A terrible upgrade process that took forever and resulted in VMs that ran so slow I couldn't even install Parallels tools without timing out. Support tickets and forum posts failed to get a useful response.
I switched to VMWare 2 (free after competitive upgrade) and will never go back.
For those people making posts about why run Windows in a VM, I would respond that I think all software developers should run each of their projects in a separate VM (as I do) to prevent contamination of the OS's. I run 3-5 VMs at once, all running Visual Studio, with different projects in each. The freedom of this also allows me to use the best tool to host the VMs, surf the internet, read my mail and do everything else, except write software for MS based clients, in Mac OS X.
I've got a Mac Pro as my primary machine now, with 3 GB of RAM in it. My keyboard has never, ever, ever bounced a key, ever. Its in use for 12 hours / day for 4 months now.
And as I write this, I have 3 Parallels' VMs open, all running Visual Studio with different client's code bases in each one. Works like a dream. Better than any development setups I ever had on a PC.
And yes, I run Adobe CS2 on my Mac Pro with no problems. Incidentally, I also run WoW on it with no problem, I just have to be sure to close all my VMs first to make sure there's a good chunk of memory available for it.
Sure, everything single thing you do in life is a value decision of some sort. Do you value the money from overtime or the time with your family? Do you value your morals over stealing that TV? Money is just a measure of one facet of value. Do you value the 20 hours of work you had to labor to generate this amount of money or the value of that new big screen?
If we start putting family and happiness into the wealth equation, we'll start to see that all those heavily compensated CEOs everyone loves to hate have sacrificed their personal lives and their families to get to the positions they are in. Would I do the same? Absolutely not. They can have the money, I wouldn't want that job for anything.
Voting is run by the localities, not the federal government. The feds have no say in what contracts Diebold will get. This is a good thing. It makes our election process a mess of different technologies, with small groups of non technical people choosing voting platforms, but it does keep control of the overall process out of the hands of any single organization.
Now, I completely and totally agree that people working on their own inside Diebold or in the polling locations could influence the vote. This shouldn't be possible, but as we've seen repeatedly, the machines suck.
Conspiracies only work when the number of people involved is one or two. As soon as more than that are required, it falls apart quickly.
I've recently enabled the FuzzyOCRplugin for SpamAssassin and it works really well. It uses gocr to convert images to text and then runs the text through a simple word check.
I manage quite a few email domains, with a total user base over 2500. Spam has really gotten out of hand over the last year and I've had to become much more aggressive. The combination of SpamAssassin, RulesDuJour with SARE rule sets and the FuzzyOCR plugin is pretty effective.
I had real hopes of Bayesian becoming the best tool for anti-spam, and it is very good for individuals, but trying to maintain an effective Bayesian database for a large number of users is difficult and always holds the threat of false positives. For example, if a user is having mail problems, they are very, very likely to send themselves an email with a subject of Test and no content. This seems to hit pretty high in any Bayesian database I've built.
The original, Harmony designed, remotes are still sought after on eBay, while the Logitech ones are seemingly designed by people that control them with something besides fingers (mine has a left-right-up-down key pad/ring that can only be operated with the tip of the thumbnail).
The web site for configuring the remote used to be pretty good. Now, it appears I have to use a downloadable application (60 MB) to configure the remote. The application has the worst UI I've seen in a very long time (I'm using the OS X version). It seems to mix out of place cartoon style chat bubbles with buttons with horribly long text that doesn't fit properly. And strangely placed Next and Done buttons.
You can hold out hope if you like for Squeezebox, but I'm already writing them off as destined for mediocrity at the hands of Logitech.
When mechanical engineers in college wanted to study how to best optimize a system to meet requirements with minimum cost, they went to a pizza buffet restaurant.
Mapping the cyclical demand to the number of registers to have open and how many pizza (and what type) should be ready at certain times is a difficult problem to solve. Having a smart (fuzzy) computer system optimizing this system would be a really good idea. I, for one, welcome a system that ensures the good pizzas are always fresh and ready just as I walk in the door.
I use BC heavily for Windows development. Being able to create sessions with very detailed criteria and ignore lists and then connect to an FTP server to compare a local directory, and THEN be able to do detailed diff and merge on individual files, if necessary, is an amazingly powerful tool.
Its not that it does any one of these things really well, just that it does them all.
Access is an interesting app but has no business use whatsoever. I have been involved in multiple projects to rip apart poorly written applications in Access to move the data and the logic to where it belongs : a real multi-user relational database.
