasoline is so cheap for the most part that we can and do by bigger cars that do poor mpg. They sell gas at 25-30p a liter and 9p of that is road tax, so we don't have the extra payments like you do. At that price it just doesn't make much of a dent in the pocket book even when you have to commute more than 30 miles each direction everyday. The other thing we have is wide roads, lot's of parking, and big garages (you can actually get a full sized SUV into most and have the people on both sides of the vehicle and be able to get out fairly easy). The newer houses typically have room for 3 vehicles and easily fit 2 SUVs and a car. (Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, a Landrover Defender 110 station wagon is what I mean by an SUV.) Those things seems to have a bigger damper on large vehicle sales here in the UK than the price of gas. I cannot get my "tiny", a behemoth by British standards, regular cab Toyota Tacoma (like a hi-lux but bigger) through the door of my garage, and have to park it in the street. Of course as you know most houses in town don't even have garages. People in the states regularly drive pick-up trucks large enough to haul around the typical British car in the back and rarely ever have a problem finding an easy spot to park in.
Hope that puts things in perspective for you. Of course my dreams of buying a new Tacoma or an FJ cruiser, both larger than I have now, are on the back burner, so I have been eye-balling one of the new Mini's. (The sad thing is it won't fit in my garage either.) It get's a respectable 35-40 mpg better than the 20 I get with the Tacoma. Of course the one I want is the S model rather the eco model.:)
I have to agree with you Google Docs is the poop, I use it all the time outside of work. Inside of work, not so easy, the IT department doesn't trust anything they can't disable with a fire axe in person so most of the web-apps are either outright blocked or will get you a meeting with the boss after they rat you out for using them. That unfortunately chucks Skype out the window for me as well, unless I'm on the road with my own laptop or on my cell phone.
For the independent worker or small offices there are many solutions that work great outside of the MS family, unfortunately the realities of big companies/groups is that it's much easier and more profitable to stick with what everyone has/knows even if it is not necessarily the best option out there. Which is exactly why Windows is going to stay dominent until someone can come up with an OS that is widely used and is easily adaptive(as in self configuring) to what ever software/hardware gene pool you chuck it into.
vista is no more than windowblinds+truecrypt except not as good as either
And most cars these days are built with parts that have been in use for nearly 20 years, but people still run out every year to get new ones.
Personally I like some of the new "Less than REAL" improvements. Apple fans rave about OSX, but 95% of what OSX is, is just a polished up version of OS9 programs or ideas lifted straight from XP and other software. I don't understand why everyone spends all their time bashing MS for doing the exact same thing. I don't need Windows to come up with the equivalent of the cure for cancer every time they release a new OS, call me easily impressed, I'm just jazed they managed to find ways of improving just about every feature of the program.
And just to set the record straight for you. XP was not an improvement over 98, NT/2000 was the improvement over 98, XP was just polishing up of NT/2000 with all those insignificant improvements you seem so disgusted with so they could sell that rather than the aborted fetus 95/98/ME turned out to be to everyone outside the business world.
:) Yeah some of these conversations were almost ten years ago and we're still not there yet.
On the other hand if all you want to do is what we dreamed about then, playing games (simpler graphics), surfing the web, listening to high quality music, taking digital pictures and video, email, and watching movies well we've reached that point a few years ago. Those are the common abilities for just about any cell phone you come across now and are well within the grasp of even the most modest of laptops/desktops.
I'll have to agree with the RAM, but then again I thought XP ran like crap with anything less than 1gb and most games ran pretty bad with less than 2gb.
When it comes to install configurations who knows what the techs/engineers were thinking? It seems no matter how good the product, the first thing you have to do is undo everything they did and set it up better.
:) Yeah I hear it too, it's the countdown till my configuration goes POOF! One drive is 2 years old, the other 1 1/2. After learning my lesson the hard way and loosing my first year of digital photos something like 8 years ago, the only thing on that drive is the OS, my programs, and whatever I'm working on at the time. The first back-up is on an external hard drive. For things that could never be replaced, home movies, photos etc, there is a second back-up on an external HD that sits in my closet in my closet. My last little bit of my back-up strategy is once a year when I make the big global lap to go see family I make copies of all my photos on their computers and take copies of all of theirs with me. I started doing that after a co-workers house burned down taking his computer and all his DVD back-ups of his photos with it. I haven't needed to use it, but it did come in handy when my mom's computer imploded and I was able to restore all of her photos to her. I used to use online photo service as my third back-up, but after having one go bankrupt and disapear and most of the others rescale your photos making the originals impossible to recover, I've steered away from them since then.
