How'd this documentary explain the existence of so many responsible teenagers? There are a lot of kids who never got in any serious trouble, are good students, etc.
Becuase of my age, I don't feel the need to go out and try what we learned on real systems to see if I can cause havoc.
So you're saying that it's your belief that older man cannot be unethical?
However, I wonder why the adults behind this "after school program" think that kids will have the same degree of responsibility that university students do when learning these things. What is to keep them from going out and writing viruses, unleasing them upon the Internet and generally causing lots of trouble after learning how to "protect" systems.
Same thing that keeps you from causing lots of trouble: a strong sense of ethics that outweighs the curiosity. Well...maybe fear of punishment as well.
I think the way they're doing it provides both deterrents. They have law enforcement agents as speakers to remind the kids of the consequences of their actions. They also have the class in the form of a competition which helps them satisfy their hacking urges against equally smart opponents.
I really don't think that you get increased ethical values with age. You need to be taught those by your family. On the flip side, I don't think you can use the age of a teenager as excuse for irresponsible actions.
I'm honestly having to think hard to post a response that doesn't sound offensive, but your post really angers me.
Don't like taxes? Fine. Then you should be active in the political arena, and make it happen. Prepare a budget plan where you cut employment and public services...no road maintenance, except for the interstate, the federal goverment pays those. No public schools, because no one will want to become a teacher with the salary you're willing to pay. Increased crime with the cutting of police officers you're willing to lay off...etc, etc, etc.
I think your idiocy can be best summarized by this statement:
No one is garunteed job security, so why does uncle sam try so damned hard to never fire anyone? Ohhh yeah I forgot... uncle sam is the only stupid employer to still over pention plans.
Uncle Sam isn't a corporation. A government's aim isn't to profit it's to provide public services to YOU. Making YOU tighten your belt by raising YOUR taxes is INFINITELY better than tightening the government's belt, because if the government has no money, the economy will fall into a state where you won't have any either, and there's no way to recover from that.
The whole point of benchmarks is to get real world performance of something right?
Sure...but my point was that by just benchmarking with current games, you can't get real world performance of features that haven't been implemented in that game. A good 3dmark score generally means a good gaming experience (unless the drivers are cheating in the 3dmark score).
Shouldn't it also try and emulate an application that is optimized as much as possiable so as to get the highest possiable performance instead of the lowest score?
Nope. They're testing the graphics cards and their respective drivers, not the skills of game programmers.
I can already tell you that the worst possiable perforamnce on all future video cards on any possiable software will be, it's less then one frame per second. This we already know, what we should be using programs like 3DMark to find out is how fast a computer with a card CAN run. because 3DMark software is about the possiabilities that a card has, not its REAL WORLD performance.
Hmm...what? You're NOT trying to find out how fast a computer with a card can run. You're trying to compare video cards so that you know which one to buy..that's why nvidia wants to cheat, so that you choose theirs instead of the ati equivalent. To do that accurately you tax them both equally as much as you can, and you *definitely* test all new features.
Game benchmarking is good. It tells you how well a card will run the current games. Synthetic benchmarks are also good...it tells you how well your card will run with the games not yet out. If you get a card scoring well on 3dmark, chances are you don't need to replace your card as early as one that does well with current games, but completely flops on the new features
If NVidia wants to do application-specific optimizations that make UT2003 go faster, then that would be great. That's what they should be doing. Those are optimizations that genuinely benefit the user.
Problem is, NVIDIA didn't just optimize. Their application specific "optimization" made the images look worse. And when you couldn't notice it, it was because they were clipping outside the camera angle (becuase they knew exactly where the camera was, something they can't do when you're playing UT2003)
Like the original statement by futurmark said, optimization is great. But when you change the image intended by the software designer in order to make it go faster, that's not an optimization. For god's sake, I can turn all the details to low on UT2003 and get it to go faster, but that's besides the point
Reason games specific benchmark don't fly for me (although now that Futuremark has issued this statement, I'm sure ATI will start cheating as well, making the whole thing useless) is that synthetic benchmarks can test features new to the cards that games may not yet have implemented. So I have an idea how it'll perform with future games.
