Antec p160, p180 or p180b. The p160 has an excellent side-panel that flips on/off and has two large easy-to-use rotating thingies that hold it in place on the upper edge. (The thumbscrews along the back edge are optional, the built-in turny-thingies... where's my thesaurus?... hold the panel in place just fine.)
The hard drives down below are tray-mounted, easily removed on the p160 (I have yet to get my hands on the p180 case).
But if you're really concerned about hard-drive cooling, put your hard drives in the 5.25" bays using a 3:2 or 4:3 bay cooler.
My home office also gets up to 85F during the summer months (no insulation in the walls). So I am very conservative when it comes to cooling. I've used the 3:2 unit for many years (1998-ish?) and have never lost a drive due to heat failure. (OTOH, I've killed a few drives that weren't in a cooler block like that.)
I'd suggest (if you have spare 5.25" bays) looking at either:
3:2 bay cooler - allows you to put up to (3) 3.5" drives into a 80mm fan unit that fits into a pair of 5.25" bays
4:3 bay cooler - same idea, takes up (3) bays, holds up to (4) drives, and uses a 120mm fan.
Both of these do a very good job of keeping hot drives cool. Plus, the larger fans are quieter then the tiny 40mm fans. (I've been using the smaller 3:2 product for 8-9 years now and it's never failed. I've seen 5-10C temp changes by using them.)
Yep, I just ordered a p180b this past week. (I also own 5 or 6 p160s and a trio of Sonata cases.)
Currently, my video editing box is crammed into a Sonata. Dual-Opteron 246s, Tyan motherboard (slightly too large for a p160's motherboard tray, hence the Sonata), 5 hard drives (3 are 5400rpm 300GB, 2 are 7200rpm 250GB) and the stock power-supply that comes with the Sonata. Memory is 3GB and I think I'm using an old Ti4600 as the video card.
I plan on moving all this to the p180b case due to heat issues with the Sonata case (too much inside too small of a case currently, hence the 5400rpm drives... which are still running too warm for my tastes). While I'm at it, I'll be dropping (3) more 500GB HDs in. Eventually, I'll replace the motherboard with a newer Tyan MB and a pair of dual-core Opterons.
Now, if you're really into packing multiple hard drives in, take a look at the cooling units that fit inside your 5.25" bays. One is made by CoolerMaster; takes up (3) 5.25" bays and allows you to pack up to (4) 3.5" hard drives into the space and is cooled by a front-mounted 120mm fan. Nice and quiet and a great way to cool your hard drives.
The other unit is a smaller one that only fills (2) 5.25" bays and allows you pack in up to (3) 3.5" hard drives. Cooling is done by a 80mm fan. It's still fairly quiet and does an excellent job of cooling. I've only seen this one available at MWave but I've bought it elsewhere in the past.
Between the (6) internal drive bays and the (4) drives in a 4:3 cooler in the upper 5.25" bays, I reckon it's not difficult to pack (10) HDs into a p180b case.
Give me an ugly old solid case with space for three or four fans any day over those with the plexiglass windows, but the fact is most of them have that now. I don't even look at the cheap plastic cases myself.
Function over form is my motto.
Antec's cases caught my eye a few years back. For example, the p160 is silver aluminum, 120mm exhaust, 120mm intake over the 4 internal rubber-grommet tray-mounted hard drive bays, 4 external 5.25" bays and a pair of temperature sensors with front panel display. Since I was looking to (a) quiet down my home server and (b) get better cooling for the drives I found the p160 to be a good fit.
It's also a nice case from a service P.O.V., easy to open and the side-oriented hard drives on trays makes it quick/easy to swap a drive out. The all-aluminum construction feels solid and it has a good "fit" to it. Even after a few years of use, that side door is still going to be easy to get on/off without finagling. (I own 5 or 6 of these cases now, having used them regularly for various machines along with a trio of the Sonata cases.)
Now, there are a few things that the p160 doesn't do well.
1) The size of the motherboard tray precludes putting an even slightly oversized ATX motherboard in the enclosure. The newer p180/p180b cases don't have a motherboard tray and seem to allow slightly larger MBs. The Sonata can also fit a slightly oversized ATX motherboard, but the case size results in thermal issues if you're trying to put a dual-CPU motherboard into the case. (A lot of the dual-CPU motherboards are slightly larger then ATX standard.)
2) Air flow over the bottom hard drive bays is only so-so. This could be user-error (not using the right 120mm fan) or a design issue. The Sonata case seems to suffer the same issue, or I could be making the same mistake on both (sometimes I use thermal controlled fans down there which are 120mm fans with a thermistor that controls the RPM automatically). The newer p180/p180b case changes the interior design quite a bit and looks like a "cleaner" air flow over the drives.
3) The flashy front on the p160. Looks a little out of place in a business environment. The newer p180b is a lot tamer in comparison.
I've also looked at the Lian Li cases, but I'm more familiar and comfortable with the Antec products currently (Sonata, p160, p180/p180b).
Compared to legal alternatives, the iPod is at best a wash on features (other than tight integration with iTMS) and is priced much, much more expensive (you pay a significant Apple fanboy premium versus competing players).