Basic rule of thumb for any harddrive is don't trust it all for the first six months you have it, and then trust it very little after that. Hard drives are very cheap and convient, there is no reason not to have a triple or quadruple back-up scheme to protect your data.
Yep that is exactly how it's played out. Even Apple pisses on it's customers with the same upgrade or Fuck Off attitude with it's software/hardware. It sucks, but unfortunately that's the reality of it all. My suggestion is stay off the bleeding edge of hardware and stick with the middle ground with regular inexpensive upgrades every couple of years. That way you are not paying the premium for the latest and the greatest, nor are you getting caught in the situation where suddenly your whole computer system is obsolete.
There is a ray of hope though. In conversations past with other computer enthusiasts we talked much about how fast computers really needed to get before people just wouldn't excited anymore about new technology. I think we are rapidly approaching that point on several major components in the system with a few more just a few more years away. Sound cards are becoming harder and hard to justify. Basic 3d Video cards cost absolutely nothing now. High end graphics cards are supper computers in their own right and are dropping fast in price. Physic cards were exciting for all of six months and now they are being run on other hardware much more cheaply. Flash memory is finally getting cheap and fast, harddrives are moving right up to rediculous for the amount they can hold and CPU prices are tanking even as they get faster and more cores. RAM is being stubborn, but new types should up the competition and put a dent in the price.
I give it only a few more years where the entire computer on a single card becomes not only possible, but the norm and "Opperating systems" are nothing more than various User Interfaces layered over which every kind software that works the best.
Really come on getting upset with your Dell purchase is like getting upset for getting crapy food and service from a fast food joint.
Buying anything that is "XXX Capable" is just opening up yourself to disappointment. I learned that with my purchase of Dolby 5.1 "ready" surround sound powered speakers ten years ago that were anything but ready.
That is why I didn't by an "HD ready" TV or "802.11n compatable wireless router" and many other transitional technologies firms have dumped on us everytime something new comes out.
I feel your pain. It's a hard (expensive) lesson to learn, but unfortunately that's just the way things go with technology since everything changes so fast that consumer protection groups can't keep up.
No you don't have even a remotely bargin basement computer. You are suffering from bleeding edge hardware and shitty driver support from Nvidia. Alot of your problem is the 8800's. People have had nothing but heartache with them, especially with some of the most recently released games. My 8800GS has been driving me nuts trying to play Supreme Commander. I'm kicking myself for jumping onto the Dx10 hardware bandwagon too early. The funny thing though it's only been with games released this year that I've been having any problem with, all the old and legacy stuff works like a dream. I haven't seen any BSOD yet, but SC has crashed hard enough times that I've had to reinstall it after it corrupted alot of it's own texture files.
Well considering that I installed it all of one time so far, and that took 1 disk, 30 minutes, and no intervention on my part other than setting up my RAID 0 which Vista had the drivers for, that includes it going out and finding all it's own network settings, internet settings, and all of the drivers that the hardware manufactures could be bothered to release, and then filling in basic ones for those that didn't...
yes I am ok with that.
Now as far as the "cheepo" machine hate to burst your bubble, but Apple sells them too and guess what, OS X runs like shit on them as well. My ex-girlfriend bought a Mac G5, I hated that damn thing since she had only 512mb of ram and had it so loaded down with every crap program that she could find that is was an absolute dog. Add in another 1gb of RAM and a thorough delousing made it run at tolerable speeds. Anytime you slap together a machine with barly any RAM, a neutered "value" processor, and a basic harddrive and then give it to an idiot user what exactly do you expect? Linux will run on it, hell it'd probably run on my wrist watch, but the average user and even quite a few computer enthusists such as myself have absolutley no interest in it.
So pretty much the only thing that truly sucks is your attitude and mostly like the five year old hand-me- down computer your mom gave you. It's either that or you're a Mac fanboy and well that doesn't say much in your favor either.
