I admit the while I do a lot of work in programs like Word and Excel, I spend a lot more time surfing the net, reading articles from online databases, watching videos and otherwise doing a great many things that the Mac Plus can't do at all.
Personally, I consider a computer that is offline to be basically unusable, unless I specifically loaded it with something to do ahead of time (i.e. copied data from my work database so I can work on a flight.) This is absurd.
While Mac Office is, in and of itself, not a bad product, Microsoft hasn't gotten around to recompiling it into a universal binary and thus it runs under Rosetta. If you're just plagiarizing Wikipedia then it'll work fine, but it gets pretty bogged down if you've put together large spreadsheets of data or vector images in Powerpoint, or whatever.
Anyway, Mac Office 2004 has some issues on newer Macs.
I have to admit, I've been curious to play around with one of these things, but I haven't even seen them in stores here (Halifax, NS) let alone in the hands of one of my friends. Not that I would buy one - my iPod works just fine.
If I super encrypt my data by using ROT-13 twice then that's a valid encryption technique, yes? Coincidentally this is functionally identical to ROT-26. So then it IS covered under the DMCA, right?
Neglecting whatever increased power requirements the new optical drive might introduce, 2.5 hours is cutting it close for burning on a battery. Now certainly it's always possible to plug in when you're on the road, but if you have a socket nearby, an external hard disk can be plugged in too (or you can beat this by using a "self-powered" USB disk).
Not to mention that, at best, you could have ~3 Blu-Ray discs worth of data stored on your hard disk.
"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
I really can't tell if you're joking or not, but here's the quote he's working from, for those who are interested but might not know the original:
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
- Winston Churchill (who most certainly did have a way with words)
What if, on one of the other thousands of days that a shooting didn't occur, one of those students carrying a handgun gets into an altercation with another student and shoots him/her in moment of rashness?
Having everyone carrying guns around is just asking for them to be used during those moments we all have when we're not thinking clearly.
I'm so bad at all PvP that I don't really notice class balancing. Whenever I get jumped by a rogue I basically just panic and die. Occasionally I get a trap down and am able to run away, but that's the best I ever do. However, those people that I know who don't suck at PvP agree with you.
I find it interesting that you only refer to the terrain/graphics as 'not too bad'. I think this is the big thing that WoW got right. I've run the game effectively on systems as low as a Celeron 800, all the way up to Athlon X2 3800+ PCIe systems. Even on the shittiest computer the game runs well enough to play, because of the relatively low polygon count. What always stuns me though is that the game still looks good regardless of the rendering quality of the system it's running on.
You have to admit that art direction is something that Blizzard really got right with WoW.
While I agree that World of Warcraft takes a lot of cues from Lord of the Rings in terms of lore, style, races, etc the actual gameplay in World of Warcraft is what makes it what it is. I'm pretty sure that Tolkien didn't lay out a UI in the preface of his books when he wrote them:
It's not just the UI. The quest-heavy gameplay (as opposed to the Everquest/FFXI grind), the way the classes are balanced, etc. All that stuff is lifted from WoW, and certainly is not dictated by the "original" lore. I should also mention that it *should* have been lifted (although the UI is a bit much). World of Warcraft got it right - LoTRO absolutely should mimic a great deal of what makes World of Warcraft good if they want to appeal to the same large market.
But don't try to tell me that the LoTRO is the "original". That only applies to the setting.
It should be noted that while there is no official support, the low-level stuff on NForce2 based boards still works. The Asus A7N8X-X I have in my living room PC (cobbled together from old parts) is still running the drives in UDMA, the USB ports all work, etc. However I do have my sound and network disabled, and handled by other devices I had lying around.
The point is that you DO have to make some sacrifices, but it's not like you need a new Socket A board or something.
When speaking a hexadecimal number, one says "x" beforehand to indicate that the following number is in hex. Therefore x2A, when read aloud, is a perfectly valid hexadecimal representation.
Although, if we're being pedantic here, the verbal sound as written would have to be x2Ax. You say the x following A to distinguish it from "eight", since they could be easily confused.
I know, and I give my first-year students hell for doing what I just did. I sat there with that comment written for a couple minutes debating whether or not to say centrifugal or centripetal force. The problem is that traditionally the latter results in people saying something along the lines of "wtf you mean centrifugal n00b" and I opted for the more commonly used (if incorrect) term.
