Hmmm, what would you call Peaceville Records, The End Records and Napalm Records? Even Roadrunner is still considered an indie label, although they are pretty big.
It's easy to find indie country music that I like; loads of it gets played on Sirius Outlaw Country. Metal, OTOH, is a littel more difficult. So...anybody want to recommend some good indie hard rock / metal for someone who like Corrosion Of Conformity, Type O Negative, Black Sabbath, Monster Magnet, Tool, Anthrax, Rammstein, Megadeth, and Faith No More? If you like Black Sabbath, check out Katatonia. They are a doom metal band, on Peaceville Records, indie. Some other good doom bands you might like could be Candlemass and maybe Wildhoney album by Tiamat. Peaceville has a lot of good doom metal bands which is basically Black Sabbath slowed down even more with more atmospheric effects. Agalloch might be something you might like too, they have very melodic progressive songs, long ones. Brilliant band. Also, check out the solo records of Bruce Dickinson, I am thinking Chemical Wedding or Accident of Birth.
For Megadeth and Anthrax, check out Iced Earth. They got a thrash / power metal style with Iron Maidenesque melodies with Halford like vocals, awesome band. You might like some later Arcturus, Sideshow Symphonies or The Sham Mirrors albums. Maybe even some melodic death metal, Hypocrisy, In Flames (although they change a lot), Amon Amarth. Maybe symphonic black metal bands like Dimmu Borgir. There is also Mastodon, that resembles a later, Bush era Anthrax. I haven't found a band yet that did early Anthrax like songs.
If you like Rammstein, check out Skinny Puppy, the later records, especially the live Greater Wrong of the Right DVD might be something a Rammstein fan would like. They are not metal but pure electro industrial, but lot of metalheads like em. Check out Falkenbach also, a viking metal band, that use a lot of electronic sounds in their records.
As for CoC, Tool and Faith No more, try out The End Records. Probably the best metal label out there. Ulver, Green Carnation and Stolen Babies might be something you might enjoy. The End Records have some insane metal bands from all weird genres, progressive, experimental, avant-garde, name it. Again, Mastodon would probably be a bit like CoC and Tool, although heavier and a bit less progressive. Some avant-garde stuff you might enjoy could be Cult of Luna or Isis.
For Type O Negative, check out Tiamat. Although Tiamat is more gothic rock style lately, some older albums are more gothic/doom style. You'd probably want to check out Wildhoney or Prey. You'd probably like some Tiamat records like Judas Christ and A deeper Kind of Slumber if you like Monster Magnet. Oh, and The Gathering, for sure, Mandylion, if_then_else and How to Measure a Planet.
Top of my head, some labels: Peaceville = Doom Metal. Napalm Records = Lots of death metal, some gothic. The End Records = All kind of progressive, weird, avant-garde stuff. SPV = Lots of gothic, power and symphonic metal. Nuclear Blast: Lots of more "popular" stuff like Therion, Nightwish and Opeth. Roadrunner: Another "popular" label. Some neat bands, pretty much all metal genres.
When this is not an occasion for celebration - I don't know.
What about an SCO party? You can use facebook, upcoming.org and all the web 2.0 platforms to plan a party near you. Lots of people will be eager to join. Try it now. This was nearly a small part of the Linux vs Microsoft war. The patent battles are still coming. Unfortunately, this is an insignificant victory.
(BTW, that's one of the reasons drivers need to be signed to run on Windows Vista x64.) If by that you mean DRM, then yes. The reason drivers need to be signed is to prevent "theft", to prevent the DRM from breaking.
"It's easier, cheaper and less time consuming to be a fat ass" everywhere in the world. Yet, the rest of the world obesity problem is not, for now, as serious as the one in the US. Why ? I think it has way too many factors. IMO, some are:
(1) Food quality regulation sucks. Too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat. Europe has much more food regulation, the Food Industry in the US has pretty much "carte blanche", free to do whatever they want.
(2) The entire society is extremely reliant on cars. Go to Europe and watch the myriad of bike lanes, people walking or biking to work. In quite a few cities, downtown is closed to cars, only emergency cars and public transportation is allowed. Western society has become very sedentary, normal evolution from factory work to cubicule work. However, Europeans walking and biking to work, burns calories vs the people in the US who drive cars.
