Come on, who is the worst drive manufacturer, my money's on Maxtor - based on at least six drives dying within 6 months.
Could be, though I have had good luck with Maxtor. Could very well be Western Digital too.
Has IBM improved since merging with Hitachi, or have they just renamed the Deathstar?
The Hitachi drives seem to have average reliability. Really, there was just a couple of bad years there for IBM with the Deathstars. The ones before and after those drives don't seem any worse than average.
Does anyone even use Samsung drives? Whatever happened to Fujitsu and Conner - they really were bad, i.e. sometimes didn't even work when new!
My experience with Samsung drives is that they are quiet, low heat, and reliable. I recommend them. Conner got bought out by Quantum, which got bought by Seagate (IIRC). Fujitsu is still around, they make 2.5" drives mostly. Reliability seems average as 2.5" drives go.
Are Western Digital the best for SATA and Seagate the best for IDE, as is my opinion (got about a dozen of these and only one failure)
I have not had any SATA failures (yet). Seagate IDE drives do seem reliable, Western Digitals are terrible.
All Google told us is that temperature doesn't make a difference, and power-cycling may but they can't really tell as they don't do it often!
Actually, Google tells us that very low and very high temperatures are bad. The temperatures that most drives seem to operate at in most computers is the best, going outside of that is trouble.
I have a friend who has a theory that BitTorrent is really bad for drives, as its constant read/write of little bits.
I'm going to guess that a lot of Google's usage patterns are a lot like bittorrent (as in lots of small, random accesses and writes as opposed to large continous reads and writes). Google's data seems to show us that a lot usage like this is able to weed out the early failures quickly, but after that it doesn't matter until the drive gets old.
I would have to say that the temperature thing is interesting too. Conventional wisdom is to keep the drives as cool as possible. However, they seem to have found that overzealous cooling of the drives is almost as bad as letting them get excessively hot.
They could have still broke it down as "Brand A", "Brand B", "Brand C", etc. and that could have atleast told us whether the brand really matters (which is what I have seen from my admittedly small sample size), or if all the brands are pretty much the same.
Yes, you must have the feedback and flexibility of input of a GUI to do this. However, for those millions of tasks that you do every day that don't require this flexibility, a gui is the wrong tool for the job.
Which I read as, in the context of your posts, as "Except for a few things, the CLI is the only efficient way to use the computer." Backed up with a few contrived examples - how many people need to mess with 10,000 csv files on a regular basis anyway? A bit different than my conclusion, but whatever.
Finally, a proper editor isn't the CLI. Emacs and vim are proper editors. Notepad and Nano are for people who are too stupid to remember how to operate in Emacs or vim. (That is why nano puts the commands down in the bottom wasting space.)
Now who's being obnoxious for no reason whatsoever?
The thing about asteroids and comets is that they are out there in space for us to observe, and we can predict their movements pretty well. That means that unlike an earthquake or a volcano, we can know about an asteroid or comet strike years - even decades in advance. And that means we have time to do something about it. We could actually prevent these disasters. Given that a strike could wipe out the human race entirely, that justs makes it even more prudent to divert some resources to asteroids and comets.
Also, when studying history, don't forget the asteroid that came down over Siberia in 1908. Luckily few were hurt, but if that happened over a major city today, it could postentially kill millions.
*Also, you can throw one of them on a second computer by a KVM (or by using the multiple input capabilities of some monitors) and view the output of two computers at once. *You can have one be a CRT and other be an LCD and get the best of both worlds.
Programming a macro in Photoshop is pretty easy. In your example, I could open up the first image, hit the record button, do whatever to put the water mark on the image, then save the file. Then I point Photoshop to the files, tell it to run the macro, then go grab a sandwich 'cause it's going to be while. Mainly because putting a watermark on an image has to (at a minimum) load each image to ram, put the the watermark on, and then write it back to disk. Doing 50,000 images in a minute is pure BS.
By the way, the stuff I was doing was manipulating images captured from a CCD camera on a telescope. We had a program that could display them, but not really manipulate the images. So change the contrast? Execute a command line tool to do that, open the image, see the results, be not happy, close the image, execute another command to change it again, open it back up, be not happy etc. etc. Sure, once I had a setting I liked I could then apply it to 2000 images with relative ease, but not having a GUI to find the initial settings was a real thorn in the side, or to just play around by being able to rapidly change settings and instantly see the results would have saved tons of time of having to constantly type in commands that only would take a couple of clicks on a GUI. And don't even get me started on stacking all those images.
