Yes, Mr. Anonymous Uber-Gamer, I'm sure onboard video is not awesome enough for you. You need some add-on card that draws enough power to run an arc furnace. Or maybe a couple of them in SLI/Crossfire mode.
Seriously, for normal computing, onboard video is absolutely just fine. I have a 790GX, and it does absolutely everything I need it to, but then again I use my machine purely for development/engineering/graphics work, and no gaming. For that category, onboard and sub-100 is just fine.
Actually EMD/GMD was sold to a private capital company several years back. I hate to say it, but they now suffer the same problem as their former parent - quality issues and turning out locomotives that don't reflect any attention to the users' requests (either the crews, the maintenance guys, or the railroad management). They're getting their pants handed to them by GE (who would be the equivalent of Honda in this example).
Uh, fail. While I can't speak for the reliability of VRE's locomotive fleet (when I've seen it, it seems to be running rather well), but their oldest power are the F40s, built in the early 1980s and with a lot of miles on them. The rest - the RP39-2Cs and GP40PH-2s - are all recent rebuilds. Sure the frames and shells used in the rebuilt are from the late 1960s, but they've essentially been overhauled from the ground up with new innards, making for an almost new locomotive.
If they're having reliability issues, then it's either a maintenance problem or an inherent design flaw, but not a result of them being "from the 1950s"
DUMBEST FUCKING THING I'VE READ TODAY. It is a fucking car and it does NOT need to be retooled year after fucking year.
Who said anything about retooling year after year? I just want something that doesn't look like the standard generic sedan/econobox/truckmoster.
I hate to say it, but to many of us, looks make the difference once the mechanicals are roughly equivalent. I don't want the Fuglymobile, even if it does last a million miles. Take that million mile powertrain and put it in something attractive.
They're not, much in the same way it'll be a cold day in hell before I'm a GM customer again.
I grew up on a farm. We drove all sorts of GMC/Chevy trucks, because they were what we needed to get the job done. Sure, they broke down, but they were the best option available.
I continued being a loyal GM customer through college and into my professional life. Each one was a progressively more annoying piece of junk. Each generation found more bells and whistles added (that often broke) without going back and fixing the powertrain / steering issues that had plagued the previous generations. Basically, rather than focusing on what was really important, they kept adding crappy "features".
Finally, with my 2001 Yukon having chronic steering and transmission issues that started right after the warranty was up and costing me a grand or so in repairs every 10,000 miles, I bought a Honda. Just a little used 95 Civic as a commuter car that I bought for $3k. I was hooked - the damn thing was simple, without many of the extras to which I'd become accustomed, but it ran. And ran. And ran. It seldom ever needed maintenance, and usually when it did, it was cheap and easy to fix.
I still have it. It now is closing in on 300k miles with the original engine and transmission. I do scheduled maintenance, and it mostly just runs. I now have a CR-V and an S2000 backing it up, and you won't find a GM product around. My Yukon is gone, my Pontiac is gone, my wife's truck is gone, and I don't even look at what they're offering these days because they haven't learned to concentrate on the basics yet.
My parents, back on the farm in Iowa, have learned the same thing. The troublesome GMs and Fords are gone. In their place are Toyota trucks and Honda/Acura cars.
GM & Ford, hear this: Build a car that is first and foremost fundamentally sound, and then look at which of those "features" you really should offer.
We used to have a massive rail infrastructure in the USA. The neo-con revolution killed it when Reagan made the point of gutting social infrastructure.
Bzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing. Almost all of the railroads were on the verge of failure in the 1970s and early 1980s. The weakest couldn't survive - evidence the failure of the Rock Island and the Milwaukee. The rest were deferring capital spending and running on an increasingly weak infrastructure, destroyed by their inability to turn a profit. The reason? Well-meaning government rate regulation that eliminated any actual competition by setting uniform rates (usually out of step with costs and far too low), discouraged any innovation, and forced railroads to carry on the financial black hole of passenger service. It was only deregulation that saved the network we have today. If the railroads hadn't been allowed to set rates to cover their cost of capital and discontinue unprofitable services, we'd probably have one worn-out, crappy nationalized system today similar to what Conrail was in the 1980s. Instead, we have the best rail freight system in the world in terms of ton-miles carried and cost per mile.
