Interesting you should mention Wal-Mart.... Wal-Mart was the major company to push suppliers to begin using the UPC barcode labelling system, and once major Wal-Mart suppliers did, every other company fell into line.
Quite frankly if you haven't been spending cash your whole life, this adver-tracking business has been going on for quite some time upon your delicate soul, if you knew it or not. Or at least, it would if it had been generally effective.
Myself I am not too worried;
as it becomes easily possible to collect greater amounts of data, it also becomes more difficult to tell what data is worth paying attention to. I'd bet if you looked back in history at the time (in any particular country) when standardized vehicle serial numbers, registration and license plates became required, you'd find howls of outrage and predicions of doomsday as well. Has anything really horrible happened to you because your car simply had license plates? Alternately, has your car ever been stolen and recovered?
There will become a system, but there will be ways to minimize involvement and hide details as well. And there will be benefits: consider the possibility of eliminating not only shoplifting, but nearly all other forms of property theft as well.... -horrible, isn't it?
~
Firstly it's not hardly just engineering, it's many subjects, particularly hard sciences and mathematics it seems. US colleges are filled with foreign-born professors who simply can't speak English well enough to teach.
Secondly: how often one will pull all-nighters and put up with incomprehensible professors and borderline-incompetent TA's is certainly some measure of detirmination, but it has very little to do with effectively learning anything concerning what subject the course is alleged to be studying. I'd have thought that the will to go 50K or more in debt would count for something.
If anything, lousy teaching only teaches a student to ignore the people in charge and only pay attention to the technical requirements they give. Dare I ask, how long would an employer put up with that kind of attitude?
"Anything you focus a huge-ass amount of energy of any kind on a little-bitty tiny amount of pretty much anything, like, the shit blows up and it goes nukular."
If you had installed Microsoft's News Alert Messenger plugin and disabled your popup blocker, firewall and virus scanner, you would have been informed in plenty of time.
As a never-Mac-owner intrigued by the OSx86 business, I have looked around on Mac forums online--and they look pretty much the same as Windows support forums, just without the spyware and virus problem threads. You still see programs and hardware that refuses to work right, and you still see operating system utitities that won't work right. Right now there's threads polling who has installed the latest two security updates, because some people's machines will not boot afterwards, or will only boot partially. There's one topic posted around concerned with if refurb G5's are covered under the "exploding capacitor" warranty that Apple is providing original owners for their G5 machines that fail due to this problem. There's not really a lot of solid ground to claim that Mac is any better than WinXP at anything except at running Mac applications. If you want to use the word "perfect", then let me know when Apple offers a money-back crash-proof guarantee on their OS's.
Aso I noticed: when anyone asks about office software in general, most people say MS is simply the best. Neo Office lacks many features, and nothing Apple themselves provides even approaches the features of MS Office. Often you don't need all those features, but when you do nothing else has them. And note: these are current Mac owners, not my opinions.
I'm still intrigued by running OSx86, but would have to buy the hardware to do it fully. The other thing Mac users gush so much about is that "kick-ass graphical interface", but I'd just have to spend time trying to use one to comment on that--but I have not yet heard of anything involving it that is really significant. I *do* like the Linux GUI feature of multiple desktops--especially if you only have one screen--but then, what's even better than multiple desktops is having the hardware priced cheaper, so that you can [i]afford to buy two screens[/i]. But when I think of "Apple" and "low-priced hardware", somehow that just doesn't compute.....
While his workmanship is fairly nice, he seems to have reinvented the wheel more than a couple times. At least one website ( hXXp://logisysus.com/ ) has been selling in-dash car PC's for at least the last couple years, that I've seen. Since some P-II models used to be available, I'd bet it's been longer than I've seen. Non-Mac-Mini anyone? Or (now) Mac-non-Mini even....
Include the usual disclaimers here;
I've bought other smaller items from them but never bought any if their PC's, so I dunno how they stack up value-wise or how they take the Penguin.
