Battery life is sucktastic, and I'm not sure if that's a hardware or a software problem. It's a fairly old computer, and it's been through a lot. It also refuses to hibernate properly, so I have to power down when I'm moving it from place to place.
Hardware probably. Batteries degrade after a few years.
I don't remember all the specifics, but NiCd has to be handled differently then Lithiums in order to keep the batteries from degrading. For example, I think with Lithiums that if you leave the laptop plugged in all the time it will be bad for the Lithium battery.
So if battery life is really important, you may want to look at buying a replacement battery.
The only strenuous advice I have is to avoid "desktop replacement" pigs.
That's not as true for any machines created in the last few years (anything after 2000 that shipped with Win2000 is my cut-off). Performance gains have slowed quite a bit in the past few years. Not including the dual-core improvement, CPU speeds have only been doubling every 3-5 years instead of every 12-18 months.
As an anecdotal example, my current laptop is a Tecra 9100 (built in early 2002, ~1.6Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, WinXP Pro, 100GB HD). I've been using this laptop for 4 years, 7 days a week, 8-15 hours per day. Over the years I bumped the memory from 512MB to 1GB, replaced the 30GB HD with a larger 100GB HD, and I just replaced the DVD drive and the keyboard.
It's still a very useable machine for being 4 years old. The key to that usefulness is mostly the 1GB of RAM. (It also helps that I have a dual-CPU workstation sitting next to me for the really CPU-intensive stuff.) Right now, the only reason that I'm considering replacing the unit is that 1GB of RAM isn't quite enough for my work style (where I have half a dozen apps all open at the same time).
So I'll probably upgrade this year to a 2GB T60p and hand this unit off to someone less demanding. They'll probably get 4-6 years of use out of my old Tecra. It will probably need a new backlight in another 2 years. So this laptop bought in early 2002 will still be functional in 2010-2012. That's a pretty impressive lifespan.
I feel pretty confident in saying that a dual-core machine, bought today, can easily last 8-12 years as long as it's taken care of. Make sure you get as much RAM as feasible (2GB is reasonablely priced) and get a 5 year warranty.
It won't be the fastest thing on the block 5 years from now, but it will still be a very serviceable machine.
A system image of the hard-drive will save you oodles of pain down the road. Making that image should always be your first step.
Use Ghost, Acronis TrueImage or just plain Knoppix + NTFSClone and create an image of the laptop's hard drive as soon as you get it. Burn that image to DVD, sprinkled with adequate PAR2 recovery data. Heck, make 2 copies.
Then, after you finish the initial setup, do another image.
Now, pretty much no matter what, you can always get back to your starting point without having to deal with things like glitchy recovery CDs.
I typically create a new image every 30-90 days. Data files get backed up using a different program.
However, you really need an orthagonal approach too, that includes banning things that aren't meant to be coming into your network in the first place, as well has having perhaps a different branded AV agent on the client machines.
Definitely. While not sure-fire (webmail is a big hole) our mailserver simply rejects messages with common virus-laden file extensions. Here's our list from postfix's filtering:
#block unsafe attachments /^Content-(Type|Disposition):.*(file)?name=.*\.
(asd|bat|chm|cmd|com|dll|exe|hlp|hta|js|jse|lnk|
ocx|pif|scr|shb|shm|shs|vb|vbe|vbs|vbx|vxd|wsf|wsh )
/ REJECT Sorry, we do not accept.${3} file types.
It doesn't protect against the ones inside of ZIP files, but it kills off a decent percentage of the mail-bourne worms.
Norton Antivirus Corporate edition however is fantastic
Aye, we use Symantec's corporate A/V (same thing) and have been pretty happy with it. The corporate product does a good job of staying out of the way, staying up-to-date and doing its job.
The downside is the cost per seat for licensing. For a business, it's fairly easy to justify the cost (since cleaning up an infection pays for the license fees just in labor and lost time), but I can see annual license fees as being a problem for a non-profit.
One solution might be ClamAV on the desktops and only putting a stronger / costlier package like SAV on the central servers.
So I have a catch-all email on my domain name (say 'example.com').
