"And what's the big deal about it being a 2 lane highway?"
Because I'm paying for it, that's the big deal! Having to pay $15 makes all the difference: if I ordered a $15 pizza and it was cold I'd bitch, but if it was free I wouldn't mind. Many other states have the same 2 lane highway crossing them and I don't mind, but if I have to pay I want a few more lanes.
Last time I crossed New York I went 2 miles in 30 minutes at one point because they were doing road construction. Traffic is never fun, but having to pay to sit in traffic makes it even worst.
"Capacities will be 2 and 4GB -- meaning users could store some 400 and 800 songs, respectively."
Perhaps it's just a misprint, but at the ~1 meg per minute that mp3s are (and nearly every other popular compressed music format) that's 2000 minutes on 2gig, or nearly 600 songs averaging 3m 20s a song. 400 songs would average 5 minutes per song, which seems a bit long for the average song.
Example: a recent complilation CD I created of modern hip-hop & rock music had 20 songs in 78 minutes, or 3.9 minutes per song.
Course using the same numbers (3m 20s per song) the 4gig unit would hold 1200 songs, not 800 as reported.
"It costs more to drive on the NYS Thruway than it does for the MS Turnpike."
I'll second that. It costs over $15 in tolls alone to drive the ~400 miles across NY state. $15 for a tiny two-lane road!! Not to mention the high gas prices along the way.
My boss watching me and knowing what I'm doing while I'm on the job?!? Sounds like a serious privacy issue to me, god forbid my boss make sure I'm doing my job!
Boss: what the hell? why are all the plows parked at the strip club?
Driver: we're getting snowjobs
" '...it's great for people that don't know what they're doing... '
That is a rather large market share"
I'm sorry, I should have said "it's great for people that don't know what they're doing and need/desire a file server."
How many AOL users do you know with Unix file servers, or any Unix machines for that matter, or even know what Unix is? I see your market share dwindling...
"The DVD format was the most quickly adopted new media format ever."
"Adopted" is up to dispute. How do you determine "adopted"? I think if you'd do your homework there's still more people with VCRs than DVD players, at least in the US, so I believe the DVD still hasn't been fully adopted in the US yet, especially considering it's just as easy to find a new movie on VHS as it is on DVD.
One could even argue CDs haven't been fully adopted yet: new tape players are still easy to find anywhere CD players are sold, and new music on tapes is still readily available. I think your belief that CDs were fully adopted in the early 90s is premature.
"That's around 15 years from invention to full adoption. It took DVD's something like 4 years to do that."
DVDs were actually invented in 1993, but at the time it was just video burnt on to a double-density CD. In 94, Philips and Sony announced a proposal for a high density disc called MMCD, which went on to become the DVD we know today.
So, 10 years later and DVD haven't come anywhere near killing VHS.
In a move to fight anything promoted by the West, China has revealed plans to create it's own air.
"Western air is just too... western" says Director of Foreign Affairs Kim Woo. "Chinese air should have a more traditional feeling to it."
Kim Woo continues "China has more people any any other country, we can do whatever we want without taking orders from Western influence, including making Chinese air."
"I like the idea," said one Chinese citizen, "I live in China, so I should breath Chinese air, right?"
Although no details have been revealed about the distribution system of the new Chinese air, inside sources say it will be bottled like water and priced at roughly $1 USD per quart. Bottling is likely to take place in the US.
" It's just a matter of having the right attitude to cut though the "I don't care about my job" mentally that exists at these places. "
just remember, the "I don't care about my job" mentally is taught to them. They come in as average IT folks and are taught to ignore and avoid helping customers, and if they do and caught they're fired, or at least reprimanded.
Here's a story about that: I once had a customer call complaining about pop-ups even then they weren't surfing and blamed it on our software and threatened to cancel. I assured them it's not our software (although I knew it might be) and helped them find pop-up stopper and a program that'd remove spyware. A manager walked by and noticed what I was doing and asked what I was doing. I explained I was helping a customer with problems with pop-ups. I was told it wasn't our problem and the customer would have to figure it out themselves. I told the customer I could no longer help them with the issue. The customer was shocked, not happy and hung up. I was then reprimanded for even answering a question like that.
