I work maybe a block from a CompUSA and once in a while I go in there to buy something that I need right now and can't buy elsewhere (like dual layer DVD-Rs), but I never go there to have discussions with the employees. Why the hell would I do that?
I think you are missing the point. No one is down at their local big box trying to "show off their intelligence". The employees at those places are there to answer questions and help the customers find what they need. Even "technical" people ask questions sometimes and it isn't out of the ordinary to have a discussion with a salesman or customer (depending on which side of the fence you are on). It's called friendliness. I know a lot of geeks lack social skills but not all of us do.
That should be "so much smarter than I", Mr. Brilliant.
-- one of those assholes
I guess you have never heard of the term "colloquialism". By the way I prefer to call you "Mr. Grammar Nazi", or "Mr. Asshole", but that's just my preference.
Personally I defected from gentoo to Ubuntu simply because Ubuntu made it easy to play on the bleeding edge, which is where the interesting things happen. (It's also where you get cut...)
Not to be an annoying Gentoo user but it's not very hard to live on the bleeding edge in Gentoo. Two things come to mind...~x86 and overlays. Even x86 is pretty new. I'm using a mix of all three. My default is x86 but I have a few overlays with svn builds and such and a pretty decent sized list in/etc/portage/package.keywords and/etc/portage/package.unmask. I've been running my system like this for years without borking it badly enough to have to reinstall.
I admit that I've had more intelligent sales staff at the big box store than at CompUSA.
That statement scares me.
Believe it or not not all big box sales people are idiots. Some of them are actually computer geeks in college getting their computer science degrees, or programmers that want a part time job. I think the stereotype of the idiot salesmen is a huge over-generalization. In fact I worked retail while I was in college and I often ran into assholes who thought they were so much smarter than me because they had "real" tech jobs, not knowing that I was just paying my way to a computer science degree. I've found that a lot of customers who claimed to be techies were actually not that intelligent at all. So it works both ways. You have some extremely intelligent sales people and some clueless ones. It's just as common in the tech world. Some of my colleagues are on the same intellectual level as the generalized sales people you speak of.
While that's very true, what if the "research" happens to be correct? Or at least fairly positive? Agreed, most research studies have uncertainty to them (correlation vs. causation to name only one), but even if Microsoft paid for X research, do you really think, say, that a group of GNU-affiliated University Professors would actually have an unbiased view when comparing, say, Open Office to Microsoft Office? Even though there is no money changing hands?
The problem isn't the outcome or who funded the research as much as it is about disclosure. It is perfectly ok to do your own studies and publish the favorable results but you have to disclose that you funded the study. Otherwise it is just dishonest. Even if Microsoft didn't specifically ask for favorable results the researchers have a financial incentive to produce good results for Microsoft so they can get paid again when Microsoft wants another study done.
Spoken like a true American (I'll assume you're not from the USSR since the US basically ended their world around 10 years ago). Do you honestly believe we'd miss you, McDonald's, lawyers out of control, the Iraq war and all that other stuff???
The USSR officially collapsed 16 years ago, not 10. In reality the USSR was done long before that. I guess this true American is a little keener on history than some.
....not for USA sales,not if you are talking joe sixpack home desktops, that's just asking for trouble and annoyed customers. And the reason is very simple-no *legal* popular consumer entertainment media playback, which is right up there with what folks want to do with their computers, listen to music, watch some vids. AFAIK, of the major distros, linspire/freespire is the only ones to have or offer legal DVD, MP3, windows media, etc playback, because they have gone ahead and legally licensed, paid the fees, etc. The other ones, including ubuntu, all have the wink wink nudge nudge "do it this way" and send you off to offshore servers for downloads. Mostly right now this is ignored, but if Dell starts shipping linux pre installed and it becomes an issue because of the distro picked, those various entities involved with those things would make a stink about this downloading and installing illegal "features".
This is a total non-issue. Dell could buy licenses from fluendo and easily install the needed codecs onto each ubuntu machine.