Mine latest computer build on the other hand absolutely screams and both Xp and Vista have worked just fine on it. The guts of from my old machine, the one I got around the same time the X-girlfriend got her Mac, runs Vista quite well too.
I agree with you for the most part, that's why started buying mechanical pencils that are clear. Easy enough to tell when they are out of lead. My big problem was/still is breaking them. I found one that I loved in college and had it for nearly 5 years before one of the guys at work stole it. The thing was an absolute tank, and was the first one I've ever seen with a fully retractable tip. Since then I just keep switching brands till I notice that I've managed to go through a refill or two without breaking them. When that is the case I go buy 5-10 of them and keep them in a safe place away from the theiving bastards. Currently I've been using a.7 Papermate Clear Point. They are kinds of gay when it comes to colors (bright purple or green trim with a clear body is all the local store caries), but I can spot it from 20 feet away if someone managed to swipe it when I wasn't looking. Holds lot's of lead, nice big eraser, and retractable tip.
It's not that bad. The biggest problem is Nvidia has been slow to roll out their drivers and some of the latest games that are trying to release DX9/DX10 games are having teething issues (Supreme Commander), which again rolls back into losey driver support, and the premature release of games that are supposed to work with Dx10 and Vista before Vista even launched. Nothing from Valve, using Steam, has even hickuped. The loss of frame rates, Half-Life 2 Lost Coast was 130fps on Vista, compared to 137fps on XP Pro. 7fps yeah I'm loosing sleep over that. I've been runing Oblivion at max everything as wells as Eve-Online, again no problems, no lock-ups.
I picked up a Dx10 card, but so far nothing is out there that takes advantage of it yet, though the demo videos for various games showing the difference looks pretty amazing.
I'm going to have to agree with Bigstrat. You seem to be talking out your lower body cavity. This version has been the easiest to set up and with no activation problems, unlike XP which I had to call practically every time, and it runs just as fast as XP. There are a few quirks in the way it shuts down and copies files, but that is better than the old XP method which was to just do a crash shut down or lock up.
The only thing that eats into "performance" is that it actually want you to have a 3d video card, which can be had for the princely sum of $50 to run the extra eyecandy. If that is too rich for your blood then you can run it in standard 2d mode and it looks alot like XP.
The other is the "bloatware" that eats up practically all the RAM. Well that bloatware is Vista pre-caching your favorite programs so that they instant start when you click on them. Just because the RAM is showing 98% utilization doesn't mean all that info is blocking programs from working, unlike previous versions of Windows, it just dumps it as it's needed and things continue to hum along as if the RAM wasn't even full. Personally I like it and I'm going to go out and get more RAM to bring up my total to 4gb since the process works so well. In the month I've been using it, it has already spoiled me badly, so the normal 30 second wait for most programs on my machine at work to start is driving me completely batshit.
I'll have to agree a bit with the UI changes. Software writers should never be allowed to set up the UI, since they developed it of course it seems rational, while the rest of us pull our hair out having to change 5 years worth of habits from XP. Part of the developement process should involve a random off the street computer geek, an office drone, and someone's grandmother. If the computer geek can't find a particular setting in 2 minutes it needs to be changed back. If the office drone can't figure out the email or how to print files in the same amount of time, then it needs to be changed back. Finally if Grandma can't figure out how to email pictures, she's too damn old anyway and needs to be sent to the Soylent Green factory for processing.;)
I wish they would include all the old ways of doing things, since many of the "improvements" seem to be nothing more than just some random changes in locations.
As far as the drivers go. It's starting to come along. One of my SATA controllers had no driver available when I upgraded last month, but the damn motherboard has four of them so I wasn't to worried about it. Since then Vista went out and grabbed the driver for it along with updates for just about everything else. The only one that is pissing me off is Nvidia's crap support for their 8800 series video cards. They haven't posted anything in a month and still are only offering Beta drivers. As far as things like old printers, I wouldn't hold your breath, the same thing happened when XP came out, most of the manufactures just simply abandoned hardware support for old stuff. I can't see them being anymore generous this time around.
Thirty years ago computer security was not leaving the phone receiver plugged into the modem (literally having the entire handset plugged in, not just a cord) and making sure the door to the computer room was locked.
I wonder if you are still using wood #2 pencils since there is no "real benefit" to those new fangled plastic and metal mechanical pencils.
