The combination of glamour and a huge catastrophe definitely helped creating this incredible fascination. Because they eyes of the world were on that ship, the catastrophe is far more well-known than e.g. the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, where over 9000 died. As for a larger civilian ship sinking, look up the Dona Paz (sunk 1987).
Yes, exactly. If Joe User right-clicks on a large file in Windows and looks at the file size, Windows tells him e.g. "19.9 GB (21.367.462.297 bytes)", so Windows clearly does NOT use the SI units. So a standard user would rightfully be confused if he could not fit five of those files on his 100GB hard disk, after all there should be 0.5 GB free afterwards, or?
The real problem definitely is that the definitions like K=1024 are so well-known that is is next to impossible to totally overthrow their use. This is not the usual problem of using different units instead of old ones (e.g. cm instead of inch), it is about using the same names for different things. And it does not help that one hardware component (hard disk) uses the new definition, while another component (RAM) uses due to technical reasons the old definition (anybody up for buying a new computer with approximately 4.295 GB of RAM?). It would have been far easier to use the weird GiB etc. as the SI units and leave the old definitons as they are.
We are living in the age of massive internet usage now. Video streaming, audio streaming, distribution of software via downloads (downloading 2GB+ software packages is nothing unusual - just sign up for any of the various online RPGs and you will see...), multimedia-heavy websites... traffic limits of 10GB per month are outdated. Even 100GB+ are very easy to reach, without downloading porn or warez. I guess a lot of management-type people just have not realized this yet, and so completely NORMAL internet usage is seen as being a "bandwidth hog" or "using the internet at the cost of others".
Thank god I live in Germany. 49.95 Euros per month for 16000 DSL without time/volume limits and including unlimited phone calls. And no traffic shaping either. And somehow, even without placing limits on what people do, it still works...
You are assuming the Internet connection is only being used by one person / one machine. Many home Internet connections are used by several persons, e.g. several family members via a wifi router. Now imagine SEVERAL people listening to web radio, or playing online games like WoW, or watching stuff on Youtube. Still hard to imagine a customer might end up at 100 GB/month?
I would agree with you - if it was a picture of the teacher-to-be in an alcohol coma with puked-on clothing, or a video of her downing a whole bottle of Schnapps or something like that. But it is a picture of her drinking from a plastic cup, and you cannot even identify WHAT it is she is drinking. For all we know, it could be orange juice in there. I simply cannot see anything bad about that picture.
You are so right. I really do not understand why people are so dead set on introducing voting machines. Paper ballots work. There is no need to change them, and any kind of machine introduces new chances for errors - and manipulations. Everybody can go to the place where votes are counted and verify that nothing illegal is going on. But no normal voter can verify that a voting machine does not contain code which changes a "0" to a "1" every now and then. Making a cross on a piece of paper and putting that paper into an envelope is wonderfully simple, and whenever somebody questions the result of the election, you can just take those papers and recount. When a machine screws up and somebody says "no way those numbers are correct", what then? If the machine may have been at fault, you need some kind of paper trail. So you recount the printouts, because they are more reliable. Why then not just ONLY count the printouts in the first place? Oh wait, counting pieces of paper with votes on them - that's what we have been doing all along already...
So far nobody brought forth any convincing arguments WHY we need voting machines. Faster results? Why is that so important? Why can't we wait half a day for the results? And it's not exactly as if voting machines make things faster, as we can see...
The problem is that when there is real money involved, it destroys the game. As soon as people realize that other players buy the "pink pantaloons" item for $50, you will have hundreds of players in game who kill the green stinkworms you have to kill to get that item. All the green stinkworms will be killed the second they spawn in game. No "real" player who just wants to get the pink pantaloons for himself will have a chance at killing those monsters, since the people who are in it for the money will kill him as soon as he even tries to get one of the monsters. Now repeat this scenario for every other interesting item in the game, even pure basic "money" which you might be able to get easily at a few special spots in the game, and you can see how normal players might be annoyed by the situation. This is exactly what happens, and where the big "virtual property" companies like IGE get the game money from which they sell.
If you were dealing with illegal pictures, would you store them on your own computer? The video linked to in the article mentions child pornographers storing their data on other computers than their own, so maybe they use some kind of p2p network where "zombie" machines store the pictures/videos. That way, if police find out where the pictures come from, the child pornographers would not be at risk themselves.
I don't know who you talked to, but it surely was not normal German teenagers... Most of them do not give a damn if downloading movies/music is illegal or not, they just do it because "everybody does it".
True. Never buy an adult who is REALLY interested in something a gift related to that area of interest. At the very least ASK the person if what you intend to buy is ok with him. Otherwise chances are you will buy something that person already owns, or you will buy something that person intentionally does not own (because he does not like it). A gamer who earns money usually WILL own all the games he really is interested in. As simple as that.