Here's how their collective childhood was "raped" pal (I'd include myself in the list, but I wasn't around for ANH--although I also feel the pain):
Star Wars is a part of their childhood memories...it was a phenomenon, and they were a part of it when it happened
When Star Wars gets re-released, and they try to recapture what they felt when they first watched it, they find out it has been changed. Now, enhanced special effects can be good in the minds of some, but almost everyone will agree that Han Solo's very character was changed with the Greedo event. From a smart outlaw, to a brave, foolish man (notice how fake the whole scene looks...with Han not even ducking as Greedo fires the shot--what the heck is up with Greedo's aim anyway? He's not a stormtrooper.)
When the movies are available for purchase once again, lo and behold...the original ones aren't. So those of us who were not happy with the special edition, couldn't get the old stuff. That may make you happy, because you like the new stuff...but it doesn't make everyone happy.
Lucas creates prequels, gets every Star Wars fan hyped up. Somehow, however, he changes the demographics that he's aiming at. He starts aiming at children for the movies. Now, even if you were to argue that the original trilogy was also aimed at kids (and the only possible argument you could have is ewoks, while everything else points elsewhere), he still changed the audience...because the mainstream star wars fans, those who were kids when the first trilogy came out, grew up by now...these are the people he needs to cater for.
Lucas creates the previously unknown "boring action scene" by making the pod race so long that I'll bet many people thought the sound of the pod engines were different when they got the dvd--because they thought the collective sound of half the theater snoring was engine sound, when they saw it in the big screen. Reason:
Make previously unknown "boring fight scene"
Use the Star Wars hype to convince people it's not actually bad
Sell video games and action figures based on the previous step
???
Profit!
Lucas, the technological "all digital man", decides to release TPM in VHS only, initially stating the DVD will only be out after all three prequels are released, together with the original trilogy. Then, when everyone buys the VHS, he "succumbs to pressure" and releases the DVD, causing a lot of the people to buy the movie twice. The force may not be with Lucas, but Greed certainly is.
From current rumors, it appears that he intends to change the original trilogy once again (Natalie Portman seems to have filmed some scenes, there's some speculation as to it being a flashback scene of some sort). And from the same rumors, he intends to release only the "extra special edition" or whatever on dvd. A format that would EASILY allow for releasing all different versions of the film in the same disk, T2 Ultimate Edition-like. Now, this is just a rumor as far as I know, so I won't blame this on Lucas...yet.
In order to convince people who did not yet see Lucas as a greedy man who would ruin everybody's childhood memories to make a buck, he decides to charge for things that would ordinarily be called promotional material--things given for free to attract attention to the real product. He fails in this step...you still call him a genius.
Now...the above statements are FACT. He's not just changing the stuff, he's refusing to give us the original trilogy back as well. Oh, I know...he'll probably "succumb to pressure" again...after he convinces people he's not going to release the original, and forces everyone to buy the "extra special edition" first.
Hah! I just scanned 127.0.0.1 and all your ports are open, prepare for the system halt of your life!
Go ahead, pal. I protected his computer with a corbomite device. Whatever you attempt to do to his computer, will, instead happen to yours. Don't believe me? Try it.
Which costs employers extra money in the real world, and what the professors are trying to address.
Dude, it took them a little longer because they never did that type of stuff before. It means if they never had the labs, they'd still be able to do everything, but it'd take them longer and more work to figure thinks out when they went to the workforce, costing the employers money, you're right. But they did have the labs, thus this adaptation time in between theory and praticality happens in the school lab
Like I said, labs are good. The difference in between how the "practical people" and the "theory people" did their labs is this:
The practical people would get known designs from places (the book, the net, previous work they've done, etc) and start messing with values. "Hey look...if I increase the capacitance here, it goes the opposite way that I want it to...so I need to decrease it" and start putting in random values accordingly until something works. God forbid they ever actually use a resistor, they'd go straight for a vast amount of pots, and start tweaking them until something showed up in the scope. That works because they've seen that stuff built before, but they wouldn't be able to design anything themselves...that makes them good technicians, not good engineers"
The theory people, in addition to figuring out how to use a solder iron, would spend too much time to realize real world isn't perfect. They'd design everything from scratch, figure out exact values for components...and when stuff doesn't work, they'd spend a real long time in their notebooks trying to figure out why. Eventually they realize that some tweaking is needed, but they'd know why their tweaking is working. Their attitude wouldn't be, "let's try to change random values in this multitude of pots"...it'd be more like, "It looks like the problem is we're getting too much ripple in the current output, so let's increase inductance #2". There would be logic behind their trials. Eventually, definitely by the end of the senior design project, they knew how to solder, and they had enough experience to know where to use trial and error. The lab taught them that, and in the end, they're useful engineers with design skills.
