I reformat and install Windows on other people's PCs. I tell them upfront that I won't put 98/ME/2000 on their PC for them, I tell them that I have an illegal copy of XP Pro that I will put on for them.
These people are the kind of schmucks that went out 2 - 4 - 6 years ago and spent 2,000 on a *new* shiny PC with all the trimmings. They got hauled over the coals for the box, they paid the Windows tax, the system fell the fuck to pieces because Windows is a Piece Of Shit.
I'm there wiping their hard drives to get rid of spyware, malware, left over DLLs and registry entries, unsafe/unstable 16 bit code, useless hacks that MS have given them over the years to fix up problems that should have been peer reviewed in the first place and to make sure that they have at least the benefit of the last 6 years of "progression" in the Win32 platform.
To stop myself from having to go round again in 3 months I install OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adaware and Spybot. I put a start menu group called "weekly" and put WinUpdate and the spyware stuff in there.
If Windows ever stops updating, they knew I was putting illegal software on there, and the reasons for it.
Also, they really ought to jump to Firefox when it hits 1.0.2 or so
Can you honestly say that in your normal day's usage, you find Firefox to be any less reliable or secure than Mozilla?
I hate to seem like a fanboi, but Firefox has been my browser of choice for over a year now and to see people maligning it for not being 1.x is, to me, like telling them not to buy a computer because they don't have quantum desktops yet.
You know all the arguments, Gecko engine, stable branch, extensions and all that, so I won't bother preaching at you.
I got this far through the comments and not one mention of DeusEx. Talk about missing the boat, that game is probably the closest thing to a future hostory book we have ever created, Nostrodamus was on the Dev team for that and Invisible War. The grey goo scene at the start of IW took my breath away and I often use it to show people what grey goo is all about.
Cloning, GM food/animals/people transgenics and the rest of the atrocities in DE an DE:IW are right on our doorstep, yet they pass us by in this discussion?
Sorry to say it, but I even block OSDN ads. I don't want commercials flashing away at me or lurid colors (other than games.slashdot.org) messing up my reading.
In my defence I will say that I buy stuff from ThinkGeek. I don't need advertising to send me there, I found out for myself that the ThinkGeek "soothing green light" shirt I wear (and the Ducti wallet, the CHIMP mirror, the "no I will not fix your computer" shirt, the geek blanket and the rest) means I don't have to view 10,000 pointless ads. I pay my dues without the adverts.
If I ever find something on Cash and Carrion (The Register's version of ThinkGeek) worth buying, I will support The Register (.co.uk) by buying from it. Their commercials are the best I have seen. They disguise themselves as stories on the front page and you don't even realise you have seen an ad until you have read it. Brilliant.
Only kids need those kind of instructions and parents are the ones to impart that knowledge, any adults that run with scissors and stupid things like that should be, and often are, subjected to the teachings of Darwin.
Someone once suggested that taking all the warning labels off products would help, but not enough to really matter. It was a jest, but many a true word is spoken in jest.
This is probably to comply with the FBI regulations on Carnivore or something like that... All WiFi comms must have a backdoor accessible to law enforcement.
I painted my other tinfoil hat black, now it looks like a ski mask.
Thats all well and good but what happens when all those stupid ISPs decide that anyone on a home IP block is a spammer the way AOL did?
Running your own email server isn't the be all and end all of privacy, you still have to use your ISP for those poor unfortunate souls that haven't gotten off AOL yet.
Re:And the point of this is?
on
PC In An XP Box
·
· Score: 1
You mean like having a base OS of Linux (for stability) and then making a switch to detect which way up the box is, and switching between different VMware machines accordingly?
It would take a long time to boot up 7 OSs, but it could be done.
If your boss misspelled "coroporate" would you think he didn't know he was misspelling it?
People on/. aren't my boss, they are people who for the most part can spell and do know how to use grammar to make their reading intelligible. The few posts that make it through the AC filter that are poorly written cause breaks in the rhythm of reading that most people have. Is it small wonder that some people find reading hard work if they only ever read crap like that?
I was just about to post a huge apology for actually knowing how to spell. Being one of the few literate people in this world of underpriviledged typists is something that I feel bad about, and consequently I feel I should hide my knowledge to compensate for their inabilities.
But then! I read your post and I feel good about myself again; I can proudly type "dict underpriviledged" in my Firefox address bar and find that I misspelled it. I feel whole again! Thank you!