I dunno. Even though I don't personally own one, I think they're the first who have a good form factor (small, thin, and *flat*) across their models. Combine that with the widely-reported easy-to-use UI. I also find their product line-up easy to remember and very straightforward. And the people that I know who own iPods are generally enthusiastic about theirs (or at least, they don't seem to have reservations about recommending them).
I've considered buying one for a few years now, but since I don't commute/travel on a regular basis, I don't have a need for one. (I listen to my music at home via speakers hooked up to my laptop or via a CD/MP3 player in the car. And I have a CD/MP3 player for those infrequent trips.)
Nope. The solution is to spend the thirty minutes uninstalling the crapware. If you can't get it the way you want it in one single day, then your solution should be to contact the company and tell them you'll return it if they can't do X.
Close... it also helps if you buy a corporate level system that doesn't ship with such nonsense in the first place. (How much is your time worth? Okay, corporate level might b be overkill...)
But seriously, almost the first thing I do when I get a laptop setup is to burn an image file (Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost, Knoppix + NTFSClone... pick your poison). Then I never have to rely on the recovery software and I always get a system restore that *exactly* meets my needs. It generally saves me 20+ hours on the re-install time if I ever decide to wipe the laptop back to its starting configuration.
Note: If you're putting the image files on optical media, make sure to burn two copies or toss 5% or 10% PAR2 files (using QuickPAR) on the disks.
I'll second Sawmill. While I haven't upgraded in a while, I find their pricing to be at least somewhat reasonable (as opposed to WebTrends). Even for a small business with multiple domains, you're only going to pay a few hundred bucks. (Pricing)
Sawmill also did a good job of analyzing our load-balanced set of web servers (allowing us to roll-up a set of combined stats).
I imagine non-fixed-width fonts are also vulnerable, since word lengths and average character length can be known.
Fixed-width fonts would actually be more secure. With a variable-width font, you can glean another few bits of information about words based on the length of the black line. At least, if the black lines only cover up the words and not entire lines.
OTOH, with a fixed width font, you know that N pixels = M characters while with a variable width font, you're not going to be sure.
(sigh) I know enough to be a danger to myself, methinks...
Take WoW for example. Say you have a group of 30 lvl10s. You will never, ever kill a level60. They will just resist, dodge, absorb or tank all your damage and one-shot each of you without breaking a sweat. A level 30 in the 30-39 bracket? Welcome to hurting.
That's the big problem that I see in a lot of PVP setups.
I'm waiting for the day when someone realizes that PVP action needs a different scale of effect then PVE. The level 60 player should have more tools at their disposal, but not more power or health.
While a level 60 would probably win a 1v1 battle against a level 10, the level 60 player should walk away from it with moderate damage rather then not getting a scratch. That gives level 10s a chance to use teamwork to bring down a level 60 player.
A good rule of thumb , never use your real name online for anything that doesn't need it.
I am fairly open about my life and work, but I am not that open about where and who I am. Change a few details, omit company and private names and you are a bit safer.
Exactly. Use a pseudonym or alias for your personal ramblings. Encourage your friends to do so as well. And be very careful never to let the two mix. This makes it easy for friends to keep up with your life, but difficult for strangers to simply search the web using your name in order to uncover your personal blog / website.
I'll even go as far as using different aliases for different services / communities. It keeps things from being easily tied together and linked back. (It's possible, just not automatic.)
Ah, a like-minded soul who mourns the loss of "scale" in EQ1. I'm one of those firm believers in the concept that travel should require effort. That effort can be any of the following:
- Time: walk/run your way across the land
- Money: pay for a port
- Networking: get ports for free by networking with others
- Personal Effort: Level up as a porting class
In short, provide a variety of means for players to short-cut the distance problem. That allows players to choose their mode of travel based on their own personal values. Some will choose to walk (thus exploring the land and spreading out the population) while others will gladly pay for a port to speed up their travels.
Travel should never be free. It shrinks the world and, as you noted, decimates the population in zones that don't have portals.
I would've stayed with EQ1 had they:
- Left the nexus port in-place on a 20-30 min timer for free
- Added the ability to purchase a shard and insta-port (which would've been a good cash sink and they could've charged different ticket prices based on player level). This fee would've also left the port-for-cash business mostly intact as enterprising players could try to undercut the NPCs prices.
- Added NPCs at the druid rings (again, charging a healthly amount for the convenience of not waiting for a porter class to wander by). Prices should've been high enough that the diehard port-for-hire folks could still attempt to undercut the fees.
(shrugs) I still think the Nexus and the Bazaar were a bad idea, especially when you had NPCs that would buy/sell to everyone. It killed off the old-world cities almost instantly and made faction meaningless (a big loss for a game like EQ1 where faction was a core game element). The Plane of Knowledge just made it worse and drove me away from the game entirely.
Not when I have mod points. Not all of us adhere to the prevalent group-think, but we do take care to pick our battles. I will admit to possibly steering clear of those topics when I have mod points, so maybe I need to start focusing on those stories to moderate.