Not really THAT impressive, since he basically just put the Mac into the plastic model. See what can be done if you start from scratch with a motherboard instead of just hiding a working machine: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/minifalcon/
I don't think you're right. When I play a MMORPG where people can buy money / items via 2nd market, it DOES influence me.
First off, it damages the economy. Players tend to sell items at the highest price they can sell them for. Without people buying money from e.g. IGE, items are sold at a "realistic" price, i.e. at a price standard (non-cheating) players can afford at the point in the game these items become interesting for them.
Players who bought their in-game currency from vendors like IGE don't necessarily buy at "realistic" prices, they want their items NOW and don't care that much whether they get a good deal or not. Players selling items of course notice this and think "why sell at realistic prices, when there's a fool each day who will buy my items for more money?"
Other players who want to sell items see these higher prices when they check the player shops to see what the "standard" price is and offer their items at similar prices.
End result: everything is getting more expensive, just because there are some fools who buy at these inflated prices. IGE customers don't care, but the non-cheating players are faced with the situation that they either just cannot afford good items anymore and have to play gimped characters with sub-standard items, or they have to adapt to the situation and buy from IGE, too.
And as for "if you have better items that make you more effective in battle, you are actually helping the party, not harming it":
How would you feel if you want to join a party goint into a dungeon when all the other players have ultimate gear (which you KNOW they normally could never afford at their level) and you are the only one with average-for-your-level items?
Of course the others will "help" the party kill the monsters. But you won't - compared to them, you are "gimped" and it will feel as if the others are just dragging you along out of generosity. And the next time (if you even want to join that party again), they will most likely tell you to stay away, since "you suck".
"Laut NEC funktioniert die Firnware hingegen nicht mit dem ND-2500A, da für das Bespielen einer DVD+R DL die Laseroptik genau justiert werden muss. Diese Justage müsse bei der Herstellung erfolgen und könne nachträglich nicht durchgeführt werden. Daher sei es nicht möglich, dem ND-2500A das Beschreiben einer DVD+R DL nachträglich per Firmware-Update beizubringen. Selbst wenn es vereinzelt klappen sollte, sei die Gefahr eines Fehlbrandes sehr hoch und die DL-Rohlinge würden sehr hohe Fehlerraten jenseits der Spezifikationen zeigen."
Rough translation:
According to NEC, the firmware does not work with the ND-2500A, since the laser optics have to be calibrated correctly in order to burn a DVD+R DL. This has to be done by the manufacturer, when the unit is built, and cannot be done later on. Due to this, it is not possible to enable the ND-2500A to burn a DVD+R DL via a firmware update. Even if it should work in some cases, the danger of burning a coaster would be very high and the burnt DL DVDs would show high error rates far beyond the specifications.
Yes, that's what I ask myself: why should I switch to Gmail? What are the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages?
Let's see: so far I have got as the advantages:
- 1GB space for mail - slick web interface (so they claim) with threaded view etc. - access your mail everywhere, as long as you have web access
and the disadvantages are:
- 1GB storage? Wow, cool. I've got a 250GB hard disk right here.
- ONLY web access. No POP3 or whatever. Your mail stays there, unless you forward it to a second mail account which allows you to store your mail locally (and why would you need Gmail then in the first place?). If you've got no web access (say, your DSL modem is defective or your ISP has trouble), you've got no way to access your stored mails.
- I have yet to see a web-based mail application which is as easy/quick to use as a standard one. Sorting mails, full text search, printing, exporting mails into a different file format - sorry, but I just cannot believe that Gmail will be better than Eudora or whatever.
- data storage issues. Sorry, but I want to store my important mail HERE, on my own machine, where I can make SURE that the data won't be lost and where I can make regular backups on CD or whatever MYSELF.
- privacy issues. Nobody reads my personal mail. NOBODY. I am aware that any mail travels through countless servers on its way to my computer, but why should I sign up for a service which is based on reading its customers mails and then sending ads based on what it has read (i.e. sends you spam you cannot filter out)? How long before the user profile data walks out of the Google offices and gets used by other companies "associated" with Google? They have everything there in their hands - name, address, age and every private mail you ever sent or received via Google! As well as all the email addresses of everybody you ever exchanged mails with. How long before police etc. order Google to run queries against the data? "Hey, please run a query and give us the addresses of everybody who has mail with this-and-that warez URL!" Oh, your buddy sent you a mail half a year ago and told you "hey dude, check out this cool server"? And you wrote him back "thanks, looks cool - check out this mp3 ftp here"? Sorry, expect an official visit real soon.
No, I see absolutely NO reason why I should sign up for Gmail. Nothing they offer is so incredibly good that I would gladly give up my email privacy for it. Just use GMX or whatever and download your mail to your machine - that way you can STILL check your mail via the web interface when you're not at home.