This goes hand in hand with a discussion in another forum I visit about kids being told to not win every race they take part in on a school sports day. To borrow an acronym from the latest poll, WTF? If you are capable of winning, spelling, coding or earning money, you should do it to the best of your abilities at all times, as with everything in life. Let those people who can't do it to the same standard as you rot.
They will do one of two things; either sling mud at you for being better than they are or seek to improve themselves and their abilities to the point where they feel they have succeeded at achieving their targets.
I'm a spelling snob, so should you be. We can help people help themselves.
What is common sense anyway? Something that most people believe?
Common Sense is that thing that is distinctly lacking in today's society, the thing that makes people like me able to drive a car and remember to leave my hands on the wheel instead of taking them off because the manual doesn't explicitly state that they should both be used at once.
Its that thing that means I don't go throwing hot coffee over myself, no matter HOW hot it might not be. The same way that I don't run my fingers down knife blades to see how sharp they are, or jam my fingers in power points to see if they are live.
Common Sense is what stops me from needing instructions like "do not iron clothes while on body" or any of those other messed up warning labels that appear on products and foods "Open mouth, insert muffin, eat" is one of them.
Common Sense is what disappears first when a society turns into a legal battlefield, and the most important thing in any child's upbringing.
You ask what Common Sense is, I tell you to use your own to find the answer. Should you have none, go find someone with two arms, two legs, no visible scars, someone that hasn't been to the emergency room for 5 years or the lawyer's office for 10 and ask them why they are so much more than you are. They will tell you, and they will probably save your life by it.
This was not a flame, this is a soapbox post to all those people who want to sue over stuff that wouldn't have happened if they used a little brain in their day to day lives.
Mark & Lard were where it was at a few years back, and it did stick.
If you ever get fed up of listening to the same old same old stuff, grab a copy of their album - The worst album in the world... Ever! - by the Shirehorses. You *may* laugh your pants off, or you will wonder what kind of lunatic I am to find it funny.
Don't tell anyone, but we don't actually have a decent FM receiver in the house.
We had NTL cable TV until recently, and one of the channels on that was Radio 1, so we never really needed anything else. The only other FM box in the house is a tinny little tranny with a handle on it.
Parent is (Score:1, Offtopic), but I'm in 100% agreement with it.
Over here in the UK the BBC has a radio station called "radio 1" which is the flagship of national radio in Britain. They have a website directly off the bbc site (bbc.co.uk - bbc.co.uk/radio1) and they have streaming for it. On a Tuesday night they do a rock show, with Mary Anne Hobgoblin, and that is worth waiting up for. I have my awesome 5.1 surround system here, with great bass and minted high tones, but I cannot listen to it because they stream in RealAudio.
I would compare RealPlayer to a combination of New.Net mixed with yahoo messenger, with a little Gator/Claria thrown in for good measure.
Removing New.Net is next to impossible, Yahoo IM uses more firewall ports than any other 10 applications on my system and Gator/Claria is Spyware.
I'll stick to going out for a drive at 11:55 every Tuesday night and listen to it in the car, thankyouverymuchindeed.
You may want to rethink your figures if you assess the components in your PC instead of just the CPU.
486/150w inc 5400rpm drive and single speed CDROM
P200/250w inc CD Writer, 7200rpm drive and network crad, fan on CPU, bigger fan in PSU, soundcard and USB
P4/350 inc 2 or more 7200rpm HDs, fans on case, CPU, northbridge, CD and DVD writers (50x speed of the 486 version), soundcard pumping out 6 channels and gigabit networking. Just for fun lets throw in Firewire, USB2 and WiFi, all options onboard.
Your CPU doesn't use those watts, I have a system with 6 7200rpm drives, 2 opticals, 8 fans and lights. I have a 550w PSU running a processor that I *could* run on 150w if put the old 486 drives in my box and turned off all the motherboard devices.
But every use of the terms "Master" and "Slave" is. Or is that because they are always racist?
Hell, for all I know they might even have something to do with bloody computers, after all, this is/....
Do you get the same fuel efficiency from Tesco's petrol as from other brands?
Couldn't say, I have such a crappy engine that if I dared to work out the MPG I would probably find out that I was better off claiming the Dole and writing software freelance...
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
...
I'm not anonymous
I reformat and install Windows on other people's PCs. I tell them upfront that I won't put 98/ME/2000 on their PC for them, I tell them that I have an illegal copy of XP Pro that I will put on for them.
These people are the kind of schmucks that went out 2 - 4 - 6 years ago and spent 2,000 on a *new* shiny PC with all the trimmings. They got hauled over the coals for the box, they paid the Windows tax, the system fell the fuck to pieces because Windows is a Piece Of Shit.