There are a lot of us here who believe in copyright, but are still disgusted by the lengthy extentions to copyright, the bully tactics used by RIAA/MPAA, the stupidity of the Sony rootkit, and the pointlessness of DRM. Not to mention the unevenness of laws being applied where citizens are held to a different standard then corporations.
So, while I may personally disagree with the "screw-you RIAA" attitude as an excuse to infringe on copyrights, I can understand the motivation behind the backlash movement. It logically follows that if one side commits abuses of power, the other side will retaliate. But as with all "movements" there are people who will cloak their personal greed under the mantle of being a victim in order to appease their personal desires.
And sometimes those users (who use the cloak) are good enough liars / dissemblers to fool other people into thinking that their actions are high and mighty. Which gets them mod'd up by less discerning moderators.
We could also get into the whole "not everything that is immoral is illegal and not everything that is legal is moral" argument. As a functioning citizen, it is best if I follow the legal code. But if it disagrees with my moral code then I need to decide which is more important.
(shrug) Different priorities. I'd never upgrade a Win2000 laptop to WinXP for example and I don't plan on upgrading any of our WinXP laptops to Vista. Older, non-NT systems might be worth it, but stuff made before 2000 tends to be just under what I consider worth upgrading.
As for restore CDs, I prefer to make a drive image after I've stripped the Manufacture's extra bits off. (And corporate laptops tend to not come with extra cruft in the first place.) Then after I finish configuring the laptop, we create a 2nd image in case the user complete hoses the machine.
Or is flash getting better, so that this isn't the concern that it once was?
I'm pretty sure flash memory has gotten better. I don't know exact numbers, but it's probably an order of magnitude more writes then was possible a few years ago. Some (all?) of the chips even do automatic wear leveling so that frequent writes by the O/S (such as swap files or updating a directory entry) don't wear out a particular spot in the flash chip.
And even if you do start to wear out sectors, it will be a gradual process (slowly losing usable space). Which is probably better then a hard drive that catastrophically fails all at once due to mechanical defect.
Am I the only one who's sitting here and wondering, "What was this guy thinking?!" Laptops have so much custom hardware these days that it's a Bad Idea(TM) to attempt an OS installation from anything but restore CDs. This guy not only tried to install from new media, but he tried to install a cutting-edge operating system that isn't even out of beta!
Nope, I'm right there with you. See also the silliness of the BusinessWeek article from a few weeks ago where the reviewer chooses a laptop based on its theoretical upgrade to Vista down the road.
I've done the "put a newer OS on an older laptop". It's a real PITA and the only reason I did it was that Toshiba shipped this model with both Win98 or WinNT and I ended up with a Win98 through miscommunication. Fortunately, it (mostly) worked was because Toshiba had device drivers for this laptop.
But for the most part, putting a new Windows OS on old laptops is a fool's errand. Way too much custom hardware in these beasts and you'll spend a long time looking for drivers. If the laptop has been out of production for a year or more, very few manufacturers will go back and write drivers to make newer Windows OSs work on older hardware. There's simply no profit in it.
Apple does it because they control the hardware (it makes sense to upgrade to the various revisions of OS X). Upgrading to Linux is also possible but you also have to do a lot of research on what laptops have good Linux support. At least in the Linux camp, you have a dedicated group of developers who are interested in writing the drivers and making sure they work with the newer kernels.
That was definitely true back in the AthlonXP days (I fought with the KT266? chipset for longer then I care to think about).
Not so true anymore.
I have an Asus A8V motherboard that I use for a Gentoo server and I've had very good results. I think that's using a KT800 chipset. I've used a few other more recent VIA chipsets without problems as well. (Mostly 64bit systems.)
So right now, I have no real bias against either NV or VIA chipsets. Neither have bitten me in the past few years. I typically buy Asus motherboards, usually the middle-tier products (not the super-cheap ones).
That PISSES ME OFF TO NO EXTENT, so I will usually close out of the AIM client (or minimize it), I am hoping that AIM is seeing how many people let the video run it's length, and when they look at my stat, they will realize that each and every time a video comes on, I close out of it. Perhaps they will stop sending those damn things.
You want to get *really* ticked off?
Open up Task Manager and look at how much CPU time the AIM client uses, even when minimized. You'll find that it uses quite a bit of CPU time per day even when you have it minimized to the system tray all day.
I put up with it for a while, but once it started burning significant amounts of CPU time per day it got the boot. (Since I refuse to run the AIM client any more, I don't remember the numbers. But 10-30min of CPU time per day on my 1.6Ghz CPU sounds about right.)
In comparison, things like PGPTray (5 sec/day), my EFax (JFax now?) account (1 sec/day) are pretty tame. Yahoo's messenger is running at 2.5 min/day of CPU time so I'm debating whether that one is going to get the boot next.
Personally, Altavista (with their www.av.com domain) had the mind-share in my part of the country. Lycos was a runner-up in that race.
Of course, back then, Yahoo! was a decent directory of websites. So if you were looking for something, you'd start in Yahoo! and look at the site listings. Only after you didn't find it (or your search was *really* specific) would you go using AV's search.
(Based on a hazy recollection of the latter-90s...)
associate "Burger King" with "crappy advertising" rather than food might also be telling
As I was driving around town yesterday... I was amused by the thought of how repugnant I find fast food places. Somewhere along the line I stopped looking at McDs, BK, Hardees, Wendy's as suitable places to get a bite to eat.