~~~
A local newspaper story a year or two back on the USA/St Louis Int'l airport noted that the management was having a tough time budgeting. Their main source of revenue for interior-building maintenance (janitorial and light-repair) was from pay phones--but with the popularity of cell phones, pay phone use had dropped off so much that 95% had already been removed (from the number they had three years earlier) and even the 5% left were not generating very much revenue, and the current plan was to remove even more of them. Because of existing term-contracts for other aspects of airport operations, they couldn't immediately raise fees for any other type of airport use, and they had found nothing new that passengers would pay anywhere near as willingly for to replace the lost revenue of pay phones.
....So if passengers want 802.x on the concourse, I expect it's going to end up costing them money.
(of course a couple of Windows versions further on we'll need them anyway, but I mean I want one right now...)
I remember those, and this looks very familiar, doesn't it? Headed for the same dustbin of history, I would bet.
I will not be buying company stock.
While you could write an app or an OS to do so, most really aren't written to take good advantage of a ramdisk. If anything is right now, I'd bet it's probably enterprise server software. The RAMdisk concept is very enticing and would seem like the fastest option, but (in Windows) it really doesn't improve most aspects of use anywhere near as well as you'd think. ....I experienced this [lack of] effect somewhat when I built my latest PC with triple 74Gb Raptors (OS, swap and programs). It does run somewhat faster in general but as far as applications go, some things speeded up noticeably, while others didn't speed up at all.
I was really bummed last time I bought a mobo that had 4 1-gig ram slots, but found that it would only run 2.5 gigs max at full speed (or something, there was some good reason not to actually put 4x1-gigs in there....). More conventional RAM for me, thanks...
Okay, that was really a sly off-the-cuff remark, but it did get me thinking again today; it really doesn't matter if parts are moved to poor countries, because users would find ways around mismanaged portions anyway a la' Freenet. .....
-And a bit later I thought a third time (in one day, possibly a record for me) that this is exactly the reason why it shouldn't be moved into any country that doesn't already have the IT network in place to handle it. Anything moved to a cesspool country and mismanaged to the point of impracticality would just get adapted "out-of-the-loop" anyway, by whatever means necessary. If you collect a list of countries that really have the network capacity in place already for a major piece of this pie, the plan doesn't sound so unreasonable.
But then again, somehow I just know the UN would end up moving most of it into Iran, Sudan and Haiti....,BR>
To call the UN incompetent isn't accurate.
The UN is more like a giant prehistoric incompetency, from thirty million years ago when huge lumbering pea-brained incompetencies roamed the earth.
I agree, the UN is not just the "high profile stories" we have seen on the evening news. It is a giant heavily-politicized self-serving corporation, with its own perverse interests that often cripple the very persons it claims to want to assist. By any reasonable measure the UN aid programs are mostly failures--note how many countries that recieved large amounts of UN aid, oh, say, ten or twenty or thirty years ago are still shit-holes today. Perhaps dumping money on third-world oligarchs isn't the solution, you think maybe?
Here's a cheerful read: "Lords of Poverty" by Graham Hancock, ISBN #0-87113-469-1 .
Come on now, be civil. The internet belongs to the world. It's only fair that 60% of the TLD servers are in the world's poorest countries, and they charge $1 and take 15 minutes to do a lookup....
Hey, wow! I found my old reg name! I still don't know the password, but it let me log in and as long as I'm cookied I guess it's all good.
I don't get chubbies about uptime, I'm just lazy and don't want to clean. I want a case with a filter in the front that I only need to clean maybe once a year (ideally), and that works well enough during that whole time that I don't have to ever clean out the inside of the case at all for the ~5 yrs I'll use it.
And as far as water-cooling being just as reliable, sorry, it ain't so. You may rarely hear of cars having radiator problems, but you never hear of old Volkswagen Beetles having radiator problems. Adding a conventional (flow-through) radiator just moves the dust problem from the CPU heatsink to the radiator--and most PC's out there (at least mine) simply don't need to use water cooling anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting you should mention Wal-Mart.... Wal-Mart was the major company to push suppliers to begin using the UPC barcode labelling system, and once major Wal-Mart suppliers did, every other company fell into line.