After all, theory is all well and good, but at an introductory level, there's nothing quite like practical application to help demonstrate the theory (not to mention make the course material more interesting so students will be motivated to continue in the program).
I find that the theory and practical use work very well in completely separate classes. In the course of studying EE, I found that many people who did extremely well in labs because they had previous practical experience in the real world didn't do so well in theory classes. Turns out they were doing their lab well because either they had done that particular thing before or they knew the trial and error process well (because they did similar things before)
However, those students doing well in theory classes would always do well in the lab (even if it took them a little longer, and a bit more work).
So, labs are a Good Thing...changing theory classes to labs isn't.
I assume your using special equipment which connect to a pci card on your computers. If that is the case then Windows is the only option.
Not necessarily true. I work on research for the university I study at, and the particular branch I work on uses comedi drivers to interface with our pci data acquisition boards. Take a look, it might support what you're using.
Many things people would ordinarily think linux can't do is already, or will one day be possible, so keep looking. A lot of people tend to think you can't do real-time work on Linux, because it's not a real-time kernel "like windows nt", but we do it with a patched RTAI kernel too. My advice is to research what you need, in any operating system. Check out all your options, and choose what's best for you.
I believe it is our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this day holds for each and every one of us...the very chance to download the matrix. When I see thousands of us here, on slashdot, and a program that thrives on distributed downloading, I do not see a coincidence.
You don't need to buy the top of the line card to play the current games well. So you want a benchmark that'll tell you how your card will deal with the features that are new to the card and will make their way down to the games later.
If you're buying a top of the line card, either you just want the status of having a top of the line card, in which case you want it to pass all benchmarks with flying colors, or you want a card that you won't be replacing for a while...in which case you want the benchmark to show that it can handle a whole bunch of new features future games might make use of.
Maybe so, but that's not how I interpreted this at the time.
The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it. For example if you have downloaded some strange porn-viewer.exe that has fsked everything up a reinstall should be your last resort option.
In my interpretation, that "fsked everything up" scenario is the scenario where your computer is unusable...you get blue screen of deaths when you're booting up, only way you get access to your stuff is by going to safe mode, etc. I figured that with things such as spyware and viruses, he'd let adaware and his favorite virus scan handle the problem, since the clean install is the last resort option. I, on the other hand, prefer to be more thorough once the accumulated trash in my computer reaches a certain level. Thus I made the distinction between "something wrong with your OS", ie, you can't boot up or do anything useful to your computer with "something wrong with your system", which could be a severe lack of performance, and you don't know the reasons exactly.
No disrepect intended to the original poster and his intentions. I saw a distinction, posted according to my interpretation, and unfortunately wasn't clear enough to avoid a misunderstanding in my own post. Sorry about that, hope I was able to clear it up this time.
If you know what you're doing (as in, not the type of thing that should be posted in an article for novices, although he did include a warning) doing a clean install can have a *much* greater performance advantage in windows--including windows xp. Heck, from what I observed with my computer, I'd do it every 3 months...although every 6 months is good enough for most heavy users and every year should be good enough for the rest of the population.
The trick is knowing what you want to backup, and making absolutely sure that you have it in places that you'd normally back up anyway. If possible, keep all data files in a separate partition so you can just format the one where windows and the installed programs are. I'd never back up the windows directory (that's where most of the trash that I want to get rid of is), but I changed the outlook directory to "E:\My Documents\mail" (yes, I changed the my documents directory to the "data" partition as well). If you don't have a separate partition, keep a checklist of every directory that you need to backup, and save everything that you would want to backup to those directories.
The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it.
Not really, sometimes there's something wrong with your system and the best way to truly fix it is by doing the clean install thing. Try running adaware and see how much spyware is installed. Then there are viruses...I've never had problems with them, but a friend of mine recently ran a scan and found 9 viruses in his computer, and his only detectable symptom was the computer would lock up often.
