That would be easy enough for Microsoft to fix, as Windows can control what the power button does on the PC. So if you jab the power button, Microsoft could make the screen wake up instead of shutting the PC down (which seems to be the case now). Of course, this won't work for old AT-style computers, but I would imagine there aren't too many of those around anymore, particularly ones running XP.
At the time the G3 was technically a faster processor than the Pentium II according to the BYTEmark test [techimo.com]. "Apple says that a PowerMac G3/300 scores 10.2 on the BYTEmark test, more than twice as fast as the 4.3 rating the Pentium II got, and 45 percent higher than a 400-MHz Pentium II." Now it's debatable whether the computer was overall faster as then you have to factor in bus speeds, memory, etc. Back then these things mattered a lot. The main point was at the minimum it was debatable and not blatantly false.
Apple was infamous for singling out some specific benchmark they happened to do well in back in the day, and then try to claim that their CPU was 3 times faster or some nonsense like that. Sure, it was for some specific thing, but if you combed through the numbers enough, you would be sure to find some metric where the Pentium was 3 times faster than the PPC. It was misleading at best.
Of course, the funniest is how Apple went from something like '2x faster than a Pentium 4' to 'now 5 times faster than before' with the Intel switch. Yeah, we all know the Core Duos were faster than the Pentium 4, but even Intel wasn't claiming they were 10 times faster.
"low end" means "junk". I build my own machines. To purchase a decent MOBO, CPU, and decent memory has stayed pretty consistent for several years - about 450 to 550 dollars. That is, no OS, no extra frills, nada. Add in a case, a CD or DVD, a hard drive or two, and you're already at $1,000 bucks.
How do you come up with that price? You can get a decent motherboard for $75. 2-4GB of name brand DDR2 ram will run you $50. A dual core CPU will run you $50. Now that stuff won't be cutting edge or anything like that, but it'll all be name brand, reliable parts that will give you years of service - no junk like PCChips, VIA, or no-name ram. That's less than $200. Spend a bit more on the CPU ($75-$100 more), and you're already in iMac territory in terms of CPU and ram.
The Cyrix chips were hot back in the day, but they only used 25W or so in their peak. That's less than pretty much any mainstream desktop processor nowadays, and less than many of the mobile ones too (a mobile Core 2 Duo is about 30-35W). It only seemed bad because back then we were still trying to cool them with a smallish heatsink and a small fan that had to spin at crazy speeds to move enough air. That, and the fact that Win95/98 wouldn't HALT the chip when idle so it ran 100% all the time.
Even the P4 doesn't seem that bad a few years after its release. We thought it was crazy when they started pulling down more than 100W, but most Core 2 Quad's are at about 100W, and the Core i7 is up there at around 130W or so. My older Athlon also was considered a power hog back in the day, but at about 70W it's right about where all the mainstream Core 2 Duo chips sit at now.
I saw that more in high school. For example, there was your typical biology class, and then there was "accelerated biology" which was more rigorous, and went into more depth. It was aimed at the smarter kids, and put you on track for taking the AP biology exam if you wanted to put in a bit more effort (taking the AP exam was optional). Many of the kids who obsessed over their GPA decided to skip the accelerated class and take the regular course for fear of a lower grade. Most of these kids were actually pretty smart, and they weren't worried so much about getting a D in the class so much as something like a B+ which would make their GPA something like 3.96. I thought they were just cheating themselves, and since I really didn't care whether my GPA was 3.1 or 3.9 I took the accelerated courses anyway.
College you really didn't have a chance to do that as much. You could take an easy major I suppose, but once you chose your major you had your coursework for your degree laid out for you. You couldn't just substitute the easier algebra-based physics I & II courses for the harder calculus-based physics courses if you were a physics major, for example.
How do you know that some spammer just didn't strip off the '+whatever" part and spam your root address? It's so blindingly obvious that I would be surprised if spammers aren't doing this.
You might want to consider that there is more to taxes than just the Federal Income Tax. For example, most of the very rich get most of their income from capital gains, which is currently taxed at 15%. That's how Warren Buffet's effective tax rate is less than his secretary's.
