That won't work as well as you think. All a worm would have to do is sniff the packets on a network (even easier if it is a wireless network). From there, they'll know your IP and be able to infect you as before.
Firefox does have its downfalls (coming from a long time Opera user), and yeah, a careful person could probably run IE okay, but why put up with a browser that has hardly changed since the P5-233MMX came out?
If I unlock my own music to facilitate my own use and don't share any of it, have I committed a wrong?
If you reside in the USA, by breaking the encryption on the file, you have violated the DMCA. Whether or not anyone actually thinks this is a wrong thing to do is another thing entirely.
Google doesn't do half the things that Yahoo does, and as far as I know, Yahoo's equilivent of the things Google does work fine outside of IE. It's things like games.yahoo.com and Yahoo Messenger that that is causing the all the problems.
And atleast Yahoo mail works with Opera, unlike Gmail.
So first, you aren't going to give them free tech support, expecting them to pay up. Now you are going to give them $500 Mac Minis? Okay... this makes no sense.
For the cheap: Set them up with a patched Windows (autoupdates on), alternative browser, and a hardware firewall. Spybot and antivirus ace a good idea too. A software firewall also doesn't hurt. My Mom does just fine with Windows 2000, Opera, Eudora, and a Linksys box - zero viruses, spyware, trojans in several years.
Even better: An easy to use Linux distro. For the truly hopeless give them a bootable CD. Then, no matter how bad they mess it up, a fresh install is a reset away.
If possible, just bring their box back over to your place. I can set up a computer with ease and very little time using a KVM while I do work on one of my machines.
Though do I agree, the Mac Mini is not a bad idea. But I don't have piles of money laying around to give all my relatives a Mac.
Once a computer becomes a zombie, just disable all traffic to that computer except port 80. 99% of the clueless types who let their computers become zombies would never notice, and then they can continue to live in their ignorant bliss. Problem solved.
The few who would notice are more likely be the more savvy ones who might be able to keep their computer clean next time - so once they disinfect their machine you could let them back on. Problem solved.
Now imagine you're talking about fruit. An orange gets pretty banged up and the grocer sells it for a little less. Ok. But then the grocer decides to start smashing oranges on the ground to sell. Doesn't that seem a little odd? Maybe a little wrong?
It is a little strange. The free market solution would be to let supply and demand take over - and if the demand is that high for the budget version, then let people bid those up. But if the supply is tight, you might end up with vanilla 6800 = $190, 6800 Ultra = $200 [I made those numbers up]. Then nVidia no longer has a budget card, and everyone buys the budget ATI card.
However, what really should happen is the price should come down on the 6800 Ultra (since if nVidia gets good at making the GPU's, and thus there are few failed chips to turn into 6800 vanilla's, then supply of Ultra's should be high). This should drive down the price of the Ultra's - say $90 for a vanilla 6800, and $120 for a 6800 Ultra [I made those numbers up too]. But it seems that the hardware maker would rather keep the margins high on the Ultra and sell it for $200 instead. I suppose this makes them the most money.
Now that I think about it, this does seem a bit wrong (if you want a 6800 Ultra, that is). But for the hardware manufacturer, I suppose this makes them the most money.
In the case of Microsoft, they have pretty much complete control over the supply and demand. And like the hardware manufacturers, they want the margins to be high on XP Pro - that's why they won't sell it for, say, $35. Instead, for that they want to sell you Starter Edition for cheap.
Oftentimes with hardware, the crippled version is a way for the hardware manufacturers to sell off chips that did not fully pass all the tests. My guess is that many GeForce 6800 Ultra chips fail because they have a bad pipeline or two. So nVidia disables those bad pipelines and viola - you get a perfectly good vanilla 6800. This lowers the cost of the Ultra (since Nvidia doesn't have to absorb the costs of trashing all the failed chips into the price of the non-failed chips), plus it brings a lower cost budget option into the market. Another example is Intel selling Pentium 4's with a bad bank of L2 cache disabled as Celeron D's.