I think you are buying far too much into the negative hype around Vista. The only way you'll be having problems with your Vista laptop is if you plan on buying a bargan basement no frills machine that has minimal hardware specs. Even Xp would be hard pressed to run properly on it as well. That or if your son has a full range of periphrials that are 3-4 years old (printers/scanners etc.). Alot of companies are still dragging their feet on driver support for old gear, but that is nothing new.
If the university doesn't support Vista, then they must not support XP either, since at the basic level they have the same requirements as far as network connectivity. So far the only problems running software I've run into are very minor. Simple things like the fact that Vista can't tell the difference between me closing Winamp down and the program crashing (the program has yet to lock up under Vista) and a few admin authorization issues with installing programs like Flash (unchecked a check box for the fix after a google search). There are a few companies that don't have updates for their software yet, but I find most them no longer needed, such as DVD burning software since it is finally included in the OS. The only place I can see there being a problem is some sort of specialized software or the lack of support for the latest version of Explorer, which if you updated on XP you'd be having the same problem anyway.
The only big quirk that I've found, that is annoying the piss out of me is I rip my DVD's to harddrives for storage and playback. For some odd reason the player has decided anything that is on an external drive is not of the correct region code (US). My fault really. When I did the install I told it I was in England (I live here at the moment) thinking it was for time zone setting, but it was for DVD playback. I switched it back to the States. It works fine for any internal drives, but still have the same problem with the external ones. I think it's going to take a full blown reinstall. The reinstall process is super easy, takes all of 30 minutes to get it back up and running, but I'm being lazy since the movies play fine off of the internal drives. The install process of Vista pretty much shines. It has never been easier (again as long as you are not dealing with antique hardware (4+ year old stuff)
The last of the big problems have been with particular games and the latest Nvidia video cards, which aren't offered in laptops anyway, and that has nothing to do with Vista and everything to do with Nvidia dropping the ball on release date support.
All in all I don't know what you are worried about. If you buy a cheapo computer you are going to get a cheapo experience reguardless of what whether it be XP, Vista, or OSX. If not then you really don't have much to worry about.
They are erring on the side of caution, because they do interfere with things in the cockpit, the problem is that how much they interfere depends on too many factors.
I'm sure the no cell phone rules originated when cell phones (bag phones) were 5-7 watts, which is a pretty respectable output to be having near sensitive equipment. Phones haven't been that powerful in a long time, these days they are typically in the.3 -.7 watt range. You would think that wouldn't be enough to cause a problem, but it can. During my pilot training I could always tell when my instructor had a call. At first she thought I was just being weird everytime I told her she had a call, but when we got back to the ground she'd see that she had. I could always tell, because I could hear it over my headset in the pilot seat. For whatever reason she couldn't hear it from the copilot seat. I could even tell the difference between a call, a text, or a voice message alert depending on the interference noise that I heard. Of course the phone was all of five feet from the antenas and radios.
Now before you get all "but on a passenger plane we're in the back no where near the cockpit!", I'll tell you another story about something we had going on for a while at my last base. I'm an aircraft maintainer by trade, a pilot just for fun. Two years ago the crews were flying test missions and kept having problems with their radios. They kept hearing a Mexican radio station through their headsets, this is not entirely unusual considering the base was in southern California and the radios can pick up music stations. The odd thing was that the radios were turned off and they were hearing it over the intercom. The intercom on an aircraft routes all of the various radios, warning alerts, etc into the crew's headsets, it's not just for talking on the aircraft. While this sort of thing is usually funny and sporatic at it's worst, this time it stopped being so, because it was continuous and eventually go loud enough to distract the crew when trying to talk to each other, other aircraft, or traffic control. It took a long time for the engineers to figure out what was going on since it was occuring on more than one type of aircraft. Turns out some of our test equipment was picking up the signal bleeding it in through the power bus. The equipment that was causing the problem wasn't even a radio, it just turns out that it inadvertantly acted like one.
So don't get so worked up thinking it's just some grand conspiracy to sell more air phone minutes or keep you from listening to some tunes. Considering how fast technology changes and how many devices are going wireless there is just no way they can keep up with testing every single device to make sure it won't cause a problem.