Not to mention most computers. You pretty much have to have a decent dual-core machine or a high end video card to play h.264 in.mkv containers, while Xvid/Avi will play on much older PCs.
The problem I have with the Mac is that if you actually know what all those obscure settings are and want to play with them, or if you have a situation where you actually need to go and tweak them to get a good result because the defaults aren't working, you can't because the interface is so dumbed down. That's the problem I have with a lot of Mac software.
Winamp runs in the "high" priority class, which meant that few things could interupt it. Despite this being something that many people would frown upon, it actually worked pretty well. You should be able to do basically the same thing in Linux on older hardware.
The DSL company assumes that if you got the faster package, you wouldn't really use the service more, so the extra money you give them would be pure profit. That's why they are always after you to upgrade. Of course, the people running P2P 24/7 don't follow this pattern, but they are the exception here.
Did you try to format it? Flash memory will eventually lose its charge, so it will "forget" whatever was stored on it if you let it sit a long time. However, it should still be good if you try to write to it again.
Even so, you would still have to know if you are at a site where they only use the letter "l" or they only use the number "1". I haven't seen a site yet that gives a list of the letters/numbers they use, so you're pretty much at square one in most cases.
Storm-related outages are fairly well understood. You know what caused it (the weather), and you know how to fix it (find and repair the damaged parts). It's happened enough that we know about how long it's going to take to repair. They also are fairly localized - for all but the worst you're a short drive away from a place that has power, and people are willing to help out with supplies and such. In other words, things are under control, and people deal with it.
Now, if you have computer hackers shutting down parts of the grid, people aren't going to know what (and who) knocked out their power, how to the problem is going to be fixed, and how long it's going to take. Outages could be more widespread, and those with supplies are going to be more likely to hoard them, given the unknowns. People are going to be on edge, and I could see riots happening if people don't see that things are under control and they aren't able to get supplies.
I wouldn't count on newer Macs lasting that long. The level of quality has gone down, and Apple is running them way too hot to expect them to last anywhere near 15 years. Furthermore, with the exception of the Mac Pro, they are not built with repair in mind and if anything other than the RAM and probably the harddrive goes bad you'll probably end up having to trash them once the warranty is over. Even the Mac Pro would be a bit iffy after a few years as the power supply/motherboard are non-standard parts and once Apple drops support for them the only place to get a replacement would be from a donor machine.
Your best bet would be to go with a low power, well cooled PC system with high quality, standard off-the-shelf parts. Use common parts, stay away from stuff that will be hard to come by in a few years like BTX formfactor stuff or a hardware raid controller. With a bit of luck, they'll easily last 3-5 years. In that time, when everyone else is upgrading to new machines, save some of the better machines like the ones you built from the scrap heap and throw them in a closet so you'll bave parts to keep the main machines going.
Considering that this feature of PC floppy drives seemingly was never or almost never used (I didn't know about it until reading the article), it wouldn't surprise me at all if a bunch of hardware manufacturers had omitted support for it entirely, thus you would also have to deal with a third type of drive that would never change the value reported back, and even a possible fourth type where the value could change but would have nothing to do with a disk being inserted. That is another likely reason for not adding this feature to Windows.
Floppy drives didn't seem to care about that standard at all. Some were that way, and others were not. I'm sure the ones that were that way were purely by accident. On the other hand, I think almost every single harddrive and optical drive I ever had to connect up had pin 1 closest to the power.
I'm not sure if it was by design or not, but when the cable was on backwards, the access light would be on all the time so you at least knew immediately what was wrong.
It's also the thing that every Mac user had a paper clip next to their computer for, mostly because Apple has a thing about not putting buttons on things.
I believe with registered mail, the post office will stamp all seams on the envelope so that if it is opened and resealed it should be detectable. Obviously, the mail it to yourself method does have its flaws so it shouldn't be counted upon, but even the site you linked to suggests that it can't hurt.
