The only thing that may be prudent would be to go to Abit's site and grab all the latest drivers and burn them to a CD. I have a Soltek board in my main computer, they seem to no longer be in business. I'll keep using it so long as it works, but if I ever have to reinstall Windows I may have to tear this place apart in hope that I didn't toss the original driver CD.
I think the point he's trying to make is that "piracy" has meant unauthorized copying of copyrighted works long before MP3's, computers, radio, record players, and even the **AA's. Even if you don't consider 130 years a long time, you can hardly say the use of the word is anything new.
The Lenovo W700ds has got to be the stupidest concept ever. Who would buy a lumbering beast like that, with a styling that might have been moderately cool back in 1993? I don't get it. This is proof the PC industry is dying. *Even uglier* than the 17" HP Pavilions.
No, this is why the PC industry will continue to thrive. You can buy giant, lumbering beasts like this. You can buy small, inexpensive netbooks. You can buy cheap desktop replacements. You can buy a laptop with a 20" screen, or even built in RAID. You can buy high end ultra-portables. You can buy high powered gaming laptops with quad core processors and the latest GPUs. You can buy a water proof, hardened laptop that is designed to take tons of abuse and keep working. You're not limited to a handful models with certain feature sets at carefully picked price points like with Apple. You have a choice, and you can buy the laptop that best suites your needs and price range with the features you want. It's obvious that this Thinkpad is positioned to be a low volume niche product, so just because you don't want one doesn't mean someone else doesn't.
Also, I do realize that styling is subjective, but I consider the Thinkpads with their no nonsense, utilitarian styling to be some of the best looking laptops out there.
The power savings are probably eaten up by the higher initial cost of the hardware and the increased repair costs (though granted, a laptop that never moves may be no less reliable than a desktop). Ditto the added costs when the users start demanding external monitors/keyboards/mice when they get tired of being hunched over the laptop for hours a day.
I have an R60 for about 2 years now. When I first got it, it had problems coming out of sleep, but after downloading some updated drivers they went away. The only other complaint I have is that apparently it's limited to 2GB of memory, so no upgrades for me (I bought it with 2GB). But I guess that's what you get when you buy the low-end of the Thinkpads.
I've always wondered why someone hasn't built a portable LCD screen yet. The way I figure it, take a laptop screen, and have a protective cover that unfolds into a stand. Even better would be to figure out some clever way to manage the cables (retractable?) so you can pretty much grab it and go. Maybe put a battery in it. If done right, you'd have something smaller than the MacBook Air that you could fold up and throw in your laptop bag, then you could have dual screens while on the road. I'd buy one.
I'll second this. A lot of cars with LED taillights, to my eyes, are just fine. But the Cadillacs really stand out with the way their lights flicker at around 60Hz.
If I had to guess, if it isn't because they are just being cheap, it's because they want to attract attention to the car. A lot of people seem to have noticed that the LED Christmas lights "twinkle" (even if don't know why) and it grabs their attention. Perhaps Cadillac is trying to capitalize on this.
Sawing through CAT5 with a butter knife doesn't sound all that easy. Most butter knifes are pretty dull. It would be more effective to jam it into an electrical socket on the same power strip the computer is plugged into.
I have no idea if it would help, but there are computers out there with external power supplies such as the Mac Mini and some of the Shuttles. It would seem obvious to me that getting the power supply out of the case would help, but I could be wrong.
It's probably a standard 80mm fan in the power supply. So you can pull the power supply out of the computer, open it up, and put a standard 80mm case fan in there. You may have to make some minor wiring modifications as fan in the power supply probably uses a non standard plug or is soldered to the board directly. Alternatively, you could pull the fan out, peel back the sticker, and put a few drops of a light machining oil or general lubricant (not WD40) on the brushing/bearings, then put the sticker back on and tape it in place. This is typically good for a few months or a year or so before it starts getting noisy again.