Is it that unreasonable to want to be able to windowshade windows, and raise/lower them? Slightly-more-powerful-than-MS-Windows window managers are the main reason a Linux environment is more productive for me than a Windows one. Gnome is great if you're an idiot, but if you want to do anything even slightly beyond what the idiots want, you're horribly restricted.
You're the idiot. I have no problem configuring GNOME. There is this common mis-perception that GNOME is not configurable just because the options are stored in gconf, an interface that should be easy for power users to manipulate, but hidden from normal users. My GNOME interface shades windows when double-clicked and keystrokes raise and lower windows on command. I do think the sloppy focus needs a little work though. I prefer windowmaker's implementation.
Typical "missing the point" blather. Answer truthfully - would you feel safer walking down the street at night in a Black ghetto or a lily-White suburb (if there are any left)? Oops! your a racist!!!
First of all that has nothing to do with what I am talking about, it isn't racism to be nervous in a ghetto. If you are unfamiliar with your surroundings you are going to be nervous. Secondly, if you must know, I lived in a "black ghetto" for 3 years and I walked to and from work everyday for two of those years. The only thing that made me nervous was the ridiculous concentration of police officers in my area. I was never mugged, beaten, or even threatened, nor did I feel threatened in any way. Not everyone is as racist as you are.
Now STFU about murder vs. manslaughter and the poor black victim bullshit. Blaming whites on black crime is not going to help blacks - it is only creating more animosity.
Racism rearing its ugly head again. This isn't about black crime vs white crime. This is about poverty and racism and it is clear by statements like yours that it is still a real problem. We don't need to "help blacks". We need to fix the racial and class divisions in this country if we expect to overcome violence and crime. Try looking for the real problems for once, not the symptoms.
It would appear that the death row in Texas fairly accurately reflects national murder trends, with blacks grossly overrepresenting themselves by commission of the crime.
Typical racist blather. You fail to take into account convictions vs actual crime committed, sentencing (death row inmate numbers are not a good indicator of murder rates as the death penalty is applied rather arbitrarily), and poverty as a factor indirectly related to race and representation.
Tangent: There are roughly six times as many whites in the US as there are blacks. According to the FBI statistics, they split the murder statistics equally...making a black person six times more likely to commit murder than a white person. Of course, some 85+% of their victims are black; as a white man, I'm six times more likely to be killed by a white person.
You are making the same mistake again. Those statistics represent convictions. If someone pleas down to manslaughter it is not counted as murder. It is not at all an accurate representation of murder as a crime, only as a conviction.
And the climate scientists who created this report aren't idealogically motivated?
That's a hefty charge to be leveling against climatologists without any proof.
...scientists who respond to the $10,000 bounty may or may not be motivated
The point is that you are giving so called scientists a financial motivation for making one conclusion over another. This is nothing like your OSS bounty comparison.
If ExonMobile itself wants to offer bounties for this research I really don't care.
I don't either but that is not what ExxonMobil is doing. They are not offering bounties for research, they are offering bounties for specific conclusions.
I don't believe it. If it runs Windows 2000 it runs KDE. I'm telling this from a PIII 860MHz with 256MB RAM that runs KDE 3.5.5 full bells&whistles (from Debian Etch) just smoothly. And I've run it decently on a K6-II too.
I don't know about that. I've had Windows 2000 running on a Pentium with 64 MB of RAM. KDE is not going to run on that.
I'm looking into Spain or New Zealand. I've been to Spain and I loved it. Never been to New Zealand but it looks amazing. I was on the verge of spending an extended time there and researched it a lot but eventually those plans fell through.
Geez, why can't they make an eco-friendly car 'look' nice and exotic? Make it look sleek and sporty. Can't they make it look nice like a new mustang, a vette, porsche...or hell, stick it in the frame of a new miata....
The answer you're looking for is "none - no chance whatsoever". And for good reason.
What is that good reason? It's not apparent from your post and in fact your assumption that a driver for a rare piece of hardware wouldn't be included is false. It's been done before and kernel maintainers have no problems with including drivers as long as they are free (GPL), regardless of the device's popularity.