Writing a business application in Access is like writing it in Excel. The logic is poorly located and hard to share, the app is single-user, and the interface is crap.
What you want is a framework for quickly building apps on top of a real database. And thats another debate.
Seriously, why would they need to join the group promoting EFI? Apple just has to decide to use it, put it in every Mac and that's it. There's not a bunch of motherboard and chipset makers to convince.
The HD-3000 drivers you're talking about (the old ones) were written by the company that makes the HD-3000. They chose the distribution to support. The new DVB drivers are included in the 2.6.12 kernel and work just fine for me.
As for the little quirks for each and every distribution : Myth does its best to support as many distributions as possible, but until they all handle shared libraries, udev/modprobe, locations for user compiled source, etc, in a reasonably similar fashion, there will be some differences.
And really, in the end, Myth compiles and runs on just about anything (my Macs, even), it's just the drivers for capture cards, video out, remotes, etc, that have problems in different environments.
This is where Jarod's guide (wilsonet.com) comes in handy. It's thorough, regularly updated, handles a wide range of hardware and can be used by even the newest Linux user. Why try anything else when this one works?
Private schools are parochial (religious) schools are super hot in Kansas. Booming enrollment.
I figure that if the state can figure out a way to force as many people as possible to go to private schools to get their kids a real education, instead of the mess that the state serves up, they get to continue collecting the taxes, but will have fewer kids to educate. Free money!
Thats probably not their goal, but they sure seem to be heading that way.
Seriously, I wonder about Kansas sometimes. The people I know don't seem backwards and closed minded, yet the legislation that keeps getting passed is like a trip back to the dark ages.
It's not really easy or cost effective to capture component video in (I think the last time I saw it quoted was $30k). Too much processing required and too much data / sec.
Component video out to your TV from an HTPC is easy (well, besides tweaking it to fit just right).
The best ways of getting high def content into the box are: 1. An off the air HD tuner card (HD3000 from pchdtv.com or the Air2PC card) 2. A slim chance of firewire output from a high def digital cable box. 3. Rip your own DVDs. This makes sense if you want to setup up something like every Baby Einstein video on demand (I do). 4. I heard once that someone downloaded high def tv shows from teh Intarweb.
Part of the current high prices of gasoline are directly related to the cost of crude (which has many, many factors with OPEC being by far the largest). And part of it has to do with federal and local regulations.
On the federal side, oil companies are now spending many billions of dollars upgrading their refineries to meet new low-sulphur regulations. This is a good thing, but expensive.
On the local side, areas that have clean air problems are either forced into using clean-air reformulated gasoline or choose to do so proactively. Unfortunatley, there are now 8 different specs of gasolines mandated across the country. So now a refinery needs to make several different specs of gasoline, each for a specific market. If a refinery that supplies a certain market has some downtime, there will be fewer other refineries to cover the market, causing prices to increase. The other major issue is storage : with so many different specs of gasoline, transportation and storage becomes more expensive.
And don't forget that demand in the US continues to increase year after year, yet there are no new refineries being built. Same or less supply, more demand, you do the math.
Iraq makes a very little difference in the grand scheme of things, really. Bush did not invade Iraq for oil. Of course, I wouldn't rule out revenge for trying to kill his dad.
The ultra is just fine. If you need a full remote, get a nice all-in-one on the side, it's still cheaper than the Media Center package and will work better.
I use mine with a Fedora Core 3 system running MythTV and I had to do absolutely zero to get it to work perfectly right out of the box.
We get to choose between 2 idiots this year. I sure wish we had a better choice too.
I hope they kill Retrospect for Mac
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EMC Buying Dantz
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· Score: 2, Informative
I bought Retrospect about a year and a half ago to do incremental backups of non-system and non-media files to cd-r's. It was a massive pile of steaming crap. It does not want to do anything but full drive backups. Ever time I did a backup, it would just keep asking for more disks to write on (a backup that was estimated at 6 disks ended up at 14). It was constantly making coasters (about 65% success rate with my Pioneer DVR-104 on good brand name media, which has never made a coaster in any program but Retrospect). And when I went back to verify a previous backup, it declared the whole set corrupted. It did not inspire confidence in me that my backups were being done correctly and would be useable when I needed them.
They released two pay-for-upgrades in that year and a half, while not releasing any new device drivers (or driver updates) for their older versions. I was told that I should try newer drivers for my DVR-104 and that it might make fewer coasters, but I would have to pay for an upgrade just to try them.