When you're told daily "screw the customer" how much are you going to care about your job?
"Regardless of supported or not, I will call them"
Not sure how easy it'd be in England to sue over this since that's where the incident took place, but here in the US I imagine a lawsuit would soon follow, and the fact that everything's online would make evidence oh-so-easy, and with the recent school shooting in the US I don't think a judge would be too nice to the bullies. Police might be interested too.
I enjoy hacking systems as much as the next guy, but when I can get something much better for much less and it's more reliable (no bubble wrap), I don't see the point.
So please, someone explain why the Qube is so great compared to Mini-ITX systems because I fail to see the advantages.
blaming my problems on my "non-standard OS" and the VPN that "We don't support" (contrary to every published piece of literature they have -- AND their own webpage) is a piss poor excuse for a simple network outage.
If you're using anything not supported don't expect to call support and ask them anything, even if it is just a simple "is the network down?" question. Why? They could lose their jobs for helping you.
You'd be shocked the number of people I had to tell "sorry, we don't support 64megs" and end the conversation right there, even though I knew I could get their DSL up and running in 5 minutes. Actually, the number is almost the same as the number of people who called with VPN and I told them the same thing. When I'd argue with management over blowing off customers with BS reasons I was basically told "like it or leave".
You might be saying "then I'll take my business elsewhere!" and SBC would say "we don't care". I was just one of 600 tech employees at the smallest of ~5 service centers in the US. Unless you're Microsoft they'll never notice you're gone.
After reading the job posting and some of the posts on here that basically say "be happy with that!" I'm starting to wonder if IT is really all it's cut out to be?
The article affects me directly: after struggling for far too long I'm a year away from finishing my CS, but money has become tight and I'm wondering should I work my a$$ off at two jobs to afford to finish school, or perhaps start looking in another direction? I've had friends who went to tech school to become electricians and plumbers and within a year of starting school they were making $20/hr USD. Now they're making $40+/hr thanks to Unions while I'm barely making $10/hr 3 years into a CS degree with 5x more loan debt, and it doesn't sound like it's going to get much better after I graduate judging.
Do I (and thousands of other IT students) keep pouring money into the IT education money pit, or suck up our losses and head in another direction?
Perhaps Slashdot should be "News for minimum-wage making Nerds" and a new article category should be offered: "stuff you can't afford until it's hopelessly obsolete"
"These are the exact same arguments I heard growing up when beating your kids became child abuse. However will we discipline little Johnny if we can't give him a good whuppin? Well, sometimes abuse isn't just physical."
beating your kids != knowing where your kids are
In a day and age where kids are walking into schools and killing classmates I don't think that allowing parents to know where their kids are at all times is too much to ask.
"Me: Actually yes, according to your sales people, you _do_ support VPNs"
I use to do support for a major competing DSL provider and we'd get all kinds of stories that sales told customers. Trust me when I say that sales will promise whatever you want to get the sale. Why? They get commission whether they lied to you or not, and if it's easier to make a sale by lying then they'll lie to customers all day long.
I can't say it enough: Casper XP is, by far, the best drive imaging software I've ever used for Windows XP.
I've cloned drives on one PC, brought it to another and it works great. Clones within XP, so no restarting. The new version even allows scheduling, so I can now clone XP to a spare drive on a nightly basis. Drive to drive clone speeds are fast, about 30gigs per hour.
he's pretty frustrated that the article was released without his editing, it wasn't ready yet
It was listed on the main site the day before it was slashdotted. If he doesn't want the world to see his articles before he edits them then perhaps he shouldn't post them on the main page?
I know this has been said already, but the author is clearly biased towards 3dfx.