First, it seems many people around here are not THAT up to date on what you can actually buy right now. It is correct that Gigabit is not really THAT useful when you're using a PCI card stuck to the 133MB/s PCI bus (although I would not consider around 60-70MB/s THAT bad compared to a standard 100MBit network card, it's still 8-9 times faster...). But you CAN buy motherboard integrated GBit cards that ARE on their separate bus right now, at consumer prices. Just look for an Intel 875P board with Intel CSA GBit, e.g. an ASUS P4C800E Deluxe. German c't magazine tested various home GBit solutions and they got around 110 MB/s over consumer priced hardware, if you just choose the right components.
Second, the speed depends of course mainly on what the two sides of the connection are capable of in read speed (from disk) and write speed (to disk). If you copy files from A to B and one side is only using a cheap-ass 10 MB/s hard disk, you won't get anywhere near the theoretical maximum network speed.
I have a LAN here with my main machine being a machine with Intel CSA, and then there are three other machines - two with a PCI GBit card and one with a motherboard-integrated PCI 3com NIC. Depending on which machine copies to which machine, I get transfer speeds of 30 MB/s (copying to my old Celeron PC) to about 70 MB/s (the last only when I copy files from a machine with a fast hard drive to my main machine, which is using the CSA GBit and the SATA stripe set, which is also using a separate bus away from PCI - in this case the network speed seems to be limited by the read speed of the other machine).
So I would say that right now the home GBit is limited mainly a.) by the combined speed of hard disk and PCI GBit card being smaller than 133MB/s in the case of a machine with a PCI network card and b.) the hard disk read/write speed being slower than the max GBit speed in the case of a machine with CSA GBit. I would guess that if I had a second machine like my fastest one (both hard disk and GBit away from PCI and the hard disk stripe set being able of read/write speed greater than 100MB/s) I would finally be in GBit heaven:)
As far as components go - look, as was said, for the motherboard integrated, non-PCI solutions if you buy a new PC. If you're upgrading an old PC, PCI cards are OK - they are a DEFINITE improvement over 100MBit cards, even if you just read 30MB/s. As for the switch - don't buy the cheapest one, the Realtek chips (they're the ones most likely using in there) seem to have some real issues. Also, if you are noise sensitive, look for one without a fan, those little buggers can get pretty annoying real soon. I bought a 3com 5 port 10/100/1000 switch for (half a year ago) 150 Euros, and I'll probably stick another one on top of it pretty soon. That thing (3C1670500) is small, has no fan and simply does what you want it to do. And it's pretty cheap for a brand name product. And all the components which don't use GBit (like the print server, the DSL router and the Access Point) I simply left on the old 100MBit switch, so the five ports limitation wasn't really one.
>There's only one cosmonaut on the ISS, Alexander Kaleri. Yup, sure - Igor is on the outside, trying to get back in after stepping outside for a quick smoke.
Sure, I won't generate 400GB every week. But 100GB of different data when you compare data of a week ago to today it sure is, since most of the stuff on my hard disks is for video editing (i.e. video tapes I capture, edit and author to DVD). And it would be a MAJOR hassle to do even an incremental backup on rewritable DVDs - which is why I don't do it. An extra hard disk and then, say, a "robocopy/mir" on Windows every night or whatever one wants to do on $favorite_os would be very cool.
I guess these large drives will - when they become a little bit cheaper - be the perfect backup solution for home users who care about their data. For years now I have been searching for a relatively cheap way of backing up the incredible amount of data on the hard disks of my home PCs. My primary home PC has a only 36GB Raptor for the OS and an 80GB for data, but my little file server here has a 40GB, a 60GB, a 120GB and a 250GB disk. That's 470GB of space, filled with about 350GB of data (fansubs, video editing stuff, all of my CDs and LPs in mp3 form, all my savegames, various hard disk images of my Notebook with various OS installed to swap around, etc.). For a home user, there just IS no way of backing up this amount of data. Tape backup? Yeah, sure. You would need a DLT or Ultrium streamer - at the price of a small car. Burning CDs or DVDs? Yup, the data could be burned - on about 80 DVDs or 500 CDs. And that at least once a week, to keep the backup current. The only way is to install an additional hard disk and then simply copy all the data over or to use a backup software and write everything into one backup file on that disk.
I already had considered something like this, but the problem was that one single additional hard disk would not have been enough. One of these 400GB monsters might be enough, with a bit of compression used.
Is there any reason (apart from maybe lack of sales - but that's probably due to the price) why tape backup is not cheaper? I mean, one 40/80 DLT tape has about the same price as an 80GB hard disk. And it's simply a roll of magnetic tape. And the tape drives are simply so expensive that it's ridiculous.
They way printer manufacturers try to sell cheap printers only to then make money by selling the ink has gotten really ridiculous. Let me tell you an example: Somebody I know has a small PC shop in addition to his normal job. Some weeks ago, he got an offer from one of the sellers he gets his hardware from about a pretty cheap Lexmark printer (Z65pro IIRC, some color ink printer with integrated 10/100 print server). They offered the printer to him for about 60 Euros, including a "high capacity" color ink cartridge. Since this was pretty cheap, he ordered fifteen printers and then sold them to some of his customers who were looking for a cheap printer to go with their new computer. Some of them also wanted an additional ink cartridge, just in case. My colleague then looked what a new original Lexmark ink cartridge for this printer would cost - 70 Euros!