I switched to Apple's Backup. Its not as full featured, it doesn't do incremental and I do pay an annual fee (but it includes all.Mac stuff too). But it always works. If I want incremental, I'll use build a Linux file server and run Rync on my Mac. And if they do kill Retrospect for Mac, maybe Apple will add some of the higher end features to Backup to take its place.
I've always had trouble with local anesthesia, I feel incredible pain when have cavities drilled even with multiple shots of novacaine. I felt the cutting on my eye pretty clearly and just kept a good grip on my belt.
I love the results. 20/10 for the first few weeks, and now 20/15 3 years later.
About my surgery: I had gas perm lenses before surgery. I had to wear soft lenses for a couple of months to let my eyes relax to their natural shape. I had a moderate astigmatism in one eye. It was completely corrected. The computer they used to map the eye was very cool - you could see the astigmatism in the map. I got a pretty large diameter cut. Having a small diameter cut is what causes halos at night, as the circular cut is inside the range of vision. A large diameter avoids this (but there must be some limiting factor, or everyone would have large cuts).
Rules I would follow (this are also repeated throughout this thread): 1. Pay for a good doctor. I went to TLC to a doctor who's done more than almost any other doctor in the country. Make sure they have the latest machines (new ones come out constantly). $1800/eye is what you would expect to pay for this. 2. Try to use a pre-tax medical flex spending account to at least save 20-30%. 3. Ask for a valium if they don't offer it upfront. Wish I had. 4. Be nice to your eyes. Take regular breaks from your monitor. Do focus exercises on your breaks (far away, left eye only, right eye only, etc).
Piece of crap, really. Lots of defective units from the factory. Not as easy to use as the earlier Pronto remotes (which I really do like a lot). Surfing the net is slow and hard to use a touchscreen for.
Lots of promise in this unit, as it does run Linux and does a lot of cool stuff, but it just didn't turn out that well.
My recomendation : get a Harmony or a Pronto. If you have a Tivo, get a Pronto (because you don't need the guide in the Harmony).
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One of the best museums I've been to. The SR-71 is unbelievable.
A terrible upgrade process that took forever and resulted in VMs that ran so slow I couldn't even install Parallels tools without timing out. Support tickets and forum posts failed to get a useful response.
I switched to VMWare 2 (free after competitive upgrade) and will never go back.
For those people making posts about why run Windows in a VM, I would respond that I think all software developers should run each of their projects in a separate VM (as I do) to prevent contamination of the OS's. I run 3-5 VMs at once, all running Visual Studio, with different projects in each. The freedom of this also allows me to use the best tool to host the VMs, surf the internet, read my mail and do everything else, except write software for MS based clients, in Mac OS X.
I'm not sure of the time, but it locked up sometime during the night. After a measly 6 months of up time.
Slightly dark, but a great story. Really gets the imagination going. I've read it many times and always love it.
I've got a Mac Pro as my primary machine now, with 3 GB of RAM in it. My keyboard has never, ever, ever bounced a key, ever. Its in use for 12 hours / day for 4 months now.
And as I write this, I have 3 Parallels' VMs open, all running Visual Studio with different client's code bases in each one. Works like a dream. Better than any development setups I ever had on a PC.
And yes, I run Adobe CS2 on my Mac Pro with no problems. Incidentally, I also run WoW on it with no problem, I just have to be sure to close all my VMs first to make sure there's a good chunk of memory available for it.
Sure, everything single thing you do in life is a value decision of some sort. Do you value the money from overtime or the time with your family? Do you value your morals over stealing that TV? Money is just a measure of one facet of value. Do you value the 20 hours of work you had to labor to generate this amount of money or the value of that new big screen?
If we start putting family and happiness into the wealth equation, we'll start to see that all those heavily compensated CEOs everyone loves to hate have sacrificed their personal lives and their families to get to the positions they are in. Would I do the same? Absolutely not. They can have the money, I wouldn't want that job for anything.
It really doesn't (and can't) happen all that much. Except for the amazingly incomprehensible and plain idiotic Alternative Minimum Tax.
Voting is run by the localities, not the federal government. The feds have no say in what contracts Diebold will get. This is a good thing. It makes our election process a mess of different technologies, with small groups of non technical people choosing voting platforms, but it does keep control of the overall process out of the hands of any single organization.
Now, I completely and totally agree that people working on their own inside Diebold or in the polling locations could influence the vote. This shouldn't be possible, but as we've seen repeatedly, the machines suck.
Conspiracies only work when the number of people involved is one or two. As soon as more than that are required, it falls apart quickly.