One thing about older hardware, is that there is so much of it available that you can pretty much pick from the cream of the crop. All my older hardware I have running are either Dell Optiplexes or HP Vectras. Other than possibly IBM stuff, I wouldn't use anything else other than for spare parts. Considering that these were enterprise-class machines back in the day, I find they are well supported by both Linux and Microsoft, generally have easy to work with cases, are well built, quiet, and still very reliable. And sadly, as much as I liked the K6's and early Athlons back in the day, dealing with the driver headaches and general flakiness of the AMD-based motherboards means I won't touch them now.
This won't work if OS is installed on a drive that connects to a drive controller on the new motherboard that XP doesn't recognize. In which case, you'll get the dreaded BSOD right when you start up that you can't get around. The solution is to run the motherboard's install disk first (at least the chipset/drive controller part) so XP will recognize the drive controller and be able to talk to the drive. Alternatively, use a PCI drive controller card (that XP knows about) to boot up the new motherboard, install the drivers, then swap to the motherboard.
I never understand why 2000/XP dropped support for reading/writing to the HDD through the BIOS like Windows 95/98 could. True, the performance is dreadful, but at least you can get the system up and running and have a chance to fix the problem.
He's right. Think about it, in 1996 very little of the time I spent at the computer I was doing things on the internet. In 2008, almost all of the time (at home) I'm doing things on the internet. Part of this is because many of the interesting things to do is on the internet - including a lot of things that weren't available in 1996, and another part is because a lot of "offline" applications in 1996 are now online, like games and encyclopedias. Work is a different story, but then again the iMac isn't really targetted towards businesses and the design reflects that.
I would say that when it was releaseed, the iMac was a bit ahead of it's time, and was a pretty radical move by 1998 standards. But it fits in a lot better today.
Depends on whether or not you want to count the suicides where the person killed themselves by shooting themselves in the back of the head three times.
Inches/feet to centimeters is an easy one. There is about 2.5[*] centimeters to every inch, so your Blackberry is 7.5cm wide. This means that there is about 30cm to every foot.
[*] Exact conversion is 2.54cm to every inch, but for most everyday things like estimating the width of your Blackberry, you can ignore the 0.04.
The thing that bothers me is when colleges require the students to print out worksheets and handouts on their own dime. An industrial photocopier is going to be cheaper and more efficient than having all the students print the stuff out on their own inkjets or even on the lab laser printers. It's more of a way to shift costs to the students (with a significant hike in costs to the student) than anything else.
I have no clue what information I have on these drives, but don't worry, it's not kiddie porn. However, I do know the fallacy of assuming that data on my drives are not recoverable, even if I do take the proper measures using current technologies. What I don't like is the fact that I have my entire life exposed in some garbage dump, that maybe 10 years in the future some garbage dump scavenger happens to come across my drive, and the technology has advanced to the point that the information is completely recoverable.
If you're really that paranoid, why don't you just keep the drives around after you SDelete them? 15 drives really don't take up much space, even less so if you reduce it to just a stack of platters and get rid of the other bits. That way, you don't have to worry about anyone scavenging the drives from a garbage dump somewhere. And besides, keeping them around could mean burying them in your yard and pouring a concrete porch over them. I would say that's pretty secure.
If you say macbook is just like any other laptop then you don't get it. Look at any other laptop and just look at the level of "noise" on the keyboard designs these days. Find me one keyboard that doesn't scream at you with 5 things written on each keyboard with different colored letters, keys non-standard width or position etc.
That's just one detail, and then look at the beauty of simplicity of classical Macbook keyboard. It just disappears, and doesn't scream at you.
What are you talking about? The MacBook keyboard is terrible. First of all, you have those chiclet style keys, which make typing anything of significant length a chore. Secondly, they have been screwing with the sizes and layout, for example, you have that really weird looking Enter/Return key, and the arrow keys are really small for some reason, and they removed the right hand Control key. They also make the function keys do other things, and you have to press the Fn key to get regular F1-F12 back. They also decided not to group the function keys which makes it hard to press the right one without looking (granted, most over laptops are the same way, and Apple's desktop keyboards don't do this either). They also made the keyboard white for some reason, which also means it's going to show dirt and stain easily. Also, while not an issue with the Macbook, they could include a numeric keypad on their larger Macbook Pros instead of all that wasted space on both sides of the keyboard.