End result: he ended up buying ten additional PRINTERS, stripped them of the ink cartridge (which he then sold to his customers) and sold the printers, without ink cartridge, for a few Euros each on eBay. It was actually FAR CHEAPER to buy a WHOLE NEW PRINTER than to buy an additional ink cartridge.
Instead of buying ink - just throw the printer away and buy a new one...
> Indeed. The vast majority of all cellphone ringers are horrendously annoying. >Every time I sit in a room and one of these dumb MIDI ringtones >plays (and, mind you, they play loudly), I want to strangle someone.
We had a colleague here who tended to choose the absolutely most disgusting ring tones for his cellphone. You know, the ones you click through when choosing one on your own phone and think about "who would EVER choose that one?". Turkish dances, unrecognizable beeptone versions of stupid pop songs - you name it, he had it. One day, he left his cellphone on his desk and left the office for a while. Somebody called his phone. An extremely annoying oriental song started playing. The caller did not give up. After about two minutes of ringing, we opened the window and threw the phone out:)
(IIRC he eventually found his phone again somewhere deep in the vegetation outside our office building. He always took his phone with him from then on...)
Yes, of course nearly all alarm clocks (and all other digital clocks, e.g. on my windows desktop) around here - Germany, France, Austria,... - are 24h, since everybody is "thinking" in the 24h time system all of the time. A digital clock with the "AM/PM" system would be a total non-seller, since many people simply would not understand it: "why does the clock show '08:00' when it's 20:00?"
Around here (Germany), this is still something which is not widely recognized as a problem, so information is hard to come by. I have read through most of the comments in this thread, and recognized some problems people here had and "fixed" as what I myself had and still have trouble with, too. I have never seen a doctor about this, since I never even thought that my troubles with concentrating e.g. when I still was at school could be something which could be treated.
So, please, let me tell you about my situation and then please tell me what you think about a.) are these typical symptoms and b.) is there something I can do about it as an adult (33yrs.)?
When I still was in Kindergarten, (I cannot remember it myself:), but my mother often tells me the story) they did some kind of test to figure out which children might have problems - it involved telling the child to walk along a line painted on the floor from one end of the room to the other. Apparently I was one of the only children to fail miserably, because I always walked away... So they told my parents that I might have some kind of mental disability (as in "he's an idiot, any child of that age should be able to do it"). Well, my parents were against putting me in a school for the mentally challenged, so life went on. At age five, I started reading and when I went to school at age six, I already read books (e.g. "The Hobbit"). I finished elementary school with a perfect score ("A" in all tests, except for sports, where I never was really good) - even though I never, ever spent time learning at home. I just went to school and did my stuff, then I went home and had fun. My teachers told my parents that I was nice and intelligent, but that I was "overactive".
Then came the Gymnasium (that's approx. up to High School, e.g. age 11 to 18, pre-University). Everything started out fine like in elementary school, i.e. I did pretty well, even though I had trouble with some of the teachers becaues of my tendency to do other stuff while sitting in class. The first three years I received prices for being one of the best in class. I still did not learn one single bit at home, except for homework. Well, yes - I tried, since it seemed important to my parents that it looked to them as if I *was* doing something, but to me it mainly involved reading the relevant stuff for a while and then browsing through the rest of the books for interesting stuff until enough time had been wasted. During the next years, there were some classes I started to have trouble with, though. Mainly history and geography, i.e. the classes which involved sitting down and simply learning stuff until you knew it by heart. Whenever I sat down to learn, I could not do so for more than maybe half an hour before my mind started drifting off to other things. I started doing really bad at tests in those classes, and in other classes I went from very good to average. My parents were at a loss - "look at those classes [e.g. history] - all you have to do is learn those facts and remember them, it's nothing you have to be extremely intelligent for, anybody can do that, and you ARE intelligent, so it should be really easy for you".
I finished the Gymnasium with a very average score and went on to study in order to become a teacher, since I liked working with children. While the theoretical stuff was very interesting, the learning was pure horror. Since you had to organize your time yourself (unlike school), my inability to sit down and use my free afternoons to work for several hours at a time really gave me trouble. It was even worse when I had an internship for two weeks - I talked with my tutor about the classes I had to give the next day, and when I went home, I sat down to prepare them. Since I could not keep my mind on the work, I tended to space out and think about other stuff, then I had to take a short walk to "free my mind" again, worked for another half hour and so on - until three or four in the morning, when I finally had the work done. Let's say I realize
Slashdot Mirror
The combination of glamour and a huge catastrophe definitely helped creating this incredible fascination. Because they eyes of the world were on that ship, the catastrophe is far more well-known than e.g. the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, where over 9000 died. As for a larger civilian ship sinking, look up the Dona Paz (sunk 1987).