Yes it is true that most software, Mac or MS, still can only usually run on one processor at a time. Even so having extra cores will make a noticeable boost since all the other background stuff that seems to inhabit the computer these days can soak up one core while your app runs solo on the other. There is the joy of multi-tasking as well. You can be working on a clip with your editing program while playing video/music at the same time without your machine missing a beat. The more cores you have the more heavy applications you can have open and working at the same time. The performance boost comes from the fact that you don't have to wait for it to finish what it is doing with one program before you can use another. Of course the first thing you'll want to add after an extra core is an extra monitor, RAM, and a RAID set-up to really see your set-up shine!
I'm currently living the "English Dream" at the moment (American transplant), and even though I despise sprawl, living doublestacked elbow to elbow is hardly an improvement over American Suburbia.
7 parking spots for every 10 cars. Garages that are barely big enough to park a compact in, hence the reason of having to fight for the spots on the streets, daily mini-rush hours at all the main round-abouts. Yep it's an enlighted way to live.
Public transporation is not as plentiful nor as convenient as everyone makes it out to be. In the places it does exist, it works out fine, but then again in the States it's the same deal. Where it's not to be found, the British love their cars just as much as Americans do and are just as hard to pry out from behind the wheel. Places like Cambridge lot's of people ride bikes, but that is again due to the fact that there is literally no where to park a car.
I'll give them this, there are almost no stop signs/lights to be found, just lots of round-abouts. Once you get used to them you'll love them, since you don't hardly ever have to stop. That and the simple fact that practically any where you go you are just a few blocks from a pub. There are 6 of them within 3 blocks of my house. Don't need a designated driver and there is a Chinese place half way home. On that portion of city planing they certainly have things back in the States beat.
I always figured the/. crowd would be a little more well read on tech subjects, but from the number of responses that think this is an April 1st joke is astounding. They've been talking about this technology for more than a year now. Popular Science had a blurb on it last month. None of the devices charge over large distances, though they did mention that theoretically they should absorb any radio waves in the air. Most had to be place either on or with in a few inches of the recharge station for the recharge to work. While that doesn't sound terribly usefull to some essentially all you have to do is chuck your device onto the charger without plugging it in. The other advantage is that we would finally have a "universal" charger since there would be no plugs. The one article that I did find pretty facinating, though now I can't remember where I saw it, they had the "charging station" as the entire desk top. The signal was only strong enough to work with devices within an inch of the surface, but what they were showing off was the fact that you could place your devices where ever on the desk and they would be powered. They had a lamp and a few other items.
Still think this is an hoax, Google it, you'll find it to be otherwise.
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You are right it'll probably be a second, third or even fourth network. I can see the banks wanting a private network as well as diplomats, and the military, there is no reason why this couldn't be done.
I think the whole 911/999 VOIP "crisis" is overblown, it would be simpler just to make local emergency only cell phones for the home or just have a emergency registration site for the VOIP providers I don't know why so many people are getting worked up over it.
Now as far as setting up a new internet, the trick is to keep quite a few countries outside of the US and the majority of the EU from having a say how things are set up because far too many of them want way too much control over what people can do.
A shiny new OS...or is it patch #5 on a seven year old program?
In the MS world we call them service packs and they don't cost $100.
Yeah they do laugh at me on occassion, it's when they're not laughing is when I know they're about to ask me to move some furniture for them. Which funny enough is where I just got back from. ;)
And yes gasoline is so cheap for the most part that we can and do by bigger cars that do poor mpg. They sell gas at 25-30p a liter and 9p of that is road tax, so we don't have the extra payments like you do. At that price it just doesn't make much of a dent in the pocket book even when you have to commute more than 30 miles each direction everyday. The other thing we have is wide roads, lot's of parking, and big garages (you can actually get a full sized SUV into most and have the people on both sides of the vehicle and be able to get out fairly easy). The newer houses typically have room for 3 vehicles and easily fit 2 SUVs and a car. (Just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, a Landrover Defender 110 station wagon is what I mean by an SUV.) Those things seems to have a bigger damper on large vehicle sales here in the UK than the price of gas. I cannot get my "tiny", a behemoth by British standards, regular cab Toyota Tacoma (like a hi-lux but bigger) through the door of my garage, and have to park it in the street. Of course as you know most houses in town don't even have garages. People in the states regularly drive pick-up trucks large enough to haul around the typical British car in the back and rarely ever have a problem finding an easy spot to park in.