Of course, many times the demand for the budget version is so high that the hardware manufacturer ends up disabling otherwise perfectly good chips to satisfy the demand.
Of course, this simply does not translate well to the software world, where it costs exactly as much for Microsoft to stamp out a "starter edition" CD as it does to stamp out an "XP Pro" cd. Even if Microsoft tried to make it as cheap as possible (Windows XP download edition?), they are still going to end up competing with the $5/CD street vendor.
Oh by the way, naming it Shorthorn is just as bad as XP Starter, MS should have the standard Longhorn with fewer features, and come out market Longerhorn as the premium.
Longhorn is just the codename for the next version of Windows, not the final name (atleast I hope not). Just like "Chicago" was the codename for the original Windows 95. We have yet to see what naming scheme Microsoft is actually going to market.
WindowsXP CDs however, will stop working if their authorisation server stops responding.
Not my burned copy of Windows XP Pro Corp, along with XPkeySP2.exe. I pity the fools who actually paid for a retail version.
Re:Just dont show this guy an Apple computer!!
on
Pentium M Goes SFF
·
· Score: 1
I don't know - a smallish PC based upon the Pentium M, as opposed to the outdated G4, where I can use a fast 3.5" desktop drive, the AGP video card of my choice, optical audio in/out, and an extra PCI slot is kind of exciting. The Mac Mini is a great machine, but some people care about other things as well.
You could always get an aftermarket kit like this to passively cool a higher end video card. However, I'm somewhat doubtful that it would work well in such a small case.
Re:Except only one company has done that
on
Pentium M Goes SFF
·
· Score: 1
Look around, and only one company has truly done that... Apple with the Mac mini.
These guys have been at it bit longer. Even have the option of a PCMIA slot so you upgrade it with laptop expansion cards.
Yeah, the speeding up/slowing down is far more annoying than just having the fans run at full speed (Seti is good for making the fans ramp up and stay there).
Noisy harddrives are really annoying though. Nothing like the wweeeeeooooeeewwwoooowooeeeeee to keep me awake. It seems that just about every HDD manufacturer has made major progress in the noise department in the last couple of years though. It's mostly the older 10-80GB drives that I have that are the most annoying.
But usually, I turn the computer off unless it needs to be on for a reason (long download, encoding, generally).
The thing to do with complete computer newbies is to have them use the menus, instead of right click. For example, don't say "right click and select create new folder", say "now go to the file menu and select create new folder". Just about all basic tasks on the PC can be accomplished using just the left mouse button. Doesn't solve the single click vs. double click problem, but the Mac hasn't solved that either.
After a while, either these users will steer clear of the right mouse button (because they are scared of the computer, these users are mostly hopeless anyway), or likely they will get curious, start pressing it, and they'll figure it out on their own.
Better than the ones with the power switch on the back. Got to be really annoying having to find the switch on a daily basis due the computer locking hard all the time.
I remember back in the school days when people were always needing paper clips to retrieve their floppies from the Apple labs. The funniest thing was when a disk the Mac didn't recognize was inserted (such as a FAT12 MSDOS disk), it would not eject it, and you needed the paper clip. Another favorite was when the computer crashed (extremely common), when it rebooted it wouldn't realize it still had a floppy in it, and thus wouldn't eject it, so you needed the paper clip. A simple solution would be to have the computer go through the eject motions whenever you told it to eject, even if the computer thought it did not have a disk in it - but something so simple was never implemented. This even continued on with some Mac CD drives (like the early iMac) - put in the wrong CD and you were stuck taking the computer apart. Stupid stupid stupid.
On the other hand, I don't remember anyone having problems ejecting disks at the wrong time on the PCs. People seemed smart enough to realize whirring sound + LED light = do not eject.
Slashdot Mirror
That won't work as well as you think. All a worm would have to do is sniff the packets on a network (even easier if it is a wireless network). From there, they'll know your IP and be able to infect you as before.