Yes, exactly. If Joe User right-clicks on a large file in Windows and looks at the file size, Windows tells him e.g. "19.9 GB (21.367.462.297 bytes)", so Windows clearly does NOT use the SI units. So a standard user would rightfully be confused if he could not fit five of those files on his 100GB hard disk, after all there should be 0.5 GB free afterwards, or?
The real problem definitely is that the definitions like K=1024 are so well-known that is is next to impossible to totally overthrow their use. This is not the usual problem of using different units instead of old ones (e.g. cm instead of inch), it is about using the same names for different things. And it does not help that one hardware component (hard disk) uses the new definition, while another component (RAM) uses due to technical reasons the old definition (anybody up for buying a new computer with approximately 4.295 GB of RAM?). It would have been far easier to use the weird GiB etc. as the SI units and leave the old definitons as they are.
We are living in the age of massive internet usage now. Video streaming, audio streaming, distribution of software via downloads (downloading 2GB+ software packages is nothing unusual - just sign up for any of the various online RPGs and you will see...), multimedia-heavy websites... traffic limits of 10GB per month are outdated. Even 100GB+ are very easy to reach, without downloading porn or warez. I guess a lot of management-type people just have not realized this yet, and so completely NORMAL internet usage is seen as being a "bandwidth hog" or "using the internet at the cost of others".
Thank god I live in Germany. 49.95 Euros per month for 16000 DSL without time/volume limits and including unlimited phone calls. And no traffic shaping either. And somehow, even without placing limits on what people do, it still works...
You are assuming the Internet connection is only being used by one person / one machine. Many home Internet connections are used by several persons, e.g. several family members via a wifi router. Now imagine SEVERAL people listening to web radio, or playing online games like WoW, or watching stuff on Youtube. Still hard to imagine a customer might end up at 100 GB/month?
I would agree with you - if it was a picture of the teacher-to-be in an alcohol coma with puked-on clothing, or a video of her downing a whole bottle of Schnapps or something like that. But it is a picture of her drinking from a plastic cup, and you cannot even identify WHAT it is she is drinking. For all we know, it could be orange juice in there. I simply cannot see anything bad about that picture.
You are so right. I really do not understand why people are so dead set on introducing voting machines. Paper ballots work. There is no need to change them, and any kind of machine introduces new chances for errors - and manipulations. Everybody can go to the place where votes are counted and verify that nothing illegal is going on. But no normal voter can verify that a voting machine does not contain code which changes a "0" to a "1" every now and then. Making a cross on a piece of paper and putting that paper into an envelope is wonderfully simple, and whenever somebody questions the result of the election, you can just take those papers and recount. When a machine screws up and somebody says "no way those numbers are correct", what then? If the machine may have been at fault, you need some kind of paper trail. So you recount the printouts, because they are more reliable. Why then not just ONLY count the printouts in the first place? Oh wait, counting pieces of paper with votes on them - that's what we have been doing all along already...
So far nobody brought forth any convincing arguments WHY we need voting machines. Faster results? Why is that so important? Why can't we wait half a day for the results? And it's not exactly as if voting machines make things faster, as we can see...
Then don't use the cheats? Or do you want others to not enjoy the game, just so that you can gloat "but *I* beat the game!" ?
The problem is that when there is real money involved, it destroys the game. As soon as people realize that other players buy the "pink pantaloons" item for $50, you will have hundreds of players in game who kill the green stinkworms you have to kill to get that item. All the green stinkworms will be killed the second they spawn in game. No "real" player who just wants to get the pink pantaloons for himself will have a chance at killing those monsters, since the people who are in it for the money will kill him as soon as he even tries to get one of the monsters. Now repeat this scenario for every other interesting item in the game, even pure basic "money" which you might be able to get easily at a few special spots in the game, and you can see how normal players might be annoyed by the situation. This is exactly what happens, and where the big "virtual property" companies like IGE get the game money from which they sell.
If you were dealing with illegal pictures, would you store them on your own computer? The video linked to in the article mentions child pornographers storing their data on other computers than their own, so maybe they use some kind of p2p network where "zombie" machines store the pictures/videos. That way, if police find out where the pictures come from, the child pornographers would not be at risk themselves.
They did not have legal claim to the information, that is the whole point here.
I don't know who you talked to, but it surely was not normal German teenagers... Most of them do not give a damn if downloading movies/music is illegal or not, they just do it because "everybody does it".
True. Never buy an adult who is REALLY interested in something a gift related to that area of interest. At the very least ASK the person if what you intend to buy is ok with him. Otherwise chances are you will buy something that person already owns, or you will buy something that person intentionally does not own (because he does not like it). A gamer who earns money usually WILL own all the games he really is interested in. As simple as that.