Detroit does not need to be retooled to build rail vehicles. It's a whole different engineering problem, and there are plenty of qualified companies out there who could do the job. The problem is that if we want national passenger rail service, we need to somehow encourage a network of high speed lines to be built.
In the long distance market, Amtrak is an anachronistic novelty. I say this as someone who takes the SWC and CZ from Colorado to Chicago regularly - at least 6-7 times/year. I hate flying and I regularly get too lazy to drive it, so I spend more and take Amtrak because I'm a train nut at heart. It cannot compete, no matter how much money you throw at the problem, because it's dependent upon its host railroads. They're not interested in building out 200+ mph infrastructure - hell, half the time they're not even interested in keeping Amtrak on schedule.
Quite frankly, it's nuts to mix express passenger traffic with an endless glut of coal and mixed freight on the existing network. It needs it's own dedicated network, and that's going to take some serious private-public partnership that will, no doubt, find powerful enemies in the airlines and bus companies. If we're serious in developing a long distance passenger network, we need to start from scratch and leave the freight boys to what they do best - move freight.
Actually, no, you can legally photograph nearly everything you can see from public land in the US. There are a few places where they're known to lack a sense of humor about it, but almost everything is fair game. (That said, there are a few rare restrictions on such things.)
Now understanding that this is the law in your country, and it is (apparently) clearly posted, well... yeah, they broke the law and got caught. As usual,/. distorts the story.
I don't define myself as "hesitant" to use manage code, I define myself as "where's my pointer?" You're right, I'm generally skeptical at best of new trends. My job isn't to be trendy or try new stuff - it's to solve problems in something standard, efficient, and sustainable. C has proven a language capable of nearly every practical task thrown at it for the last 30 years. It is easily the most portable ever created. Why would I want to switch?
Yes, there are those that say I shouldn't be tied to a programming language, because they come and go. That's absolutely true, but I see no reason to use new tools if they offer no substantial advantages to my problems over the old toolsets.
I'm sorry, I can manage memory and manage pointers. I do not need to incur the penalty and nuisance of using java. C very closely resembles how the underlying machine works (at least for Von Neumann architectures), and I think that's a very good thing for programmers.
NAT is not a permanent solution, but there are so many places out there using public addresses everywhere - including, for example, my employer, where everything sites behind a firewall that forwards damn near nothing through. Sure, the production subnet can access the whole world, but what about those other two Class B subnets and another partial B that we own? Hint - not being used in any way where private addresses would make a difference.
That said, I'm like you. When my ISP tells me "here's your IPv6 addresses, you might want to switch", I'll get right on it. (Speakeasy, you listening out there?) Until then, it's IPv4 for me.
I disagree that following procedures is more important than saving lives in a terrorist attack -- even if the law were clear and undisputed regarding the procedures.
Seriously, show me where following existing laws would have caused a terrorist to succeed in the last eight years. I mean, go ahead, just try...
(pause)
Oh wait, that's because there are no known situations. We have to take the government's good word for it. I personally don't trust anyone's good word. Show me proof. Let it be independently validated. Then we'll talk. And let's not whip out the "compromising state secrets" bit - surely if they've thwarted more than a few terrorists using this method, there must be a couple of examples that wouldn't give much away.
Even then, I personally would rather accept some risk than live under an increasingly invasive government. I would rather live - and possibly die - by the principles I believe in (strictly limited government power with checks and balances) than give them up.
I voted for Barr. He would have fixed it... Probably would have screwed up a bunch of other stuff, but at least worked to put protections of our civil rights in place.
