You problem is that you've configured the graph differently than everyone else. Difficulty on the vertical access, ability on the horizontal. Thats why a 'steep learning curve' is hard.
You seem to be using ability on the vertical and time on the horizontal.
Off topic to this discussion in general, but maybe useful. Heres my solution, constantly using VirtualBox took me from 7 hours to 2 hours battery life, these get my back to about 6, give or take screen brightness.
First, buy CoolBook
Buy CoolBook from coolbook.se. The trial doesn't do anything actually useful, its more of a 'will the app run' trial than anything else so don't try it and throw it out cause it doesn't work. Its only $10, and after you register it will takes some time (few hours) for them to email you the 'key'. The 'key' is generally your First and Last names and the email address tied to your paypal or google checkout account. Once you've paid, you can use it very shortly after, well before the email arrives in my experience.
Set it to limit your CPU temp as much possible, unless you're playing WoW you probably won't notice the difference, this will keep your mhz and cpu speed down. I used it to lower my voltages slightly as well cause the thing gets way too damn hot sitting on my lap, you probably really don't need that though. I only use lower voltages for the bottom end of the CPU speeds, I leave the higher speeds as default for stability. I haven't tweaked this much as the temp limiter does most everything I need.
Second, disable 3d accel in virtual box if its enabled, this will help a lot if you use Vista or Win7, at the cost of 'ooooh shiny'. If you have multiple cores, only use one. That'll help keep things snappy on your mac without pushing up the speed of your CPU since it leaves a core for the host OS untouched. Not as big of an improvement as disabling 3d accel though.
Third, in the Energy Saver preference pane, set your graphics to 'Better Battery Life' if you have the option for your card. This gave me a good bit of battery life and drastically lowered the heat level. To be honest I have no clue what it did as far as performance, I haven't noticed, I switch it back if I'm going to play a game that needs it.
Forth, lower your keyboard backlighting (if you have it) and display backlighting. Depending on your system this may not be as useful, I have one of the LED backlighting machines so its not as big of a difference as FL, but its still 30 minutes to an hour of extra time on a full charge. If you have the preference option to have it track external light sources, you'll automatically save power when the lights are lowered and eyes too, but it seems to vary too much like when I move around in front of it and block a light source behind me. Makes you think you're going nuts when the screen dims and brightens seemingly randomly so you may not like the feature. It can certainly be annoying in the wrong environment, a typical lecture hall should be fine.
At the end of this, I'm almost back to full life on the battery, I just fire up my virtual machine now and forget them, but you HAVE to make sure you don't have any background processes running on them that eat CPU. Things like Google Desktop Search or the Windows Search 4.0 will bite you when you least expect it, they always seem to start indexing when I'm the furthest away from a power source, and I don't notice them until I wonder why my battery meter is dropping from several hours to a few or even minutes, which means its already consumed a fair amount of your reserves. This is one place things like Parallels have an advantage. Spotlight can index my VM drives and is far more aware that I'm active than the VM is.
Your milage may very, I've done no real testing to prove out these differences, its purely anecdotal, but, its something and may help you use your Linux or Windows VM through a days worth of classes.
Thank you airman. I for one appreciate your grasp on reality and your sacrifice both past, present, and future. I'm most thankful that you know what you did and are aware of the differences between war time and peace time. I can not express my thanks to you and everyone like you as much as I would like to.
I always wanted to fly military aircraft, I was just never sure that when the time came, and others lives were on the line, that I'd be able to do the deed, even though I have no problem doing it in all sort of video games. Frankly, I don't have the balls to put myself in that situation, knowing that if I hesitate people could die, not just myself.
Thank you for doing what I could not, so I do not have to.
The government doesn't have a mind of its own, the people you elect to the positions DO.
If you live in America you CAN control the government, you are just too lazy to do so.
Just like corporations do no wrong, they can't, they are not alive.
If you want to fix the problem stop treating these organizations (government and corps) as protection umbrellas for the people operating them. Start actually holding these people responsible.