Firefox does have its downfalls (coming from a long time Opera user), and yeah, a careful person could probably run IE okay, but why put up with a browser that has hardly changed since the P5-233MMX came out?
It initially rejected Opera 7.54, but I switched my user agent (using F12) to MSIE 6 and it worked fine. Overall: Crappy website.
Netscape 3.0
Now that's old school!
Their interviews are famous for questions like "How would you move mount fuji?"
/mnt/fuji
That's easy.
$ mv
If I unlock my own music to facilitate my own use and don't share any of it, have I committed a wrong?
If you reside in the USA, by breaking the encryption on the file, you have violated the DMCA. Whether or not anyone actually thinks this is a wrong thing to do is another thing entirely.
there are more important things to work on
I agree. Stop trolling slashdot.
Take the number of hits Yahoo gets daily, and multiply by .01. I bet you'll still be over 1 million. There are a lot of Opera users out there.
Google doesn't do half the things that Yahoo does, and as far as I know, Yahoo's equilivent of the things Google does work fine outside of IE. It's things like games.yahoo.com and Yahoo Messenger that that is causing the all the problems.
And atleast Yahoo mail works with Opera, unlike Gmail.
So first, you aren't going to give them free tech support, expecting them to pay up. Now you are going to give them $500 Mac Minis? Okay... this makes no sense.
For the cheap: Set them up with a patched Windows (autoupdates on), alternative browser, and a hardware firewall. Spybot and antivirus ace a good idea too. A software firewall also doesn't hurt. My Mom does just fine with Windows 2000, Opera, Eudora, and a Linksys box - zero viruses, spyware, trojans in several years.
Even better: An easy to use Linux distro. For the truly hopeless give them a bootable CD. Then, no matter how bad they mess it up, a fresh install is a reset away.
If possible, just bring their box back over to your place. I can set up a computer with ease and very little time using a KVM while I do work on one of my machines.
Though do I agree, the Mac Mini is not a bad idea. But I don't have piles of money laying around to give all my relatives a Mac.
Once a computer becomes a zombie, just disable all traffic to that computer except port 80. 99% of the clueless types who let their computers become zombies would never notice, and then they can continue to live in their ignorant bliss. Problem solved.
The few who would notice are more likely be the more savvy ones who might be able to keep their computer clean next time - so once they disinfect their machine you could let them back on. Problem solved.
Now imagine you're talking about fruit. An orange gets pretty banged up and the grocer sells it for a little less. Ok. But then the grocer decides to start smashing oranges on the ground to sell. Doesn't that seem a little odd? Maybe a little wrong?
It is a little strange. The free market solution would be to let supply and demand take over - and if the demand is that high for the budget version, then let people bid those up. But if the supply is tight, you might end up with vanilla 6800 = $190, 6800 Ultra = $200 [I made those numbers up]. Then nVidia no longer has a budget card, and everyone buys the budget ATI card.
However, what really should happen is the price should come down on the 6800 Ultra (since if nVidia gets good at making the GPU's, and thus there are few failed chips to turn into 6800 vanilla's, then supply of Ultra's should be high). This should drive down the price of the Ultra's - say $90 for a vanilla 6800, and $120 for a 6800 Ultra [I made those numbers up too]. But it seems that the hardware maker would rather keep the margins high on the Ultra and sell it for $200 instead. I suppose this makes them the most money.
Now that I think about it, this does seem a bit wrong (if you want a 6800 Ultra, that is). But for the hardware manufacturer, I suppose this makes them the most money.
In the case of Microsoft, they have pretty much complete control over the supply and demand. And like the hardware manufacturers, they want the margins to be high on XP Pro - that's why they won't sell it for, say, $35. Instead, for that they want to sell you Starter Edition for cheap.
Oftentimes with hardware, the crippled version is a way for the hardware manufacturers to sell off chips that did not fully pass all the tests. My guess is that many GeForce 6800 Ultra chips fail because they have a bad pipeline or two. So nVidia disables those bad pipelines and viola - you get a perfectly good vanilla 6800. This lowers the cost of the Ultra (since Nvidia doesn't have to absorb the costs of trashing all the failed chips into the price of the non-failed chips), plus it brings a lower cost budget option into the market. Another example is Intel selling Pentium 4's with a bad bank of L2 cache disabled as Celeron D's.