Okay, bare with me, I'm thinking about this. My bicycle has a MTBF which isn't related to its lifetime - it breaks and I repair it, until at some point it breaks really badly and I replace it. But if my hard drive dies, it's dead, end of story - in other words I only care about the first failure. The 'infant mortality' stage makes sense, but let's assume that is covered by the guarantee (I know, my data's gone, but I'm bound to have backups;-) Once we've reached the 'low failure rate' stage, isn't the mean time-to-first-failure related to the MTBF?
I don't think you understand. MTBF doesn't have anything to do with multiple failures when talking about hard drives. It really just means that if you have an MTBF of 100 hours and you have 100 drives, on average one drive will die per hour. MTBF is the inverse of failure rate. MTBF, when describing hard drives, says nothing about shock, heat, or electrical damage outside of the hdd itself. So basically what MTBF tells you about the reliability of a specific drive is NOTHING.
Actually, one local court in Essex stated that it didn't have maritime jurisdiction, and the owners of Sealand managed to convince a lot of people that this meant that all courts in the UK agree that they have no jurisdiction over Sealand.
When Germany had grievances with Sealand they went to the UK government to resolve the issues but the UK government cited their previous rulings and refused to do anything about it on the grounds that it was not under the jurisdiction of the UK. This seems to support the notion that the UK government is at least in agreement with itself that Sealand is not under the jurisdiction of the UK.
I agree. In fact I would rather shoot myself than attempt to explain anything about computers to retirees. I've done it before and it's the most frustrating thing in the world. Most people that age don't even understand the concept of a computer, never mind how to actually operate one.
I have. They are thin, but certainly nowhere near paper thin. They are decidely rigid.
They most certainly are paper thin. Recently I had to destroy a hard drive for a friend and when I opened the hard drive up I shattered the platter into a million pieces by just pressing on it with my finger.
Flash chips can handle certain types of physical abuse better than hard drives, while hard drives can handle others.
Like what? Your previous examples were easily countered by my experience.
In any case, there's a reason they make the cases for hard drives extremely strong... It won't fall apart as your flash drive did, and should withstand a dip in the lake without error.
I highly doubt that. The only hard drive that I ever attempted to recover after water damage (flood) was completely toast.
And, HDDs have it all over flash when it comes to electronic abuse.
Never. You don't give one good example. All of my examples are from experience.
I do. The system I'm typing on has an Enermax PSU in it. Still, I don't expect it to last even 2 years. I don't even have a remotely power hungry system...
Well that's your problem. Enermax PSU's aren't as great as you think they are.
Platters really aren't thin. A piece of aluminum as think as most (desktop) hard disk platters would be strong enough to make into a countertop.
You obviously have never opened up a notebook hard drive. The platters are paper thin and extremely delicate.
It should be quite surprising, since there is absolutely no way a speck of dust can get inside a hard drive in the first place (unless you have a strange habbit of opening functioning units). The precision of solid-state computer chips means they're more susceptible to a spec of dust than a hard drive would be.
I think you're over estimating the quality of mass produced hard drives and underestimating the durability of solid-state computer chips. My flash drive has gone swimming in a lake and still works. In fact the case has since fallen apart and the chips are bare and it still works. That kind of treatment would kill a hard drive pretty quickly.
Either you are buying absolutely top-notch parts for the rest of the system, and dirt cheap hard drives, or your (desktop) case keeps the hard drives in a tiny enclosed space with no airflow. Cheap hard drive caddies and shock-mounted hard drives have that problem, but you very rarely see it in a normal system.
I lose many power supplies before the first hard drive fails. I lose many more motherboards than hard drives (yes, name-brands with 2+ year warranties like Asus, MSI, etc).