You'll pretty much have to knuckle-down and ditch the catch-all email account. It's no longer worth it to have one. Just configure aliases for the common ones (dns@, admin@, postmaster@, webmaster@, root@, abuse@) and let the rest of mis-addressed e-mails get the reject notification.
Also why the fsck are email servers bouncing email back to an address that obviously can be easily spoofed?
Because SMTP never included a mechanism to say "mail from MY domain only comes from THESE servers". There's the MX mechanism to tell you where to deliver mail to my machine(s), but no way for me to say that I only send e-mail through X, Y and Z machines.
That is basically what SPF attempts to address. It allows you to publish reverse-MX information for your domain where you state: "e-mail from my domain only comes from these addresses, you should possibly/definitely ignore e-mail from any other address".
It's not an anti-spam technique (spammers can simply add SPF records with very loose restrictions to their DNS records). Instead, its goal is anti-forgery to lessen the amount of forged e-mail out there, along with less blowback from forged domains (such as bounce messages or virus notifications).
Configuring SPF for a domain is easy. Just figure out what addresses you use to send e-mail, calculate the SPF record, then stick the record in your DNS.
It has a few detractors, but for the domains that I control, the downsides of SPF are negligible. I'd rather deal with the limitations of putting such a "lock" on my domains rather then have all of the blowback from forgeries.
Dell is great for small businesses who have a moderate amount of technical prowess but who want a warranty. i.e. Me
With Dell, I can go and configure the server or workstation and get *exactly* what I want. I don't have to flip for hours through IBM or HP/Compaq websites trying to find a configuration that meets my needs. (Some companies have gotten better, but we've had good reliable hardware from Dell and have no reason to switch.)
In addition, their configuration page shows me exactly how much I'll save/spend if I add a particular option. (A lot of early, now defunct, PC sales websites failed to include this simple feature.)
So, when ordering the system, I feel like I'm in control of the process. There's no sales droid trying to sell me a configuration that I don't want just because they have too many sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
I can get a 3-5 year warranty on it with on-site response so that if hardware fails I don't have to drive 5 hours to go replace a fan. That's a big reason we simply order the boxes from Dell rather then building them ourselves. For some custom workstations, we'll build our own, but mostly Dell meets the needs of our less demanding users.
Unfortunately for us, Dell didn't sell AMD-based machines. Now they do and I'm looking forward to ordering them (rather then the noise-as-hell, hot-as-hell Xeons).
The system that I'm currently considering building (to replace my old Dual-Opteron 2Ghz single-core system that I use for video editing):
Antec p180b case (fairly new on the market) Tiger K8WE (S2877)
(2) Opteron 270/275/280 chips
4GB RAM
WinXP Pro (32bit still, not comfortable with 64bit yet)
Probably a 500W P/S. Pair of 400GB PATAs and (4) 400GB SATAs.
Noise-wise it shouldn't be terribly bad. The current unit is crammed into a Antec Sonata case but with only (4) HDs. The big key is the 120mm fans in the case combined with the fairly quiet Opteron fans. Heat is the big problem in the smaller Sonata case which is why I'm moving up to the p180/p180b cases for the next system.
I'm just waiting for dual-core Opteron prices to drop a bit more (I'd prefer to only pay ~$300/chip).
After a certain pixel count, there's not much point in going much further in consumer devices. You're just adding data, but not improving the viewable image. Why have an image that is higher res than a monitor or your eyeball's ability to process data? Where is that cut-off?
The "limits" have more to do with the quality of the optics in the camera rather then your eyeball or your monitor. Beyond a certain pixel density, you exceed the resolution/detail (there's a better technical word for this) of what the optic components are capable of resolving.
You can improve the optics by using better materials (optical grade glass instead of cheap plastic) or you can make the optics larger. Both are ways to improve the resolution that the optics are capable of capturing.
(Sorry if that's poorly explained, it's been a while since I've seen it explained.)
Now, is it practical for a consumer level point-and-shoot to capture high amounts of pixels? Eh... if they can make the sensor cheap enough, why not? The consumer will buy the pixel size that they feel gives them the most value for the dollar. I may think it's foolish while the next person down the line thinks it's a great value.