(3) Food portions. I was shocked when I traveled to Florida at the gigantic "normal" portions they serve in restaurants. I could never finish a plate. Few months ago I watched a documentary about Huston, apparently the fattest state in the US. Something like 36% of the people are overweight. It's crazy. People seem to have lost all self control.
(4) Education. Yes, mod me down. In a society that 92% of the people believe in God, they will shun science because science is continually questioned by religion. They won't read enough scientific papers, articles, books, whatever to know that some foods are bad for you, some good. They have deep mistrust for science. People who don't read scientific papers don't realize how bad salt is, how bad fat is, how good omega-3 is, how good broccolis or cranberries are and so on. They keep eating very bad food because they don't know better.
(5) Fast food culture. I want it now, fast. Downside of it: people become lazy, they want easy solutions and easy answers. Right now you have a pill for pretty much everything. Foot ache? Take FooticideX! Your wingwang is not flacid enough? FlacidiX! People expect this magic pill that will solve all their problems. People rather have gastric bypass surgery and take pills than do 30-45 min exercise each day.
IIS has something like 5-6 places to configure for security for a full blown out of process COM supporting ASP application.
HTTPSSL service - not even sure if it's possible to run in under different credentials. Inetinfo.exe - IIS itself. W3wp.exe - Worker processes that run the application pools. In process COM objects - the user running the w3wp.exe process needs read and execute rights on this folder or DLL file (if you want to be more granular). Out of process COM objects or DCOM - service security and DCOM object execution priviledges.
And finally put the user running the worker processes into the IIS_WPG group (the only "special" group).
You are done!
How is that different from apache that needs chroot,.htaccess and various directory directives along with an application server configuration? Windows security is way more granular than *nix, it can be scary but IIS is not hard to modify security settings. People just need to understand the interactions between the different parts of the application, IIS ==> Worker process ==> Com/DCOM object ==> file system. Once you got those interactions down, modifying IIS security becomes a joke.
Also, IIS comes with pretty paranoid security settings out of the box so very little hardening is required.
Security on IIS is really hard. It is really easy to forget some obscure setting, because of all those damn tabs. What is so hard in IIS security? Care to elaborate.
Really the best answer to the Fermi paradox is that Earth-like conditions are rare. However, I think we just discovered a planet 20 light years away that has 0-40 degreee celsius temperature, water, and is a rocky planet, so maybe that is not the answer either. How about life is common, intelligence not so common? Or maybe multi cellular life is very rare, whatever that be, maybe that's why we can't find any aliens. It took what? 3+ billion years for intelligence to evolve on Earth? 3 billion years is 1/6th of the age of the universe.
We have been sending out signals, albeit involuntarily, using Radio and TV.
Also, I don't think we need to be super advanced super smart to detect the existence of a much more advanced civilization. Our science IMO has been developed logically, I don't see anything wrong with it (minus string theory). It's all based on observation. We can measure the impact of gravity of a planet on it's own star, I am sure we could pick up a Dyson Sphere.
As for the paradox, where are the Dyson Spheres? Matrioshka Brains? According to TFA, scientists have estimated that it would take a species about 1 to 100 million years to colonize the galaxy. Where are they?
According to these scientists, our galaxy has been ready for intelligent life for the last 4.5 billion years, so during that, 4500 species could have colonized the entire galaxy. Every species will realize that their own sun has a limited life time, all it takes is one to say, ok, let's get the fudge out of this solar system. All it takes is one alien species to come in contact with us, one to send probes, just one. That's why the Fermi Paradox is so powerful.
Our galaxy is very old, our sun is something like 4th generation star, yet there is no sign of intelligent life.
They want you to believe *they* are the ultimate authority. So far, it's working great. I have a few computer illiterate friends, who don't know what the fudge is DRM (nor do they care), they got 10x as much illegally downloaded stuff as I do. I was shocked to see one of my friends who can barely turn on a computer having over 1TB of videos (non pr0n unfortunately). The other has over 20k songs downloaded. My sister has a shitty dialup internet connection, every time she comes over to my place she brings her laptop and leeches music off the net. A gamer friend of mine has about 100+ PS2 games and a modded PS2.