Instead, I go looking for the local diner or greasy spoon. Probably just as bad for me, but the food is often made by the owners of the place and it's nice to get waited on at the counter. (I know of at least one diner in Camp Hill PA where the owners are the cooks.)
Heck, become a regular (and a decent tipper) at a diner for long enough and the waitress will bring you your favorite drink as soon as you sit down.
I have seen flash banner ads with 10s of translucent layers and antialiasing and shit that tried to run at 1000 fps or so. One of them made an A64 come down to a crawl.
That's what prompted me to finally install FlashBlock and be done with it. I didn't mind (too much) the moving ads or the ones that made noise when you would mouse-over them. But when you start to screw with my CPU utilization, even while in the background, you get the boot.
Seems to have made the system much more responsive as a result as well (FlashBlock on Mozilla 1.7x).
Other ads like GIF banner adds I won't block. They're unobtrusive and stay out of the way (and I have Mozilla set to only display GIF animations a single time).
Most items over at www.pricescan.com have price trend charts. It's not a chart for the overall category, just charts for each individual item.
(I've been using PriceScan for quite a few years... maybe as far back as 1998? I still end up ordering from places like NewEgg or MWave.com or TheNerds.net but it's good for seeing prices.)
I think upgradeable laptops are pretty much here (or as far as they're going to get). Most upgrades are simply more RAM or larger HDs and those are already pretty easy. Sure, video upgrades would be nice, but I don't view laptops as being gaming system powerhouses. CPU upgrades are a pipe-dream (and generally a waste of fundage) because RAM technology and motherboard technology has usually changed enough to make it better to upgrade all 3 in tandem.
a three year old machine is still perfectly able to run just about everything you want to throw at it
That's what we've discovered as well over the past few years. Anything made after ~2001 is still a decent system as long as it has enough RAM. CPU speed improvement have pretty much stalled (no more doubling performance every 12 months) and other then dual-core I don't see much signs of rapid improvement any time soon.
I view a 3-year old laptop as middle-aged now rather then being suited for the junk heap. At least, if it's a corporate level laptop with 512MB or 1GB of RAM. The consumer level products probably won't go the distance.
I think you should re-examine the "3 years and out" mantra. Things have changed a bit in the past few years with regards to how fast technology is advancing. CPU speeds are somewhat stagnant (but dual-core does present a sizeable increase in performance).
Our old standard was:
- Every 2 years for power users (1/3 of our users)
- Every 3-5 years for non-power users (2/3 of our users), hand-me-downs from the power users
I'm one of those power users. Yet when my turn came up in 2004, I passed on the upgrade. Why? Because my Tecra 9100 from 2002 still had legs to spare (1.6Ghz 1GB RAM 100GB HD). In fact, I just had the keyboard and DVD drive replaced and it feels like a brand-new machine (I use the laptop keyboard 100% of the time).
I'll still probably upgrade later this year (to a Thinkpad T60/T60p) because I do need the 2GB of RAM and the dual-core is interesting. But I could probably get by with this laptop for another year easily. This laptop will end up in the hands of a less needy user who will probably use it until it finally dies 4-5 years from now.
I fully expect the new Thinkpad to last me 5 years as my primary machine (and we'll be buying the 5-yr warranty). Then I wouldn't be surprised if it's still functional for another 5 years.
Inverters cost about $300 to replace, at least that was the cost for a Tecra 8100 we repaired last year. Now, that machine is 5 years old and barely worth repairing, but still worth it (a 512MB Win2000 system). But it will probably get used for another 3-4 years by a user who only does light word-processing and checks their e-mail.
In case you didn't notice, we max out the RAM as much as possible on our machines. New laptops won't be bought with less then 1GB (and probably 2x1GB since it's only $200/chip). We find that gives us the most bang for the buck and gives us systems that are still viable (barring outright hardware failures) a few years down the road.
I have tried unsuccessfully to get a wiki going at my company. Its very easy to get people excited about it, but very difficult to get them to actually contribute. Wiki syntax does have a learning curve, and most "non-technical" employees throw up their hands is short order.
Personally, I think what you ran up against is what I call the "creator foots the bill but rarely benefits" syndrome. I'm sure there's a better word for it.
Basically, it's the same reason that metadata never gets entered into document properties (i.e. all those extra nifty metatags in Microsoft Word/Excel files). To the creator of said documents, it's an extra step that doesn't gain them anything except once in a blue moon.
Another example is why the semantic web or publishing data in XML format rarely takes off. The creator has to expend effort but rarely gets rewarded. In fact, the creator has just made it easier for others to mooch off of their hard work.
I've seen this effect with both Lotus Notes installations (where you try to get users to store knowledge into Notes database) and with Wikis (again, where you're trying to get users to document knowledge). Without management involvement, it's unlikely to happen.
And from my experience, very few corporate cultures really reward sharing of knowledge. To give away knowledge is to give away power and it makes the person with the knowledge more replaceable.