The problem is that I can't control what the dice will roll. So if I roll my dice and get a 7, then I know that your dice will also show a 7. But if I wanted your dice to show a 9 - which would be a form of communication - I would need to force my dice to roll a 9 somehow. However, there is no way to do this, hence no way to communicate. Keep in mind that with entanglement, you only get one dice roll then the number is set - so I can't just keep re-rolling until I get the desired number to show up like I can do with real dice.
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That would be easy enough for Microsoft to fix, as Windows can control what the power button does on the PC. So if you jab the power button, Microsoft could make the screen wake up instead of shutting the PC down (which seems to be the case now). Of course, this won't work for old AT-style computers, but I would imagine there aren't too many of those around anymore, particularly ones running XP.
Apple was infamous for singling out some specific benchmark they happened to do well in back in the day, and then try to claim that their CPU was 3 times faster or some nonsense like that. Sure, it was for some specific thing, but if you combed through the numbers enough, you would be sure to find some metric where the Pentium was 3 times faster than the PPC. It was misleading at best.
Of course, the funniest is how Apple went from something like '2x faster than a Pentium 4' to 'now 5 times faster than before' with the Intel switch. Yeah, we all know the Core Duos were faster than the Pentium 4, but even Intel wasn't claiming they were 10 times faster.
How do you come up with that price? You can get a decent motherboard for $75. 2-4GB of name brand DDR2 ram will run you $50. A dual core CPU will run you $50. Now that stuff won't be cutting edge or anything like that, but it'll all be name brand, reliable parts that will give you years of service - no junk like PCChips, VIA, or no-name ram. That's less than $200. Spend a bit more on the CPU ($75-$100 more), and you're already in iMac territory in terms of CPU and ram.
The Cyrix chips were hot back in the day, but they only used 25W or so in their peak. That's less than pretty much any mainstream desktop processor nowadays, and less than many of the mobile ones too (a mobile Core 2 Duo is about 30-35W). It only seemed bad because back then we were still trying to cool them with a smallish heatsink and a small fan that had to spin at crazy speeds to move enough air. That, and the fact that Win95/98 wouldn't HALT the chip when idle so it ran 100% all the time.
Even the P4 doesn't seem that bad a few years after its release. We thought it was crazy when they started pulling down more than 100W, but most Core 2 Quad's are at about 100W, and the Core i7 is up there at around 130W or so. My older Athlon also was considered a power hog back in the day, but at about 70W it's right about where all the mainstream Core 2 Duo chips sit at now.
I saw that more in high school. For example, there was your typical biology class, and then there was "accelerated biology" which was more rigorous, and went into more depth. It was aimed at the smarter kids, and put you on track for taking the AP biology exam if you wanted to put in a bit more effort (taking the AP exam was optional). Many of the kids who obsessed over their GPA decided to skip the accelerated class and take the regular course for fear of a lower grade. Most of these kids were actually pretty smart, and they weren't worried so much about getting a D in the class so much as something like a B+ which would make their GPA something like 3.96. I thought they were just cheating themselves, and since I really didn't care whether my GPA was 3.1 or 3.9 I took the accelerated courses anyway.
College you really didn't have a chance to do that as much. You could take an easy major I suppose, but once you chose your major you had your coursework for your degree laid out for you. You couldn't just substitute the easier algebra-based physics I & II courses for the harder calculus-based physics courses if you were a physics major, for example.
How do you know that some spammer just didn't strip off the '+whatever" part and spam your root address? It's so blindingly obvious that I would be surprised if spammers aren't doing this.
You might want to consider that there is more to taxes than just the Federal Income Tax. For example, most of the very rich get most of their income from capital gains, which is currently taxed at 15%. That's how Warren Buffet's effective tax rate is less than his secretary's.
Not to mention most computers. You pretty much have to have a decent dual-core machine or a high end video card to play h.264 in .mkv containers, while Xvid/Avi will play on much older PCs.
The problem I have with the Mac is that if you actually know what all those obscure settings are and want to play with them, or if you have a situation where you actually need to go and tweak them to get a good result because the defaults aren't working, you can't because the interface is so dumbed down. That's the problem I have with a lot of Mac software.