I have not met a computer illiterate person who gives a shit about copyrights. For many, they don't even think it's illegal to download. After all, plenty of ISP ads are along the line: download music and movies at blazing speeds!
If it makes Slashdot more like digg, then bad idea. It's a train wreck of sex and conspiracy theories over there. Well...on second thought maybe we can make it half like digg. Digg is more like a trainwreck of "OMG LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OMFG!". That and regurgitated blogspam. It's gotten so bad, that you have to click through 3 or more blogs just to get to original article. Each of these blogs has some very "insightful" 2 line commentary and link to another blog. Every moron spams Digg with their own shitty blogs, they know it's a highway for great hitcount and their ego.
I really hope Slashdot doesn't become half like Digg, not even 0.00001% of Digg.
I *REALLY* hope they'll use WoW as a training camp. It's the only way we'll win this "War on Terror". The terrorists will be confused by very different laws of physics in the real world.
I can picture it already... Terrorist sees an airplane, jumps on a bird thinking it has the same abilities as a netherdrake in WoW and tries to fly to intercept plane and make it crash with his Fireball rank XII spell. Or better, they'll work in gold farming sweatshops trying to "subvert" the "evil" western economies!
can someone make a HARDENED WINDOWS XP version please:) hehehe You can too!
(1) Don't use your PC logged in as administrator unless updating hardware/OS. Run as command prompt or MMC works great too, and don't even have to log off or switch user. (2) Patch it to the max. (3) Disable every service you can. I run Windows 2003 with about 8 or so services on, default install: 25+ services. (4) Stop using IE for other than Windows Updates. Firefox + AdBlock Plus + NoScript = awesomesauce. (5) Stop clicking on every "OMGZ! CLICK ME AND WIN!!!!! OMG111!!!" popup. (6) Stop downloading videos called something like "Pr0nMovieHotBabe.exe". If you really MUST download those movies, use a VM to test them. (7) Most importantly, common sense. Oh and, did I mention never use administrator unless you have to configure hardware or update OS? (8) ????? (9) Profit!
I never understood why people look at OS boot times. Unless it's 10+ minutes, what does it matter if it's 1:30 or 2:15 boot time. I usually get to work, turn on my PC, go get a juice, when I am back, PC is already on. When I get home, I turn on my PC, go change, get back to my PC, it's already on, sometimes even screen saver kicked in. Since I don't reboot my PC every 2 min, I don't give a damn if it takes an extra 20 seconds to boot.
Do people really reboot PCs 100+ times a day so that saving 15-20 seconds on boot is really THAT important?
To me, none of those things are the hallmark of a good operating system. MS has coded some nice things into their OS on a higher level, but the underlying OS itself is terrible. OpenGL doesn't make an OS. Remote desktop doesn't make an OS. Good APIs, good scheduling, good timesharing, good fault tolerance, good response, good hardware support (ok, Windows has this at least), good networking, good filesystem, good caching strategy, etc... THOSE are the things that make an OS good. Windows might be a good windowing system, but IMO it's a terrible OS because it fails to provide the basics at a really good quality level, with really good performance. Underlying OS is terrible? Maybe you should read about a bit before making dismissive statements.
What I am wondering about these cases is how the hell the family can afford to pay for all this food. I saw the same show last night, and they mentioned that the cost of one day worth of food is around 300$. 300 smackers, Jeebus, how are people getting money for all this food?
No genes.. No viruses.. Not what your friend does.. Not what your family does..
It's what you choose to do. Period.
If your metabolism slows down, eat less, exercise more - as long as your body isn't so badly out of shape that taking 3 steps will kill you. There was this show on TLC about people with weight problems. One woman was working out crazy with help of trainers and doctors, eating extremely well, as little calories as was possible yet she was unable to lose any weight. In fact, sometimes she even gained a few pounds. If I recall correctly, it was some thyroid problem that cut back heavily on some hormone production and this caused her body to "believe" she was constantly starving so her metabolism slowed down to a crawl.
and dumped Windows for a more stable and secure approach. You know, I am probably going to get modded down to hell.