Ideally, the disks would be spinning so quickly that the outward force would keep them almost perfectly flat. Assuming the disks were very smooth and the internal atmosphere of the drive is gas-only (no dust - a safe assumption) there would hopefully be very little turbulence within the drive to cause fluctuations in the flatness of each platter.
In my lab we coat floppy materials (like plastic) in a spin coater at several thousand RPM. At that speed the disk may aswell be rigid.
While I agree that it's stupid that you can only get one system or the other you could
a) Take a friend/your girlfriend along and have him/her order the other one.
b) Pre-order from two different stores
or even c) Come back later (won't work if the line-up thing happens) when there are different employees, and pre-order the remaining system under a different phone number.
"3. How safe should I feel about uploading files with sensitive personal info?"
This is my main worry. When I sit down to write a paper for publication or my MSc thesis, what's to stop them from claiming it? I know it sounds paranoid, but on the off-chance that my research produces something revolutionary or profitable, I don't want there to be the slightest ambiguity about who the discovery belongs to. Keeping my research documents on Google's servers (even if only for a backup) seems to me to be the kind of thing lawyers could turn into "ownership". There's no way someone like me (or any individual really) could fight Google if they decided to make a claim.
"Microsoft hasn't learned from XP - that piss poor drivers are the primary reason people think their OS is unstable"
I would say that they have learned. AFAIK the x64 version of Windows Vista won't allow any drivers that aren't WHQL signed. While I've still have the occasional problem with a signed driver during my use of XP, most driver-related issues were caused by unsigned crap. This is certainly a step toward OSX-type stability by controlling the driver distribution process, although as someone who is willing to risk a little instability to try out a bleeding edge driver, I'm not sure I like it.
Yay for VoIP. I called the number and got an answer after five or six rings. The voice mail message says something along the lines of "You have reached the legal department of the ESPC. Our hours are blah blah blah" in what sounds (to my Canadian ears) like a southern accent. The hours match those listed on the site. Note: the message didn't expand the acronym, so it this IS a prank, they could just have pulled the number from some other legal department and made up a ridiculous-sounding agency to match.
Oh, I called at around 10:50pm Atlantic (9:50pm EST) on Tuesday the 12th.
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Megatasking would be 1,000,000+ processes at once.
In all honesty then, what is?
I admit the while I do a lot of work in programs like Word and Excel, I spend a lot more time surfing the net, reading articles from online databases, watching videos and otherwise doing a great many things that the Mac Plus can't do at all.
Personally, I consider a computer that is offline to be basically unusable, unless I specifically loaded it with something to do ahead of time (i.e. copied data from my work database so I can work on a flight.) This is absurd.
"Is there something wrong with Mac Office 2004?"
While Mac Office is, in and of itself, not a bad product, Microsoft hasn't gotten around to recompiling it into a universal binary and thus it runs under Rosetta. If you're just plagiarizing Wikipedia then it'll work fine, but it gets pretty bogged down if you've put together large spreadsheets of data or vector images in Powerpoint, or whatever.
Anyway, Mac Office 2004 has some issues on newer Macs.
These are the three big-name electronics retailers in Canada:
Future Shop
Best Buy
The Source
Not one of them seems to carry it. What's that all about?
I have to admit, I've been curious to play around with one of these things, but I haven't even seen them in stores here (Halifax, NS) let alone in the hands of one of my friends. Not that I would buy one - my iPod works just fine.
That's a really good idea. Anyone know how to start a class-action suit?
If I super encrypt my data by using ROT-13 twice then that's a valid encryption technique, yes? Coincidentally this is functionally identical to ROT-26. So then it IS covered under the DMCA, right?
Neglecting whatever increased power requirements the new optical drive might introduce, 2.5 hours is cutting it close for burning on a battery. Now certainly it's always possible to plug in when you're on the road, but if you have a socket nearby, an external hard disk can be plugged in too (or you can beat this by using a "self-powered" USB disk).
Not to mention that, at best, you could have ~3 Blu-Ray discs worth of data stored on your hard disk.
$550 Billion in a quarter!
No wonder the American economy is in trouble. At this rate, in a year AMD will have blown 1/6 of the country's GDP!
"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
- Winston Churchill
I really can't tell if you're joking or not, but here's the quote he's working from, for those who are interested but might not know the original:
"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
- Winston Churchill (who most certainly did have a way with words)
Having everyone carrying guns around is just asking for them to be used during those moments we all have when we're not thinking clearly.