Basically, what I'm trying to say with all this is that, if you're careful, you can safely do clean installs without risking the loss of any data at all, and the benefits are much greater than "reorganizing and defragging". And to those who will undoubtly respond...yes, I know, I've never had the need to do frequent clean installs with my linux partition either.
One final advice for all you novices who are going to take the risk and do this for the first time. Don't follow these instructions:
Then you turn your computer off, put the operating system CD into the drive and turn the computer back on.
For god's sake...don't force your cdrom open when the computer is off. Just turn it on and plop the cd in there first thing, while in the bios screen:)
Remember: the lobbyists only have to win ONCE in each state. We only have to get careless or complacent ONCE to let them win.
What would it take to start going on the offensive instead of the defensive, here? Can't special interests groups like the EFF lobby for the creation of laws protecting our rights to fair use, backups, reverse engineering, etc. so that *we* only have to win once?
I do understand we can't compete monetarily, but letting the general public know and understand these issues (instead of preaching to the choir and only publishing these types of things on a site dedicated to "news for nerds") could offset the problem. After all, I guess the only thing that can compete with campaign contributions is the actual swaying of public opinions at times of elections and, due to MPAA/RIAA/Blah propaganda, we are the minority.
I do understand that I'm probably being really naive here, not being a guy that keeps up with/understands politics well. Maybe someone who does can explain the problem and make a few useful suggestions to overcome it.
That is a myth. Radio/TV engineers keep the volume the same. Look on the net and you'll find discussion.
Sometimes the commercial seems louder, if the TV show doesn't have people running around yelling as loudly as the announcer is saying "SALE! SALE!".
If you look on the net you can find discussions supporting almost anything. So although you can argue that the "SoundRite" feature in this advertised zenith television which supposedly "automatically corrects the annoying difference in volume levels that frequently occur between programs and commercials" is just playing to that myth, I can argue that those net discussions you speak of are BS.
In fact...I do argue that. Simply because I've heard differences in volume that are too great for me to attribute to a difference in activity level (especially during high action movies with explosions and the such)
I used to wonder the same thing, until a friend of mine who is messing around with mythtv pointed it out to me (and he's going to be pissed he didn't get to post this):
There are the screen changes, as you mentioned
Commercials are usually a set length: 30 seconds, 1 minute, per ad
Sometimes you get the network logo when the show comes back on
I think there are other ways...sc00p, post 'em up.
the only reason anyone does any work at work is because it's marginally less tedious than the alternative activities that you can engage in until 5pm
That, and deadlines...You stop missing deadlines, whether you're playing games or diligently working 9-5, and you wouldn't have that tedious job to go to.
Truth is, if you're playing games, but turning in excellent work to your boss on time, he won't care. If you're not wasting your time at all, but you're still not being productive, you're not going to hold on to that job (or at least, you shouldn't). The key is not "whether games increase productivity"...I'm sure it hurts productivity for some, and it helps for others. The important part is finding whatever increases productivity for you and hope your boss sees it that way as well, and won't interfere.
On the same page as the article explaining how you can have a really compact PC for $336 by modding the x-box is an advertisement for Dell computers with free shipping.
That gets me thinking...maybe Microsoft needs to abandon the whole losing money on the xbox to compete with the playstation 2 strategy and start charging more for it and advertise the modding--and compete with companies such as Dell and Gateway:)
Slashdot Mirror
How'd this documentary explain the existence of so many responsible teenagers? There are a lot of kids who never got in any serious trouble, are good students, etc.
So you're saying that it's your belief that older man cannot be unethical?
However, I wonder why the adults behind this "after school program" think that kids will have the same degree of responsibility that university students do when learning these things. What is to keep them from going out and writing viruses, unleasing them upon the Internet and generally causing lots of trouble after learning how to "protect" systems.Same thing that keeps you from causing lots of trouble: a strong sense of ethics that outweighs the curiosity. Well...maybe fear of punishment as well.
I think the way they're doing it provides both deterrents. They have law enforcement agents as speakers to remind the kids of the consequences of their actions. They also have the class in the form of a competition which helps them satisfy their hacking urges against equally smart opponents.