But what makes you think Windows is less stable and less secure than *Nix or OSX? Other than people and their dogs running Windows as administrators (that's more an education problem vs Windows security), Windows is not less secure than *Nix or OSX. In fact, things like file system security is better than *nix, IMO. Windows ACLs just own, it's a breeze to use them versus the obscure *Nix FS security.
And for stability? The only time my Windows box crashed was because of piece of shit ATI drivers. People need to get away from the Windows 9x crashing every 3 minutes mentality. XP is rock solid (didn't drive Vista enough to tell on it's stability). I am currently running a VWare GSX server on Windows 2003, the only time I reboot is to install OS patches. Crashes so far: zero, nada, zilch. Been running it for 7+ months. Hardware: Do it your own el-cheapo components.
The vast majority of Windows crashes are due to defective hardware and/or drivers. Ever installed an unstable driver on Linux? Ever had a hardware failure on OSX?
Bah. Today's programmers aren't better or worse than they were ten years ago - they're just distributed differently. I am not so sure. I remember my first C++ class in college, we didn't touch C++ for at least half the semester (well almost). We learned the basics of OOP and the rest of time was spent on learning how compilers compile code. We also learned a lot of assembly. Hell, in mainframe assembly class we wrote an entire assembler. Bonus points were given to people who used their own assembler to generate the code of the assignment.
While C++, assembly and C might no longer be "cool", it definitely teaches people how to write optimal code, how to debug efficiently, understand a wide variety of computing concepts.
The same college today is too busy teaching C# and Java. While those languages are nice and all, not teaching low level C, C++ and assembly IMO leads to sloppy coders, people who don't understand the byte code generated, people who don't mind wasting system resources because hey... the garbage collector will take care of it.
I was nearly crucified when I suggested my boss to recode a piece of an application in C so it scales better than the current shitty VB COM version. He just looked through me and said: add another server! Lot of today's code is written by people who don't even understand how the code is getting executed.
Re:It doesn't solve the problem
on
Zune DRM Cracked
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· Score: 1
We hardcore and tech savvy users usually crack, mod or unlock any device we got ours hand into (Ipods, cell phones, DVD Players, Apple TV, etc) but it doesn't solve Six pack Joe's DRM problems. He will get a Zune, won't bother or know how to crack it and play along MS and MAFIAA's rules. The same thing will happen with our parents and most people. The solution is buying products that are open and DRM free in the first place. I don't think it happens to our parents and friends. My friends and family know I am tech savvy. They always ask me for advice about buying different things, using software and whatnot. The result is almost 100% Firefox usage, my mother and sister are on Ubuntu, they use Google docs with Open Office, my friends avoid DRM ridden hardware or software. I did show my sister how to rip CDs in mp3, how to burn CDs, even how to download stuff she wants. She is happy with some random hardware mp3 player without any Apple or MS DRM.
We the tech savvy can influence our friends and family and educate them about the wrongs of DRM and lock ins. And it works (well, it worked for me!).
I was thinking along the lines of "something companies don't make drivers for."
In my defense, the last two or three summers I have given Linux (Ubuntu) a go. I still hit hardware (ATI, Creative's X-Fi) and software (iTunes + iPod) that can't be easily replicated or adjusted to a novice Linux user.
It's gotten better though. Well, if you want Audigy on Vista, please pay 10$. Other than that, yes ATI drivers need a boost. AMD promised to do much better for Linux, we'll see how that pans out. Also, since feisty, installing proprietary drivers is 2 mouse clicks away. NVidia drivers work great by the way.
Oh yah and Amarok owns iTunes. Also, if you really want iTunes, there is always VMWare player.
This doesn't mean, Linux is ready for mainstream on desktop, but flat out dismissing it because it doesn't have iTunes and iPod support (it has better) it's just shortsighted IMO.