But what if we change the scenario to this: Add a watermark to every file uploaded to your ftp server before allowing it to be hosted on your web server? Good fucking luck with your macro language or finding freeware that does that.
Again, I can do this in less than a minute.
What in the hell does the CLI have to do with this? If you want your FTP/webserver server to watermark images for you, then you are going to want to put some script files on your server to run off of some event that gets triggered. Granted, if it was a Windows server it could be a bit tricky.
Complaining about having to learn a CLI is false economy, just the same as the idiots who refuse to learn a real editor and instead use notepad or nano (pico). They are too lazy or stupid to spend a week learning something that will speed up everything else they do, and let them do things in a second they wouldn't even have considered otherwise.
I suppose a "proper" editor is something along the lines of "edlin" and "copy con"? Being able to type one line at a time with no way to change an error after hitting Enter is about as close to the command line as your going to get. Oh, you want a UI with that?
Like I say, they are both seperate tools and have their uses. I don't suppose you are browsing slashdot right now from the comand line, are you?
Mostly because back then, Dos was a lightweight enough operating system to run on a typical home/business computer of the era. Sure, it wasn't as advanced as other platforms, but when you have 640k of ram and a 4.77Mhz processor it's not like you're going to be running a full Unix system with X11.
Well, they are really suited for different things. I wouldn't want to edit a an image from the command line (as a matter of fact, I've used image manipulation utilities that are purely command line based. Pain in the ass, give me a GUI any day). Same with movies, or even sound editing. I also wouldn't want to, say, sort a directory of MP3 files by genre into sub directories using the command line either. Ctrl+click and drag is far faster and easier than anything that can be cooked up from the command line. I also wouldn't want to browse the internet from the command line either.
I also don't know much about VBAScript, but I'm sure a whiz could come up with something in much less than an hour, which is only fair if you are going to put him up against a command line guru.
I never said analog was wonderful, I can easily tell the difference at 1600x1200, and usually at 1280x1024 unless the video card is of exceptional quality (like Matrox). It's just that analog doesn't have a hard high end limit like DVI does, due to the nature of the connection.
I've had this problem a few times. The problem is that there is a DVI-D port on either the computer (or the monitor). This port has no holes for the DVI-A pins. And I have a DVI-I cable with both the digital and the analog pins. So while it should work in theory, in practice you can't physically plug the damn thing in!
Though as other people have suggested, you can get a DVI-D cable. This should physically fit both ends, and the missing pins on the monitor side are not needed anyway. Other solution is to try to bust off the extra pins on one end of the DVI-I cable.
I really wish that everything was simply DVI-I when it came to the physical connectors.
You might want to check the dates on some of those reports. Like the yellow cake thing, by the time that Bush was touting that is his State of the Union address, it had aleady been discredited.
Besides, even if you go down that path, the best you can do is show how Bush administration is totally incompetent versus that they knowingly lied.
That's a nice piece of revisionist history. The whole reason we had to go in unilaterally is because the rest of the world didn't believe our intelligence, and I can't blame them - as it seemed to mostly consist of a bunch of satellite photos that we took with our own satellites that didn't show shit, a paper plagerizred from some grad student, and a bunch of documents like the yellow cake stuff that the rest of the world already knew was bogus. And don't forget the US spies that we planted in the UN weapon inspection teams (who incidently, also found no evidence of mass quantities of WMD). If the rest of the world actually believed us, they would have been a lot more willing to help out (see: Afganistan).
There is no way to make sure the rights are completely revoked.
There sure is. The song has DRM. Any computer that has the file and can play it has been authorized by Apple to play that song. Apple knows that your laptop has the song, because they authorized the laptop to play it - either directly, or through your desktop. So it's just a simple matter of Apple requiring that the laptop be de-authorized before you get your money back. Same thing with iPods - Apple would require you sync up the iPod to get your money back. They also know if you burned a CD with the song on it. Since they can't confirm that you actually destroyed the CD, I imagine that they will say any return prilivedge is void once you burn a disk.
Heavier vehicles in colder climates are generally bad. They have more momentum, they are harder to control, and they generally have a higher center of mass. All of those are bad in slippery situations, and that's why you see disproportionally more SUVs and trucks in the ditch whenever it snows. Of course, higher ground clearance and more mass can benefit in deep snow, but having to drive through deep snow is fairly rare, while slippery roads is a lot more common - even in Minnesota.