Hope that puts things in perspective for you. Of course my dreams of buying a new Tacoma or an FJ cruiser, both larger than I have now, are on the back burner, so I have been eye-balling one of the new Mini's. (The sad thing is it won't fit in my garage either.) It get's a respectable 35-40 mpg better than the 20 I get with the Tacoma. Of course the one I want is the S model rather the eco model. :)
For the independent worker or small offices there are many solutions that work great outside of the MS family, unfortunately the realities of big companies/groups is that it's much easier and more profitable to stick with what everyone has/knows even if it is not necessarily the best option out there. Which is exactly why Windows is going to stay dominent until someone can come up with an OS that is widely used and is easily adaptive(as in self configuring) to what ever software/hardware gene pool you chuck it into.
And most cars these days are built with parts that have been in use for nearly 20 years, but people still run out every year to get new ones.
Personally I like some of the new "Less than REAL" improvements. Apple fans rave about OSX, but 95% of what OSX is, is just a polished up version of OS9 programs or ideas lifted straight from XP and other software. I don't understand why everyone spends all their time bashing MS for doing the exact same thing. I don't need Windows to come up with the equivalent of the cure for cancer every time they release a new OS, call me easily impressed, I'm just jazed they managed to find ways of improving just about every feature of the program.
And just to set the record straight for you. XP was not an improvement over 98, NT/2000 was the improvement over 98, XP was just polishing up of NT/2000 with all those insignificant improvements you seem so disgusted with so they could sell that rather than the aborted fetus 95/98/ME turned out to be to everyone outside the business world.
On the other hand if all you want to do is what we dreamed about then, playing games (simpler graphics), surfing the web, listening to high quality music, taking digital pictures and video, email, and watching movies well we've reached that point a few years ago. Those are the common abilities for just about any cell phone you come across now and are well within the grasp of even the most modest of laptops/desktops.
When it comes to install configurations who knows what the techs/engineers were thinking? It seems no matter how good the product, the first thing you have to do is undo everything they did and set it up better.
Basic rule of thumb for any harddrive is don't trust it all for the first six months you have it, and then trust it very little after that. Hard drives are very cheap and convient, there is no reason not to have a triple or quadruple back-up scheme to protect your data.
If you are old enough to remember people cried about XP not running well on hardware that ran Windows98 just fine too.
There is a ray of hope though. In conversations past with other computer enthusiasts we talked much about how fast computers really needed to get before people just wouldn't excited anymore about new technology. I think we are rapidly approaching that point on several major components in the system with a few more just a few more years away. Sound cards are becoming harder and hard to justify. Basic 3d Video cards cost absolutely nothing now. High end graphics cards are supper computers in their own right and are dropping fast in price. Physic cards were exciting for all of six months and now they are being run on other hardware much more cheaply. Flash memory is finally getting cheap and fast, harddrives are moving right up to rediculous for the amount they can hold and CPU prices are tanking even as they get faster and more cores. RAM is being stubborn, but new types should up the competition and put a dent in the price.
I give it only a few more years where the entire computer on a single card becomes not only possible, but the norm and "Opperating systems" are nothing more than various User Interfaces layered over which every kind software that works the best.
Really come on getting upset with your Dell purchase is like getting upset for getting crapy food and service from a fast food joint.
Buying anything that is "XXX Capable" is just opening up yourself to disappointment. I learned that with my purchase of Dolby 5.1 "ready" surround sound powered speakers ten years ago that were anything but ready .
That is why I didn't by an "HD ready" TV or "802.11n compatable wireless router" and many other transitional technologies firms have dumped on us everytime something new comes out.
I feel your pain. It's a hard (expensive) lesson to learn, but unfortunately that's just the way things go with technology since everything changes so fast that consumer protection groups can't keep up.
No you don't have even a remotely bargin basement computer. You are suffering from bleeding edge hardware and shitty driver support from Nvidia. Alot of your problem is the 8800's. People have had nothing but heartache with them, especially with some of the most recently released games. My 8800GS has been driving me nuts trying to play Supreme Commander. I'm kicking myself for jumping onto the Dx10 hardware bandwagon too early. The funny thing though it's only been with games released this year that I've been having any problem with, all the old and legacy stuff works like a dream. I haven't seen any BSOD yet, but SC has crashed hard enough times that I've had to reinstall it after it corrupted alot of it's own texture files.
yes I am ok with that.