If you want a good keyboard on a laptop, you really don't have any choice other than a Thinkpad, where the layout is as close as possible to a standard keyboard, the feel is great, and the keyboard is actually engineered to last a while. I'll admit most other PC laptop keyboards are pretty crappy and crowded with a lot of useless keys and other bling, so in comparison to those the Macbook's keyboard maybe isn't so bad.
Well, the difference is, as the owner of his company he's probably interested in its long-term success. So he's not going to run it like these corporate types who shit all over everything in the name of short term profits, then bail with their golden parachutes before the long term effects can kick in. If we only threw these people under a bus instead of paying their bonuses with taxpayer dollars, the world would be a much better place.
Do you really think that Apple got almost done designing the MacBook, then went "Huh, I guess there's no room left for the FireWire port, bummer."? I suspect that the Apple never intended for the MacBook to have FireWire from the start, and the design reflects this.
Why would we? The issue here is that Microsoft's "progression" of operating systems is sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Apple seems to be consistently moving forward.
I remember a few cycles of Apple trying to kill Classic, only to have to bring it back by popular demand, before The Steve finally declared it dead several years later.
Yes. The license becomes tied to the computer it's installed to. I believe that in terms of the license, the "computer" is defined as the motherboard so you can swap out memory, processors, harddrives, video cards, etc. There are provisions for replacing the motherboard if it was to fail, but you can't simply transfer the license to a whole new machine.
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The only thing that may be prudent would be to go to Abit's site and grab all the latest drivers and burn them to a CD. I have a Soltek board in my main computer, they seem to no longer be in business. I'll keep using it so long as it works, but if I ever have to reinstall Windows I may have to tear this place apart in hope that I didn't toss the original driver CD.
I think the point he's trying to make is that "piracy" has meant unauthorized copying of copyrighted works long before MP3's, computers, radio, record players, and even the **AA's. Even if you don't consider 130 years a long time, you can hardly say the use of the word is anything new.
The Lenovo W700ds has got to be the stupidest concept ever. Who would buy a lumbering beast like that, with a styling that might have been moderately cool back in 1993? I don't get it. This is proof the PC industry is dying. *Even uglier* than the 17" HP Pavilions.
No, this is why the PC industry will continue to thrive. You can buy giant, lumbering beasts like this. You can buy small, inexpensive netbooks. You can buy cheap desktop replacements. You can buy a laptop with a 20" screen, or even built in RAID. You can buy high end ultra-portables. You can buy high powered gaming laptops with quad core processors and the latest GPUs. You can buy a water proof, hardened laptop that is designed to take tons of abuse and keep working. You're not limited to a handful models with certain feature sets at carefully picked price points like with Apple. You have a choice, and you can buy the laptop that best suites your needs and price range with the features you want. It's obvious that this Thinkpad is positioned to be a low volume niche product, so just because you don't want one doesn't mean someone else doesn't.
Also, I do realize that styling is subjective, but I consider the Thinkpads with their no nonsense, utilitarian styling to be some of the best looking laptops out there.
Why not? Apple doesn't make a Netbook, so if you want an ultraportable that runs OSX the Air is your only choice (other than a Hackintosh I suppose).
The power savings are probably eaten up by the higher initial cost of the hardware and the increased repair costs (though granted, a laptop that never moves may be no less reliable than a desktop). Ditto the added costs when the users start demanding external monitors/keyboards/mice when they get tired of being hunched over the laptop for hours a day.
I have an R60 for about 2 years now. When I first got it, it had problems coming out of sleep, but after downloading some updated drivers they went away. The only other complaint I have is that apparently it's limited to 2GB of memory, so no upgrades for me (I bought it with 2GB). But I guess that's what you get when you buy the low-end of the Thinkpads.