You must buy really crappy power supplies. Buy something a little more reliable like a PC Power and Cooling power supply. It's not surprising that hard drives fail so often. They consist of thin platters spinning at very high rpm, vulnerable to even one speck of dust. Personally I don't have an issue with either power supplies or hard drives because I generally buy quality parts. OEM machines are a different story and they are much more common than built computers. PC manufacturers usually skimp on both the power supplies and the hard drives. Both fail often in OEM PCs. A few years ago you couldn't get a Gateway that wouldn't have a hard drive failure within the first year.
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I think you are missing the point. No one is down at their local big box trying to "show off their intelligence". The employees at those places are there to answer questions and help the customers find what they need. Even "technical" people ask questions sometimes and it isn't out of the ordinary to have a discussion with a salesman or customer (depending on which side of the fence you are on). It's called friendliness. I know a lot of geeks lack social skills but not all of us do.
I guess you have never heard of the term "colloquialism". By the way I prefer to call you "Mr. Grammar Nazi", or "Mr. Asshole", but that's just my preference.
Not to be an annoying Gentoo user but it's not very hard to live on the bleeding edge in Gentoo. Two things come to mind...~x86 and overlays. Even x86 is pretty new. I'm using a mix of all three. My default is x86 but I have a few overlays with svn builds and such and a pretty decent sized list in /etc/portage/package.keywords and /etc/portage/package.unmask. I've been running my system like this for years without borking it badly enough to have to reinstall.
Believe it or not not all big box sales people are idiots. Some of them are actually computer geeks in college getting their computer science degrees, or programmers that want a part time job. I think the stereotype of the idiot salesmen is a huge over-generalization. In fact I worked retail while I was in college and I often ran into assholes who thought they were so much smarter than me because they had "real" tech jobs, not knowing that I was just paying my way to a computer science degree. I've found that a lot of customers who claimed to be techies were actually not that intelligent at all. So it works both ways. You have some extremely intelligent sales people and some clueless ones. It's just as common in the tech world. Some of my colleagues are on the same intellectual level as the generalized sales people you speak of.
The problem isn't the outcome or who funded the research as much as it is about disclosure. It is perfectly ok to do your own studies and publish the favorable results but you have to disclose that you funded the study. Otherwise it is just dishonest. Even if Microsoft didn't specifically ask for favorable results the researchers have a financial incentive to produce good results for Microsoft so they can get paid again when Microsoft wants another study done.
The USSR officially collapsed 16 years ago, not 10. In reality the USSR was done long before that. I guess this true American is a little keener on history than some.
This is a total non-issue. Dell could buy licenses from fluendo and easily install the needed codecs onto each ubuntu machine.
You're the idiot. I have no problem configuring GNOME. There is this common mis-perception that GNOME is not configurable just because the options are stored in gconf, an interface that should be easy for power users to manipulate, but hidden from normal users. My GNOME interface shades windows when double-clicked and keystrokes raise and lower windows on command. I do think the sloppy focus needs a little work though. I prefer windowmaker's implementation.
First of all that has nothing to do with what I am talking about, it isn't racism to be nervous in a ghetto. If you are unfamiliar with your surroundings you are going to be nervous. Secondly, if you must know, I lived in a "black ghetto" for 3 years and I walked to and from work everyday for two of those years. The only thing that made me nervous was the ridiculous concentration of police officers in my area. I was never mugged, beaten, or even threatened, nor did I feel threatened in any way. Not everyone is as racist as you are.
Racism rearing its ugly head again. This isn't about black crime vs white crime. This is about poverty and racism and it is clear by statements like yours that it is still a real problem. We don't need to "help blacks". We need to fix the racial and class divisions in this country if we expect to overcome violence and crime. Try looking for the real problems for once, not the symptoms.
Typical racist blather. You fail to take into account convictions vs actual crime committed, sentencing (death row inmate numbers are not a good indicator of murder rates as the death penalty is applied rather arbitrarily), and poverty as a factor indirectly related to race and representation.
You are making the same mistake again. Those statistics represent convictions. If someone pleas down to manslaughter it is not counted as murder. It is not at all an accurate representation of murder as a crime, only as a conviction.