I'd love for albums to still be filled with 15 awesome songs, but that's just not reality anymore. There are plenty of good albums, not just one good song and rest fillers but not from major labels. Lot of indie/small labels have some great bands who produce entire records with quality songs.
From the top of my head, some recent albums (2006/2007) that are great entirely not just one song: Loreena McKennit - An Ancient Muse Agalloch - Ashes Against the Grain Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos Katatonia - The Great Cold Distance Liva - De Insulis Virgin Black - Requiem Mezzo Forte Mastodon - Blood Mountain Iron Maiden - A Matter of Life and Death
Probably others I forgot. Lot of great records from indie/unknown/obscure bands, ya know, the real musicians. Of course, if people are looking for the MAFIAA to bring them quality music, they will be disappointed. Not many quality bands left on main labels.
I use an MSI NVidia 7600 GS, bonus: passive heatsink, zero noise. Back when I played WoW, it ran it at 1280 x 1024 with max settings, max anti aliasing and all bells and whistles at 30+ FPS (40 man raids and all). In fact I was able to two box on it no problems with both WoW clients running at over 20+ FPS. The card has a DVI and standard VGA port, I plugged both monitors on it, if I recall correctly, it comes with a VGA to DVI converter so you can even plug two older monitors on it. There should be a DX10 version of that card out (8500 GS or something). Price range is around 130$, worth every penny.
I moved my mother's stuff over to Ubuntu, she has my old Radeon 9600 Pro, the proprietary driver installs just as easy as NVidia, however, the control panel sucks (more like it's worthless) and I wasn't able to get Beryl nor Compiz running (I am not a Linux expert) so I gave up on those eye candy. Also, I have no idea how multi monitoring works on ATI cards.
There are however some new ATI drivers out, that came out in the last few weeks with a much better control panel (finally). That might allow you to get your rig going on Ubuntu without buying new video cards.
I am using 2 x 19 inch monitors with Kubuntu, both plugged into the same NVidia 7600 GS card.
Install Kubuntu. Install restricted driver manager. (skip this step on Ubuntu) Click on checkbox to enable NVidia driver. Reboot. Configure multiple monitors. Enjoy a nice 2560 x 1024 double monitor setup!
I would personally avoid any ATI cards like the black plague, until good drivers come out. The NVidia control panel compared to the joke that is the ATI panel was more than enough to convince me.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, what would you call Peaceville Records, The End Records and Napalm Records? Even Roadrunner is still considered an indie label, although they are pretty big.
Maybe I am mistaken!
For Megadeth and Anthrax, check out Iced Earth. They got a thrash / power metal style with Iron Maidenesque melodies with Halford like vocals, awesome band. You might like some later Arcturus, Sideshow Symphonies or The Sham Mirrors albums. Maybe even some melodic death metal, Hypocrisy, In Flames (although they change a lot), Amon Amarth. Maybe symphonic black metal bands like Dimmu Borgir. There is also Mastodon, that resembles a later, Bush era Anthrax. I haven't found a band yet that did early Anthrax like songs.
If you like Rammstein, check out Skinny Puppy, the later records, especially the live Greater Wrong of the Right DVD might be something a Rammstein fan would like. They are not metal but pure electro industrial, but lot of metalheads like em. Check out Falkenbach also, a viking metal band, that use a lot of electronic sounds in their records.
As for CoC, Tool and Faith No more, try out The End Records. Probably the best metal label out there. Ulver, Green Carnation and Stolen Babies might be something you might enjoy. The End Records have some insane metal bands from all weird genres, progressive, experimental, avant-garde, name it. Again, Mastodon would probably be a bit like CoC and Tool, although heavier and a bit less progressive. Some avant-garde stuff you might enjoy could be Cult of Luna or Isis.
For Type O Negative, check out Tiamat. Although Tiamat is more gothic rock style lately, some older albums are more gothic/doom style. You'd probably want to check out Wildhoney or Prey. You'd probably like some Tiamat records like Judas Christ and A deeper Kind of Slumber if you like Monster Magnet. Oh, and The Gathering, for sure, Mandylion, if_then_else and How to Measure a Planet.
Top of my head, some labels:
Peaceville = Doom Metal.