I'm so bad at all PvP that I don't really notice class balancing. Whenever I get jumped by a rogue I basically just panic and die. Occasionally I get a trap down and am able to run away, but that's the best I ever do. However, those people that I know who don't suck at PvP agree with you.
I find it interesting that you only refer to the terrain/graphics as 'not too bad'. I think this is the big thing that WoW got right. I've run the game effectively on systems as low as a Celeron 800, all the way up to Athlon X2 3800+ PCIe systems. Even on the shittiest computer the game runs well enough to play, because of the relatively low polygon count. What always stuns me though is that the game still looks good regardless of the rendering quality of the system it's running on.
You have to admit that art direction is something that Blizzard really got right with WoW.
World of Warcraft UI Lord of the Rings Online UI
It's not just the UI. The quest-heavy gameplay (as opposed to the Everquest/FFXI grind), the way the classes are balanced, etc. All that stuff is lifted from WoW, and certainly is not dictated by the "original" lore. I should also mention that it *should* have been lifted (although the UI is a bit much). World of Warcraft got it right - LoTRO absolutely should mimic a great deal of what makes World of Warcraft good if they want to appeal to the same large market.
But don't try to tell me that the LoTRO is the "original". That only applies to the setting.
The point is that you DO have to make some sacrifices, but it's not like you need a new Socket A board or something.
Although, if we're being pedantic here, the verbal sound as written would have to be x2Ax. You say the x following A to distinguish it from "eight", since they could be easily confused.
"x2alpha" would work too, I suppose.
I know, and I give my first-year students hell for doing what I just did. I sat there with that comment written for a couple minutes debating whether or not to say centrifugal or centripetal force. The problem is that traditionally the latter results in people saying something along the lines of "wtf you mean centrifugal n00b" and I opted for the more commonly used (if incorrect) term.
Damned if I do, damned if I don't. Oh well.
Ideally, the disks would be spinning so quickly that the outward force would keep them almost perfectly flat. Assuming the disks were very smooth and the internal atmosphere of the drive is gas-only (no dust - a safe assumption) there would hopefully be very little turbulence within the drive to cause fluctuations in the flatness of each platter.
In my lab we coat floppy materials (like plastic) in a spin coater at several thousand RPM. At that speed the disk may aswell be rigid.
"grotequely bad local radio in my city"
Ah, so you live in Halifax?
While I agree that it's stupid that you can only get one system or the other you could
a) Take a friend/your girlfriend along and have him/her order the other one.
b) Pre-order from two different stores
or even c) Come back later (won't work if the line-up thing happens) when there are different employees, and pre-order the remaining system under a different phone number.
"3. How safe should I feel about uploading files with sensitive personal info?"
This is my main worry. When I sit down to write a paper for publication or my MSc thesis, what's to stop them from claiming it? I know it sounds paranoid, but on the off-chance that my research produces something revolutionary or profitable, I don't want there to be the slightest ambiguity about who the discovery belongs to. Keeping my research documents on Google's servers (even if only for a backup) seems to me to be the kind of thing lawyers could turn into "ownership". There's no way someone like me (or any individual really) could fight Google if they decided to make a claim.
"Each american produces about 2.3 kg of trash a day, the current rate is about 5 times that in developing countries."
Is this supposed to read:
a) Each American produces about 2.3 kg of trash a day, which is about 5 times the rate in developing countries.
or b) Each American produces about 2.3kg of trash a day. In developing countries the rate is about 5 times that.
"Microsoft hasn't learned from XP - that piss poor drivers are the primary reason people think their OS is unstable"
I would say that they have learned. AFAIK the x64 version of Windows Vista won't allow any drivers that aren't WHQL signed. While I've still have the occasional problem with a signed driver during my use of XP, most driver-related issues were caused by unsigned crap. This is certainly a step toward OSX-type stability by controlling the driver distribution process, although as someone who is willing to risk a little instability to try out a bleeding edge driver, I'm not sure I like it.
Yay for VoIP. I called the number and got an answer after five or six rings. The voice mail message says something along the lines of "You have reached the legal department of the ESPC. Our hours are blah blah blah" in what sounds (to my Canadian ears) like a southern accent. The hours match those listed on the site. Note: the message didn't expand the acronym, so it this IS a prank, they could just have pulled the number from some other legal department and made up a ridiculous-sounding agency to match.
Oh, I called at around 10:50pm Atlantic (9:50pm EST) on Tuesday the 12th.