And some families are just too big. Overpopulation is another problem we face, there is no reason for more than 3 kids, and most families should have only 2.
Actually, the reason why the station wagon died out is that under the cafe regulations, they are cars. Cars are held to a more strict safety and environmental standard than light trucks (SUVs, etc.). Because of this, it meant that SUVs weren't competing on the same playing field with stations wagons, and station wagons simply couldn't compete (except where price wasn't such a big deal, such as Mercedes). This is also the reason why, a few years back, Subaru jacked up the frame and put bigger tires on some of their wagons to get it out of the car category and into the light truck category.
Part of the solution to the SUV problem is to make them meet the same CAFE standards as cars. This would jack the price of SUVs up to where they should be, and sales would naturally drop.
Secondly, the United States was loathed before 911. Back then, one of the major complaints was that we weren't involved in world affairs enough. I remember many a diatribe about how we let down the Kurds by not toppling Sadam after the first gulf war -- there was even a movie "The Siege" expressing the very idea that the world hated us precisely because we never followed through in world events.
Well, now we've followed through, and the world still hates us. Forgive me if I'm starting to lose patience and concern with the world's vacillating opinion. The only common thread seems to be a hatred of America.
Maybe the hatred isn't because the US finally did something about Saddam, maybe the reason is because the US did it on the pretense of a bunch of lies, and then managed to completely botch it anyway.
The Neo-con movement is much older than that, it dates back to the 1970's when many of the people running the government now were part of Nixen's administration, though a lot of the ideas date back to the McCarthy era. However, now it's basically used to describe anyone who claims to be conservative, but doesn't act it (for example, most Republicans).
On the other hand, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. While they can get away with shipping basic utilities like Paint and Notepad with their OS, if they tried to make them more powerful, they could find themselves in court against Adobe and Corel for illegal bundling again. For that reason, they probably aren't ever going to make any real changes significant changes to those programs so long as they hold a monopoly on the desktop.
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Come on, who is the worst drive manufacturer, my money's on Maxtor - based on at least six drives dying within 6 months.
Could be, though I have had good luck with Maxtor. Could very well be Western Digital too.
Has IBM improved since merging with Hitachi, or have they just renamed the Deathstar?
The Hitachi drives seem to have average reliability. Really, there was just a couple of bad years there for IBM with the Deathstars. The ones before and after those drives don't seem any worse than average.
Does anyone even use Samsung drives? Whatever happened to Fujitsu and Conner - they really were bad, i.e. sometimes didn't even work when new!
My experience with Samsung drives is that they are quiet, low heat, and reliable. I recommend them. Conner got bought out by Quantum, which got bought by Seagate (IIRC). Fujitsu is still around, they make 2.5" drives mostly. Reliability seems average as 2.5" drives go.
Are Western Digital the best for SATA and Seagate the best for IDE, as is my opinion (got about a dozen of these and only one failure)
I have not had any SATA failures (yet). Seagate IDE drives do seem reliable, Western Digitals are terrible.
All Google told us is that temperature doesn't make a difference, and power-cycling may but they can't really tell as they don't do it often!
Actually, Google tells us that very low and very high temperatures are bad. The temperatures that most drives seem to operate at in most computers is the best, going outside of that is trouble.
I have a friend who has a theory that BitTorrent is really bad for drives, as its constant read/write of little bits.
I'm going to guess that a lot of Google's usage patterns are a lot like bittorrent (as in lots of small, random accesses and writes as opposed to large continous reads and writes). Google's data seems to show us that a lot usage like this is able to weed out the early failures quickly, but after that it doesn't matter until the drive gets old.
I would have to say that the temperature thing is interesting too. Conventional wisdom is to keep the drives as cool as possible. However, they seem to have found that overzealous cooling of the drives is almost as bad as letting them get excessively hot.
They could have still broke it down as "Brand A", "Brand B", "Brand C", etc. and that could have atleast told us whether the brand really matters (which is what I have seen from my admittedly small sample size), or if all the brands are pretty much the same.
Yes, you must have the feedback and flexibility of input of a GUI to do this. However, for those millions of tasks that you do every day that don't require this flexibility, a gui is the wrong tool for the job.
Which I read as, in the context of your posts, as "Except for a few things, the CLI is the only efficient way to use the computer." Backed up with a few contrived examples - how many people need to mess with 10,000 csv files on a regular basis anyway? A bit different than my conclusion, but whatever.