The Nvidia TNT is completely left out, which is a shock considering the TNT is the card that lead to the downfall of 3dfx. It was the first card that beat the Voodoo2's 3D performance and offered 2D in one card: Pentium 2 400mhz - Quake 2 @ 800x600 TNT2 = 40fps Voodoo2 = 37fps
And the TNT was priced lower than a single Voodoo2, easily making it the best bang for the buck. How good was it really? Tom said it best: "This article shall answer the question if NVIDIA's RIVA TNT will be able to replace Voodoo2 and if it's indeed better than Banshee.... To already answer this question for my part, yes, I am using TNT and there are no 3Dfx cards in my own system anymore, the first time after more than 2 years."
After the TNT everything changed for Nvidia: the TNT2 followed in early '99, with the Geforce late '99 and Geforce2 in 2000. 3dfx never really caught up after the TNT, releasing the Voodoo3 in '99 but it wasn't quite up to par with the TNT2 (despite FastSilicon claiming "The Voodoo3 barely beat the TNT2 in pure FPS") and it clearly didn't compete with the TNT2 Ultra or Geforce. The rest is history.
For more video card history I suggest reading Tom's Hardware. He's still got the reviews from 1996-1997 and 1998. A much more complete history and no cards have been left out.
If you'd consider a phone that's less than $10 as "disposable" than it already exists. It's the Nokia 5160 or 5165. Quick search of ended items on ebay turns up hundreds of Nokia 5160/5165 phones that have sold in the past 2 weeks, most for less than $10, some as low as $1.
Disposable Cell Phones have been on slashdotmanytimes before, and isn't Hop-On the same company cited for repackaging $200 Nokia's and calling them "Hop-On" phones 18 months ago? I still haven't seen Hop-On phones in retail stores years after they were first announced, and I have a feeling I won't see them for many more years. Might as well start advertising disposable computers too, since I'm sure we'll see those in the next 10 years... probably before the disposable cellphone.
this is only a concept design, and that the final product may be less sleek. I wish people would pay attention, this is not the final PSP and its not coming out next week.
We are paying attention. The design concept is based on the hardware specs that have been released, so there's a good chance the PSP will look very much like the concept. Besides, even if it's not exactly what the final PSP will look like it's a first glimpse into the direction that Sony is taking.
I also wish/. would do more content proofreading but oviously those worries continue to be founded and unaddressed.
er... everything in the post is spelled correctly and used in the correct context. I recommend you bookmark dictionary.com.
Ok let me get this straight, I could buy a Zodiac1 for $300 and lay down $20-$30 for the very few games currently avaliable, or I could get a 400mhz PocketPC for $300 (or $179 for a refurbished 400mhz Toshiba e740) and play hundreds of shareware titles like Age of Empires and only pay for the games I actually like?
Wow, this is a tough decision, give me a minute will ya?
Slashdot Mirror
Because I'm paying for it, that's the big deal! Having to pay $15 makes all the difference: if I ordered a $15 pizza and it was cold I'd bitch, but if it was free I wouldn't mind. Many other states have the same 2 lane highway crossing them and I don't mind, but if I have to pay I want a few more lanes.
Last time I crossed New York I went 2 miles in 30 minutes at one point because they were doing road construction. Traffic is never fun, but having to pay to sit in traffic makes it even worst.
Perhaps it's just a misprint, but at the ~1 meg per minute that mp3s are (and nearly every other popular compressed music format) that's 2000 minutes on 2gig, or nearly 600 songs averaging 3m 20s a song. 400 songs would average 5 minutes per song, which seems a bit long for the average song.
Example: a recent complilation CD I created of modern hip-hop & rock music had 20 songs in 78 minutes, or 3.9 minutes per song.
Course using the same numbers (3m 20s per song) the 4gig unit would hold 1200 songs, not 800 as reported.
I'll second that. It costs over $15 in tolls alone to drive the ~400 miles across NY state. $15 for a tiny two-lane road!! Not to mention the high gas prices along the way.
Boss: what the hell? why are all the plows parked at the strip club?
Driver: we're getting snowjobs
That's easy: Halo for PC
That is a rather large market share"
I'm sorry, I should have said "it's great for people that don't know what they're doing and need/desire a file server."