Not really THAT impressive, since he basically just put the Mac into the plastic model. See what can be done if you start from scratch with a motherboard instead of just hiding a working machine: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/minifalcon/
I don't think you're right. When I play a MMORPG where people can buy money / items via 2nd market, it DOES influence me.
First off, it damages the economy. Players tend to sell items at the highest price they can sell them for. Without people buying money from e.g. IGE, items are sold at a "realistic" price, i.e. at a price standard (non-cheating) players can afford at the point in the game these items become interesting for them.
Players who bought their in-game currency from vendors like IGE don't necessarily buy at "realistic" prices, they want their items NOW and don't care that much whether they get a good deal or not. Players selling items of course notice this and think "why sell at realistic prices, when there's a fool each day who will buy my items for more money?"
Other players who want to sell items see these higher prices when they check the player shops to see what the "standard" price is and offer their items at similar prices.
End result: everything is getting more expensive, just because there are some fools who buy at these inflated prices. IGE customers don't care, but the non-cheating players are faced with the situation that they either just cannot afford good items anymore and have to play gimped characters with sub-standard items, or they have to adapt to the situation and buy from IGE, too.
And as for "if you have better items that make you more effective in battle, you are actually helping the party, not harming it":
How would you feel if you want to join a party goint into a dungeon when all the other players have ultimate gear (which you KNOW they normally could never afford at their level) and you are the only one with average-for-your-level items?
Of course the others will "help" the party kill the monsters. But you won't - compared to them, you are "gimped" and it will feel as if the others are just dragging you along out of generosity. And the next time (if you even want to join that party again), they will most likely tell you to stay away, since "you suck".
Don't forget these guys: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/09/175022 3&tid=152&tid=137
German magazine c't wrote yesterday:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/47428
"Laut NEC funktioniert die Firnware hingegen nicht mit dem ND-2500A, da für das Bespielen einer DVD+R DL die Laseroptik genau justiert werden muss. Diese Justage müsse bei der Herstellung erfolgen und könne nachträglich nicht durchgeführt werden. Daher sei es nicht möglich, dem ND-2500A das Beschreiben einer DVD+R DL nachträglich per Firmware-Update beizubringen. Selbst wenn es vereinzelt klappen sollte, sei die Gefahr eines Fehlbrandes sehr hoch und die DL-Rohlinge würden sehr hohe Fehlerraten jenseits der Spezifikationen zeigen."
Rough translation:
According to NEC, the firmware does not work with the ND-2500A, since the laser optics have to be calibrated correctly in order to burn a DVD+R DL. This has to be done by the manufacturer, when the unit is built, and cannot be done later on. Due to this, it is not possible to enable the ND-2500A to burn a DVD+R DL via a firmware update. Even if it should work in some cases, the danger of burning a coaster would be very high and the burnt DL DVDs would show high error rates far beyond the specifications.
Yes, that's what I ask myself: why should I switch to Gmail? What are the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages?
Let's see: so far I have got as the advantages:
- 1GB space for mail
- slick web interface (so they claim) with threaded view etc.
- access your mail everywhere, as long as you have web access
and the disadvantages are:
- 1GB storage? Wow, cool. I've got a 250GB hard disk right here.
- ONLY web access. No POP3 or whatever. Your mail stays there, unless you forward it to a second mail account which allows you to store your mail locally (and why would you need Gmail then in the first place?). If you've got no web access (say, your DSL modem is defective or your ISP has trouble), you've got no way to access your stored mails.
- I have yet to see a web-based mail application which is as easy/quick to use as a standard one. Sorting mails, full text search, printing, exporting mails into a different file format - sorry, but I just cannot believe that Gmail will be better than Eudora or whatever.
- data storage issues. Sorry, but I want to store my important mail HERE, on my own machine, where I can make SURE that the data won't be lost and where I can make regular backups on CD or whatever MYSELF.
- privacy issues. Nobody reads my personal mail. NOBODY. I am aware that any mail travels through countless servers on its way to my computer, but why should I sign up for a service which is based on reading its customers mails and then sending ads based on what it has read (i.e. sends you spam you cannot filter out)? How long before the user profile data walks out of the Google offices and gets used by other companies "associated" with Google? They have everything there in their hands - name, address, age and every private mail you ever sent or received via Google! As well as all the email addresses of everybody you ever exchanged mails with. How long before police etc. order Google to run queries against the data? "Hey, please run a query and give us the addresses of everybody who has mail with this-and-that warez URL!" Oh, your buddy sent you a mail half a year ago and told you "hey dude, check out this cool server"? And you wrote him back "thanks, looks cool - check out this mp3 ftp here"? Sorry, expect an official visit real soon.
No, I see absolutely NO reason why I should sign up for Gmail. Nothing they offer is so incredibly good that I would gladly give up my email privacy for it. Just use GMX or whatever and download your mail to your machine - that way you can STILL check your mail via the web interface when you're not at home.