Napalm Records = Lots of death metal, some gothic.
The End Records = All kind of progressive, weird, avant-garde stuff.
SPV = Lots of gothic, power and symphonic metal.
Nuclear Blast: Lots of more "popular" stuff like Therion, Nightwish and Opeth.
Roadrunner: Another "popular" label. Some neat bands, pretty much all metal genres.
What about an SCO party? You can use facebook, upcoming.org and all the web 2.0 platforms to plan a party near you. Lots of people will be eager to join. Try it now. This was nearly a small part of the Linux vs Microsoft war. The patent battles are still coming. Unfortunately, this is an insignificant victory.
(BTW, that's one of the reasons drivers need to be signed to run on Windows Vista x64.) If by that you mean DRM, then yes. The reason drivers need to be signed is to prevent "theft", to prevent the DRM from breaking.
(1) Food quality regulation sucks. Too much sugar, too much salt, too much fat. Europe has much more food regulation, the Food Industry in the US has pretty much "carte blanche", free to do whatever they want.
(2) The entire society is extremely reliant on cars. Go to Europe and watch the myriad of bike lanes, people walking or biking to work. In quite a few cities, downtown is closed to cars, only emergency cars and public transportation is allowed. Western society has become very sedentary, normal evolution from factory work to cubicule work. However, Europeans walking and biking to work, burns calories vs the people in the US who drive cars.
(3) Food portions. I was shocked when I traveled to Florida at the gigantic "normal" portions they serve in restaurants. I could never finish a plate. Few months ago I watched a documentary about Huston, apparently the fattest state in the US. Something like 36% of the people are overweight. It's crazy. People seem to have lost all self control.
(4) Education. Yes, mod me down. In a society that 92% of the people believe in God, they will shun science because science is continually questioned by religion. They won't read enough scientific papers, articles, books, whatever to know that some foods are bad for you, some good. They have deep mistrust for science. People who don't read scientific papers don't realize how bad salt is, how bad fat is, how good omega-3 is, how good broccolis or cranberries are and so on. They keep eating very bad food because they don't know better.
(5) Fast food culture. I want it now, fast. Downside of it: people become lazy, they want easy solutions and easy answers. Right now you have a pill for pretty much everything. Foot ache? Take FooticideX! Your wingwang is not flacid enough? FlacidiX! People expect this magic pill that will solve all their problems. People rather have gastric bypass surgery and take pills than do 30-45 min exercise each day.
IIS has something like 5-6 places to configure for security for a full blown out of process COM supporting ASP application.
.htaccess and various directory directives along with an application server configuration? Windows security is way more granular than *nix, it can be scary but IIS is not hard to modify security settings. People just need to understand the interactions between the different parts of the application, IIS ==> Worker process ==> Com/DCOM object ==> file system. Once you got those interactions down, modifying IIS security becomes a joke.
HTTPSSL service - not even sure if it's possible to run in under different credentials.
Inetinfo.exe - IIS itself.
W3wp.exe - Worker processes that run the application pools.
In process COM objects - the user running the w3wp.exe process needs read and execute rights on this folder or DLL file (if you want to be more granular).
Out of process COM objects or DCOM - service security and DCOM object execution priviledges.
And finally put the user running the worker processes into the IIS_WPG group (the only "special" group).
You are done!
How is that different from apache that needs chroot,
Also, IIS comes with pretty paranoid security settings out of the box so very little hardening is required.
We have been sending out signals, albeit involuntarily, using Radio and TV.
Also, I don't think we need to be super advanced super smart to detect the existence of a much more advanced civilization. Our science IMO has been developed logically, I don't see anything wrong with it (minus string theory). It's all based on observation. We can measure the impact of gravity of a planet on it's own star, I am sure we could pick up a Dyson Sphere.
As for the paradox, where are the Dyson Spheres? Matrioshka Brains? According to TFA, scientists have estimated that it would take a species about 1 to 100 million years to colonize the galaxy. Where are they?