I've recently enabled the FuzzyOCRplugin for SpamAssassin and it works really well. It uses gocr to convert images to text and then runs the text through a simple word check.
I manage quite a few email domains, with a total user base over 2500. Spam has really gotten out of hand over the last year and I've had to become much more aggressive. The combination of SpamAssassin, RulesDuJour with SARE rule sets and the FuzzyOCR plugin is pretty effective.
I had real hopes of Bayesian becoming the best tool for anti-spam, and it is very good for individuals, but trying to maintain an effective Bayesian database for a large number of users is difficult and always holds the threat of false positives. For example, if a user is having mail problems, they are very, very likely to send themselves an email with a subject of Test and no content. This seems to hit pretty high in any Bayesian database I've built.
The original, Harmony designed, remotes are still sought after on eBay, while the Logitech ones are seemingly designed by people that control them with something besides fingers (mine has a left-right-up-down key pad/ring that can only be operated with the tip of the thumbnail).
The web site for configuring the remote used to be pretty good. Now, it appears I have to use a downloadable application (60 MB) to configure the remote. The application has the worst UI I've seen in a very long time (I'm using the OS X version). It seems to mix out of place cartoon style chat bubbles with buttons with horribly long text that doesn't fit properly. And strangely placed Next and Done buttons.
You can hold out hope if you like for Squeezebox, but I'm already writing them off as destined for mediocrity at the hands of Logitech.
It was a production facility for weapons grade plutonium. Power plants do not generate anything like what was made at Hanford.
Plus, you would imagine that a few things have been learned in the 60 years since Hanford was built.
When mechanical engineers in college wanted to study how to best optimize a system to meet requirements with minimum cost, they went to a pizza buffet restaurant.
Mapping the cyclical demand to the number of registers to have open and how many pizza (and what type) should be ready at certain times is a difficult problem to solve. Having a smart (fuzzy) computer system optimizing this system would be a really good idea. I, for one, welcome a system that ensures the good pizzas are always fresh and ready just as I walk in the door.
I use BC heavily for Windows development. Being able to create sessions with very detailed criteria and ignore lists and then connect to an FTP server to compare a local directory, and THEN be able to do detailed diff and merge on individual files, if necessary, is an amazingly powerful tool.
Its not that it does any one of these things really well, just that it does them all.
http://www.star-force.com/computer_security/protec tion.phtml?c=77
I found this download page with lots of large downloads. Now to see if I can run them all on OS X simultaneously...
Access is an interesting app but has no business use whatsoever. I have been involved in multiple projects to rip apart poorly written applications in Access to move the data and the logic to where it belongs : a real multi-user relational database.
Writing a business application in Access is like writing it in Excel. The logic is poorly located and hard to share, the app is single-user, and the interface is crap.
What you want is a framework for quickly building apps on top of a real database. And thats another debate.
Seriously, why would they need to join the group promoting EFI? Apple just has to decide to use it, put it in every Mac and that's it. There's not a bunch of motherboard and chipset makers to convince.
The HD-3000 drivers you're talking about (the old ones) were written by the company that makes the HD-3000. They chose the distribution to support. The new DVB drivers are included in the 2.6.12 kernel and work just fine for me.
As for the little quirks for each and every distribution : Myth does its best to support as many distributions as possible, but until they all handle shared libraries, udev/modprobe, locations for user compiled source, etc, in a reasonably similar fashion, there will be some differences.
And really, in the end, Myth compiles and runs on just about anything (my Macs, even), it's just the drivers for capture cards, video out, remotes, etc, that have problems in different environments.
This is where Jarod's guide (wilsonet.com) comes in handy. It's thorough, regularly updated, handles a wide range of hardware and can be used by even the newest Linux user. Why try anything else when this one works?
Private schools are parochial (religious) schools are super hot in Kansas. Booming enrollment.
I figure that if the state can figure out a way to force as many people as possible to go to private schools to get their kids a real education, instead of the mess that the state serves up, they get to continue collecting the taxes, but will have fewer kids to educate. Free money!
Thats probably not their goal, but they sure seem to be heading that way.
Seriously, I wonder about Kansas sometimes. The people I know don't seem backwards and closed minded, yet the legislation that keeps getting passed is like a trip back to the dark ages.
It's not really easy or cost effective to capture component video in (I think the last time I saw it quoted was $30k). Too much processing required and too much data / sec.
:
Component video out to your TV from an HTPC is easy (well, besides tweaking it to fit just right).