As long as you let a CEO walk away after screwing people over or polluting the environment because he/she was 'protected under the corparation' then this will continue. You give them a free pass, they'll use it. There are very few people who are qualified for these positions because they will do it 'for the good of the people', and as some citizens realize, the people who will do it 'for the good of the people' don't want anything to do with those jobs because without the bribes and other benefits you can exploit in those positions, the jobs are rather shitty jobs to have.
You can fix this crap with a simple solutions, if you weren't too lazy to look at whos on the ballot rather than checking the box for your favorite team, errrr, political party.
Look at the mess with banking, everyone is upset about these companies paying out huge bonuses and salaries, their excuse is that 'they have contracts with these people', which is funny cause they seemed to ignore all the other contracts they had with the people who invested with them in the first place. Simply make it so in order to get money they have to follow specific rules. If they don't, start putting people in jail, from the CEO all the way down to the accountant who issues the check. EVERY SINGLE ONE of those people can say 'no, I'm not doing it, its wrong'. But they don't, its far easier to just spend my tax dollars and rubber stamp the check than it is to stand up and do the right thing, especially since no one actually holds the people accountable. If you never hold individuals responsible for their actions, theres no reason for them to do the right thing.
You may not consider WindowsXP modern, but its going to have have more 'features' as far as a random desktop user is concerned than Ubuntu when both have 256MB of ram.
I know this will be considered flamebait by most of slashdot but...
A usable ubuntu desktop in the default configuration with 256mb of RAM is not the same as what Win7 is on 512MB of ram. Sorry to disappoint but you're comparing apples to oranges. Win7 just does not allow you to cut your options down so far that you have a system that can work on 256MB, and thats fine because now days people expect far more out of their machines than you can run usefully on 256MB.
You're comparing ram requirements as if both OSes provide the same level of functionality. They do not. Which is fine, some people don't need/want the additional functionality, but lets not try to pretend that Ubuntu on 256MB is anything like Windows7.
I can run my BitStreamOS on 1k of RAM on an ATmega microcontroller, suck that UNIX! Of course, I have no video driver, require a special file system, only work with a specific type of MMC card for disk IO, have no keyboard or mouse support, (continue the list of just about everything useful on the desktop). You get a serial console with some debugging output and two processes with pre-emptive multitasking (with no memory protection mind you) that flash LED and play specially formatted audio from a MMC card. This is a basic musical greeting card with blinky lights. It is NOT what you get with Ubuntu or Windows in any way.
You can boot a linux machine on far less ram than 256mb, that doesn't mean it actually compares to a Win7 desktop.
I'm not saying you need to run Windows 7 on your netbook, I'm just saying you are comparing one part of the system and ignoring the rest of it which other than using a mouse, keyboard and monitor, are pretty much entirely different. Ignorance is bliss, but this is just a ridiculous comparison.
Might as well compare the 0.95 Linux kernel to the 2.6.31 kernel while you are at it.
At $9, a trip from one of the outer stops to the inner city during rush hour is still probably cheaper than gas and wear and tear on your car, and doesn't take nearly as long.
You can waste 2 hours of your life driving in and our of the city, I'll sit on the dirty smelly trains browsing slashdot and using my time more wisely than sitting in my car on the 395 parking lot.
Wow, why don't you whine some more about your office job.
Go do roofing, work in oil fields or at a coal power plant. Go repair the trains that bring coal to them.
Go get a real job that actually sucks, then come back and whine about your IT job.
Jesue Christ you are one spoiled little bitch.
This may come as a shock, but the intelligent people aren't working as slaves. You may think because you can updates some drivers or figure out Outlook that you are intelligent, but you aren't.
Regardless of what you think, the guy making 7 figures and leaving earlier to have drinks is more intelligent than you, which is why your dumbass is still working there and he makes a million plus and leaves early for drinks.
It didn't 'come to this'. It was always this way. The only thing that happened is a few IT guys decided because they could do something with computers that other people couldn't, that they must be more intelligent. You just got into the field before it had enough people to support it, now that the field is balancing out, you're being put where you belong in it. You never belonged at the top or you'd still be there. Get over yourself.
Regardless of how you look at it, if you were as intelligent as you think you are, you wouldn't be someone elses bitch unless you liked it.