How many AOL users do you know with Unix file servers, or any Unix machines for that matter, or even know what Unix is? I see your market share dwindling...
"Adopted" is up to dispute. How do you determine "adopted"? I think if you'd do your homework there's still more people with VCRs than DVD players, at least in the US, so I believe the DVD still hasn't been fully adopted in the US yet, especially considering it's just as easy to find a new movie on VHS as it is on DVD.
One could even argue CDs haven't been fully adopted yet: new tape players are still easy to find anywhere CD players are sold, and new music on tapes is still readily available. I think your belief that CDs were fully adopted in the early 90s is premature.
"That's around 15 years from invention to full adoption. It took DVD's something like 4 years to do that."
DVDs were actually invented in 1993, but at the time it was just video burnt on to a double-density CD. In 94, Philips and Sony announced a proposal for a high density disc called MMCD, which went on to become the DVD we know today.
So, 10 years later and DVD haven't come anywhere near killing VHS.
Posted by icup
In a move to fight anything promoted by the West, China has revealed plans to create it's own air.
"Western air is just too... western" says Director of Foreign Affairs Kim Woo. "Chinese air should have a more traditional feeling to it."
Kim Woo continues "China has more people any any other country, we can do whatever we want without taking orders from Western influence, including making Chinese air."
"I like the idea," said one Chinese citizen, "I live in China, so I should breath Chinese air, right?"
Although no details have been revealed about the distribution system of the new Chinese air, inside sources say it will be bottled like water and priced at roughly $1 USD per quart. Bottling is likely to take place in the US.
Plans are also in the works for Chinese water.
just remember, the "I don't care about my job" mentally is taught to them. They come in as average IT folks and are taught to ignore and avoid helping customers, and if they do and caught they're fired, or at least reprimanded.
Here's a story about that: I once had a customer call complaining about pop-ups even then they weren't surfing and blamed it on our software and threatened to cancel. I assured them it's not our software (although I knew it might be) and helped them find pop-up stopper and a program that'd remove spyware. A manager walked by and noticed what I was doing and asked what I was doing. I explained I was helping a customer with problems with pop-ups. I was told it wasn't our problem and the customer would have to figure it out themselves. I told the customer I could no longer help them with the issue. The customer was shocked, not happy and hung up. I was then reprimanded for even answering a question like that.
When you're told daily "screw the customer" how much are you going to care about your job?
"Regardless of supported or not, I will call them"
Well of course, who else you gonna call?
Sounds like the argument for Macs... let me guess, it looks pretty too? Oh what a shock, the author is a Mac user.
Don't get me wrong, it's great for people that don't know what they're doing, but if you know anything the Qube is inferior.
Not sure how easy it'd be in England to sue over this since that's where the incident took place, but here in the US I imagine a lawsuit would soon follow, and the fact that everything's online would make evidence oh-so-easy, and with the recent school shooting in the US I don't think a judge would be too nice to the bullies. Police might be interested too.
I enjoy hacking systems as much as the next guy, but when I can get something much better for much less and it's more reliable (no bubble wrap), I don't see the point.
So please, someone explain why the Qube is so great compared to Mini-ITX systems because I fail to see the advantages.
If you're using anything not supported don't expect to call support and ask them anything, even if it is just a simple "is the network down?" question. Why? They could lose their jobs for helping you.
You'd be shocked the number of people I had to tell "sorry, we don't support 64megs" and end the conversation right there, even though I knew I could get their DSL up and running in 5 minutes. Actually, the number is almost the same as the number of people who called with VPN and I told them the same thing. When I'd argue with management over blowing off customers with BS reasons I was basically told "like it or leave".
You might be saying "then I'll take my business elsewhere!" and SBC would say "we don't care". I was just one of 600 tech employees at the smallest of ~5 service centers in the US. Unless you're Microsoft they'll never notice you're gone.