The best ways of getting high def content into the box are
1. An off the air HD tuner card (HD3000 from pchdtv.com or the Air2PC card)
2. A slim chance of firewire output from a high def digital cable box.
3. Rip your own DVDs. This makes sense if you want to setup up something like every Baby Einstein video on demand (I do).
4. I heard once that someone downloaded high def tv shows from teh Intarweb.
Part of the current high prices of gasoline are directly related to the cost of crude (which has many, many factors with OPEC being by far the largest). And part of it has to do with federal and local regulations.
On the federal side, oil companies are now spending many billions of dollars upgrading their refineries to meet new low-sulphur regulations. This is a good thing, but expensive.
On the local side, areas that have clean air problems are either forced into using clean-air reformulated gasoline or choose to do so proactively. Unfortunatley, there are now 8 different specs of gasolines mandated across the country. So now a refinery needs to make several different specs of gasoline, each for a specific market. If a refinery that supplies a certain market has some downtime, there will be fewer other refineries to cover the market, causing prices to increase. The other major issue is storage : with so many different specs of gasoline, transportation and storage becomes more expensive.
And don't forget that demand in the US continues to increase year after year, yet there are no new refineries being built. Same or less supply, more demand, you do the math.
Iraq makes a very little difference in the grand scheme of things, really. Bush did not invade Iraq for oil. Of course, I wouldn't rule out revenge for trying to kill his dad.
The ultra is just fine. If you need a full remote, get a nice all-in-one on the side, it's still cheaper than the Media Center package and will work better. I use mine with a Fedora Core 3 system running MythTV and I had to do absolutely zero to get it to work perfectly right out of the box.
We get to choose between 2 idiots this year. I sure wish we had a better choice too.
I bought Retrospect about a year and a half ago to do incremental backups of non-system and non-media files to cd-r's. It was a massive pile of steaming crap. It does not want to do anything but full drive backups. Ever time I did a backup, it would just keep asking for more disks to write on (a backup that was estimated at 6 disks ended up at 14). It was constantly making coasters (about 65% success rate with my Pioneer DVR-104 on good brand name media, which has never made a coaster in any program but Retrospect). And when I went back to verify a previous backup, it declared the whole set corrupted. It did not inspire confidence in me that my backups were being done correctly and would be useable when I needed them.
.Mac stuff too). But it always works. If I want incremental, I'll use build a Linux file server and run Rync on my Mac. And if they do kill Retrospect for Mac, maybe Apple will add some of the higher end features to Backup to take its place.
They released two pay-for-upgrades in that year and a half, while not releasing any new device drivers (or driver updates) for their older versions. I was told that I should try newer drivers for my DVR-104 and that it might make fewer coasters, but I would have to pay for an upgrade just to try them.
I switched to Apple's Backup. Its not as full featured, it doesn't do incremental and I do pay an annual fee (but it includes all
And I'd still do it again in a second.
:
I've always had trouble with local anesthesia, I feel incredible pain when have cavities drilled even with multiple shots of novacaine. I felt the cutting on my eye pretty clearly and just kept a good grip on my belt.
I love the results. 20/10 for the first few weeks, and now 20/15 3 years later.
About my surgery:
I had gas perm lenses before surgery. I had to wear soft lenses for a couple of months to let my eyes relax to their natural shape.
I had a moderate astigmatism in one eye. It was completely corrected. The computer they used to map the eye was very cool - you could see the astigmatism in the map.
I got a pretty large diameter cut. Having a small diameter cut is what causes halos at night, as the circular cut is inside the range of vision. A large diameter avoids this (but there must be some limiting factor, or everyone would have large cuts).
Rules I would follow (this are also repeated throughout this thread)
1. Pay for a good doctor. I went to TLC to a doctor who's done more than almost any other doctor in the country. Make sure they have the latest machines (new ones come out constantly). $1800/eye is what you would expect to pay for this.
2. Try to use a pre-tax medical flex spending account to at least save 20-30%.
3. Ask for a valium if they don't offer it upfront. Wish I had.
4. Be nice to your eyes. Take regular breaks from your monitor. Do focus exercises on your breaks (far away, left eye only, right eye only, etc).
Good luck!
Piece of crap, really. Lots of defective units from the factory. Not as easy to use as the earlier Pronto remotes (which I really do like a lot). Surfing the net is slow and hard to use a touchscreen for.
Lots of promise in this unit, as it does run Linux and does a lot of cool stuff, but it just didn't turn out that well.
My recomendation : get a Harmony or a Pronto. If you have a Tivo, get a Pronto (because you don't need the guide in the Harmony).