Some of us, the intelligent ones, still sit in air-conditioned rooms, behind a desk, with complete power.
You are right, you aren't trolling, you're whining about how you are entitled to something you don't deserve. Gather up your little friends and go throw yourself a pity party, and the rest of us who actually know what we're doing and can actually command good pay and benefits will continue to do so, and have our drinks with the execs.
Note: I started out working at the local computer store/ISP who's sole job was to drive into the rural areas around the city I lived in fixing and educating those people who were ignorant about computers. I've worked my way up from the lowest of the low to comfy and cushie because I'm good at what I do and I do it. I don't sit around bitching about how someone else has it better than me, I just take their place. And thats EXACTLY what those guys who make 7 figures and go out for drinks did. Sorry, you really aren't all that you think you are.
The key is to find a position where the job can't be sent to China or the worker can't be imported from Mexico.
You realize you just ruled out every single job in existence right?
Both Chinese and Mexicans are more than capable of doing EVERYTHING an American can do. Second generations immigrents born here generally speak better english than most Americans who have been here for several generations.
Whats best about it all is they have actually had hard lives most of the time so they don't have their head up their asses expecting to get paid a ridiculous amount of money for a trivial job.
If you want to prevent outsourcing or 'insourcing', drop the entitlement additude, stop demanding pay levels you don't deserve, and put in a fair days work.
When spoiled brats compete against people who have experienced true hardship, the brats will lose, EVERY TIME. As an American, in IT, I can say for a fact, we are completely spoiled brats.
By law, Americans must make more in one hour than many far harder working people in the rest of the world make in a month, how do you ever think you can compete against those people?
I despise illegal immigration. I say we start shooting illegal immigrants on site. I however have no problem with the legal immigrants who come to America and 'take American jobs'. Come to America, take my job because you are better and cheaper, then they aren't the problem, I am. I am not an immigrant, but one of my grandfathers was, and one of them was a native American. Makes it rather hard for me, as a sane minded person to have a problem with someone doing the same thing my grandfather did that put me where I am today.
Of course, being spoiled, you wouldn't understand that.
They are on the Internet, they've seen the stinger picture before unless they just got online for the first time this morning, in which case, they'll see it before the end of the day I'm sure.
You may be embarrassed, but they are probably viewing far worse out of choice. Do you get embarrassed when you see a car accident? Getting embarrassed because spam got through on the Internet is about the same as getting embarrassed when you see a car accident. Theres no reason for it.
Spammers are FAR better that resolving the letters in captchas than I am. It took me 3 tries to get a google captcha I could read just recently.
Ticketmaster.com is an example of extreme over kill. Not only are the they next to impossible to decipher, they require you to enter a new one for practically EVERYTHING YOU DO.
Its become easier for me to just drive to a box office than buy tickets online, and funny enough, cheaper too, even including gas involved.
If captcha's are the solution, the system is doomed.
This isn't the way to win the war. The way to win the war is to make it an economic loss to use spam. Right now there are too many older generations of people that spam still works on. Change nothing about the Internet now, and spam will die on its own in 20 years as the generations shift through and the mass of the Internet knows better than to buy from spammers.
Please don't spread your misinformation to others.
Mammals are by definition, warm blooded. These animals do have a difficult time controlling their body temp, but that does not make them cold blooded.
They also are not 'immune' to pain. Immunity is by definition resistance to infection from other organisms such as bacteria and viruses. Pain is not another organism, its a sensation the brain generates based on the signals sent by nerve endings throughout different parts of the body. They may not perceive certain types of pain, but that is not "immunity".
I'm guessing you failed high school biology?
They aren't a particularly impressive vermin, their inability to control their own temp puts severe constraints on where they can live and what they can do. The would, for instance, not survive in most of the united states for most of the year without remaining a fair distance underground, in which case they are of little threat to much of anything other than some plants with deep roots.
Your potatoes are still safe, since they would freeze to death in the winters where most potatoes are grown, and most people keep their homes below an acceptable temp for them to reside in doors.