First, it seems many people around here are not THAT up to date on what you can actually buy right now. It is correct that Gigabit is not really THAT useful when you're using a PCI card stuck to the 133MB/s PCI bus (although I would not consider around 60-70MB/s THAT bad compared to a standard 100MBit network card, it's still 8-9 times faster...). But you CAN buy motherboard integrated GBit cards that ARE on their separate bus right now, at consumer prices. Just look for an Intel 875P board with Intel CSA GBit, e.g. an ASUS P4C800E Deluxe. German c't magazine tested various home GBit solutions and they got around 110 MB/s over consumer priced hardware, if you just choose the right components.
:)
Second, the speed depends of course mainly on what the two sides of the connection are capable of in read speed (from disk) and write speed (to disk). If you copy files from A to B and one side is only using a cheap-ass 10 MB/s hard disk, you won't get anywhere near the theoretical maximum network speed.
I have a LAN here with my main machine being a machine with Intel CSA, and then there are three other machines - two with a PCI GBit card and one with a motherboard-integrated PCI 3com NIC. Depending on which machine copies to which machine, I get transfer speeds of 30 MB/s (copying to my old Celeron PC) to about 70 MB/s (the last only when I copy files from a machine with a fast hard drive to my main machine, which is using the CSA GBit and the SATA stripe set, which is also using a separate bus away from PCI - in this case the network speed seems to be limited by the read speed of the other machine).
So I would say that right now the home GBit is limited mainly a.) by the combined speed of hard disk and PCI GBit card being smaller than 133MB/s in the case of a machine with a PCI network card and b.) the hard disk read/write speed being slower than the max GBit speed in the case of a machine with CSA GBit. I would guess that if I had a second machine like my fastest one (both hard disk and GBit away from PCI and the hard disk stripe set being able of read/write speed greater than 100MB/s) I would finally be in GBit heaven
As far as components go - look, as was said, for the motherboard integrated, non-PCI solutions if you buy a new PC. If you're upgrading an old PC, PCI cards are OK - they are a DEFINITE improvement over 100MBit cards, even if you just read 30MB/s. As for the switch - don't buy the cheapest one, the Realtek chips (they're the ones most likely using in there) seem to have some real issues. Also, if you are noise sensitive, look for one without a fan, those little buggers can get pretty annoying real soon. I bought a 3com 5 port 10/100/1000 switch for (half a year ago) 150 Euros, and I'll probably stick another one on top of it pretty soon. That thing (3C1670500) is small, has no fan and simply does what you want it to do. And it's pretty cheap for a brand name product. And all the components which don't use GBit (like the print server, the DSL router and the Access Point) I simply left on the old 100MBit switch, so the five ports limitation wasn't really one.
>There's only one cosmonaut on the ISS, Alexander Kaleri.
Yup, sure - Igor is on the outside, trying to get back in after stepping outside for a quick smoke.
Sure, I won't generate 400GB every week. But 100GB of different data when you compare data of a week ago to today it sure is, since most of the stuff on my hard disks is for video editing (i.e. video tapes I capture, edit and author to DVD). And it would be a MAJOR hassle to do even an incremental backup on rewritable DVDs - which is why I don't do it. An extra hard disk and then, say, a "robocopy /mir" on Windows every night or whatever one wants to do on $favorite_os would be very cool.
I guess these large drives will - when they become a little bit cheaper - be the perfect backup solution for home users who care about their data. For years now I have been searching for a relatively cheap way of backing up the incredible amount of data on the hard disks of my home PCs. My primary home PC has a only 36GB Raptor for the OS and an 80GB for data, but my little file server here has a 40GB, a 60GB, a 120GB and a 250GB disk. That's 470GB of space, filled with about 350GB of data (fansubs, video editing stuff, all of my CDs and LPs in mp3 form, all my savegames, various hard disk images of my Notebook with various OS installed to swap around, etc.). For a home user, there just IS no way of backing up this amount of data. Tape backup? Yeah, sure. You would need a DLT or Ultrium streamer - at the price of a small car. Burning CDs or DVDs? Yup, the data could be burned - on about 80 DVDs or 500 CDs. And that at least once a week, to keep the backup current. The only way is to install an additional hard disk and then simply copy all the data over or to use a backup software and write everything into one backup file on that disk.
I already had considered something like this, but the problem was that one single additional hard disk would not have been enough. One of these 400GB monsters might be enough, with a bit of compression used.
Is there any reason (apart from maybe lack of sales - but that's probably due to the price) why tape backup is not cheaper? I mean, one 40/80 DLT tape has about the same price as an 80GB hard disk. And it's simply a roll of magnetic tape. And the tape drives are simply so expensive that it's ridiculous.