Quite frankly if you haven't been spending cash your whole life, this adver-tracking business has been going on for quite some time upon your delicate soul, if you knew it or not. Or at least, it would if it had been generally effective.
Myself I am not too worried;
as it becomes easily possible to collect greater amounts of data, it also becomes more difficult to tell what data is worth paying attention to. I'd bet if you looked back in history at the time (in any particular country) when standardized vehicle serial numbers, registration and license plates became required, you'd find howls of outrage and predicions of doomsday as well. Has anything really horrible happened to you because your car simply had license plates? Alternately, has your car ever been stolen and recovered?
There will become a system, but there will be ways to minimize involvement and hide details as well. And there will be benefits: consider the possibility of eliminating not only shoplifting, but nearly all other forms of property theft as well.... -horrible, isn't it?
~
Firstly it's not hardly just engineering, it's many subjects, particularly hard sciences and mathematics it seems. US colleges are filled with foreign-born professors who simply can't speak English well enough to teach.
Secondly: how often one will pull all-nighters and put up with incomprehensible professors and borderline-incompetent TA's is certainly some measure of detirmination, but it has very little to do with effectively learning anything concerning what subject the course is alleged to be studying. I'd have thought that the will to go 50K or more in debt would count for something.
If anything, lousy teaching only teaches a student to ignore the people in charge and only pay attention to the technical requirements they give. Dare I ask, how long would an employer put up with that kind of attitude?
"Anything you focus a huge-ass amount of energy of any kind on a little-bitty tiny amount of pretty much anything, like, the shit blows up and it goes nukular."
[-patiently awaiting Nobel comittee letter-]
If you had installed Microsoft's News Alert Messenger plugin and disabled your popup blocker, firewall and virus scanner, you would have been informed in plenty of time.
As a never-Mac-owner intrigued by the OSx86 business, I have looked around on Mac forums online--and they look pretty much the same as Windows support forums, just without the spyware and virus problem threads. You still see programs and hardware that refuses to work right, and you still see operating system utitities that won't work right. Right now there's threads polling who has installed the latest two security updates, because some people's machines will not boot afterwards, or will only boot partially. There's one topic posted around concerned with if refurb G5's are covered under the "exploding capacitor" warranty that Apple is providing original owners for their G5 machines that fail due to this problem. There's not really a lot of solid ground to claim that Mac is any better than WinXP at anything except at running Mac applications. If you want to use the word "perfect", then let me know when Apple offers a money-back crash-proof guarantee on their OS's.
Aso I noticed: when anyone asks about office software in general, most people say MS is simply the best. Neo Office lacks many features, and nothing Apple themselves provides even approaches the features of MS Office. Often you don't need all those features, but when you do nothing else has them. And note: these are current Mac owners, not my opinions.
I'm still intrigued by running OSx86, but would have to buy the hardware to do it fully. The other thing Mac users gush so much about is that "kick-ass graphical interface", but I'd just have to spend time trying to use one to comment on that--but I have not yet heard of anything involving it that is really significant. I *do* like the Linux GUI feature of multiple desktops--especially if you only have one screen--but then, what's even better than multiple desktops is having the hardware priced cheaper, so that you can [i]afford to buy two screens[/i]. But when I think of "Apple" and "low-priced hardware", somehow that just doesn't compute.....
While his workmanship is fairly nice, he seems to have reinvented the wheel more than a couple times. At least one website ( hXXp://logisysus.com/ ) has been selling in-dash car PC's for at least the last couple years, that I've seen. Since some P-II models used to be available, I'd bet it's been longer than I've seen. Non-Mac-Mini anyone? Or (now) Mac-non-Mini even....
Include the usual disclaimers here;
I've bought other smaller items from them but never bought any if their PC's, so I dunno how they stack up value-wise or how they take the Penguin.