I'm there wiping their hard drives to get rid of spyware, malware, left over DLLs and registry entries, unsafe/unstable 16 bit code, useless hacks that MS have given them over the years to fix up problems that should have been peer reviewed in the first place and to make sure that they have at least the benefit of the last 6 years of "progression" in the Win32 platform.
To stop myself from having to go round again in 3 months I install OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, Adaware and Spybot. I put a start menu group called "weekly" and put WinUpdate and the spyware stuff in there.
If Windows ever stops updating, they knew I was putting illegal software on there, and the reasons for it.
Well the article says
Oh there's always one, isn't there? You had to show off that you Read TFA.
Also, they really ought to jump to Firefox when it hits 1.0.2 or so
Can you honestly say that in your normal day's usage, you find Firefox to be any less reliable or secure than Mozilla?
I hate to seem like a fanboi, but Firefox has been my browser of choice for over a year now and to see people maligning it for not being 1.x is, to me, like telling them not to buy a computer because they don't have quantum desktops yet.
You know all the arguments, Gecko engine, stable branch, extensions and all that, so I won't bother preaching at you.
Would you stick a disk in your computer that some strange guy on the street handed you?
Would you click on an executable in an email from someone you didn't know?
People who shop at CompUSA do it all the time. Why should a CD seem more dangerous to them?
Link! Link! Oh its a link!
</slashbot>
I smoke a hell of a lot less pot and spend at lot less time on the computer overall
I'm sorry to hear that, would you like me to send you a Windows CD so you can carry on as before?
You mean the right individual like ... JC Denton?
I got this far through the comments and not one mention of DeusEx. Talk about missing the boat, that game is probably the closest thing to a future hostory book we have ever created, Nostrodamus was on the Dev team for that and Invisible War. The grey goo scene at the start of IW took my breath away and I often use it to show people what grey goo is all about.
Cloning, GM food/animals/people transgenics and the rest of the atrocities in DE an DE:IW are right on our doorstep, yet they pass us by in this discussion?
Hear hear!
Sorry to say it, but I even block OSDN ads. I don't want commercials flashing away at me or lurid colors (other than games.slashdot.org) messing up my reading.
In my defence I will say that I buy stuff from ThinkGeek. I don't need advertising to send me there, I found out for myself that the ThinkGeek "soothing green light" shirt I wear (and the Ducti wallet, the CHIMP mirror, the "no I will not fix your computer" shirt, the geek blanket and the rest) means I don't have to view 10,000 pointless ads. I pay my dues without the adverts.
If I ever find something on Cash and Carrion (The Register's version of ThinkGeek) worth buying, I will support The Register (.co.uk) by buying from it. Their commercials are the best I have seen. They disguise themselves as stories on the front page and you don't even realise you have seen an ad until you have read it. Brilliant.
Only kids need those kind of instructions and parents are the ones to impart that knowledge, any adults that run with scissors and stupid things like that should be, and often are, subjected to the teachings of Darwin.
Someone once suggested that taking all the warning labels off products would help, but not enough to really matter. It was a jest, but many a true word is spoken in jest.
Or only allow whitelist MACs?
... All WiFi comms must have a backdoor accessible to law enforcement.
This is probably to comply with the FBI regulations on Carnivore or something like that
I painted my other tinfoil hat black, now it looks like a ski mask.
Thats all well and good but what happens when all those stupid ISPs decide that anyone on a home IP block is a spammer the way AOL did?
Running your own email server isn't the be all and end all of privacy, you still have to use your ISP for those poor unfortunate souls that haven't gotten off AOL yet.
You mean like having a base OS of Linux (for stability) and then making a switch to detect which way up the box is, and switching between different VMware machines accordingly?
It would take a long time to boot up 7 OSs, but it could be done.
Think of it this way
/. aren't my boss, they are people who for the most part can spell and do know how to use grammar to make their reading intelligible. The few posts that make it through the AC filter that are poorly written cause breaks in the rhythm of reading that most people have. Is it small wonder that some people find reading hard work if they only ever read crap like that?
If your boss misspelled "coroporate" would you think he didn't know he was misspelling it?
People on
I was just about to post a huge apology for actually knowing how to spell. Being one of the few literate people in this world of underpriviledged typists is something that I feel bad about, and consequently I feel I should hide my knowledge to compensate for their inabilities.
But then! I read your post and I feel good about myself again; I can proudly type "dict underpriviledged" in my Firefox address bar and find that I misspelled it. I feel whole again! Thank you!
