On the other hand, there are companies who think that in a recession, people are desperate enough for a job that they'll take anything. Sure, this is true to some extent, but it's still true that if you want top quality talent you're still going to have to pay more for it. Especially if you want them to hang around once things improve.
Vista is starting to get old enough that if you have cutting edge hardware like an AMD Phenom II system, Vista won't recognize the built in ethernet. Understandable, as Phenom II (and it's associated chipsets) came after Vista was released.
I was fairly impressed though when I installed Vista on an older Dell P4 and did not have to install a single driver to make it work.
LCDs and plasmas still have HV parts in them too. Not sure about plasmas, but the inverter board in an LCD that powers the backlight is a very common point of failure. However, no big capacitors in LCDs so they should be fairly safe if unplugged.
I think he meant a longer useful lifespan. I pull the working drives out of older computers, and put them into USB enclosures or stick them into computers I'm still using. But the old motherboards just kind of pile up in the closet.
I also find it surprising you've never had a board fail - did you somehow manage to dodge the capacitor plague?
Right now he would have to drag around two laptops - his new personal one and the current cruddy old one from work. So by taking the reimbursement and buying another laptop, he effectively gets a new work laptop issued to him from the company, which is strangely similar to one he might buy for his own use.
If it was me, I would say that it was my personal laptop and turn them down, but ask if the company would be willing to let me pick out another laptop that they would buy as my new work laptop. This doesn't seem unreasonable, as I would choose different machines for work and personal as I would be using them for different purposes. Then pick out a small laptop as the work laptop, if possible.
Most Socket 754 boards were still AGP (that would be the first generation Athlon 64's). However, good luck finding a board from back then that would also support more than 4GB of DDR memory. So I agree, few people are going to be running into that problem.
If you're trying to compare the battery life while using different OS's, like what we're trying to do now - then using different machines is totally worthless as there are just too many variables.
Sounds like you need a UPS. For the cost of a decent Netbook, you're desktop can easily rival many notebooks in battery life. Try plugging the modem and router into it too. Did you know that your DSL will still work during a power outage?
Wow, she'll have around $2000 then. In 2025 dollars. While I'm sure she won't be complaining about free money, it's not like it's going to be a heck of a lot of money.
If you want to get something along the lines of a long term investment, I would recommend an ounce of gold. Perhaps get a bullion coin like an American Eagle or Canadian Maple minted in the current year. One will run you a bit less than $1000 currently. I would expect it will appreciate better than the CD will. Or at the very least it will be a pretty physical object to find in the time capsule in 16 years.
Pick any video standard used in the past 30 years, then go to an electronics store and seeing if there isn't a brand new TV that will accept that kind of signal. Coax, RCA, S-Video, component, VGA, DVI, etc. all seem to be well supported. HDMI may be superseded by some new format by then, but I would be very surprised if no new TVs in 16 years have an HDMI connector. Heck, chances are pretty good that you would have no problems finding a TV to hook up your 40 year-old VHS deck either.
OSS? I run a LAMP server on an old 800Mhz Celeron. My BSD router is a 600Mhz P3 and is pretty much gross overkill for what it does. The two biggest problems I have with using older computers really isn't the CPU speed, it's either the memory limit (many will only accept 512MB), and the fact that they have been outclassed in the free hardware department by P4-class stuff.
The only problem with that is how the banks like to let you go over your limit nowadays instead of simply declining the card so they can whack you with outrageous fees. Nothing like paying $37.00 for an hour's worth of parking, $41.63 for a meal at Taco Bell, and $65.90 to dry-clean a pair of pants and a few shirts.
Well, one major difference is that few people back in the day owned a horse and cart. Nowadays, at least in America, almost everyone owns a car. The problem isn't really the car so much, it's all the congestion from having all these cars trying to use the road at the same time. No one likes sitting in traffic amongst a sea of cars containing one person - if we can eliminate a lot of the more wasteful trips, it will make the car more even useful for when its use is appropriate (like hauling lots of items or many people).
I just tried it, and it looks like the page then tried to use some exploit in Firefox to download a fake AV program (named GreenAV) to my computer. I guess word is, beware.
He most likely would have let GM fail and rightly so. Probably not the banks because we would still be on the hook for the majority of the money.
Actually, Bush bailed out both the banks and GM. Though in the case of GM, all he was doing was passing the buck by giving GM just enough to last the rest of his term, at the cost of a few billion that we'll never see again.
land lines are cheaper unless you make a bunch of long distance calls
I disagree. I switched to a cell phone because it was cheaper. After all the fees and charges, plus adding things like call waiting and caller ID, my land line was pushing $40 a month. I figured that I would save money with a basic cell phone plan, and I would save even more if I went with a prepaid (which I did).