I really don't think that you get increased ethical values with age. You need to be taught those by your family. On the flip side, I don't think you can use the age of a teenager as excuse for irresponsible actions.
Now there's just no more incentive :)
I'm honestly having to think hard to post a response that doesn't sound offensive, but your post really angers me.
Don't like taxes? Fine. Then you should be active in the political arena, and make it happen. Prepare a budget plan where you cut employment and public services...no road maintenance, except for the interstate, the federal goverment pays those. No public schools, because no one will want to become a teacher with the salary you're willing to pay. Increased crime with the cutting of police officers you're willing to lay off...etc, etc, etc.
I think your idiocy can be best summarized by this statement:
No one is garunteed job security, so why does uncle sam try so damned hard to never fire anyone? Ohhh yeah I forgotUncle Sam isn't a corporation. A government's aim isn't to profit it's to provide public services to YOU. Making YOU tighten your belt by raising YOUR taxes is INFINITELY better than tightening the government's belt, because if the government has no money, the economy will fall into a state where you won't have any either, and there's no way to recover from that.
Sure...but my point was that by just benchmarking with current games, you can't get real world performance of features that haven't been implemented in that game. A good 3dmark score generally means a good gaming experience (unless the drivers are cheating in the 3dmark score).
Shouldn't it also try and emulate an application that is optimized as much as possiable so as to get the highest possiable performance instead of the lowest score?Nope. They're testing the graphics cards and their respective drivers, not the skills of game programmers.
I can already tell you that the worst possiable perforamnce on all future video cards on any possiable software will be, it's less then one frame per second. This we already know, what we should be using programs like 3DMark to find out is how fast a computer with a card CAN run. because 3DMark software is about the possiabilities that a card has, not its REAL WORLD performance.Hmm...what? You're NOT trying to find out how fast a computer with a card can run. You're trying to compare video cards so that you know which one to buy..that's why nvidia wants to cheat, so that you choose theirs instead of the ati equivalent. To do that accurately you tax them both equally as much as you can, and you *definitely* test all new features.
Game benchmarking is good. It tells you how well a card will run the current games. Synthetic benchmarks are also good...it tells you how well your card will run with the games not yet out. If you get a card scoring well on 3dmark, chances are you don't need to replace your card as early as one that does well with current games, but completely flops on the new features
Problem is, NVIDIA didn't just optimize. Their application specific "optimization" made the images look worse. And when you couldn't notice it, it was because they were clipping outside the camera angle (becuase they knew exactly where the camera was, something they can't do when you're playing UT2003)
Like the original statement by futurmark said, optimization is great. But when you change the image intended by the software designer in order to make it go faster, that's not an optimization. For god's sake, I can turn all the details to low on UT2003 and get it to go faster, but that's besides the point
Reason games specific benchmark don't fly for me (although now that Futuremark has issued this statement, I'm sure ATI will start cheating as well, making the whole thing useless) is that synthetic benchmarks can test features new to the cards that games may not yet have implemented. So I have an idea how it'll perform with future games.
Now...the above statements are FACT. He's not just changing the stuff, he's refusing to give us the original trilogy back as well. Oh, I know...he'll probably "succumb to pressure" again...after he convinces people he's not going to release the original, and forces everyone to buy the "extra special edition" first.
Hah! I just scanned 127.0.0.1 and all your ports are open, prepare for the system halt of your life! Go ahead, pal. I protected his computer with a corbomite device. Whatever you attempt to do to his computer, will, instead happen to yours. Don't believe me? Try it.
Dude, it took them a little longer because they never did that type of stuff before. It means if they never had the labs, they'd still be able to do everything, but it'd take them longer and more work to figure thinks out when they went to the workforce, costing the employers money, you're right. But they did have the labs, thus this adaptation time in between theory and praticality happens in the school lab
Like I said, labs are good. The difference in between how the "practical people" and the "theory people" did their labs is this:
The practical people would get known designs from places (the book, the net, previous work they've done, etc) and start messing with values. "Hey look...if I increase the capacitance here, it goes the opposite way that I want it to...so I need to decrease it" and start putting in random values accordingly until something works. God forbid they ever actually use a resistor, they'd go straight for a vast amount of pots, and start tweaking them until something showed up in the scope. That works because they've seen that stuff built before, but they wouldn't be able to design anything themselves...that makes them good technicians, not good engineers"
The theory people, in addition to figuring out how to use a solder iron, would spend too much time to realize real world isn't perfect. They'd design everything from scratch, figure out exact values for components...and when stuff doesn't work, they'd spend a real long time in their notebooks trying to figure out why. Eventually they realize that some tweaking is needed, but they'd know why their tweaking is working. Their attitude wouldn't be, "let's try to change random values in this multitude of pots"...it'd be more like, "It looks like the problem is we're getting too much ripple in the current output, so let's increase inductance #2". There would be logic behind their trials. Eventually, definitely by the end of the senior design project, they knew how to solder, and they had enough experience to know where to use trial and error. The lab taught them that, and in the end, they're useful engineers with design skills.