The additional cost required to make controllers that will do on the fly encryption is considerable on a large scale and there really isn't a point to it. When the drive works, you can just use the standard interface to pull the data off so encrypting it is pointless additional latency and cost. In order to be even slightly useful the key has to be unique for each device which means you can't just mass produce the controller in the typical way, you have to build in some form of way to modify it for each controller so the key is unique or someone just learns the key from one drive and uses it to get data off all the other models. In a controlled environment where you can see that putting A in results in C coming out, you can brute force your way to finding the key much faster than typical encryption where all you know is that C came out, and you need to figure out what went in.
There are drives that do it, but you pay out the ass for them, just like with USB sticks that do encryption. The cost isn't so much because its really THAT hard, its just that the demand is so low, and people who really care about encryption are willing to pay with their first born for it. On that note, I don't care about encryption of my personal data and you can have my first born anyway, so maybe thats a bad example.:)
IDE drive 'password protection' on most drives is simply a controller password, the drive is still contains the raw data. This of course is not true for every drive, but for the drives you buy from newegg, bestbuy or your local computer store it is. Most people aren't going to take a drive and swap out the controller board from an identical drive to get at the data on a desktop PC.
Of course, the reality of it is, VERY VERY few people have data that is worth encrypting, no one cares THAT much about your data, hence why no one really uses BitLocker, TruCrypt or encrypted filesystems (Settle down geeks, no one cares about your data either, regardless of how important you think it is) in the real world. Geeks do, but geeks do plenty of pointless things because they just want to do it to learn or in most cases, ePenis size.
While I whole heartedly agree, most people are too ignorant to make the right choices for themselves.
This is why we have warning signs on bug spray and bleach, and placards on lawn mowers that tell you not to pick them up while running and clipping your hedges with them.
Personally, I say remove the warning labels and let people kill themselves, we're slowing evolution down by not weeding out the useless chaff, and I for one would rather let evolution handle population control more than we allow it.
Likewise, what you can take away from this story is not to hire this guy to work in your IT department. Just because he can connect wires to the only plug they'll plug into, and match the colors, doesn't mean he is qualified to understand what he's doing. I've had friends, who know nothing about PCs build PCs from parts and do a good job with the occasional hiccup like mounting the board directly to the case without standoffs. The only reason they didn't do that is because, and I quote: "I thought something was wrong, but everything else was color coded, these didn't seem like extras." As soon as I explained why the new PC wouldn't boot it made total sense to her, but she also never claimed to be able to do it, she just didn't want to wait for me to get back in town and was willing to take the risk. Fortunately, the machine appeared to function fine afterwords, but it ran Windows, so if it was broken, you'd probably not be able to tell the difference between fried hardware and bad drivers.
You mean when you are buying new tech, that isn't really in mass production and hasn't been around for 50 years that it isn't as reliable?
Who would have thought?
IF SSDs stick around for the time span that traditional magnetic drives have, I suspect they'll make them more reliable. Thats part of the process, as time goes on the production process, technology, and knowledge of the technology result in faster, cheaper, and more reliable devices.
If you are just now figuring this out, you aren't a geek and shouldn't be posting on slashdot. That includes most of the mods that approve these stories.
Oh how I miss the days when slashdot was for geeks with a clue and more than a months experience using a computer.
Okay, the mercury part is true, but irrelevent, the amount they contain really isn't that important outside of waste disposal, you get more from eating Atlantic Salmon.
30 second wait to brighten? Either stop using them in your freezer or stop buying the cheapest ones in the store.
White light out of an LED where blue is horribly hard to produce? Your definition of white and mine are different I think.
Not saying that LEDs are going to take over, but your reasoning and evidence is more than slightly flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because laws were enacted USPS mail specifically. Want the same protection, enact laws for private email.
Except that we've enacted special laws for your medical records. No such laws have been enacted for email.
You problem is that you've configured the graph differently than everyone else. Difficulty on the vertical access, ability on the horizontal. Thats why a 'steep learning curve' is hard.
You seem to be using ability on the vertical and time on the horizontal.
Off topic to this discussion in general, but maybe useful. Heres my solution, constantly using VirtualBox took me from 7 hours to 2 hours battery life, these get my back to about 6, give or take screen brightness.