I've always wondered why someone hasn't built a portable LCD screen yet. The way I figure it, take a laptop screen, and have a protective cover that unfolds into a stand. Even better would be to figure out some clever way to manage the cables (retractable?) so you can pretty much grab it and go. Maybe put a battery in it. If done right, you'd have something smaller than the MacBook Air that you could fold up and throw in your laptop bag, then you could have dual screens while on the road. I'd buy one.
I'll second this. A lot of cars with LED taillights, to my eyes, are just fine. But the Cadillacs really stand out with the way their lights flicker at around 60Hz.
If I had to guess, if it isn't because they are just being cheap, it's because they want to attract attention to the car. A lot of people seem to have noticed that the LED Christmas lights "twinkle" (even if don't know why) and it grabs their attention. Perhaps Cadillac is trying to capitalize on this.
Sawing through CAT5 with a butter knife doesn't sound all that easy. Most butter knifes are pretty dull. It would be more effective to jam it into an electrical socket on the same power strip the computer is plugged into.
I have no idea if it would help, but there are computers out there with external power supplies such as the Mac Mini and some of the Shuttles. It would seem obvious to me that getting the power supply out of the case would help, but I could be wrong.
It's probably a standard 80mm fan in the power supply. So you can pull the power supply out of the computer, open it up, and put a standard 80mm case fan in there. You may have to make some minor wiring modifications as fan in the power supply probably uses a non standard plug or is soldered to the board directly. Alternatively, you could pull the fan out, peel back the sticker, and put a few drops of a light machining oil or general lubricant (not WD40) on the brushing/bearings, then put the sticker back on and tape it in place. This is typically good for a few months or a year or so before it starts getting noisy again.
One thing about older hardware, is that there is so much of it available that you can pretty much pick from the cream of the crop. All my older hardware I have running are either Dell Optiplexes or HP Vectras. Other than possibly IBM stuff, I wouldn't use anything else other than for spare parts. Considering that these were enterprise-class machines back in the day, I find they are well supported by both Linux and Microsoft, generally have easy to work with cases, are well built, quiet, and still very reliable. And sadly, as much as I liked the K6's and early Athlons back in the day, dealing with the driver headaches and general flakiness of the AMD-based motherboards means I won't touch them now.
This won't work if OS is installed on a drive that connects to a drive controller on the new motherboard that XP doesn't recognize. In which case, you'll get the dreaded BSOD right when you start up that you can't get around. The solution is to run the motherboard's install disk first (at least the chipset/drive controller part) so XP will recognize the drive controller and be able to talk to the drive. Alternatively, use a PCI drive controller card (that XP knows about) to boot up the new motherboard, install the drivers, then swap to the motherboard.
I never understand why 2000/XP dropped support for reading/writing to the HDD through the BIOS like Windows 95/98 could. True, the performance is dreadful, but at least you can get the system up and running and have a chance to fix the problem.
He's right. Think about it, in 1996 very little of the time I spent at the computer I was doing things on the internet. In 2008, almost all of the time (at home) I'm doing things on the internet. Part of this is because many of the interesting things to do is on the internet - including a lot of things that weren't available in 1996, and another part is because a lot of "offline" applications in 1996 are now online, like games and encyclopedias. Work is a different story, but then again the iMac isn't really targetted towards businesses and the design reflects that.
I would say that when it was releaseed, the iMac was a bit ahead of it's time, and was a pretty radical move by 1998 standards. But it fits in a lot better today.
Depends on whether or not you want to count the suicides where the person killed themselves by shooting themselves in the back of the head three times.
Inches/feet to centimeters is an easy one. There is about 2.5[*] centimeters to every inch, so your Blackberry is 7.5cm wide. This means that there is about 30cm to every foot.
[*] Exact conversion is 2.54cm to every inch, but for most everyday things like estimating the width of your Blackberry, you can ignore the 0.04.