I find that the theory and practical use work very well in completely separate classes. In the course of studying EE, I found that many people who did extremely well in labs because they had previous practical experience in the real world didn't do so well in theory classes. Turns out they were doing their lab well because either they had done that particular thing before or they knew the trial and error process well (because they did similar things before)
However, those students doing well in theory classes would always do well in the lab (even if it took them a little longer, and a bit more work).
So, labs are a Good Thing...changing theory classes to labs isn't.
They still have 1 (one) aircraft carrier remaining...The "São Paulo".
But, heck, who needs aircraft carriers when you can have this baby?
LOL...and before the flame war starts...please understand this is just a joke. The list of other ships still commissioned is quite impressive.
Not necessarily true. I work on research for the university I study at, and the particular branch I work on uses comedi drivers to interface with our pci data acquisition boards. Take a look, it might support what you're using.
Many things people would ordinarily think linux can't do is already, or will one day be possible, so keep looking. A lot of people tend to think you can't do real-time work on Linux, because it's not a real-time kernel "like windows nt", but we do it with a patched RTAI kernel too. My advice is to research what you need, in any operating system. Check out all your options, and choose what's best for you.
Hand over your /. membership card, pal...you forgot 2 steps
Step 1: Advanced aliens create gigantic computers that generate so much heat -- much like some Intel chips -- that they resemble stars.
Step 2:One alien says, "Imaging a Beowulf cluster of these...."
Step 3: BOOM!
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
Yeah, exactly. If I want an instant cluster, I can just boot my server off my WindowsXP cd, thank you very much.
I believe it is our fate to be here. It is our destiny. I believe this day holds for each and every one of us...the very chance to download the matrix. When I see thousands of us here, on slashdot, and a program that thrives on distributed downloading, I do not see a coincidence.
You don't need to buy the top of the line card to play the current games well. So you want a benchmark that'll tell you how your card will deal with the features that are new to the card and will make their way down to the games later.
If you're buying a top of the line card, either you just want the status of having a top of the line card, in which case you want it to pass all benchmarks with flying colors, or you want a card that you won't be replacing for a while...in which case you want the benchmark to show that it can handle a whole bunch of new features future games might make use of.
Maybe so, but that's not how I interpreted this at the time.
The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it. For example if you have downloaded some strange porn-viewer.exe that has fsked everything up a reinstall should be your last resort option.In my interpretation, that "fsked everything up" scenario is the scenario where your computer is unusable...you get blue screen of deaths when you're booting up, only way you get access to your stuff is by going to safe mode, etc. I figured that with things such as spyware and viruses, he'd let adaware and his favorite virus scan handle the problem, since the clean install is the last resort option. I, on the other hand, prefer to be more thorough once the accumulated trash in my computer reaches a certain level. Thus I made the distinction between "something wrong with your OS", ie, you can't boot up or do anything useful to your computer with "something wrong with your system", which could be a severe lack of performance, and you don't know the reasons exactly.
No disrepect intended to the original poster and his intentions. I saw a distinction, posted according to my interpretation, and unfortunately wasn't clear enough to avoid a misunderstanding in my own post. Sorry about that, hope I was able to clear it up this time.
If you know what you're doing (as in, not the type of thing that should be posted in an article for novices, although he did include a warning) doing a clean install can have a *much* greater performance advantage in windows--including windows xp. Heck, from what I observed with my computer, I'd do it every 3 months...although every 6 months is good enough for most heavy users and every year should be good enough for the rest of the population.