The article affects me directly: after struggling for far too long I'm a year away from finishing my CS, but money has become tight and I'm wondering should I work my a$$ off at two jobs to afford to finish school, or perhaps start looking in another direction? I've had friends who went to tech school to become electricians and plumbers and within a year of starting school they were making $20/hr USD. Now they're making $40+/hr thanks to Unions while I'm barely making $10/hr 3 years into a CS degree with 5x more loan debt, and it doesn't sound like it's going to get much better after I graduate judging.
Do I (and thousands of other IT students) keep pouring money into the IT education money pit, or suck up our losses and head in another direction?
Perhaps Slashdot should be "News for minimum-wage making Nerds" and a new article category should be offered: "stuff you can't afford until it's hopelessly obsolete"
beating your kids != knowing where your kids are
In a day and age where kids are walking into schools and killing classmates I don't think that allowing parents to know where their kids are at all times is too much to ask.
I use to do support for a major competing DSL provider and we'd get all kinds of stories that sales told customers. Trust me when I say that sales will promise whatever you want to get the sale. Why? They get commission whether they lied to you or not, and if it's easier to make a sale by lying then they'll lie to customers all day long.
I've cloned drives on one PC, brought it to another and it works great. Clones within XP, so no restarting. The new version even allows scheduling, so I can now clone XP to a spare drive on a nightly basis. Drive to drive clone speeds are fast, about 30gigs per hour.
Am I the only one that noticed it looks like a toilet seat?
And I'm sure there's tons of large business admins that frequent firingsquad.com...
They really missed the boat here, the article doesn't apply to any of their regular readers.
It was listed on the main site the day before it was slashdotted. If he doesn't want the world to see his articles before he edits them then perhaps he shouldn't post them on the main page?
The Nvidia TNT is completely left out, which is a shock considering the TNT is the card that lead to the downfall of 3dfx. It was the first card that beat the Voodoo2's 3D performance and offered 2D in one card:
Pentium 2 400mhz - Quake 2 @ 800x600
TNT2 = 40fps
Voodoo2 = 37fps
And the TNT was priced lower than a single Voodoo2, easily making it the best bang for the buck. How good was it really? Tom said it best: "This article shall answer the question if NVIDIA's RIVA TNT will be able to replace Voodoo2 and if it's indeed better than Banshee.... To already answer this question for my part, yes, I am using TNT and there are no 3Dfx cards in my own system anymore, the first time after more than 2 years."
After the TNT everything changed for Nvidia: the TNT2 followed in early '99, with the Geforce late '99 and Geforce2 in 2000. 3dfx never really caught up after the TNT, releasing the Voodoo3 in '99 but it wasn't quite up to par with the TNT2 (despite FastSilicon claiming "The Voodoo3 barely beat the TNT2 in pure FPS") and it clearly didn't compete with the TNT2 Ultra or Geforce. The rest is history.
For more video card history I suggest reading Tom's Hardware. He's still got the reviews from 1996-1997 and 1998. A much more complete history and no cards have been left out.
If you'd consider a phone that's less than $10 as "disposable" than it already exists. It's the Nokia 5160 or 5165. Quick search of ended items on ebay turns up hundreds of Nokia 5160/5165 phones that have sold in the past 2 weeks, most for less than $10, some as low as $1.
Disposable Cell Phones have been on slashdot many times before, and isn't Hop-On the same company cited for repackaging $200 Nokia's and calling them "Hop-On" phones 18 months ago? I still haven't seen Hop-On phones in retail stores years after they were first announced, and I have a feeling I won't see them for many more years. Might as well start advertising disposable computers too, since I'm sure we'll see those in the next 10 years... probably before the disposable cellphone.
We are paying attention. The design concept is based on the hardware specs that have been released, so there's a good chance the PSP will look very much like the concept. Besides, even if it's not exactly what the final PSP will look like it's a first glimpse into the direction that Sony is taking.
I also wish /. would do more content proofreading but oviously those worries continue to be founded and unaddressed.
er... everything in the post is spelled correctly and used in the correct context. I recommend you bookmark dictionary.com.
Wow, this is a tough decision, give me a minute will ya?