Now as far as the "cheepo" machine hate to burst your bubble, but Apple sells them too and guess what, OS X runs like shit on them as well. My ex-girlfriend bought a Mac G5, I hated that damn thing since she had only 512mb of ram and had it so loaded down with every crap program that she could find that is was an absolute dog. Add in another 1gb of RAM and a thorough delousing made it run at tolerable speeds. Anytime you slap together a machine with barly any RAM, a neutered "value" processor, and a basic harddrive and then give it to an idiot user what exactly do you expect? Linux will run on it, hell it'd probably run on my wrist watch, but the average user and even quite a few computer enthusists such as myself have absolutley no interest in it.
So pretty much the only thing that truly sucks is your attitude and mostly like the five year old hand-me- down computer your mom gave you. It's either that or you're a Mac fanboy and well that doesn't say much in your favor either.
Mine latest computer build on the other hand absolutely screams and both Xp and Vista have worked just fine on it. The guts of from my old machine, the one I got around the same time the X-girlfriend got her Mac, runs Vista quite well too.
I agree with you for the most part, that's why started buying mechanical pencils that are clear. Easy enough to tell when they are out of lead. My big problem was/still is breaking them. I found one that I loved in college and had it for nearly 5 years before one of the guys at work stole it. The thing was an absolute tank, and was the first one I've ever seen with a fully retractable tip. Since then I just keep switching brands till I notice that I've managed to go through a refill or two without breaking them. When that is the case I go buy 5-10 of them and keep them in a safe place away from the theiving bastards. Currently I've been using a .7 Papermate Clear Point. They are kinds of gay when it comes to colors (bright purple or green trim with a clear body is all the local store caries), but I can spot it from 20 feet away if someone managed to swipe it when I wasn't looking. Holds lot's of lead, nice big eraser, and retractable tip.
I picked up a Dx10 card, but so far nothing is out there that takes advantage of it yet, though the demo videos for various games showing the difference looks pretty amazing.
The only thing that eats into "performance" is that it actually want you to have a 3d video card, which can be had for the princely sum of $50 to run the extra eyecandy. If that is too rich for your blood then you can run it in standard 2d mode and it looks alot like XP.
The other is the "bloatware" that eats up practically all the RAM. Well that bloatware is Vista pre-caching your favorite programs so that they instant start when you click on them. Just because the RAM is showing 98% utilization doesn't mean all that info is blocking programs from working, unlike previous versions of Windows, it just dumps it as it's needed and things continue to hum along as if the RAM wasn't even full. Personally I like it and I'm going to go out and get more RAM to bring up my total to 4gb since the process works so well. In the month I've been using it, it has already spoiled me badly, so the normal 30 second wait for most programs on my machine at work to start is driving me completely batshit.
I wish they would include all the old ways of doing things, since many of the "improvements" seem to be nothing more than just some random changes in locations.
As far as the drivers go. It's starting to come along. One of my SATA controllers had no driver available when I upgraded last month, but the damn motherboard has four of them so I wasn't to worried about it. Since then Vista went out and grabbed the driver for it along with updates for just about everything else. The only one that is pissing me off is Nvidia's crap support for their 8800 series video cards. They haven't posted anything in a month and still are only offering Beta drivers. As far as things like old printers, I wouldn't hold your breath, the same thing happened when XP came out, most of the manufactures just simply abandoned hardware support for old stuff. I can't see them being anymore generous this time around.
I wonder if you are still using wood #2 pencils since there is no "real benefit" to those new fangled plastic and metal mechanical pencils.
If the university doesn't support Vista, then they must not support XP either, since at the basic level they have the same requirements as far as network connectivity. So far the only problems running software I've run into are very minor. Simple things like the fact that Vista can't tell the difference between me closing Winamp down and the program crashing (the program has yet to lock up under Vista) and a few admin authorization issues with installing programs like Flash (unchecked a check box for the fix after a google search). There are a few companies that don't have updates for their software yet, but I find most them no longer needed, such as DVD burning software since it is finally included in the OS. The only place I can see there being a problem is some sort of specialized software or the lack of support for the latest version of Explorer, which if you updated on XP you'd be having the same problem anyway.