Uh, yes, that's the desired effect. We don't want corporate co-conspirators helping the government do covert and unconstitutional things. The telecoms, like all big companies, have entire legal departments and no doubt numerous policies about these sorts of things, and they almost certainly had fair notice that what they were doing was at best fuzzy and most likely blatantly illegal. I've been all for suing their asses off since day 1, and even more so since their government cronies tried to cover them.
Call it a deterrent, call it vengeance, but I call it justice.
How exactly is libertarianism a totalitarian fantasy? Libertarians by definition believe the state should control almost nothing, which would be the exact opposite.
If people want the government to give everyone rainbows and blowjobs, you have no business telling them it shouldn't.
Even as a libertarian, I agree with you. If that's what the people want, then great. Except I'd add that those who want these things can go through the proper channels - constitutional amendment. Then, after that, the libertarian in me wants to see only those interested in rainbows or blowjobs be charged (perhaps at a group discount rate) for these services.
Personally, I prefer the private sector. That way I have the freedom to choose my blowjob provider.
Defense? Against what? The US has, BY FAR, the largest military budget in the world. It is larger than the next 46 largest combined. And most of those are strong US allies. So, who poses a threat?
Yet strangely, a bunch of poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly armed locals manage to hang on in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We have the largest military, but perhaps due to budget bloat, we may have become too obsessed with technology and without focusing enough on tactics.
Of course when we have rules of engagement tying our back and they don't, which tips things in their favor significantly. We always have the solution of merely leveling the place.
Once again, the FSF takes a noble goal to a loony extreme.
If the device manufacturers had put the firmware in ROM (flash/EEPROM/whatever) attached to the peripheral rather than downloaded by the driver, does that really change anything? You haven't given the user any more or less freedom; you've just redistributed what lives where and probably increased hardware costs (and made firmware upgrades less simple). However, then those releases could support the device and be fully "free" according to this new FSF decision.
Quite frankly, I'm a pragmatist who admires all the great freedom in Linux (and that's why I choose to use it) and supports hardware manufacturers who release their specs (hence the reason I now have an ATI graphics card). That said, at the end of the day, I want a distro that makes my hardware work without a ton of fucking around because somebody philosophically disagreed with a driver. I also respect those who would rather not use such things.
Therefore, my hope is that the Ubuntu/Fedora will not change their approach. This is one of those dealbreakers on a distro for me.
But hey lets bash for a while anyways as though we don't know that this is already out of date.
Who cares if it has been changed? The mere fact that this sort of assinine stupidity happened in the first place is news enough. Stupidity is defeated on a daily basis - that doesn't make it less stupid or less worthy of discussion.
Agreed. I don't boot work's computer for fun, so if they don't pay me for it, I don't do it.
Of course I'm salaried, but my day starts when I first think about solving work problems, and ends at the last thought I have about them. Now if I go off and do other things for more than about 15 minutes, I put work time on hold, but it has nothing to do with when I'm in the office or when the computer is booted.
Actually I had sex while on conference calls a few times. Thank god for mute, both for my sake and for the sake of coworkers. My ex was a screamer. Good memories, I tell you.
GM and Chrysler are really no better. Both have massive legal bullying departments that have a track record of picking on fans and enthusiasts.
Fortunately, thanks to their own corporate stupidity, neither one of the above will be around in their current form for long. Somewhat unforuntately, however, is that the legal department's employment will likely outlast that of the actual schmucks trying to make cars.
Couldn't agree more. I just finished building a quad core machine for home (my desktop was nearing three years old, and figured I might as well change it out in conjunction with upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10), and found AMD to be the more cost-effective choice. I have no ambitions of having the fastest proc out there (or the most overclockable, since I don't overclock) - I want the most cost effective processor under about $200.
The other thing to consider with AMD is it's not just the processor price, it's proc+mb price. Sure, a Q6600 Kentsfield produces slightly better benchmarks and is only slightly more expensive. That said, good Intel motherboards are pricey ($225+), whereas good, reliable AMD boards can be had for $120.