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Antec p160, p180 or p180b. The p160 has an excellent side-panel that flips on/off and has two large easy-to-use rotating thingies that hold it in place on the upper edge. (The thumbscrews along the back edge are optional, the built-in turny-thingies... where's my thesaurus?... hold the panel in place just fine.)
The hard drives down below are tray-mounted, easily removed on the p160 (I have yet to get my hands on the p180 case).
But if you're really concerned about hard-drive cooling, put your hard drives in the 5.25" bays using a 3:2 or 4:3 bay cooler.
My home office also gets up to 85F during the summer months (no insulation in the walls). So I am very conservative when it comes to cooling. I've used the 3:2 unit for many years (1998-ish?) and have never lost a drive due to heat failure. (OTOH, I've killed a few drives that weren't in a cooler block like that.)
It doesn't take much airflow to cool a drive.
I'd suggest (if you have spare 5.25" bays) looking at either:
3:2 bay cooler - allows you to put up to (3) 3.5" drives into a 80mm fan unit that fits into a pair of 5.25" bays
4:3 bay cooler - same idea, takes up (3) bays, holds up to (4) drives, and uses a 120mm fan.
Both of these do a very good job of keeping hot drives cool. Plus, the larger fans are quieter then the tiny 40mm fans. (I've been using the smaller 3:2 product for 8-9 years now and it's never failed. I've seen 5-10C temp changes by using them.)
Yep, I just ordered a p180b this past week. (I also own 5 or 6 p160s and a trio of Sonata cases.)
Currently, my video editing box is crammed into a Sonata. Dual-Opteron 246s, Tyan motherboard (slightly too large for a p160's motherboard tray, hence the Sonata), 5 hard drives (3 are 5400rpm 300GB, 2 are 7200rpm 250GB) and the stock power-supply that comes with the Sonata. Memory is 3GB and I think I'm using an old Ti4600 as the video card.
I plan on moving all this to the p180b case due to heat issues with the Sonata case (too much inside too small of a case currently, hence the 5400rpm drives... which are still running too warm for my tastes). While I'm at it, I'll be dropping (3) more 500GB HDs in. Eventually, I'll replace the motherboard with a newer Tyan MB and a pair of dual-core Opterons.
Now, if you're really into packing multiple hard drives in, take a look at the cooling units that fit inside your 5.25" bays. One is made by CoolerMaster; takes up (3) 5.25" bays and allows you to pack up to (4) 3.5" hard drives into the space and is cooled by a front-mounted 120mm fan. Nice and quiet and a great way to cool your hard drives.
The other unit is a smaller one that only fills (2) 5.25" bays and allows you pack in up to (3) 3.5" hard drives. Cooling is done by a 80mm fan. It's still fairly quiet and does an excellent job of cooling. I've only seen this one available at MWave but I've bought it elsewhere in the past.
Between the (6) internal drive bays and the (4) drives in a 4:3 cooler in the upper 5.25" bays, I reckon it's not difficult to pack (10) HDs into a p180b case.
Give me an ugly old solid case with space for three or four fans any day over those with the plexiglass windows, but the fact is most of them have that now. I don't even look at the cheap plastic cases myself.
Function over form is my motto.
Antec's cases caught my eye a few years back. For example, the p160 is silver aluminum, 120mm exhaust, 120mm intake over the 4 internal rubber-grommet tray-mounted hard drive bays, 4 external 5.25" bays and a pair of temperature sensors with front panel display. Since I was looking to (a) quiet down my home server and (b) get better cooling for the drives I found the p160 to be a good fit.
It's also a nice case from a service P.O.V., easy to open and the side-oriented hard drives on trays makes it quick/easy to swap a drive out. The all-aluminum construction feels solid and it has a good "fit" to it. Even after a few years of use, that side door is still going to be easy to get on/off without finagling. (I own 5 or 6 of these cases now, having used them regularly for various machines along with a trio of the Sonata cases.)
Now, there are a few things that the p160 doesn't do well.
1) The size of the motherboard tray precludes putting an even slightly oversized ATX motherboard in the enclosure. The newer p180/p180b cases don't have a motherboard tray and seem to allow slightly larger MBs. The Sonata can also fit a slightly oversized ATX motherboard, but the case size results in thermal issues if you're trying to put a dual-CPU motherboard into the case. (A lot of the dual-CPU motherboards are slightly larger then ATX standard.)
2) Air flow over the bottom hard drive bays is only so-so. This could be user-error (not using the right 120mm fan) or a design issue. The Sonata case seems to suffer the same issue, or I could be making the same mistake on both (sometimes I use thermal controlled fans down there which are 120mm fans with a thermistor that controls the RPM automatically). The newer p180/p180b case changes the interior design quite a bit and looks like a "cleaner" air flow over the drives.
3) The flashy front on the p160. Looks a little out of place in a business environment. The newer p180b is a lot tamer in comparison.
I've also looked at the Lian Li cases, but I'm more familiar and comfortable with the Antec products currently (Sonata, p160, p180/p180b).
Compared to legal alternatives, the iPod is at best a wash on features (other than tight integration with iTMS) and is priced much, much more expensive (you pay a significant Apple fanboy premium versus competing players).