They way printer manufacturers try to sell cheap printers only to then make money by selling the ink has gotten really ridiculous. Let me tell you an example: Somebody I know has a small PC shop in addition to his normal job. Some weeks ago, he got an offer from one of the sellers he gets his hardware from about a pretty cheap Lexmark printer (Z65pro IIRC, some color ink printer with integrated 10/100 print server). They offered the printer to him for about 60 Euros, including a "high capacity" color ink cartridge. Since this was pretty cheap, he ordered fifteen printers and then sold them to some of his customers who were looking for a cheap printer to go with their new computer. Some of them also wanted an additional ink cartridge, just in case. My colleague then looked what a new original Lexmark ink cartridge for this printer would cost - 70 Euros!
...
End result: he ended up buying ten additional PRINTERS, stripped them of the ink cartridge (which he then sold to his customers) and sold the printers, without ink cartridge, for a few Euros each on eBay. It was actually FAR CHEAPER to buy a WHOLE NEW PRINTER than to buy an additional ink cartridge.
Instead of buying ink - just throw the printer away and buy a new one
> Indeed. The vast majority of all cellphone ringers are horrendously annoying.
:)
>Every time I sit in a room and one of these dumb MIDI ringtones
>plays (and, mind you, they play loudly), I want to strangle someone.
We had a colleague here who tended to choose the absolutely most disgusting ring tones for his cellphone. You know, the ones you click through when choosing one on your own phone and think about "who would EVER choose that one?". Turkish dances, unrecognizable beeptone versions of stupid pop songs - you name it, he had it. One day, he left his cellphone on his desk and left the office for a while. Somebody called his phone. An extremely annoying oriental song started playing. The caller did not give up. After about two minutes of ringing, we opened the window and threw the phone out
(IIRC he eventually found his phone again somewhere deep in the vegetation outside our office building. He always took his phone with him from then on...)
Yes, of course nearly all alarm clocks (and all other digital clocks, e.g. on my windows desktop) around here - Germany, France, Austria, ... - are 24h, since everybody is "thinking" in the 24h time system all of the time. A digital clock with the "AM/PM" system would be a total non-seller, since many people simply would not understand it: "why does the clock show '08:00' when it's 20:00?"
Around here (Germany), this is still something which is not widely recognized as a problem, so information is hard to come by. I have read through most of the comments in this thread, and recognized some problems people here had and "fixed" as what I myself had and still have trouble with, too. I have never seen a doctor about this, since I never even thought that my troubles with concentrating e.g. when I still was at school could be something which could be treated.
:), but my mother often tells me the story) they did some kind of test to figure out which children might have problems - it involved telling the child to walk along a line painted on the floor from one end of the room to the other. Apparently I was one of the only children to fail miserably, because I always walked away... So they told my parents that I might have some kind of mental disability (as in "he's an idiot, any child of that age should be able to do it"). Well, my parents were against putting me in a school for the mentally challenged, so life went on. At age five, I started reading and when I went to school at age six, I already read books (e.g. "The Hobbit"). I finished elementary school with a perfect score ("A" in all tests, except for sports, where I never was really good) - even though I never, ever spent time learning at home. I just went to school and did my stuff, then I went home and had fun. My teachers told my parents that I was nice and intelligent, but that I was "overactive".
So, please, let me tell you about my situation and then please tell me what you think about a.) are these typical symptoms and b.) is there something I can do about it as an adult (33yrs.)?
When I still was in Kindergarten, (I cannot remember it myself
Then came the Gymnasium (that's approx. up to High School, e.g. age 11 to 18, pre-University). Everything started out fine like in elementary school, i.e. I did pretty well, even though I had trouble with some of the teachers becaues of my tendency to do other stuff while sitting in class. The first three years I received prices for being one of the best in class. I still did not learn one single bit at home, except for homework. Well, yes - I tried, since it seemed important to my parents that it looked to them as if I *was* doing something, but to me it mainly involved reading the relevant stuff for a while and then browsing through the rest of the books for interesting stuff until enough time had been wasted. During the next years, there were some classes I started to have trouble with, though. Mainly history and geography, i.e. the classes which involved sitting down and simply learning stuff until you knew it by heart. Whenever I sat down to learn, I could not do so for more than maybe half an hour before my mind started drifting off to other things. I started doing really bad at tests in those classes, and in other classes I went from very good to average. My parents were at a loss - "look at those classes [e.g. history] - all you have to do is learn those facts and remember them, it's nothing you have to be extremely intelligent for, anybody can do that, and you ARE intelligent, so it should be really easy for you".
I finished the Gymnasium with a very average score and went on to study in order to become a teacher, since I liked working with children. While the theoretical stuff was very interesting, the learning was pure horror. Since you had to organize your time yourself (unlike school), my inability to sit down and use my free afternoons to work for several hours at a time really gave me trouble. It was even worse when I had an internship for two weeks - I talked with my tutor about the classes I had to give the next day, and when I went home, I sat down to prepare them. Since I could not keep my mind on the work, I tended to space out and think about other stuff, then I had to take a short walk to "free my mind" again, worked for another half hour and so on - until three or four in the morning, when I finally had the work done. Let's say I realize