First, buy CoolBook
Buy CoolBook from coolbook.se. The trial doesn't do anything actually useful, its more of a 'will the app run' trial than anything else so don't try it and throw it out cause it doesn't work. Its only $10, and after you register it will takes some time (few hours) for them to email you the 'key'. The 'key' is generally your First and Last names and the email address tied to your paypal or google checkout account. Once you've paid, you can use it very shortly after, well before the email arrives in my experience.
Set it to limit your CPU temp as much possible, unless you're playing WoW you probably won't notice the difference, this will keep your mhz and cpu speed down. I used it to lower my voltages slightly as well cause the thing gets way too damn hot sitting on my lap, you probably really don't need that though. I only use lower voltages for the bottom end of the CPU speeds, I leave the higher speeds as default for stability. I haven't tweaked this much as the temp limiter does most everything I need.
Second, disable 3d accel in virtual box if its enabled, this will help a lot if you use Vista or Win7, at the cost of 'ooooh shiny'. If you have multiple cores, only use one. That'll help keep things snappy on your mac without pushing up the speed of your CPU since it leaves a core for the host OS untouched. Not as big of an improvement as disabling 3d accel though.
Third, in the Energy Saver preference pane, set your graphics to 'Better Battery Life' if you have the option for your card. This gave me a good bit of battery life and drastically lowered the heat level. To be honest I have no clue what it did as far as performance, I haven't noticed, I switch it back if I'm going to play a game that needs it.
Forth, lower your keyboard backlighting (if you have it) and display backlighting. Depending on your system this may not be as useful, I have one of the LED backlighting machines so its not as big of a difference as FL, but its still 30 minutes to an hour of extra time on a full charge. If you have the preference option to have it track external light sources, you'll automatically save power when the lights are lowered and eyes too, but it seems to vary too much like when I move around in front of it and block a light source behind me. Makes you think you're going nuts when the screen dims and brightens seemingly randomly so you may not like the feature. It can certainly be annoying in the wrong environment, a typical lecture hall should be fine.
At the end of this, I'm almost back to full life on the battery, I just fire up my virtual machine now and forget them, but you HAVE to make sure you don't have any background processes running on them that eat CPU. Things like Google Desktop Search or the Windows Search 4.0 will bite you when you least expect it, they always seem to start indexing when I'm the furthest away from a power source, and I don't notice them until I wonder why my battery meter is dropping from several hours to a few or even minutes, which means its already consumed a fair amount of your reserves. This is one place things like Parallels have an advantage. Spotlight can index my VM drives and is far more aware that I'm active than the VM is.
Your milage may very, I've done no real testing to prove out these differences, its purely anecdotal, but, its something and may help you use your Linux or Windows VM through a days worth of classes.
Thank you airman. I for one appreciate your grasp on reality and your sacrifice both past, present, and future. I'm most thankful that you know what you did and are aware of the differences between war time and peace time. I can not express my thanks to you and everyone like you as much as I would like to.
I always wanted to fly military aircraft, I was just never sure that when the time came, and others lives were on the line, that I'd be able to do the deed, even though I have no problem doing it in all sort of video games. Frankly, I don't have the balls to put myself in that situation, knowing that if I hesitate people could die, not just myself.
Thank you for doing what I could not, so I do not have to.
Dear people bitching about government,
Get a clue.
The government doesn't have a mind of its own, the people you elect to the positions DO.
If you live in America you CAN control the government, you are just too lazy to do so.
Just like corporations do no wrong, they can't, they are not alive.
If you want to fix the problem stop treating these organizations (government and corps) as protection umbrellas for the people operating them. Start actually holding these people responsible.
As long as you let a CEO walk away after screwing people over or polluting the environment because he/she was 'protected under the corparation' then this will continue. You give them a free pass, they'll use it. There are very few people who are qualified for these positions because they will do it 'for the good of the people', and as some citizens realize, the people who will do it 'for the good of the people' don't want anything to do with those jobs because without the bribes and other benefits you can exploit in those positions, the jobs are rather shitty jobs to have.