According to these scientists, our galaxy has been ready for intelligent life for the last 4.5 billion years, so during that, 4500 species could have colonized the entire galaxy. Every species will realize that their own sun has a limited life time, all it takes is one to say, ok, let's get the fudge out of this solar system. All it takes is one alien species to come in contact with us, one to send probes, just one. That's why the Fermi Paradox is so powerful.
Our galaxy is very old, our sun is something like 4th generation star, yet there is no sign of intelligent life.
I have not met a computer illiterate person who gives a shit about copyrights. For many, they don't even think it's illegal to download. After all, plenty of ISP ads are along the line: download music and movies at blazing speeds!
I really hope Slashdot doesn't become half like Digg, not even 0.00001% of Digg.
I *REALLY* hope they'll use WoW as a training camp. It's the only way we'll win this "War on Terror". The terrorists will be confused by very different laws of physics in the real world.
... Terrorist sees an airplane, jumps on a bird thinking it has the same abilities as a netherdrake in WoW and tries to fly to intercept plane and make it crash with his Fireball rank XII spell. Or better, they'll work in gold farming sweatshops trying to "subvert" the "evil" western economies!
I can picture it already
(1) Don't use your PC logged in as administrator unless updating hardware/OS. Run as command prompt or MMC works great too, and don't even have to log off or switch user.
(2) Patch it to the max.
(3) Disable every service you can. I run Windows 2003 with about 8 or so services on, default install: 25+ services.
(4) Stop using IE for other than Windows Updates. Firefox + AdBlock Plus + NoScript = awesomesauce.
(5) Stop clicking on every "OMGZ! CLICK ME AND WIN!!!!! OMG111!!!" popup.
(6) Stop downloading videos called something like "Pr0nMovieHotBabe.exe". If you really MUST download those movies, use a VM to test them.
(7) Most importantly, common sense. Oh and, did I mention never use administrator unless you have to configure hardware or update OS?
(8) ?????
(9) Profit!
I never understood why people look at OS boot times. Unless it's 10+ minutes, what does it matter if it's 1:30 or 2:15 boot time. I usually get to work, turn on my PC, go get a juice, when I am back, PC is already on. When I get home, I turn on my PC, go change, get back to my PC, it's already on, sometimes even screen saver kicked in. Since I don't reboot my PC every 2 min, I don't give a damn if it takes an extra 20 seconds to boot.
Do people really reboot PCs 100+ times a day so that saving 15-20 seconds on boot is really THAT important?
This is a good starter.
What I am wondering about these cases is how the hell the family can afford to pay for all this food. I saw the same show last night, and they mentioned that the cost of one day worth of food is around 300$. 300 smackers, Jeebus, how are people getting money for all this food?
It's what you choose to do. Period.
If your metabolism slows down, eat less, exercise more - as long as your body isn't so badly out of shape that taking 3 steps will kill you. There was this show on TLC about people with weight problems. One woman was working out crazy with help of trainers and doctors, eating extremely well, as little calories as was possible yet she was unable to lose any weight. In fact, sometimes she even gained a few pounds. If I recall correctly, it was some thyroid problem that cut back heavily on some hormone production and this caused her body to "believe" she was constantly starving so her metabolism slowed down to a crawl.
But what makes you think Windows is less stable and less secure than *Nix or OSX? Other than people and their dogs running Windows as administrators (that's more an education problem vs Windows security), Windows is not less secure than *Nix or OSX. In fact, things like file system security is better than *nix, IMO. Windows ACLs just own, it's a breeze to use them versus the obscure *Nix FS security.
And for stability? The only time my Windows box crashed was because of piece of shit ATI drivers. People need to get away from the Windows 9x crashing every 3 minutes mentality. XP is rock solid (didn't drive Vista enough to tell on it's stability). I am currently running a VWare GSX server on Windows 2003, the only time I reboot is to install OS patches. Crashes so far: zero, nada, zilch. Been running it for 7+ months. Hardware: Do it your own el-cheapo components.
The vast majority of Windows crashes are due to defective hardware and/or drivers. Ever installed an unstable driver on Linux? Ever had a hardware failure on OSX?