Notes excels at distributed, free-form, disconnected access to documents that have work-flow rules attached. It's a document management system with built-in replication and the ability to add arbitrary fields to any document.
IOW: A user base that is frequently disconnected but who still need full access to all of the information. And that information changes frequently, but the users still need to always have the latest info at their fingertips. Users who need to fill out forms remotely, then seamless merge them into the workflow the next time they manage to connect to the home office. That sort of thing is cake-easy in Lotus Notes.
For the desktop user inside the corporate firewall, it makes more sense to just point them at a web portal. Unfortunately, Notes gets sold as the cure-all for all of your business problems which results in very clunky applications doing things that really aren't suited for being inside Notes.
A lot of developers try to make Lotus Notes do relational database type things (like keeping track of student attendance). They then get to deal with the fact that Notes really isn't a relational database and find out that their solution won't scale to a few thousand students.
(I did a few years working with Lotus Notes back in the late-90s. The cost of the licenses is what turns into an "every problem looks like a nail" monster.)
I'd peg it more around 2000 when the performance curve flattened enough to lengthen replacement cycles.
Back in the mid-late 90s you were still seeing double-performance about every 15-18 months and a 3-year old system was usually 4x-5x slower then a current unit. Hard drive sizes were also growing by leaps and bounds in the late 90s (IIRC, a big HD back in 1998-ish was 13GB).
The other half of that equation is that Win2000 was the first decent O/S that could realistically displace Win95 for gaming/multimedia while providing (most of) the stability of WinNT. It's a pretty tried and true O/S at this point and most newer software/hardware still works on that platform in addition to WinXP.
Starting in the early 2000s, we started making sure to buy units that were maxed out on RAM (512MB or 1GB if possible). We upgraded our power users about every 2 years (closer to every 3 now) and handed the old machines off down the line. For an undemanding user, a Win2000 box with 1GB of RAM will probably be suitable well into the early 2010s.
I'm still using my 1.6Ghz laptop from Spring 2002. It's running WinXP, has 1GB RAM and still meets my needs. With a few minor repairs it will probably last until 2010 or 2012. Possibly even longer (since it will get handed off to a less-demanding user in the next year or two). I just spent about 10% of its original puchase price to replace the keyboard and mouse button pads and it now feels like a brand new system.
That's a pretty amazing lifespan considering that we used to think 3 year old machines were basically junk. (And they were back when performance doubled every year.) We may not be far away from the point in time when a 10 year old machine is considered middle-aged.
Outfitting a laptop with a pair of 1GB chips, OTOH, is quite reasonable. Which is good, because at 1GB, I'm feeling RAM-constrained on my current 3yr old laptop. (My 2 other desktop machines have 2GB or 3GB installed RAM.)
Which is the current media player that I rely on. The big advantage is that it plays video correctly on my secondary display (which is an HDTV monitor hooked to my PC's 2nd video port).
For playing music... not sure where I'd go after WinAmp. Maybe iTunes or FooBar2000 (there aren't many *good* music players).
Then how do you explain the success of Dell in spite of virtually every tech enthusiast's constant railing against them?
Eh? For the average home user, who wants a lot of hand-holding and don't plan on running current games... sending them to Dell means I don't have to deal with the support headaches. Plus, their prices are quite reasonable for low-end machines.
Dell is not all bad. They have their niche, they're just not a good fit for folks who want oodles of upgrade room or power-users who want the best bang for the buck. (Personally, I prefer to custom-build my own.)
If I were to build a *budget* system but with upgradeability, the NVIDIA 6100/6150 motherboards look interesting. They include a GeForce 6100 chip on the motherboard but you can drop in a PCIe video card later. The downside is it's integrated video, not the fastest, but it works for casual gamers. It has 2 PCI slots, 1 PCIe 1x slot and 1 PCIe 16x slot (could stand to use a few more, maybe a different motherboard then the Asus A8N-VM has it).
Athlon64 3000+ (939pin), Asus A8N-VM ($65), 1GB RAM is around $260.
Not a bad price for a decent system with moderate upgrade options for later. Add in misc parts and a WinXP license and your costs finish at around $500.