I dunno. Even though I don't personally own one, I think they're the first who have a good form factor (small, thin, and *flat*) across their models. Combine that with the widely-reported easy-to-use UI. I also find their product line-up easy to remember and very straightforward. And the people that I know who own iPods are generally enthusiastic about theirs (or at least, they don't seem to have reservations about recommending them).
I've considered buying one for a few years now, but since I don't commute/travel on a regular basis, I don't have a need for one. (I listen to my music at home via speakers hooked up to my laptop or via a CD/MP3 player in the car. And I have a CD/MP3 player for those infrequent trips.)
Nope. The solution is to spend the thirty minutes uninstalling the crapware. If you can't get it the way you want it in one single day, then your solution should be to contact the company and tell them you'll return it if they can't do X.
Close... it also helps if you buy a corporate level system that doesn't ship with such nonsense in the first place. (How much is your time worth? Okay, corporate level might b be overkill...)
But seriously, almost the first thing I do when I get a laptop setup is to burn an image file (Acronis TrueImage, Norton Ghost, Knoppix + NTFSClone... pick your poison). Then I never have to rely on the recovery software and I always get a system restore that *exactly* meets my needs. It generally saves me 20+ hours on the re-install time if I ever decide to wipe the laptop back to its starting configuration.
Note: If you're putting the image files on optical media, make sure to burn two copies or toss 5% or 10% PAR2 files (using QuickPAR) on the disks.
I'll second Sawmill. While I haven't upgraded in a while, I find their pricing to be at least somewhat reasonable (as opposed to WebTrends). Even for a small business with multiple domains, you're only going to pay a few hundred bucks. (Pricing)
Sawmill also did a good job of analyzing our load-balanced set of web servers (allowing us to roll-up a set of combined stats).
I imagine non-fixed-width fonts are also vulnerable, since word lengths and average character length can be known.
Fixed-width fonts would actually be more secure. With a variable-width font, you can glean another few bits of information about words based on the length of the black line. At least, if the black lines only cover up the words and not entire lines.
OTOH, with a fixed width font, you know that N pixels = M characters while with a variable width font, you're not going to be sure.
(sigh) I know enough to be a danger to myself, methinks...
Take WoW for example. Say you have a group of 30 lvl10s. You will never, ever kill a level60. They will just resist, dodge, absorb or tank all your damage and one-shot each of you without breaking a sweat. A level 30 in the 30-39 bracket? Welcome to hurting.
That's the big problem that I see in a lot of PVP setups. I'm waiting for the day when someone realizes that PVP action needs a different scale of effect then PVE. The level 60 player should have more tools at their disposal, but not more power or health.
While a level 60 would probably win a 1v1 battle against a level 10, the level 60 player should walk away from it with moderate damage rather then not getting a scratch. That gives level 10s a chance to use teamwork to bring down a level 60 player.
A good rule of thumb , never use your real name online for anything that doesn't need it. I am fairly open about my life and work, but I am not that open about where and who I am. Change a few details, omit company and private names and you are a bit safer.
Exactly. Use a pseudonym or alias for your personal ramblings. Encourage your friends to do so as well. And be very careful never to let the two mix. This makes it easy for friends to keep up with your life, but difficult for strangers to simply search the web using your name in order to uncover your personal blog / website.
I'll even go as far as using different aliases for different services / communities. It keeps things from being easily tied together and linked back. (It's possible, just not automatic.)
Ah, a like-minded soul who mourns the loss of "scale" in EQ1. I'm one of those firm believers in the concept that travel should require effort. That effort can be any of the following:
- Time: walk/run your way across the land
- Money: pay for a port
- Networking: get ports for free by networking with others
- Personal Effort: Level up as a porting class
In short, provide a variety of means for players to short-cut the distance problem. That allows players to choose their mode of travel based on their own personal values. Some will choose to walk (thus exploring the land and spreading out the population) while others will gladly pay for a port to speed up their travels.
Travel should never be free. It shrinks the world and, as you noted, decimates the population in zones that don't have portals.
I would've stayed with EQ1 had they:
- Left the nexus port in-place on a 20-30 min timer for free
- Added the ability to purchase a shard and insta-port (which would've been a good cash sink and they could've charged different ticket prices based on player level). This fee would've also left the port-for-cash business mostly intact as enterprising players could try to undercut the NPCs prices.
- Added NPCs at the druid rings (again, charging a healthly amount for the convenience of not waiting for a porter class to wander by). Prices should've been high enough that the diehard port-for-hire folks could still attempt to undercut the fees.
(shrugs) I still think the Nexus and the Bazaar were a bad idea, especially when you had NPCs that would buy/sell to everyone. It killed off the old-world cities almost instantly and made faction meaningless (a big loss for a game like EQ1 where faction was a core game element). The Plane of Knowledge just made it worse and drove me away from the game entirely.
Not when I have mod points. Not all of us adhere to the prevalent group-think, but we do take care to pick our battles. I will admit to possibly steering clear of those topics when I have mod points, so maybe I need to start focusing on those stories to moderate.
There are a lot of us here who believe in copyright, but are still disgusted by the lengthy extentions to copyright, the bully tactics used by RIAA/MPAA, the stupidity of the Sony rootkit, and the pointlessness of DRM. Not to mention the unevenness of laws being applied where citizens are held to a different standard then corporations.