Finally, a proper editor isn't the CLI. Emacs and vim are proper editors. Notepad and Nano are for people who are too stupid to remember how to operate in Emacs or vim. (That is why nano puts the commands down in the bottom wasting space.)
Now who's being obnoxious for no reason whatsoever?
The thing about asteroids and comets is that they are out there in space for us to observe, and we can predict their movements pretty well. That means that unlike an earthquake or a volcano, we can know about an asteroid or comet strike years - even decades in advance. And that means we have time to do something about it. We could actually prevent these disasters. Given that a strike could wipe out the human race entirely, that justs makes it even more prudent to divert some resources to asteroids and comets.
Also, when studying history, don't forget the asteroid that came down over Siberia in 1908. Luckily few were hurt, but if that happened over a major city today, it could postentially kill millions.
*Also, you can throw one of them on a second computer by a KVM (or by using the multiple input capabilities of some monitors) and view the output of two computers at once.
*You can have one be a CRT and other be an LCD and get the best of both worlds.
Programming a macro in Photoshop is pretty easy. In your example, I could open up the first image, hit the record button, do whatever to put the water mark on the image, then save the file. Then I point Photoshop to the files, tell it to run the macro, then go grab a sandwich 'cause it's going to be while. Mainly because putting a watermark on an image has to (at a minimum) load each image to ram, put the the watermark on, and then write it back to disk. Doing 50,000 images in a minute is pure BS.
By the way, the stuff I was doing was manipulating images captured from a CCD camera on a telescope. We had a program that could display them, but not really manipulate the images. So change the contrast? Execute a command line tool to do that, open the image, see the results, be not happy, close the image, execute another command to change it again, open it back up, be not happy etc. etc. Sure, once I had a setting I liked I could then apply it to 2000 images with relative ease, but not having a GUI to find the initial settings was a real thorn in the side, or to just play around by being able to rapidly change settings and instantly see the results would have saved tons of time of having to constantly type in commands that only would take a couple of clicks on a GUI. And don't even get me started on stacking all those images.
But what if we change the scenario to this: Add a watermark to every file uploaded to your ftp server before allowing it to be hosted on your web server? Good fucking luck with your macro language or finding freeware that does that.
Again, I can do this in less than a minute.
What in the hell does the CLI have to do with this? If you want your FTP/webserver server to watermark images for you, then you are going to want to put some script files on your server to run off of some event that gets triggered. Granted, if it was a Windows server it could be a bit tricky.
Complaining about having to learn a CLI is false economy, just the same as the idiots who refuse to learn a real editor and instead use notepad or nano (pico). They are too lazy or stupid to spend a week learning something that will speed up everything else they do, and let them do things in a second they wouldn't even have considered otherwise.
I suppose a "proper" editor is something along the lines of "edlin" and "copy con"? Being able to type one line at a time with no way to change an error after hitting Enter is about as close to the command line as your going to get. Oh, you want a UI with that?
Like I say, they are both seperate tools and have their uses. I don't suppose you are browsing slashdot right now from the comand line, are you?
Mostly because back then, Dos was a lightweight enough operating system to run on a typical home/business computer of the era. Sure, it wasn't as advanced as other platforms, but when you have 640k of ram and a 4.77Mhz processor it's not like you're going to be running a full Unix system with X11.
The problem is that Microsoft did it. If Apple did the exact same thing, the fanboys would be raving about how great ribbons are.
Most of that stuff came from old-school (closed source) Unix a long time ago.
Well, they are really suited for different things. I wouldn't want to edit a an image from the command line (as a matter of fact, I've used image manipulation utilities that are purely command line based. Pain in the ass, give me a GUI any day). Same with movies, or even sound editing. I also wouldn't want to, say, sort a directory of MP3 files by genre into sub directories using the command line either. Ctrl+click and drag is far faster and easier than anything that can be cooked up from the command line. I also wouldn't want to browse the internet from the command line either.
I also don't know much about VBAScript, but I'm sure a whiz could come up with something in much less than an hour, which is only fair if you are going to put him up against a command line guru.
I never said analog was wonderful, I can easily tell the difference at 1600x1200, and usually at 1280x1024 unless the video card is of exceptional quality (like Matrox). It's just that analog doesn't have a hard high end limit like DVI does, due to the nature of the connection.