I think the problem with that philosophy is that downloading the 'right' set of plugins to get a good experience is too challenging (for most users). You really do want your users to download, once, a package of stuff that yeilds a great experience, so that your reviews will be nice an glowingly positive. Hence, we'll always want to see the best features of the most popular plugins make their way into the core browser.
Exactly.
Under the Firefox folder in our Software folder at the office, I maintain a few sub-folders with the best-of-the-best extensions. It works, but this is stuff that should be in Firefox proper (such as session restoration). Those sub-folders are titled:
There are a LOT of Firefox extensions that simply aren't suitable for regular users. Either they conflict with other extensions that are better (and more fully rounded) or they are very esoteric and narrow in scope. Other extensions are more "because it was cool to build" types. Things that you'd install once, look at once, but not use on a day-to-day basis.
I spend about a full day once a quarter digging through the extension listing, looking for gems to be added to the sub-folders.
I've been looking at the Asus A8N-VM that has the built-in GeForce 6100 chipset. Yeah, it's integrated video, but it's supposedly about as good as the old GeForce 5900 cards.
The big advantage is that it's a PCIe motherboard so you can drop in a more expensive graphics card down the road.
Price for the A8N-VM with CPU and RAM? ~$260 at MWave.com. The motherboard is only $65.
It's not the most expandable system (2 PCI, 1 PCIe 1x and 1 PCIe 16x) but it's not a bad looking board for a budget-level system. So there are ways to move towards PCIe without breaking the bank.
They're also assuming that MPEG1 is the best solution. Maybe they're trying to scare-monger...
MPEG4 for standard-def TV looks quite nice at rates of 384kbit/sec (full-frame). Definitely comparable to 2-4mbit/sec MPEG1 (or MPEG2). You could even pack that down to 192-256kbit and probably get away with it. I've seen rips at 128kbit but I think they're overcompressed.
HDTV in MPEG4 would probably work at bitrates of around 1.0-1.5mbit/sec. Versus the 19-20mbit/sec required by the MPEG2 streaming technology.
Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching.
I'm not thrilled about that particular "feature" either.
Unless... Firefox 2 gives us a "undo last closed tab" action.
That would at least make it a little more clumsy-fingered friendly. (Although I tend to use Ctrl-W to close tabs anyway rather then the mouse button.)
As mentioned by others, both Prime95 and QuickPar both assume that the user's machine is broken. Hence, they double-check their results (Prime95 is especially paranoid).
Plus, there are a lot of errors that will only show up if your CPU is loaded in addition to disk/bus activity (such as doing a disk test at the same time).
All of my jobs have been through personal networking. (My current job is due to working with someone at a previous job.)
I only had one time when I had to do the resume thing, but I already knew 3 people at this particular company. I simply structured my resume to play up my practical experience and downplayed that I had only finished 3 out of 4 years of college.
Funny thing was, I ended up with a different position at that particular job then the one I applied for. Mostly because I had a few months of experience developing for Lotus Notes.
Come to think of it, I also managed to get an interview at a large banking corporation. I also interviewed with a few staffing firms. So my resume got past filters at those places. I don't remember if my resume was passed along by someone else or if it was via one of the job websites.
Most smaller companies don't care about the 4-year degree, they tend to operate on a more practical level. OTOH, your job isn't as secure (unless the company is well managed) but you get a lot more personal freedom and flexibility.
Systems Administation is about knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know and figuring out how to know what you don't know.....or something like that.
Oh goodness, YES!
That's pretty much how I try to describe "how to be successful in tech" to people I talk to. It also requires a child-like curiosity about things other then the immediate task or fire-of-the-day.
I may not know how to do X, Y or Z, but I'd bet I can scratch something up in a day or two. And to think I'm just a college dropout...
I'm debating replacing my 19" CRT with a 1600x1200 LCD, but a 1920x1200 LCD would give me more screen realestate without sacrificing veritical resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Battery life is sucktastic, and I'm not sure if that's a hardware or a software problem. It's a fairly old computer, and it's been through a lot. It also refuses to hibernate properly, so I have to power down when I'm moving it from place to place.
Hardware probably. Batteries degrade after a few years.