While C++, assembly and C might no longer be "cool", it definitely teaches people how to write optimal code, how to debug efficiently, understand a wide variety of computing concepts.
The same college today is too busy teaching C# and Java. While those languages are nice and all, not teaching low level C, C++ and assembly IMO leads to sloppy coders, people who don't understand the byte code generated, people who don't mind wasting system resources because hey
I was nearly crucified when I suggested my boss to recode a piece of an application in C so it scales better than the current shitty VB COM version. He just looked through me and said: add another server! Lot of today's code is written by people who don't even understand how the code is getting executed.
The same thing will happen with our parents and most people. The solution is buying products that are open and DRM free in the first place. I don't think it happens to our parents and friends. My friends and family know I am tech savvy. They always ask me for advice about buying different things, using software and whatnot. The result is almost 100% Firefox usage, my mother and sister are on Ubuntu, they use Google docs with Open Office, my friends avoid DRM ridden hardware or software. I did show my sister how to rip CDs in mp3, how to burn CDs, even how to download stuff she wants. She is happy with some random hardware mp3 player without any Apple or MS DRM.
We the tech savvy can influence our friends and family and educate them about the wrongs of DRM and lock ins. And it works (well, it worked for me!).
In my defense, the last two or three summers I have given Linux (Ubuntu) a go. I still hit hardware (ATI, Creative's X-Fi) and software (iTunes + iPod) that can't be easily replicated or adjusted to a novice Linux user.
It's gotten better though. Well, if you want Audigy on Vista, please pay 10$. Other than that, yes ATI drivers need a boost. AMD promised to do much better for Linux, we'll see how that pans out. Also, since feisty, installing proprietary drivers is 2 mouse clicks away. NVidia drivers work great by the way.
Oh yah and Amarok owns iTunes. Also, if you really want iTunes, there is always VMWare player.
This doesn't mean, Linux is ready for mainstream on desktop, but flat out dismissing it because it doesn't have iTunes and iPod support (it has better) it's just shortsighted IMO.
From the top of my head, some recent albums (2006/2007) that are great entirely not just one song:
Loreena McKennit - An Ancient Muse
Agalloch - Ashes Against the Grain
Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos
Katatonia - The Great Cold Distance
Liva - De Insulis
Virgin Black - Requiem Mezzo Forte
Mastodon - Blood Mountain
Iron Maiden - A Matter of Life and Death
Probably others I forgot. Lot of great records from indie/unknown/obscure bands, ya know, the real musicians. Of course, if people are looking for the MAFIAA to bring them quality music, they will be disappointed. Not many quality bands left on main labels.
I use an MSI NVidia 7600 GS, bonus: passive heatsink, zero noise. Back when I played WoW, it ran it at 1280 x 1024 with max settings, max anti aliasing and all bells and whistles at 30+ FPS (40 man raids and all). In fact I was able to two box on it no problems with both WoW clients running at over 20+ FPS. The card has a DVI and standard VGA port, I plugged both monitors on it, if I recall correctly, it comes with a VGA to DVI converter so you can even plug two older monitors on it. There should be a DX10 version of that card out (8500 GS or something). Price range is around 130$, worth every penny.
I moved my mother's stuff over to Ubuntu, she has my old Radeon 9600 Pro, the proprietary driver installs just as easy as NVidia, however, the control panel sucks (more like it's worthless) and I wasn't able to get Beryl nor Compiz running (I am not a Linux expert) so I gave up on those eye candy. Also, I have no idea how multi monitoring works on ATI cards.
There are however some new ATI drivers out, that came out in the last few weeks with a much better control panel (finally). That might allow you to get your rig going on Ubuntu without buying new video cards.
I am using 2 x 19 inch monitors with Kubuntu, both plugged into the same NVidia 7600 GS card.
Install Kubuntu.
Install restricted driver manager. (skip this step on Ubuntu)
Click on checkbox to enable NVidia driver.
Reboot.
Configure multiple monitors.
Enjoy a nice 2560 x 1024 double monitor setup!
I would personally avoid any ATI cards like the black plague, until good drivers come out. The NVidia control panel compared to the joke that is the ATI panel was more than enough to convince me.