The trick is knowing what you want to backup, and making absolutely sure that you have it in places that you'd normally back up anyway. If possible, keep all data files in a separate partition so you can just format the one where windows and the installed programs are. I'd never back up the windows directory (that's where most of the trash that I want to get rid of is), but I changed the outlook directory to "E:\My Documents\mail" (yes, I changed the my documents directory to the "data" partition as well). If you don't have a separate partition, keep a checklist of every directory that you need to backup, and save everything that you would want to backup to those directories.
The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it.
Not really, sometimes there's something wrong with your system and the best way to truly fix it is by doing the clean install thing. Try running adaware and see how much spyware is installed. Then there are viruses...I've never had problems with them, but a friend of mine recently ran a scan and found 9 viruses in his computer, and his only detectable symptom was the computer would lock up often.
Basically, what I'm trying to say with all this is that, if you're careful, you can safely do clean installs without risking the loss of any data at all, and the benefits are much greater than "reorganizing and defragging". And to those who will undoubtly respond...yes, I know, I've never had the need to do frequent clean installs with my linux partition either.
One final advice for all you novices who are going to take the risk and do this for the first time. Don't follow these instructions:
Then you turn your computer off, put the operating system CD into the drive and turn the computer back on.For god's sake...don't force your cdrom open when the computer is off. Just turn it on and plop the cd in there first thing, while in the bios screen :)
What would it take to start going on the offensive instead of the defensive, here? Can't special interests groups like the EFF lobby for the creation of laws protecting our rights to fair use, backups, reverse engineering, etc. so that *we* only have to win once?
I do understand we can't compete monetarily, but letting the general public know and understand these issues (instead of preaching to the choir and only publishing these types of things on a site dedicated to "news for nerds") could offset the problem. After all, I guess the only thing that can compete with campaign contributions is the actual swaying of public opinions at times of elections and, due to MPAA/RIAA/Blah propaganda, we are the minority.
I do understand that I'm probably being really naive here, not being a guy that keeps up with/understands politics well. Maybe someone who does can explain the problem and make a few useful suggestions to overcome it.
That is a myth. Radio/TV engineers keep the volume the same. Look on the net and you'll find discussion.
Sometimes the commercial seems louder, if the TV show doesn't have people running around yelling as loudly as the announcer is saying "SALE! SALE!".
If you look on the net you can find discussions supporting almost anything. So although you can argue that the "SoundRite" feature in this advertised zenith television which supposedly "automatically corrects the annoying difference in volume levels that frequently occur between programs and commercials" is just playing to that myth, I can argue that those net discussions you speak of are BS.
In fact...I do argue that. Simply because I've heard differences in volume that are too great for me to attribute to a difference in activity level (especially during high action movies with explosions and the such)
I used to wonder the same thing, until a friend of mine who is messing around with mythtv pointed it out to me (and he's going to be pissed he didn't get to post this):
There are the screen changes, as you mentioned
Commercials are usually a set length: 30 seconds, 1 minute, per ad
Sometimes you get the network logo when the show comes back on
I think there are other ways...sc00p, post 'em up.
"The first official virus was in 1986 that someone was able to trace back to the perpetrators, which were two brothers in Pakistan," Seneker said.
They were easily traced because they embedded their names and address in a virus.
Or maybe this would be a course on how to avoid mistakes of the past...First lecture reminder: "DON'T write your names on the homework you turn in
That, and deadlines...You stop missing deadlines, whether you're playing games or diligently working 9-5, and you wouldn't have that tedious job to go to.
Truth is, if you're playing games, but turning in excellent work to your boss on time, he won't care. If you're not wasting your time at all, but you're still not being productive, you're not going to hold on to that job (or at least, you shouldn't). The key is not "whether games increase productivity"...I'm sure it hurts productivity for some, and it helps for others. The important part is finding whatever increases productivity for you and hope your boss sees it that way as well, and won't interfere.
I sure hope so...
On the same page as the article explaining how you can have a really compact PC for $336 by modding the x-box is an advertisement for Dell computers with free shipping.
That gets me thinking...maybe Microsoft needs to abandon the whole losing money on the xbox to compete with the playstation 2 strategy and start charging more for it and advertise the modding--and compete with companies such as Dell and Gateway :)