I don't remember all the specifics, but NiCd has to be handled differently then Lithiums in order to keep the batteries from degrading. For example, I think with Lithiums that if you leave the laptop plugged in all the time it will be bad for the Lithium battery.
So if battery life is really important, you may want to look at buying a replacement battery.
The only strenuous advice I have is to avoid "desktop replacement" pigs.
That's not as true for any machines created in the last few years (anything after 2000 that shipped with Win2000 is my cut-off). Performance gains have slowed quite a bit in the past few years. Not including the dual-core improvement, CPU speeds have only been doubling every 3-5 years instead of every 12-18 months.
As an anecdotal example, my current laptop is a Tecra 9100 (built in early 2002, ~1.6Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, WinXP Pro, 100GB HD). I've been using this laptop for 4 years, 7 days a week, 8-15 hours per day. Over the years I bumped the memory from 512MB to 1GB, replaced the 30GB HD with a larger 100GB HD, and I just replaced the DVD drive and the keyboard.
It's still a very useable machine for being 4 years old. The key to that usefulness is mostly the 1GB of RAM. (It also helps that I have a dual-CPU workstation sitting next to me for the really CPU-intensive stuff.) Right now, the only reason that I'm considering replacing the unit is that 1GB of RAM isn't quite enough for my work style (where I have half a dozen apps all open at the same time).
So I'll probably upgrade this year to a 2GB T60p and hand this unit off to someone less demanding. They'll probably get 4-6 years of use out of my old Tecra. It will probably need a new backlight in another 2 years. So this laptop bought in early 2002 will still be functional in 2010-2012. That's a pretty impressive lifespan.
I feel pretty confident in saying that a dual-core machine, bought today, can easily last 8-12 years as long as it's taken care of. Make sure you get as much RAM as feasible (2GB is reasonablely priced) and get a 5 year warranty.
It won't be the fastest thing on the block 5 years from now, but it will still be a very serviceable machine.
A system image of the hard-drive will save you oodles of pain down the road. Making that image should always be your first step.
Use Ghost, Acronis TrueImage or just plain Knoppix + NTFSClone and create an image of the laptop's hard drive as soon as you get it. Burn that image to DVD, sprinkled with adequate PAR2 recovery data. Heck, make 2 copies.
Then, after you finish the initial setup, do another image.
Now, pretty much no matter what, you can always get back to your starting point without having to deal with things like glitchy recovery CDs.
I typically create a new image every 30-90 days. Data files get backed up using a different program.
However, you really need an orthagonal approach too, that includes banning things that aren't meant to be coming into your network in the first place, as well has having perhaps a different branded AV agent on the client machines.
/^Content-(Type|Disposition):.*(file)?name=.*\.
ocx|pif|scr|shb|shm|shs|vb|vbe|vbs|vbx|vxd|wsf|wsh ) .${3} file types.
Definitely. While not sure-fire (webmail is a big hole) our mailserver simply rejects messages with common virus-laden file extensions. Here's our list from postfix's filtering:
#block unsafe attachments
(asd|bat|chm|cmd|com|dll|exe|hlp|hta|js|jse|lnk|
/ REJECT Sorry, we do not accept
It doesn't protect against the ones inside of ZIP files, but it kills off a decent percentage of the mail-bourne worms.
Norton Antivirus Corporate edition however is fantastic
Aye, we use Symantec's corporate A/V (same thing) and have been pretty happy with it. The corporate product does a good job of staying out of the way, staying up-to-date and doing its job.
The downside is the cost per seat for licensing. For a business, it's fairly easy to justify the cost (since cleaning up an infection pays for the license fees just in labor and lost time), but I can see annual license fees as being a problem for a non-profit.
One solution might be ClamAV on the desktops and only putting a stronger / costlier package like SAV on the central servers.
So I have a catch-all email on my domain name (say 'example.com').
You'll pretty much have to knuckle-down and ditch the catch-all email account. It's no longer worth it to have one. Just configure aliases for the common ones (dns@, admin@, postmaster@, webmaster@, root@, abuse@) and let the rest of mis-addressed e-mails get the reject notification.
Also why the fsck are email servers bouncing email back to an address that obviously can be easily spoofed?