The only big quirk that I've found, that is annoying the piss out of me is I rip my DVD's to harddrives for storage and playback. For some odd reason the player has decided anything that is on an external drive is not of the correct region code (US). My fault really. When I did the install I told it I was in England (I live here at the moment) thinking it was for time zone setting, but it was for DVD playback. I switched it back to the States. It works fine for any internal drives, but still have the same problem with the external ones. I think it's going to take a full blown reinstall. The reinstall process is super easy, takes all of 30 minutes to get it back up and running, but I'm being lazy since the movies play fine off of the internal drives. The install process of Vista pretty much shines. It has never been easier (again as long as you are not dealing with antique hardware (4+ year old stuff)
The last of the big problems have been with particular games and the latest Nvidia video cards, which aren't offered in laptops anyway, and that has nothing to do with Vista and everything to do with Nvidia dropping the ball on release date support.
All in all I don't know what you are worried about. If you buy a cheapo computer you are going to get a cheapo experience reguardless of what whether it be XP, Vista, or OSX. If not then you really don't have much to worry about.
I'm sure the no cell phone rules originated when cell phones (bag phones) were 5-7 watts, which is a pretty respectable output to be having near sensitive equipment. Phones haven't been that powerful in a long time, these days they are typically in the .3 - .7 watt range. You would think that wouldn't be enough to cause a problem, but it can. During my pilot training I could always tell when my instructor had a call. At first she thought I was just being weird everytime I told her she had a call, but when we got back to the ground she'd see that she had. I could always tell, because I could hear it over my headset in the pilot seat. For whatever reason she couldn't hear it from the copilot seat. I could even tell the difference between a call, a text, or a voice message alert depending on the interference noise that I heard. Of course the phone was all of five feet from the antenas and radios.
Now before you get all "but on a passenger plane we're in the back no where near the cockpit!", I'll tell you another story about something we had going on for a while at my last base. I'm an aircraft maintainer by trade, a pilot just for fun. Two years ago the crews were flying test missions and kept having problems with their radios. They kept hearing a Mexican radio station through their headsets, this is not entirely unusual considering the base was in southern California and the radios can pick up music stations. The odd thing was that the radios were turned off and they were hearing it over the intercom. The intercom on an aircraft routes all of the various radios, warning alerts, etc into the crew's headsets, it's not just for talking on the aircraft. While this sort of thing is usually funny and sporatic at it's worst, this time it stopped being so, because it was continuous and eventually go loud enough to distract the crew when trying to talk to each other, other aircraft, or traffic control. It took a long time for the engineers to figure out what was going on since it was occuring on more than one type of aircraft. Turns out some of our test equipment was picking up the signal bleeding it in through the power bus. The equipment that was causing the problem wasn't even a radio, it just turns out that it inadvertantly acted like one.
So don't get so worked up thinking it's just some grand conspiracy to sell more air phone minutes or keep you from listening to some tunes. Considering how fast technology changes and how many devices are going wireless there is just no way they can keep up with testing every single device to make sure it won't cause a problem.
7 parking spots for every 10 cars. Garages that are barely big enough to park a compact in, hence the reason of having to fight for the spots on the streets, daily mini-rush hours at all the main round-abouts. Yep it's an enlighted way to live.
Public transporation is not as plentiful nor as convenient as everyone makes it out to be. In the places it does exist, it works out fine, but then again in the States it's the same deal. Where it's not to be found, the British love their cars just as much as Americans do and are just as hard to pry out from behind the wheel. Places like Cambridge lot's of people ride bikes, but that is again due to the fact that there is literally no where to park a car.
I'll give them this, there are almost no stop signs/lights to be found, just lots of round-abouts. Once you get used to them you'll love them, since you don't hardly ever have to stop. That and the simple fact that practically any where you go you are just a few blocks from a pub. There are 6 of them within 3 blocks of my house. Don't need a designated driver and there is a Chinese place half way home. On that portion of city planing they certainly have things back in the States beat.
Still think this is an hoax, Google it, you'll find it to be otherwise.