~~~
A local newspaper story a year or two back on the USA/St Louis Int'l airport noted that the management was having a tough time budgeting. Their main source of revenue for interior-building maintenance (janitorial and light-repair) was from pay phones--but with the popularity of cell phones, pay phone use had dropped off so much that 95% had already been removed (from the number they had three years earlier) and even the 5% left were not generating very much revenue, and the current plan was to remove even more of them. Because of existing term-contracts for other aspects of airport operations, they couldn't immediately raise fees for any other type of airport use, and they had found nothing new that passengers would pay anywhere near as willingly for to replace the lost revenue of pay phones.
....So if passengers want 802.x on the concourse, I expect it's going to end up costing them money.
Not a complaint as such, just an observation....
Nerdcore Rap Battle 2005: the concerts that nobody has to worry about not bringing a date to.....
(of course a couple of Windows versions further on we'll need them anyway, but I mean I want one right now...)
I remember those, and this looks very familiar, doesn't it? Headed for the same dustbin of history, I would bet.
I will not be buying company stock.
While you could write an app or an OS to do so, most really aren't written to take good advantage of a ramdisk. If anything is right now, I'd bet it's probably enterprise server software. The RAMdisk concept is very enticing and would seem like the fastest option, but (in Windows) it really doesn't improve most aspects of use anywhere near as well as you'd think.
....I experienced this [lack of] effect somewhat when I built my latest PC with triple 74Gb Raptors (OS, swap and programs). It does run somewhat faster in general but as far as applications go, some things speeded up noticeably, while others didn't speed up at all.
I was really bummed last time I bought a mobo that had 4 1-gig ram slots, but found that it would only run 2.5 gigs max at full speed (or something, there was some good reason not to actually put 4x1-gigs in there....). More conventional RAM for me, thanks...
Okay, that was really a sly off-the-cuff remark, but it did get me thinking again today; it really doesn't matter if parts are moved to poor countries, because users would find ways around mismanaged portions anyway a la' Freenet.
.....
,BR>
To call the UN incompetent isn't accurate.
-And a bit later I thought a third time (in one day, possibly a record for me) that this is exactly the reason why it shouldn't be moved into any country that doesn't already have the IT network in place to handle it. Anything moved to a cesspool country and mismanaged to the point of impracticality would just get adapted "out-of-the-loop" anyway, by whatever means necessary. If you collect a list of countries that really have the network capacity in place already for a major piece of this pie, the plan doesn't sound so unreasonable.
But then again, somehow I just know the UN would end up moving most of it into Iran, Sudan and Haiti....
The UN is more like a giant prehistoric incompetency, from thirty million years ago when huge lumbering pea-brained incompetencies roamed the earth.
I agree, the UN is not just the "high profile stories" we have seen on the evening news. It is a giant heavily-politicized self-serving corporation, with its own perverse interests that often cripple the very persons it claims to want to assist. By any reasonable measure the UN aid programs are mostly failures--note how many countries that recieved large amounts of UN aid, oh, say, ten or twenty or thirty years ago are still shit-holes today. Perhaps dumping money on third-world oligarchs isn't the solution, you think maybe?
Here's a cheerful read: "Lords of Poverty" by Graham Hancock, ISBN #0-87113-469-1 .
Okay, it's a deal.
The current URL system is reaching capacity anyway and there's really other better ways available. XML net he said?
Come on now, be civil. The internet belongs to the world. It's only fair that 60% of the TLD servers are in the world's poorest countries, and they charge $1 and take 15 minutes to do a lookup....
Hey, wow! I found my old reg name! I still don't know the password, but it let me log in and as long as I'm cookied I guess it's all good.
I don't get chubbies about uptime, I'm just lazy and don't want to clean. I want a case with a filter in the front that I only need to clean maybe once a year (ideally), and that works well enough during that whole time that I don't have to ever clean out the inside of the case at all for the ~5 yrs I'll use it.
And as far as water-cooling being just as reliable, sorry, it ain't so. You may rarely hear of cars having radiator problems, but you never hear of old Volkswagen Beetles having radiator problems. Adding a conventional (flow-through) radiator just moves the dust problem from the CPU heatsink to the radiator--and most PC's out there (at least mine) simply don't need to use water cooling anyway.