This goes hand in hand with a discussion in another forum I visit about kids being told to not win every race they take part in on a school sports day. To borrow an acronym from the latest poll, WTF? If you are capable of winning, spelling, coding or earning money, you should do it to the best of your abilities at all times, as with everything in life. Let those people who can't do it to the same standard as you rot.
They will do one of two things; either sling mud at you for being better than they are or seek to improve themselves and their abilities to the point where they feel they have succeeded at achieving their targets.
I'm a spelling snob, so should you be. We can help people help themselves.
Leave me alone, I can lift heavy things and break walls with my head.
Look harder, or to be really blinded, open your eyes.
* This post is aimed at a Funny mod, not a Troll/Flamebait, no matter how close to the truth the joke is.
What is common sense anyway? Something that most people believe?
Common Sense is that thing that is distinctly lacking in today's society, the thing that makes people like me able to drive a car and remember to leave my hands on the wheel instead of taking them off because the manual doesn't explicitly state that they should both be used at once.
Its that thing that means I don't go throwing hot coffee over myself, no matter HOW hot it might not be. The same way that I don't run my fingers down knife blades to see how sharp they are, or jam my fingers in power points to see if they are live.
Common Sense is what stops me from needing instructions like "do not iron clothes while on body" or any of those other messed up warning labels that appear on products and foods "Open mouth, insert muffin, eat" is one of them.
Common Sense is what disappears first when a society turns into a legal battlefield, and the most important thing in any child's upbringing.
You ask what Common Sense is, I tell you to use your own to find the answer. Should you have none, go find someone with two arms, two legs, no visible scars, someone that hasn't been to the emergency room for 5 years or the lawyer's office for 10 and ask them why they are so much more than you are. They will tell you, and they will probably save your life by it.
This was not a flame, this is a soapbox post to all those people who want to sue over stuff that wouldn't have happened if they used a little brain in their day to day lives.
md04 knows the score.
Mark & Lard were where it was at a few years back, and it did stick.
If you ever get fed up of listening to the same old same old stuff, grab a copy of their album - The worst album in the world... Ever! - by the Shirehorses. You *may* laugh your pants off, or you will wonder what kind of lunatic I am to find it funny.
Don't tell anyone, but we don't actually have a decent FM receiver in the house.
We had NTL cable TV until recently, and one of the channels on that was Radio 1, so we never really needed anything else. The only other FM box in the house is a tinny little tranny with a handle on it.
Parent is (Score:1, Offtopic), but I'm in 100% agreement with it.
Over here in the UK the BBC has a radio station called "radio 1" which is the flagship of national radio in Britain. They have a website directly off the bbc site (bbc.co.uk - bbc.co.uk/radio1) and they have streaming for it. On a Tuesday night they do a rock show, with Mary Anne Hobgoblin, and that is worth waiting up for. I have my awesome 5.1 surround system here, with great bass and minted high tones, but I cannot listen to it because they stream in RealAudio.
I would compare RealPlayer to a combination of New.Net mixed with yahoo messenger, with a little Gator/Claria thrown in for good measure.
Removing New.Net is next to impossible, Yahoo IM uses more firewall ports than any other 10 applications on my system and Gator/Claria is Spyware.
I'll stick to going out for a drive at 11:55 every Tuesday night and listen to it in the car, thankyouverymuchindeed.
You may want to rethink your figures if you assess the components in your PC instead of just the CPU.
486/150w inc 5400rpm drive and single speed CDROM
P200/250w inc CD Writer, 7200rpm drive and network crad, fan on CPU, bigger fan in PSU, soundcard and USB
P4/350 inc 2 or more 7200rpm HDs, fans on case, CPU, northbridge, CD and DVD writers (50x speed of the 486 version), soundcard pumping out 6 channels and gigabit networking. Just for fun lets throw in Firewire, USB2 and WiFi, all options onboard.
Your CPU doesn't use those watts, I have a system with 6 7200rpm drives, 2 opticals, 8 fans and lights. I have a 550w PSU running a processor that I *could* run on 150w if put the old 486 drives in my box and turned off all the motherboard devices.
nt
You searched that from your FireFox search box, didn't you?
Admit it!
That's because bondage isn't always sexual
/. ...
But every use of the terms "Master" and "Slave" is. Or is that because they are always racist?
Hell, for all I know they might even have something to do with bloody computers, after all, this is
Do you get the same fuel efficiency from Tesco's petrol as from other brands?
Couldn't say, I have such a crappy engine that if I dared to work out the MPG I would probably find out that I was better off claiming the Dole and writing software freelance...