Because SMTP never included a mechanism to say "mail from MY domain only comes from THESE servers". There's the MX mechanism to tell you where to deliver mail to my machine(s), but no way for me to say that I only send e-mail through X, Y and Z machines.
That is basically what SPF attempts to address. It allows you to publish reverse-MX information for your domain where you state: "e-mail from my domain only comes from these addresses, you should possibly/definitely ignore e-mail from any other address".
It's not an anti-spam technique (spammers can simply add SPF records with very loose restrictions to their DNS records). Instead, its goal is anti-forgery to lessen the amount of forged e-mail out there, along with less blowback from forged domains (such as bounce messages or virus notifications).
Configuring SPF for a domain is easy. Just figure out what addresses you use to send e-mail, calculate the SPF record, then stick the record in your DNS.
It has a few detractors, but for the domains that I control, the downsides of SPF are negligible. I'd rather deal with the limitations of putting such a "lock" on my domains rather then have all of the blowback from forgeries.
Dell is great for small businesses who have a moderate amount of technical prowess but who want a warranty. i.e. Me
With Dell, I can go and configure the server or workstation and get *exactly* what I want. I don't have to flip for hours through IBM or HP/Compaq websites trying to find a configuration that meets my needs. (Some companies have gotten better, but we've had good reliable hardware from Dell and have no reason to switch.)
In addition, their configuration page shows me exactly how much I'll save/spend if I add a particular option. (A lot of early, now defunct, PC sales websites failed to include this simple feature.)
So, when ordering the system, I feel like I'm in control of the process. There's no sales droid trying to sell me a configuration that I don't want just because they have too many sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
I can get a 3-5 year warranty on it with on-site response so that if hardware fails I don't have to drive 5 hours to go replace a fan. That's a big reason we simply order the boxes from Dell rather then building them ourselves. For some custom workstations, we'll build our own, but mostly Dell meets the needs of our less demanding users.
Unfortunately for us, Dell didn't sell AMD-based machines. Now they do and I'm looking forward to ordering them (rather then the noise-as-hell, hot-as-hell Xeons).
The system that I'm currently considering building (to replace my old Dual-Opteron 2Ghz single-core system that I use for video editing):
Antec p180b case (fairly new on the market)
Tiger K8WE (S2877)
(2) Opteron 270/275/280 chips
4GB RAM
WinXP Pro (32bit still, not comfortable with 64bit yet)
Probably a 500W P/S. Pair of 400GB PATAs and (4) 400GB SATAs.
Noise-wise it shouldn't be terribly bad. The current unit is crammed into a Antec Sonata case but with only (4) HDs. The big key is the 120mm fans in the case combined with the fairly quiet Opteron fans. Heat is the big problem in the smaller Sonata case which is why I'm moving up to the p180/p180b cases for the next system.
I'm just waiting for dual-core Opteron prices to drop a bit more (I'd prefer to only pay ~$300/chip).
After a certain pixel count, there's not much point in going much further in consumer devices. You're just adding data, but not improving the viewable image. Why have an image that is higher res than a monitor or your eyeball's ability to process data? Where is that cut-off?
The "limits" have more to do with the quality of the optics in the camera rather then your eyeball or your monitor. Beyond a certain pixel density, you exceed the resolution/detail (there's a better technical word for this) of what the optic components are capable of resolving.
You can improve the optics by using better materials (optical grade glass instead of cheap plastic) or you can make the optics larger. Both are ways to improve the resolution that the optics are capable of capturing.
(Sorry if that's poorly explained, it's been a while since I've seen it explained.)
Now, is it practical for a consumer level point-and-shoot to capture high amounts of pixels? Eh... if they can make the sensor cheap enough, why not? The consumer will buy the pixel size that they feel gives them the most value for the dollar. I may think it's foolish while the next person down the line thinks it's a great value.
Notes excels at distributed, free-form, disconnected access to documents that have work-flow rules attached. It's a document management system with built-in replication and the ability to add arbitrary fields to any document.
IOW: A user base that is frequently disconnected but who still need full access to all of the information. And that information changes frequently, but the users still need to always have the latest info at their fingertips. Users who need to fill out forms remotely, then seamless merge them into the workflow the next time they manage to connect to the home office. That sort of thing is cake-easy in Lotus Notes.