I've had this problem a few times. The problem is that there is a DVI-D port on either the computer (or the monitor). This port has no holes for the DVI-A pins. And I have a DVI-I cable with both the digital and the analog pins. So while it should work in theory, in practice you can't physically plug the damn thing in!
Though as other people have suggested, you can get a DVI-D cable. This should physically fit both ends, and the missing pins on the monitor side are not needed anyway. Other solution is to try to bust off the extra pins on one end of the DVI-I cable.
I really wish that everything was simply DVI-I when it came to the physical connectors.
There's no reason analog RGB won't carry 2560 x 1600 resolution - it's just that Apple doesn't support it.
I think he means he's looking for a proxy server somewhere?
You might want to check the dates on some of those reports. Like the yellow cake thing, by the time that Bush was touting that is his State of the Union address, it had aleady been discredited.
Besides, even if you go down that path, the best you can do is show how Bush administration is totally incompetent versus that they knowingly lied.
That's a nice piece of revisionist history. The whole reason we had to go in unilaterally is because the rest of the world didn't believe our intelligence, and I can't blame them - as it seemed to mostly consist of a bunch of satellite photos that we took with our own satellites that didn't show shit, a paper plagerizred from some grad student, and a bunch of documents like the yellow cake stuff that the rest of the world already knew was bogus. And don't forget the US spies that we planted in the UN weapon inspection teams (who incidently, also found no evidence of mass quantities of WMD). If the rest of the world actually believed us, they would have been a lot more willing to help out (see: Afganistan).
There is no way to make sure the rights are completely revoked.
There sure is. The song has DRM. Any computer that has the file and can play it has been authorized by Apple to play that song. Apple knows that your laptop has the song, because they authorized the laptop to play it - either directly, or through your desktop. So it's just a simple matter of Apple requiring that the laptop be de-authorized before you get your money back. Same thing with iPods - Apple would require you sync up the iPod to get your money back. They also know if you burned a CD with the song on it. Since they can't confirm that you actually destroyed the CD, I imagine that they will say any return prilivedge is void once you burn a disk.
Heavier vehicles in colder climates are generally bad. They have more momentum, they are harder to control, and they generally have a higher center of mass. All of those are bad in slippery situations, and that's why you see disproportionally more SUVs and trucks in the ditch whenever it snows. Of course, higher ground clearance and more mass can benefit in deep snow, but having to drive through deep snow is fairly rare, while slippery roads is a lot more common - even in Minnesota.
And some families are just too big. Overpopulation is another problem we face, there is no reason for more than 3 kids, and most families should have only 2.
Actually, the reason why the station wagon died out is that under the cafe regulations, they are cars. Cars are held to a more strict safety and environmental standard than light trucks (SUVs, etc.). Because of this, it meant that SUVs weren't competing on the same playing field with stations wagons, and station wagons simply couldn't compete (except where price wasn't such a big deal, such as Mercedes). This is also the reason why, a few years back, Subaru jacked up the frame and put bigger tires on some of their wagons to get it out of the car category and into the light truck category.
Part of the solution to the SUV problem is to make them meet the same CAFE standards as cars. This would jack the price of SUVs up to where they should be, and sales would naturally drop.
Secondly, the United States was loathed before 911. Back then, one of the major complaints was that we weren't involved in world affairs enough. I remember many a diatribe about how we let down the Kurds by not toppling Sadam after the first gulf war -- there was even a movie "The Siege" expressing the very idea that the world hated us precisely because we never followed through in world events.
Well, now we've followed through, and the world still hates us. Forgive me if I'm starting to lose patience and concern with the world's vacillating opinion. The only common thread seems to be a hatred of America.
Maybe the hatred isn't because the US finally did something about Saddam, maybe the reason is because the US did it on the pretense of a bunch of lies, and then managed to completely botch it anyway.
The Neo-con movement is much older than that, it dates back to the 1970's when many of the people running the government now were part of Nixen's administration, though a lot of the ideas date back to the McCarthy era. However, now it's basically used to describe anyone who claims to be conservative, but doesn't act it (for example, most Republicans).
Apple has had its fair share of bulging batteries, and laptops catching on fire. It's not like they are magically immune or something.
On the other hand, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. While they can get away with shipping basic utilities like Paint and Notepad with their OS, if they tried to make them more powerful, they could find themselves in court against Adobe and Corel for illegal bundling again. For that reason, they probably aren't ever going to make any real changes significant changes to those programs so long as they hold a monopoly on the desktop.