You can fix this crap with a simple solutions, if you weren't too lazy to look at whos on the ballot rather than checking the box for your favorite team, errrr, political party.
Look at the mess with banking, everyone is upset about these companies paying out huge bonuses and salaries, their excuse is that 'they have contracts with these people', which is funny cause they seemed to ignore all the other contracts they had with the people who invested with them in the first place. Simply make it so in order to get money they have to follow specific rules. If they don't, start putting people in jail, from the CEO all the way down to the accountant who issues the check. EVERY SINGLE ONE of those people can say 'no, I'm not doing it, its wrong'. But they don't, its far easier to just spend my tax dollars and rubber stamp the check than it is to stand up and do the right thing, especially since no one actually holds the people accountable. If you never hold individuals responsible for their actions, theres no reason for them to do the right thing.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows XP.
You may not consider WindowsXP modern, but its going to have have more 'features' as far as a random desktop user is concerned than Ubuntu when both have 256MB of ram.
Compare apples to apples, not apples to coconuts.
I know this will be considered flamebait by most of slashdot but ...
A usable ubuntu desktop in the default configuration with 256mb of RAM is not the same as what Win7 is on 512MB of ram. Sorry to disappoint but you're comparing apples to oranges. Win7 just does not allow you to cut your options down so far that you have a system that can work on 256MB, and thats fine because now days people expect far more out of their machines than you can run usefully on 256MB.
You're comparing ram requirements as if both OSes provide the same level of functionality. They do not. Which is fine, some people don't need/want the additional functionality, but lets not try to pretend that Ubuntu on 256MB is anything like Windows7.
I can run my BitStreamOS on 1k of RAM on an ATmega microcontroller, suck that UNIX! Of course, I have no video driver, require a special file system, only work with a specific type of MMC card for disk IO, have no keyboard or mouse support, (continue the list of just about everything useful on the desktop). You get a serial console with some debugging output and two processes with pre-emptive multitasking (with no memory protection mind you) that flash LED and play specially formatted audio from a MMC card. This is a basic musical greeting card with blinky lights. It is NOT what you get with Ubuntu or Windows in any way.
You can boot a linux machine on far less ram than 256mb, that doesn't mean it actually compares to a Win7 desktop.
I'm not saying you need to run Windows 7 on your netbook, I'm just saying you are comparing one part of the system and ignoring the rest of it which other than using a mouse, keyboard and monitor, are pretty much entirely different. Ignorance is bliss, but this is just a ridiculous comparison.
Might as well compare the 0.95 Linux kernel to the 2.6.31 kernel while you are at it.
At $9, a trip from one of the outer stops to the inner city during rush hour is still probably cheaper than gas and wear and tear on your car, and doesn't take nearly as long.
You can waste 2 hours of your life driving in and our of the city, I'll sit on the dirty smelly trains browsing slashdot and using my time more wisely than sitting in my car on the 395 parking lot.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/12/2326251
When you actually do have skills in the field? Theres not a lot to hate compared to other jobs.
When you really aren't qualified to do the job, yes it sucks. So does every other job on the planet you aren't qualified to do.
Wow, why don't you whine some more about your office job.
Go do roofing, work in oil fields or at a coal power plant. Go repair the trains that bring coal to them.
Go get a real job that actually sucks, then come back and whine about your IT job.
Jesue Christ you are one spoiled little bitch.
This may come as a shock, but the intelligent people aren't working as slaves. You may think because you can updates some drivers or figure out Outlook that you are intelligent, but you aren't.
Regardless of what you think, the guy making 7 figures and leaving earlier to have drinks is more intelligent than you, which is why your dumbass is still working there and he makes a million plus and leaves early for drinks.
It didn't 'come to this'. It was always this way. The only thing that happened is a few IT guys decided because they could do something with computers that other people couldn't, that they must be more intelligent. You just got into the field before it had enough people to support it, now that the field is balancing out, you're being put where you belong in it. You never belonged at the top or you'd still be there. Get over yourself.
Regardless of how you look at it, if you were as intelligent as you think you are, you wouldn't be someone elses bitch unless you liked it.
Some of us, the intelligent ones, still sit in air-conditioned rooms, behind a desk, with complete power.