And the climate scientists who created this report aren't idealogically motivated?
That's a hefty charge to be leveling against climatologists without any proof.
The point is that you are giving so called scientists a financial motivation for making one conclusion over another. This is nothing like your OSS bounty comparison.
If ExonMobile itself wants to offer bounties for this research I really don't care.
I don't either but that is not what ExxonMobil is doing. They are not offering bounties for research, they are offering bounties for specific conclusions.
I don't believe it. If it runs Windows 2000 it runs KDE. I'm telling this from a PIII 860MHz with 256MB RAM that runs KDE 3.5.5 full bells&whistles (from Debian Etch) just smoothly. And I've run it decently on a K6-II too.
I don't know about that. I've had Windows 2000 running on a Pentium with 64 MB of RAM. KDE is not going to run on that.
I'm looking into Spain or New Zealand. I've been to Spain and I loved it. Never been to New Zealand but it looks amazing. I was on the verge of spending an extended time there and researched it a lot but eventually those plans fell through.
Geez, why can't they make an eco-friendly car 'look' nice and exotic? Make it look sleek and sporty. Can't they make it look nice like a new mustang, a vette, porsche...or hell, stick it in the frame of a new miata....
I think this is what you are looking for.
The answer you're looking for is "none - no chance whatsoever". And for good reason.
What is that good reason? It's not apparent from your post and in fact your assumption that a driver for a rare piece of hardware wouldn't be included is false. It's been done before and kernel maintainers have no problems with including drivers as long as they are free (GPL), regardless of the device's popularity.
I don't think you understand. MTBF doesn't have anything to do with multiple failures when talking about hard drives. It really just means that if you have an MTBF of 100 hours and you have 100 drives, on average one drive will die per hour. MTBF is the inverse of failure rate. MTBF, when describing hard drives, says nothing about shock, heat, or electrical damage outside of the hdd itself. So basically what MTBF tells you about the reliability of a specific drive is NOTHING.
When Germany had grievances with Sealand they went to the UK government to resolve the issues but the UK government cited their previous rulings and refused to do anything about it on the grounds that it was not under the jurisdiction of the UK. This seems to support the notion that the UK government is at least in agreement with itself that Sealand is not under the jurisdiction of the UK.
I'm not talking about computer concepts as in computer science. I'm talking about basic concepts like windows, menus, the internet, etc.
I agree. In fact I would rather shoot myself than attempt to explain anything about computers to retirees. I've done it before and it's the most frustrating thing in the world. Most people that age don't even understand the concept of a computer, never mind how to actually operate one.
Linux is more like Unix than BSD. BSD is more like..well..BSD. The two separated quite some time ago and Linux is much more like Unix of old than BSD.
They most certainly are paper thin. Recently I had to destroy a hard drive for a friend and when I opened the hard drive up I shattered the platter into a million pieces by just pressing on it with my finger.
Like what? Your previous examples were easily countered by my experience.
I highly doubt that. The only hard drive that I ever attempted to recover after water damage (flood) was completely toast.
Never. You don't give one good example. All of my examples are from experience.
Well that's your problem. Enermax PSU's aren't as great as you think they are.
You obviously have never opened up a notebook hard drive. The platters are paper thin and extremely delicate.
I think you're over estimating the quality of mass produced hard drives and underestimating the durability of solid-state computer chips. My flash drive has gone swimming in a lake and still works. In fact the case has since fallen apart and the chips are bare and it still works. That kind of treatment would kill a hard drive pretty quickly.
These laptops can be had with raid...
That's not the point. Show me something thin and light with a raid setup. Not everyone wants to lug around a 17 inch widescreen notebook.
Frankly, hard drives fail so rarely that it's not really a problem in my opinion.
Hard drives fail all the time. They fail more than any other part on a computer. They are unreliable garbage for the most part.
If you are so worried about reliability, for $500 you can RAID-mirror two 200GB drives in a notebook and have 6x more storage than this flash drive.
That really isn't possible with a notebook computer now is it?