So, while I may personally disagree with the "screw-you RIAA" attitude as an excuse to infringe on copyrights, I can understand the motivation behind the backlash movement. It logically follows that if one side commits abuses of power, the other side will retaliate. But as with all "movements" there are people who will cloak their personal greed under the mantle of being a victim in order to appease their personal desires.
And sometimes those users (who use the cloak) are good enough liars / dissemblers to fool other people into thinking that their actions are high and mighty. Which gets them mod'd up by less discerning moderators.
We could also get into the whole "not everything that is immoral is illegal and not everything that is legal is moral" argument. As a functioning citizen, it is best if I follow the legal code. But if it disagrees with my moral code then I need to decide which is more important.
But that's probably something for another day.
What will this do to the game rental market? (Does Blockbuster still rent games?)
(shrug) Different priorities. I'd never upgrade a Win2000 laptop to WinXP for example and I don't plan on upgrading any of our WinXP laptops to Vista. Older, non-NT systems might be worth it, but stuff made before 2000 tends to be just under what I consider worth upgrading.
As for restore CDs, I prefer to make a drive image after I've stripped the Manufacture's extra bits off. (And corporate laptops tend to not come with extra cruft in the first place.) Then after I finish configuring the laptop, we create a 2nd image in case the user complete hoses the machine.
Or is flash getting better, so that this isn't the concern that it once was?
I'm pretty sure flash memory has gotten better. I don't know exact numbers, but it's probably an order of magnitude more writes then was possible a few years ago. Some (all?) of the chips even do automatic wear leveling so that frequent writes by the O/S (such as swap files or updating a directory entry) don't wear out a particular spot in the flash chip.
And even if you do start to wear out sectors, it will be a gradual process (slowly losing usable space). Which is probably better then a hard drive that catastrophically fails all at once due to mechanical defect.
Am I the only one who's sitting here and wondering, "What was this guy thinking?!" Laptops have so much custom hardware these days that it's a Bad Idea(TM) to attempt an OS installation from anything but restore CDs. This guy not only tried to install from new media, but he tried to install a cutting-edge operating system that isn't even out of beta!
Nope, I'm right there with you. See also the silliness of the BusinessWeek article from a few weeks ago where the reviewer chooses a laptop based on its theoretical upgrade to Vista down the road.
I've done the "put a newer OS on an older laptop". It's a real PITA and the only reason I did it was that Toshiba shipped this model with both Win98 or WinNT and I ended up with a Win98 through miscommunication. Fortunately, it (mostly) worked was because Toshiba had device drivers for this laptop.
But for the most part, putting a new Windows OS on old laptops is a fool's errand. Way too much custom hardware in these beasts and you'll spend a long time looking for drivers. If the laptop has been out of production for a year or more, very few manufacturers will go back and write drivers to make newer Windows OSs work on older hardware. There's simply no profit in it.
Apple does it because they control the hardware (it makes sense to upgrade to the various revisions of OS X). Upgrading to Linux is also possible but you also have to do a lot of research on what laptops have good Linux support. At least in the Linux camp, you have a dedicated group of developers who are interested in writing the drivers and making sure they work with the newer kernels.
That was definitely true back in the AthlonXP days (I fought with the KT266? chipset for longer then I care to think about).
Not so true anymore.
I have an Asus A8V motherboard that I use for a Gentoo server and I've had very good results. I think that's using a KT800 chipset. I've used a few other more recent VIA chipsets without problems as well. (Mostly 64bit systems.)
So right now, I have no real bias against either NV or VIA chipsets. Neither have bitten me in the past few years. I typically buy Asus motherboards, usually the middle-tier products (not the super-cheap ones).
That PISSES ME OFF TO NO EXTENT, so I will usually close out of the AIM client (or minimize it), I am hoping that AIM is seeing how many people let the video run it's length, and when they look at my stat, they will realize that each and every time a video comes on, I close out of it. Perhaps they will stop sending those damn things.
You want to get *really* ticked off?
Open up Task Manager and look at how much CPU time the AIM client uses, even when minimized. You'll find that it uses quite a bit of CPU time per day even when you have it minimized to the system tray all day.
I put up with it for a while, but once it started burning significant amounts of CPU time per day it got the boot. (Since I refuse to run the AIM client any more, I don't remember the numbers. But 10-30min of CPU time per day on my 1.6Ghz CPU sounds about right.)
In comparison, things like PGPTray (5 sec/day), my EFax (JFax now?) account (1 sec/day) are pretty tame. Yahoo's messenger is running at 2.5 min/day of CPU time so I'm debating whether that one is going to get the boot next.
Personally, Altavista (with their www.av.com domain) had the mind-share in my part of the country. Lycos was a runner-up in that race.
Of course, back then, Yahoo! was a decent directory of websites. So if you were looking for something, you'd start in Yahoo! and look at the site listings. Only after you didn't find it (or your search was *really* specific) would you go using AV's search.