You are right, you aren't trolling, you're whining about how you are entitled to something you don't deserve. Gather up your little friends and go throw yourself a pity party, and the rest of us who actually know what we're doing and can actually command good pay and benefits will continue to do so, and have our drinks with the execs.
Note: I started out working at the local computer store/ISP who's sole job was to drive into the rural areas around the city I lived in fixing and educating those people who were ignorant about computers. I've worked my way up from the lowest of the low to comfy and cushie because I'm good at what I do and I do it. I don't sit around bitching about how someone else has it better than me, I just take their place. And thats EXACTLY what those guys who make 7 figures and go out for drinks did. Sorry, you really aren't all that you think you are.
You realize you just ruled out every single job in existence right?
Both Chinese and Mexicans are more than capable of doing EVERYTHING an American can do. Second generations immigrents born here generally speak better english than most Americans who have been here for several generations.
Whats best about it all is they have actually had hard lives most of the time so they don't have their head up their asses expecting to get paid a ridiculous amount of money for a trivial job.
If you want to prevent outsourcing or 'insourcing', drop the entitlement additude, stop demanding pay levels you don't deserve, and put in a fair days work.
When spoiled brats compete against people who have experienced true hardship, the brats will lose, EVERY TIME. As an American, in IT, I can say for a fact, we are completely spoiled brats.
By law, Americans must make more in one hour than many far harder working people in the rest of the world make in a month, how do you ever think you can compete against those people?
I despise illegal immigration. I say we start shooting illegal immigrants on site. I however have no problem with the legal immigrants who come to America and 'take American jobs'. Come to America, take my job because you are better and cheaper, then they aren't the problem, I am. I am not an immigrant, but one of my grandfathers was, and one of them was a native American. Makes it rather hard for me, as a sane minded person to have a problem with someone doing the same thing my grandfather did that put me where I am today.
Of course, being spoiled, you wouldn't understand that.
They are on the Internet, they've seen the stinger picture before unless they just got online for the first time this morning, in which case, they'll see it before the end of the day I'm sure.
You may be embarrassed, but they are probably viewing far worse out of choice. Do you get embarrassed when you see a car accident? Getting embarrassed because spam got through on the Internet is about the same as getting embarrassed when you see a car accident. Theres no reason for it.
Captchas are not a solution anymore.
Spammers are FAR better that resolving the letters in captchas than I am. It took me 3 tries to get a google captcha I could read just recently.
Ticketmaster.com is an example of extreme over kill. Not only are the they next to impossible to decipher, they require you to enter a new one for practically EVERYTHING YOU DO.
Its become easier for me to just drive to a box office than buy tickets online, and funny enough, cheaper too, even including gas involved.
If captcha's are the solution, the system is doomed.
This isn't the way to win the war. The way to win the war is to make it an economic loss to use spam. Right now there are too many older generations of people that spam still works on. Change nothing about the Internet now, and spam will die on its own in 20 years as the generations shift through and the mass of the Internet knows better than to buy from spammers.
Blogs ARE spam 99 times out of 100, its hard to implement spam filtering when the content in and of itself might as well be spam.
Please don't spread your misinformation to others.
Mammals are by definition, warm blooded. These animals do have a difficult time controlling their body temp, but that does not make them cold blooded.
They also are not 'immune' to pain. Immunity is by definition resistance to infection from other organisms such as bacteria and viruses. Pain is not another organism, its a sensation the brain generates based on the signals sent by nerve endings throughout different parts of the body. They may not perceive certain types of pain, but that is not "immunity".
I'm guessing you failed high school biology?
They aren't a particularly impressive vermin, their inability to control their own temp puts severe constraints on where they can live and what they can do. The would, for instance, not survive in most of the united states for most of the year without remaining a fair distance underground, in which case they are of little threat to much of anything other than some plants with deep roots.
Your potatoes are still safe, since they would freeze to death in the winters where most potatoes are grown, and most people keep their homes below an acceptable temp for them to reside in doors.
Theres a reason they live in the desert.
Depends on your definition of alive.
He was brain dead at birth, his mouth just won't stop flapping.