I suppose the landline would be cheaper if I dropped all the features, but I can't see having a landline without caller ID, given the sheer volume of crap calls I got. Which is another advantage of a cell phone - not having to deal with 2-3 unwanted calls per day, every day.
Obviously the motors that are physically connected to the wheels must be able to vary their speed. But there is no reason why the diesel engine, which is only connected to a generator, would have to vary its speed.
That generally won't help you when it comes to the specialized hardware the applications talk to. You generally have to run that kind of stuff on the bare metal. There's really no other way.
You must have missed where he said "most users". You are describing the power user situation. From what I have seen from how most people use their PC, they only have a few programs open at a time, and they don't have 40 tabs open in their browser either. They don't have virtual machines, and they don't have Rosetta@home running either. 1GB is plenty for these people. Sure, requirements are going to creep up, but I don't see them going up dramatically soon.
Locomotive engines certainly don't run at constant RPMs. There's no battery where the excess power would go, nor to draw on when the supply at a given speed is insufficient. It wouldn't work.
I don't see why it wouldn't work. Similar to how wind turbines work, they are always turning at a constant RPM even though their power output varies with the speed of the wind. Except in this case, it would be reversed, with the load on generator determining how hard the generator is to turn and thus how hard the engine has to work. (yes, I do know that locomotives don't actually work like this)
By large amounts of cash, you're generally talking like $2000 or more. The cops generally don't care if they find you're carrying $300 on you, as $300 really isn't that much money.
You might consider donating them. For people who refurbish donated computers, harddrives are the hardest part to come by because so many remove the drive before donating the computer. 10GB is a bit small, but still useful.
I can see doing it for bad drives, or ones that are so old they aren't useful for anything else. But for a 500GB drive it just seems to be a waste. And besides, you don't need to run DBAN - a single random pass would be good enough on a modern drive (which is pretty much any drive that's big enough to be useful, say 15GB+).
It's actually a pretty big problem with donated computers. Since so many remove the drives before donating them, it's not uncommon to have piles of P4's sitting around with everything you need except to give them a second life - except for the hard drive.
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On the other hand, there are companies who think that in a recession, people are desperate enough for a job that they'll take anything. Sure, this is true to some extent, but it's still true that if you want top quality talent you're still going to have to pay more for it. Especially if you want them to hang around once things improve.
Vista is starting to get old enough that if you have cutting edge hardware like an AMD Phenom II system, Vista won't recognize the built in ethernet. Understandable, as Phenom II (and it's associated chipsets) came after Vista was released.
I was fairly impressed though when I installed Vista on an older Dell P4 and did not have to install a single driver to make it work.
LCDs and plasmas still have HV parts in them too. Not sure about plasmas, but the inverter board in an LCD that powers the backlight is a very common point of failure. However, no big capacitors in LCDs so they should be fairly safe if unplugged.
I think he meant a longer useful lifespan. I pull the working drives out of older computers, and put them into USB enclosures or stick them into computers I'm still using. But the old motherboards just kind of pile up in the closet.
I also find it surprising you've never had a board fail - did you somehow manage to dodge the capacitor plague?
In which case, retrieving whatever data might be on the flash would be well beyond the abilities of your common criminal or curious nerd.
Right now he would have to drag around two laptops - his new personal one and the current cruddy old one from work. So by taking the reimbursement and buying another laptop, he effectively gets a new work laptop issued to him from the company, which is strangely similar to one he might buy for his own use.
If it was me, I would say that it was my personal laptop and turn them down, but ask if the company would be willing to let me pick out another laptop that they would buy as my new work laptop. This doesn't seem unreasonable, as I would choose different machines for work and personal as I would be using them for different purposes. Then pick out a small laptop as the work laptop, if possible.
What if the mode of failure is that the tank bursts and spills hot water everywhere?
Most Socket 754 boards were still AGP (that would be the first generation Athlon 64's). However, good luck finding a board from back then that would also support more than 4GB of DDR memory. So I agree, few people are going to be running into that problem.
If you're trying to compare the battery life while using different OS's, like what we're trying to do now - then using different machines is totally worthless as there are just too many variables.
Sounds like you need a UPS. For the cost of a decent Netbook, you're desktop can easily rival many notebooks in battery life. Try plugging the modem and router into it too. Did you know that your DSL will still work during a power outage?