Winamp runs in the "high" priority class, which meant that few things could interupt it. Despite this being something that many people would frown upon, it actually worked pretty well. You should be able to do basically the same thing in Linux on older hardware.
The DSL company assumes that if you got the faster package, you wouldn't really use the service more, so the extra money you give them would be pure profit. That's why they are always after you to upgrade. Of course, the people running P2P 24/7 don't follow this pattern, but they are the exception here.
What difference does that make?
Did you try to format it? Flash memory will eventually lose its charge, so it will "forget" whatever was stored on it if you let it sit a long time. However, it should still be good if you try to write to it again.
Even so, you would still have to know if you are at a site where they only use the letter "l" or they only use the number "1". I haven't seen a site yet that gives a list of the letters/numbers they use, so you're pretty much at square one in most cases.
Storm-related outages are fairly well understood. You know what caused it (the weather), and you know how to fix it (find and repair the damaged parts). It's happened enough that we know about how long it's going to take to repair. They also are fairly localized - for all but the worst you're a short drive away from a place that has power, and people are willing to help out with supplies and such. In other words, things are under control, and people deal with it.
Now, if you have computer hackers shutting down parts of the grid, people aren't going to know what (and who) knocked out their power, how to the problem is going to be fixed, and how long it's going to take. Outages could be more widespread, and those with supplies are going to be more likely to hoard them, given the unknowns. People are going to be on edge, and I could see riots happening if people don't see that things are under control and they aren't able to get supplies.
I wouldn't count on newer Macs lasting that long. The level of quality has gone down, and Apple is running them way too hot to expect them to last anywhere near 15 years. Furthermore, with the exception of the Mac Pro, they are not built with repair in mind and if anything other than the RAM and probably the harddrive goes bad you'll probably end up having to trash them once the warranty is over. Even the Mac Pro would be a bit iffy after a few years as the power supply/motherboard are non-standard parts and once Apple drops support for them the only place to get a replacement would be from a donor machine.
Your best bet would be to go with a low power, well cooled PC system with high quality, standard off-the-shelf parts. Use common parts, stay away from stuff that will be hard to come by in a few years like BTX formfactor stuff or a hardware raid controller. With a bit of luck, they'll easily last 3-5 years. In that time, when everyone else is upgrading to new machines, save some of the better machines like the ones you built from the scrap heap and throw them in a closet so you'll bave parts to keep the main machines going.
Or it's a laptop, as there was a mobile P3 at 400Mhz (kind of rare though).
Early 90's Honda owner?
Considering that this feature of PC floppy drives seemingly was never or almost never used (I didn't know about it until reading the article), it wouldn't surprise me at all if a bunch of hardware manufacturers had omitted support for it entirely, thus you would also have to deal with a third type of drive that would never change the value reported back, and even a possible fourth type where the value could change but would have nothing to do with a disk being inserted. That is another likely reason for not adding this feature to Windows.
Floppy drives didn't seem to care about that standard at all. Some were that way, and others were not. I'm sure the ones that were that way were purely by accident. On the other hand, I think almost every single harddrive and optical drive I ever had to connect up had pin 1 closest to the power.
I'm not sure if it was by design or not, but when the cable was on backwards, the access light would be on all the time so you at least knew immediately what was wrong.
It's also the thing that every Mac user had a paper clip next to their computer for, mostly because Apple has a thing about not putting buttons on things.
What are you talking about? A credit default swap is basically an insurance policy.
I believe with registered mail, the post office will stamp all seams on the envelope so that if it is opened and resealed it should be detectable. Obviously, the mail it to yourself method does have its flaws so it shouldn't be counted upon, but even the site you linked to suggests that it can't hurt.
Are you sure that NICE is not a backronym?
The problem is that I can't control what the dice will roll. So if I roll my dice and get a 7, then I know that your dice will also show a 7. But if I wanted your dice to show a 9 - which would be a form of communication - I would need to force my dice to roll a 9 somehow. However, there is no way to do this, hence no way to communicate. Keep in mind that with entanglement, you only get one dice roll then the number is set - so I can't just keep re-rolling until I get the desired number to show up like I can do with real dice.