(Based on a hazy recollection of the latter-90s...)
associate "Burger King" with "crappy advertising" rather than food might also be telling
As I was driving around town yesterday... I was amused by the thought of how repugnant I find fast food places. Somewhere along the line I stopped looking at McDs, BK, Hardees, Wendy's as suitable places to get a bite to eat.
Instead, I go looking for the local diner or greasy spoon. Probably just as bad for me, but the food is often made by the owners of the place and it's nice to get waited on at the counter. (I know of at least one diner in Camp Hill PA where the owners are the cooks.)
Heck, become a regular (and a decent tipper) at a diner for long enough and the waitress will bring you your favorite drink as soon as you sit down.
I have seen flash banner ads with 10s of translucent layers and antialiasing and shit that tried to run at 1000 fps or so. One of them made an A64 come down to a crawl.
That's what prompted me to finally install FlashBlock and be done with it. I didn't mind (too much) the moving ads or the ones that made noise when you would mouse-over them. But when you start to screw with my CPU utilization, even while in the background, you get the boot.
Seems to have made the system much more responsive as a result as well (FlashBlock on Mozilla 1.7x).
Other ads like GIF banner adds I won't block. They're unobtrusive and stay out of the way (and I have Mozilla set to only display GIF animations a single time).
Most items over at www.pricescan.com have price trend charts. It's not a chart for the overall category, just charts for each individual item.
(I've been using PriceScan for quite a few years... maybe as far back as 1998? I still end up ordering from places like NewEgg or MWave.com or TheNerds.net but it's good for seeing prices.)
I think upgradeable laptops are pretty much here (or as far as they're going to get). Most upgrades are simply more RAM or larger HDs and those are already pretty easy. Sure, video upgrades would be nice, but I don't view laptops as being gaming system powerhouses. CPU upgrades are a pipe-dream (and generally a waste of fundage) because RAM technology and motherboard technology has usually changed enough to make it better to upgrade all 3 in tandem.
a three year old machine is still perfectly able to run just about everything you want to throw at it
That's what we've discovered as well over the past few years. Anything made after ~2001 is still a decent system as long as it has enough RAM. CPU speed improvement have pretty much stalled (no more doubling performance every 12 months) and other then dual-core I don't see much signs of rapid improvement any time soon.
I view a 3-year old laptop as middle-aged now rather then being suited for the junk heap. At least, if it's a corporate level laptop with 512MB or 1GB of RAM. The consumer level products probably won't go the distance.
I think you should re-examine the "3 years and out" mantra. Things have changed a bit in the past few years with regards to how fast technology is advancing. CPU speeds are somewhat stagnant (but dual-core does present a sizeable increase in performance).
Our old standard was:
- Every 2 years for power users (1/3 of our users)
- Every 3-5 years for non-power users (2/3 of our users), hand-me-downs from the power users
I'm one of those power users. Yet when my turn came up in 2004, I passed on the upgrade. Why? Because my Tecra 9100 from 2002 still had legs to spare (1.6Ghz 1GB RAM 100GB HD). In fact, I just had the keyboard and DVD drive replaced and it feels like a brand-new machine (I use the laptop keyboard 100% of the time).
I'll still probably upgrade later this year (to a Thinkpad T60/T60p) because I do need the 2GB of RAM and the dual-core is interesting. But I could probably get by with this laptop for another year easily. This laptop will end up in the hands of a less needy user who will probably use it until it finally dies 4-5 years from now.
I fully expect the new Thinkpad to last me 5 years as my primary machine (and we'll be buying the 5-yr warranty). Then I wouldn't be surprised if it's still functional for another 5 years.
Inverters cost about $300 to replace, at least that was the cost for a Tecra 8100 we repaired last year. Now, that machine is 5 years old and barely worth repairing, but still worth it (a 512MB Win2000 system). But it will probably get used for another 3-4 years by a user who only does light word-processing and checks their e-mail.
In case you didn't notice, we max out the RAM as much as possible on our machines. New laptops won't be bought with less then 1GB (and probably 2x1GB since it's only $200/chip). We find that gives us the most bang for the buck and gives us systems that are still viable (barring outright hardware failures) a few years down the road.
I have tried unsuccessfully to get a wiki going at my company. Its very easy to get people excited about it, but very difficult to get them to actually contribute. Wiki syntax does have a learning curve, and most "non-technical" employees throw up their hands is short order.
Personally, I think what you ran up against is what I call the "creator foots the bill but rarely benefits" syndrome. I'm sure there's a better word for it.
Basically, it's the same reason that metadata never gets entered into document properties (i.e. all those extra nifty metatags in Microsoft Word/Excel files). To the creator of said documents, it's an extra step that doesn't gain them anything except once in a blue moon.
Another example is why the semantic web or publishing data in XML format rarely takes off. The creator has to expend effort but rarely gets rewarded. In fact, the creator has just made it easier for others to mooch off of their hard work.
I've seen this effect with both Lotus Notes installations (where you try to get users to store knowledge into Notes database) and with Wikis (again, where you're trying to get users to document knowledge). Without management involvement, it's unlikely to happen.
And from my experience, very few corporate cultures really reward sharing of knowledge. To give away knowledge is to give away power and it makes the person with the knowledge more replaceable.