Wow, she'll have around $2000 then. In 2025 dollars. While I'm sure she won't be complaining about free money, it's not like it's going to be a heck of a lot of money.
If you want to get something along the lines of a long term investment, I would recommend an ounce of gold. Perhaps get a bullion coin like an American Eagle or Canadian Maple minted in the current year. One will run you a bit less than $1000 currently. I would expect it will appreciate better than the CD will. Or at the very least it will be a pretty physical object to find in the time capsule in 16 years.
Pick any video standard used in the past 30 years, then go to an electronics store and seeing if there isn't a brand new TV that will accept that kind of signal. Coax, RCA, S-Video, component, VGA, DVI, etc. all seem to be well supported. HDMI may be superseded by some new format by then, but I would be very surprised if no new TVs in 16 years have an HDMI connector. Heck, chances are pretty good that you would have no problems finding a TV to hook up your 40 year-old VHS deck either.
OSS? I run a LAMP server on an old 800Mhz Celeron. My BSD router is a 600Mhz P3 and is pretty much gross overkill for what it does. The two biggest problems I have with using older computers really isn't the CPU speed, it's either the memory limit (many will only accept 512MB), and the fact that they have been outclassed in the free hardware department by P4-class stuff.
The only problem with that is how the banks like to let you go over your limit nowadays instead of simply declining the card so they can whack you with outrageous fees. Nothing like paying $37.00 for an hour's worth of parking, $41.63 for a meal at Taco Bell, and $65.90 to dry-clean a pair of pants and a few shirts.
Well, one major difference is that few people back in the day owned a horse and cart. Nowadays, at least in America, almost everyone owns a car. The problem isn't really the car so much, it's all the congestion from having all these cars trying to use the road at the same time. No one likes sitting in traffic amongst a sea of cars containing one person - if we can eliminate a lot of the more wasteful trips, it will make the car more even useful for when its use is appropriate (like hauling lots of items or many people).
I just tried it, and it looks like the page then tried to use some exploit in Firefox to download a fake AV program (named GreenAV) to my computer. I guess word is, beware.
Actually, Bush bailed out both the banks and GM. Though in the case of GM, all he was doing was passing the buck by giving GM just enough to last the rest of his term, at the cost of a few billion that we'll never see again.
I disagree. I switched to a cell phone because it was cheaper. After all the fees and charges, plus adding things like call waiting and caller ID, my land line was pushing $40 a month. I figured that I would save money with a basic cell phone plan, and I would save even more if I went with a prepaid (which I did).
I suppose the landline would be cheaper if I dropped all the features, but I can't see having a landline without caller ID, given the sheer volume of crap calls I got. Which is another advantage of a cell phone - not having to deal with 2-3 unwanted calls per day, every day.
Obviously the motors that are physically connected to the wheels must be able to vary their speed. But there is no reason why the diesel engine, which is only connected to a generator, would have to vary its speed.
That generally won't help you when it comes to the specialized hardware the applications talk to. You generally have to run that kind of stuff on the bare metal. There's really no other way.
You must have missed where he said "most users". You are describing the power user situation. From what I have seen from how most people use their PC, they only have a few programs open at a time, and they don't have 40 tabs open in their browser either. They don't have virtual machines, and they don't have Rosetta@home running either. 1GB is plenty for these people. Sure, requirements are going to creep up, but I don't see them going up dramatically soon.
I don't see why it wouldn't work. Similar to how wind turbines work, they are always turning at a constant RPM even though their power output varies with the speed of the wind. Except in this case, it would be reversed, with the load on generator determining how hard the generator is to turn and thus how hard the engine has to work. (yes, I do know that locomotives don't actually work like this)
By large amounts of cash, you're generally talking like $2000 or more. The cops generally don't care if they find you're carrying $300 on you, as $300 really isn't that much money.
You might consider donating them. For people who refurbish donated computers, harddrives are the hardest part to come by because so many remove the drive before donating the computer. 10GB is a bit small, but still useful.
I can see doing it for bad drives, or ones that are so old they aren't useful for anything else. But for a 500GB drive it just seems to be a waste. And besides, you don't need to run DBAN - a single random pass would be good enough on a modern drive (which is pretty much any drive that's big enough to be useful, say 15GB+).
It's actually a pretty big problem with donated computers. Since so many remove the drives before donating them, it's not uncommon to have piles of P4's sitting around with everything you need except to give them a second life - except for the hard drive.