The thing that bothers me is when colleges require the students to print out worksheets and handouts on their own dime. An industrial photocopier is going to be cheaper and more efficient than having all the students print the stuff out on their own inkjets or even on the lab laser printers. It's more of a way to shift costs to the students (with a significant hike in costs to the student) than anything else.
I have no clue what information I have on these drives, but don't worry, it's not kiddie porn. However, I do know the fallacy of assuming that data on my drives are not recoverable, even if I do take the proper measures using current technologies. What I don't like is the fact that I have my entire life exposed in some garbage dump, that maybe 10 years in the future some garbage dump scavenger happens to come across my drive, and the technology has advanced to the point that the information is completely recoverable.
If you're really that paranoid, why don't you just keep the drives around after you SDelete them? 15 drives really don't take up much space, even less so if you reduce it to just a stack of platters and get rid of the other bits. That way, you don't have to worry about anyone scavenging the drives from a garbage dump somewhere. And besides, keeping them around could mean burying them in your yard and pouring a concrete porch over them. I would say that's pretty secure.
If you say macbook is just like any other laptop then you don't get it. Look at any other laptop and just look at the level of "noise" on the keyboard designs these days. Find me one keyboard that doesn't scream at you with 5 things written on each keyboard with different colored letters, keys non-standard width or position etc.
That's just one detail, and then look at the beauty of simplicity of classical Macbook keyboard. It just disappears, and doesn't scream at you.
What are you talking about? The MacBook keyboard is terrible. First of all, you have those chiclet style keys, which make typing anything of significant length a chore. Secondly, they have been screwing with the sizes and layout, for example, you have that really weird looking Enter/Return key, and the arrow keys are really small for some reason, and they removed the right hand Control key. They also make the function keys do other things, and you have to press the Fn key to get regular F1-F12 back. They also decided not to group the function keys which makes it hard to press the right one without looking (granted, most over laptops are the same way, and Apple's desktop keyboards don't do this either). They also made the keyboard white for some reason, which also means it's going to show dirt and stain easily. Also, while not an issue with the Macbook, they could include a numeric keypad on their larger Macbook Pros instead of all that wasted space on both sides of the keyboard.
If you want a good keyboard on a laptop, you really don't have any choice other than a Thinkpad, where the layout is as close as possible to a standard keyboard, the feel is great, and the keyboard is actually engineered to last a while. I'll admit most other PC laptop keyboards are pretty crappy and crowded with a lot of useless keys and other bling, so in comparison to those the Macbook's keyboard maybe isn't so bad.
Well, the difference is, as the owner of his company he's probably interested in its long-term success. So he's not going to run it like these corporate types who shit all over everything in the name of short term profits, then bail with their golden parachutes before the long term effects can kick in. If we only threw these people under a bus instead of paying their bonuses with taxpayer dollars, the world would be a much better place.
A true software geek would first try to reset the light and see if it turns on again.
Do you really think that Apple got almost done designing the MacBook, then went "Huh, I guess there's no room left for the FireWire port, bummer."? I suspect that the Apple never intended for the MacBook to have FireWire from the start, and the design reflects this.
Why would we? The issue here is that Microsoft's "progression" of operating systems is sometimes forward, sometimes backward. Apple seems to be consistently moving forward.
I remember a few cycles of Apple trying to kill Classic, only to have to bring it back by popular demand, before The Steve finally declared it dead several years later.
Incidentally, low-end Macs come with 1GB of RAM too at $600, so I would place that pretty much where you'd expect consumers to come in nowadays.
On the other hand, the $2800 Mac Pro comes with 2GB which is a total joke at that price, so I wouldn't take Apple too seriously here.
Yes. The license becomes tied to the computer it's installed to. I believe that in terms of the license, the "computer" is defined as the motherboard so you can swap out memory, processors, harddrives, video cards, etc. There are provisions for replacing the motherboard if it was to fail, but you can't simply transfer the license to a whole new machine.