Think of how his parents must feel.
Not all of the twits who use twitter are twats, some of them are dicks as well.
I've already seen it happen, as a prank on a friend. Thats what happens when your devious friends know your Facebook password.
No.
The additional cost required to make controllers that will do on the fly encryption is considerable on a large scale and there really isn't a point to it. When the drive works, you can just use the standard interface to pull the data off so encrypting it is pointless additional latency and cost. In order to be even slightly useful the key has to be unique for each device which means you can't just mass produce the controller in the typical way, you have to build in some form of way to modify it for each controller so the key is unique or someone just learns the key from one drive and uses it to get data off all the other models. In a controlled environment where you can see that putting A in results in C coming out, you can brute force your way to finding the key much faster than typical encryption where all you know is that C came out, and you need to figure out what went in.
There are drives that do it, but you pay out the ass for them, just like with USB sticks that do encryption. The cost isn't so much because its really THAT hard, its just that the demand is so low, and people who really care about encryption are willing to pay with their first born for it. On that note, I don't care about encryption of my personal data and you can have my first born anyway, so maybe thats a bad example. :)
IDE drive 'password protection' on most drives is simply a controller password, the drive is still contains the raw data. This of course is not true for every drive, but for the drives you buy from newegg, bestbuy or your local computer store it is. Most people aren't going to take a drive and swap out the controller board from an identical drive to get at the data on a desktop PC.
Of course, the reality of it is, VERY VERY few people have data that is worth encrypting, no one cares THAT much about your data, hence why no one really uses BitLocker, TruCrypt or encrypted filesystems (Settle down geeks, no one cares about your data either, regardless of how important you think it is) in the real world. Geeks do, but geeks do plenty of pointless things because they just want to do it to learn or in most cases, ePenis size.
While I whole heartedly agree, most people are too ignorant to make the right choices for themselves.
This is why we have warning signs on bug spray and bleach, and placards on lawn mowers that tell you not to pick them up while running and clipping your hedges with them.
Personally, I say remove the warning labels and let people kill themselves, we're slowing evolution down by not weeding out the useless chaff, and I for one would rather let evolution handle population control more than we allow it.
Likewise, what you can take away from this story is not to hire this guy to work in your IT department. Just because he can connect wires to the only plug they'll plug into, and match the colors, doesn't mean he is qualified to understand what he's doing. I've had friends, who know nothing about PCs build PCs from parts and do a good job with the occasional hiccup like mounting the board directly to the case without standoffs. The only reason they didn't do that is because, and I quote: "I thought something was wrong, but everything else was color coded, these didn't seem like extras." As soon as I explained why the new PC wouldn't boot it made total sense to her, but she also never claimed to be able to do it, she just didn't want to wait for me to get back in town and was willing to take the risk. Fortunately, the machine appeared to function fine afterwords, but it ran Windows, so if it was broken, you'd probably not be able to tell the difference between fried hardware and bad drivers.
Really?
No shit?
You mean when you are buying new tech, that isn't really in mass production and hasn't been around for 50 years that it isn't as reliable?
Who would have thought?
IF SSDs stick around for the time span that traditional magnetic drives have, I suspect they'll make them more reliable. Thats part of the process, as time goes on the production process, technology, and knowledge of the technology result in faster, cheaper, and more reliable devices.
If you are just now figuring this out, you aren't a geek and shouldn't be posting on slashdot. That includes most of the mods that approve these stories.
Oh how I miss the days when slashdot was for geeks with a clue and more than a months experience using a computer.
Okay, the mercury part is true, but irrelevent, the amount they contain really isn't that important outside of waste disposal, you get more from eating Atlantic Salmon.
30 second wait to brighten? Either stop using them in your freezer or stop buying the cheapest ones in the store.
White light out of an LED where blue is horribly hard to produce? Your definition of white and mine are different I think.
Not saying that LEDs are going to take over, but your reasoning and evidence is more than slightly flawed.
Yea, but he's Finnish, so being drunk all the time makes him about as reliable as any Windows user.
Next you'll start comparing hot girls to the Swedish Bikini team. /me ducks