Of course, many times the demand for the budget version is so high that the hardware manufacturer ends up disabling otherwise perfectly good chips to satisfy the demand.
Of course, this simply does not translate well to the software world, where it costs exactly as much for Microsoft to stamp out a "starter edition" CD as it does to stamp out an "XP Pro" cd. Even if Microsoft tried to make it as cheap as possible (Windows XP download edition?), they are still going to end up competing with the $5/CD street vendor.
Oh by the way, naming it Shorthorn is just as bad as XP Starter, MS should have the standard Longhorn with fewer features, and come out market Longerhorn as the premium.
Longhorn is just the codename for the next version of Windows, not the final name (atleast I hope not). Just like "Chicago" was the codename for the original Windows 95. We have yet to see what naming scheme Microsoft is actually going to market.
WindowsXP CDs however, will stop working if their authorisation server stops responding.
Not my burned copy of Windows XP Pro Corp, along with XPkeySP2.exe. I pity the fools who actually paid for a retail version.
I don't know - a smallish PC based upon the Pentium M, as opposed to the outdated G4, where I can use a fast 3.5" desktop drive, the AGP video card of my choice, optical audio in/out, and an extra PCI slot is kind of exciting. The Mac Mini is a great machine, but some people care about other things as well.
You could always get an aftermarket kit like this to passively cool a higher end video card. However, I'm somewhat doubtful that it would work well in such a small case.
Look around, and only one company has truly done that... Apple with the Mac mini.
These guys have been at it bit longer. Even have the option of a PCMIA slot so you upgrade it with laptop expansion cards.
Yeah, the speeding up/slowing down is far more annoying than just having the fans run at full speed (Seti is good for making the fans ramp up and stay there).
Noisy harddrives are really annoying though. Nothing like the wweeeeeooooeeewwwoooowooeeeeee to keep me awake. It seems that just about every HDD manufacturer has made major progress in the noise department in the last couple of years though. It's mostly the older 10-80GB drives that I have that are the most annoying.
But usually, I turn the computer off unless it needs to be on for a reason (long download, encoding, generally).
But does that include "wear and tear" (better known as normal use)?
Unless it's the CD drive on an iMac. Then you are just plain screwed.
Should we judge it by the amount of included Ram instead?
The thing to do with complete computer newbies is to have them use the menus, instead of right click. For example, don't say "right click and select create new folder", say "now go to the file menu and select create new folder". Just about all basic tasks on the PC can be accomplished using just the left mouse button. Doesn't solve the single click vs. double click problem, but the Mac hasn't solved that either.
After a while, either these users will steer clear of the right mouse button (because they are scared of the computer, these users are mostly hopeless anyway), or likely they will get curious, start pressing it, and they'll figure it out on their own.
Better than the ones with the power switch on the back. Got to be really annoying having to find the switch on a daily basis due the computer locking hard all the time.
I remember back in the school days when people were always needing paper clips to retrieve their floppies from the Apple labs. The funniest thing was when a disk the Mac didn't recognize was inserted (such as a FAT12 MSDOS disk), it would not eject it, and you needed the paper clip. Another favorite was when the computer crashed (extremely common), when it rebooted it wouldn't realize it still had a floppy in it, and thus wouldn't eject it, so you needed the paper clip. A simple solution would be to have the computer go through the eject motions whenever you told it to eject, even if the computer thought it did not have a disk in it - but something so simple was never implemented. This even continued on with some Mac CD drives (like the early iMac) - put in the wrong CD and you were stuck taking the computer apart. Stupid stupid stupid.
On the other hand, I don't remember anyone having problems ejecting disks at the wrong time on the PCs. People seemed smart enough to realize whirring sound + LED light = do not eject.