For the desktop user inside the corporate firewall, it makes more sense to just point them at a web portal. Unfortunately, Notes gets sold as the cure-all for all of your business problems which results in very clunky applications doing things that really aren't suited for being inside Notes.
A lot of developers try to make Lotus Notes do relational database type things (like keeping track of student attendance). They then get to deal with the fact that Notes really isn't a relational database and find out that their solution won't scale to a few thousand students.
(I did a few years working with Lotus Notes back in the late-90s. The cost of the licenses is what turns into an "every problem looks like a nail" monster.)
I'd peg it more around 2000 when the performance curve flattened enough to lengthen replacement cycles.
Back in the mid-late 90s you were still seeing double-performance about every 15-18 months and a 3-year old system was usually 4x-5x slower then a current unit. Hard drive sizes were also growing by leaps and bounds in the late 90s (IIRC, a big HD back in 1998-ish was 13GB).
The other half of that equation is that Win2000 was the first decent O/S that could realistically displace Win95 for gaming/multimedia while providing (most of) the stability of WinNT. It's a pretty tried and true O/S at this point and most newer software/hardware still works on that platform in addition to WinXP.
Starting in the early 2000s, we started making sure to buy units that were maxed out on RAM (512MB or 1GB if possible). We upgraded our power users about every 2 years (closer to every 3 now) and handed the old machines off down the line. For an undemanding user, a Win2000 box with 1GB of RAM will probably be suitable well into the early 2010s.
I'm still using my 1.6Ghz laptop from Spring 2002. It's running WinXP, has 1GB RAM and still meets my needs. With a few minor repairs it will probably last until 2010 or 2012. Possibly even longer (since it will get handed off to a less-demanding user in the next year or two). I just spent about 10% of its original puchase price to replace the keyboard and mouse button pads and it now feels like a brand new system.
That's a pretty amazing lifespan considering that we used to think 3 year old machines were basically junk. (And they were back when performance doubled every year.) We may not be far away from the point in time when a 10 year old machine is considered middle-aged.
Those 2GB chips are still a little pricey.
Outfitting a laptop with a pair of 1GB chips, OTOH, is quite reasonable. Which is good, because at 1GB, I'm feeling RAM-constrained on my current 3yr old laptop. (My 2 other desktop machines have 2GB or 3GB installed RAM.)
Zoom Player
Which is the current media player that I rely on. The big advantage is that it plays video correctly on my secondary display (which is an HDTV monitor hooked to my PC's 2nd video port).
For playing music... not sure where I'd go after WinAmp. Maybe iTunes or FooBar2000 (there aren't many *good* music players).
Then how do you explain the success of Dell in spite of virtually every tech enthusiast's constant railing against them?
Eh? For the average home user, who wants a lot of hand-holding and don't plan on running current games... sending them to Dell means I don't have to deal with the support headaches. Plus, their prices are quite reasonable for low-end machines.
Dell is not all bad. They have their niche, they're just not a good fit for folks who want oodles of upgrade room or power-users who want the best bang for the buck. (Personally, I prefer to custom-build my own.)
If I were to build a *budget* system but with upgradeability, the NVIDIA 6100/6150 motherboards look interesting. They include a GeForce 6100 chip on the motherboard but you can drop in a PCIe video card later. The downside is it's integrated video, not the fastest, but it works for casual gamers. It has 2 PCI slots, 1 PCIe 1x slot and 1 PCIe 16x slot (could stand to use a few more, maybe a different motherboard then the Asus A8N-VM has it).
Athlon64 3000+ (939pin), Asus A8N-VM ($65), 1GB RAM is around $260.
Not a bad price for a decent system with moderate upgrade options for later. Add in misc parts and a WinXP license and your costs finish at around $500.
I think the problem with that philosophy is that downloading the 'right' set of plugins to get a good experience is too challenging (for most users). You really do want your users to download, once, a package of stuff that yeilds a great experience, so that your reviews will be nice an glowingly positive. Hence, we'll always want to see the best features of the most popular plugins make their way into the core browser.
Exactly.
Under the Firefox folder in our Software folder at the office, I maintain a few sub-folders with the best-of-the-best extensions. It works, but this is stuff that should be in Firefox proper (such as session restoration). Those sub-folders are titled:
ExtensionsForAllUsers (FlashBlock, PetName)
ExtensionsForDevelopers (WebDeveloper, LeetKey, ShowIP, ViewSourceWith)
OptionalExtensions (Moji, SmoothWheel)
ExperimentalExtensions (things we're testing)
There are a LOT of Firefox extensions that simply aren't suitable for regular users. Either they conflict with other extensions that are better (and more fully rounded) or they are very esoteric and narrow in scope. Other extensions are more "because it was cool to build" types. Things that you'd install once, look at once, but not use on a day-to-day basis.
I spend about a full day once a quarter digging through the extension listing, looking for gems to be added to the sub-folders.
I've been looking at the Asus A8N-VM that has the built-in GeForce 6100 chipset. Yeah, it's integrated video, but it's supposedly about as good as the old GeForce 5900 cards.
The big advantage is that it's a PCIe motherboard so you can drop in a more expensive graphics card down the road.
Price for the A8N-VM with CPU and RAM? ~$260 at MWave.com. The motherboard is only $65.
It's not the most expandable system (2 PCI, 1 PCIe 1x and 1 PCIe 16x) but it's not a bad looking board for a budget-level system. So there are ways to move towards PCIe without breaking the bank.
They're also assuming that MPEG1 is the best solution. Maybe they're trying to scare-monger...
MPEG4 for standard-def TV looks quite nice at rates of 384kbit/sec (full-frame). Definitely comparable to 2-4mbit/sec MPEG1 (or MPEG2). You could even pack that down to 192-256kbit and probably get away with it. I've seen rips at 128kbit but I think they're overcompressed.
HDTV in MPEG4 would probably work at bitrates of around 1.0-1.5mbit/sec. Versus the 19-20mbit/sec required by the MPEG2 streaming technology.
Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching.
I'm not thrilled about that particular "feature" either.
Unless... Firefox 2 gives us a "undo last closed tab" action.
That would at least make it a little more clumsy-fingered friendly. (Although I tend to use Ctrl-W to close tabs anyway rather then the mouse button.)
As mentioned by others, both Prime95 and QuickPar both assume that the user's machine is broken. Hence, they double-check their results (Prime95 is especially paranoid).
Plus, there are a lot of errors that will only show up if your CPU is loaded in addition to disk/bus activity (such as doing a disk test at the same time).
Ah, good info!
I had read Forge of God but never knew that there was a follow-up book. (Think I picked up Forge of God at a used-book sale or at a used-book store.)
All of my jobs have been through personal networking. (My current job is due to working with someone at a previous job.)
I only had one time when I had to do the resume thing, but I already knew 3 people at this particular company. I simply structured my resume to play up my practical experience and downplayed that I had only finished 3 out of 4 years of college.
Funny thing was, I ended up with a different position at that particular job then the one I applied for. Mostly because I had a few months of experience developing for Lotus Notes.
Come to think of it, I also managed to get an interview at a large banking corporation. I also interviewed with a few staffing firms. So my resume got past filters at those places. I don't remember if my resume was passed along by someone else or if it was via one of the job websites.
Most smaller companies don't care about the 4-year degree, they tend to operate on a more practical level. OTOH, your job isn't as secure (unless the company is well managed) but you get a lot more personal freedom and flexibility.
Systems Administation is about knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know and figuring out how to know what you don't know. ....or something like that.
Oh goodness, YES!
That's pretty much how I try to describe "how to be successful in tech" to people I talk to. It also requires a child-like curiosity about things other then the immediate task or fire-of-the-day.
I may not know how to do X, Y or Z, but I'd bet I can scratch something up in a day or two. And to think I'm just a college dropout...
Las Vegas and Crossing Jordan are also extremely guilty of this. Both shows frequently resort to "magic" technology to solve plot problems.
What's the make/model of that 24" LCD?
I'm debating replacing my 19" CRT with a 1600x1200 LCD, but a 1920x1200 LCD would give me more screen realestate without sacrificing veritical resolution.