Bear in mind I'm not a gamer, I'm a programmer and a photographer. My main concerns are stability, reliability, performance/$, noise, and power consumption, in that order. I need a machine that can run a ton of processes without bogging, but the speed of any single thread isn't all that critical. So, better parallelism and greater I/O bandwidth is the name of the game for me - your requirements may differ.
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Yes, Mr. Anonymous Uber-Gamer, I'm sure onboard video is not awesome enough for you. You need some add-on card that draws enough power to run an arc furnace. Or maybe a couple of them in SLI/Crossfire mode.
Seriously, for normal computing, onboard video is absolutely just fine. I have a 790GX, and it does absolutely everything I need it to, but then again I use my machine purely for development/engineering/graphics work, and no gaming. For that category, onboard and sub-100 is just fine.
Actually EMD/GMD was sold to a private capital company several years back. I hate to say it, but they now suffer the same problem as their former parent - quality issues and turning out locomotives that don't reflect any attention to the users' requests (either the crews, the maintenance guys, or the railroad management). They're getting their pants handed to them by GE (who would be the equivalent of Honda in this example).
Uh, fail. While I can't speak for the reliability of VRE's locomotive fleet (when I've seen it, it seems to be running rather well), but their oldest power are the F40s, built in the early 1980s and with a lot of miles on them. The rest - the RP39-2Cs and GP40PH-2s - are all recent rebuilds. Sure the frames and shells used in the rebuilt are from the late 1960s, but they've essentially been overhauled from the ground up with new innards, making for an almost new locomotive.
If they're having reliability issues, then it's either a maintenance problem or an inherent design flaw, but not a result of them being "from the 1950s"
DUMBEST FUCKING THING I'VE READ TODAY. It is a fucking car and it does NOT need to be retooled year after fucking year.
Who said anything about retooling year after year? I just want something that doesn't look like the standard generic sedan/econobox/truckmoster.
I hate to say it, but to many of us, looks make the difference once the mechanicals are roughly equivalent. I don't want the Fuglymobile, even if it does last a million miles. Take that million mile powertrain and put it in something attractive.
They're not, much in the same way it'll be a cold day in hell before I'm a GM customer again.
I grew up on a farm. We drove all sorts of GMC/Chevy trucks, because they were what we needed to get the job done. Sure, they broke down, but they were the best option available.
I continued being a loyal GM customer through college and into my professional life. Each one was a progressively more annoying piece of junk. Each generation found more bells and whistles added (that often broke) without going back and fixing the powertrain / steering issues that had plagued the previous generations. Basically, rather than focusing on what was really important, they kept adding crappy "features".
Finally, with my 2001 Yukon having chronic steering and transmission issues that started right after the warranty was up and costing me a grand or so in repairs every 10,000 miles, I bought a Honda. Just a little used 95 Civic as a commuter car that I bought for $3k. I was hooked - the damn thing was simple, without many of the extras to which I'd become accustomed, but it ran. And ran. And ran. It seldom ever needed maintenance, and usually when it did, it was cheap and easy to fix.
I still have it. It now is closing in on 300k miles with the original engine and transmission. I do scheduled maintenance, and it mostly just runs. I now have a CR-V and an S2000 backing it up, and you won't find a GM product around. My Yukon is gone, my Pontiac is gone, my wife's truck is gone, and I don't even look at what they're offering these days because they haven't learned to concentrate on the basics yet.
My parents, back on the farm in Iowa, have learned the same thing. The troublesome GMs and Fords are gone. In their place are Toyota trucks and Honda/Acura cars.
GM & Ford, hear this: Build a car that is first and foremost fundamentally sound, and then look at which of those "features" you really should offer.
We used to have a massive rail infrastructure in the USA. The neo-con revolution killed it when Reagan made the point of gutting social infrastructure.
Bzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing. Almost all of the railroads were on the verge of failure in the 1970s and early 1980s. The weakest couldn't survive - evidence the failure of the Rock Island and the Milwaukee. The rest were deferring capital spending and running on an increasingly weak infrastructure, destroyed by their inability to turn a profit. The reason? Well-meaning government rate regulation that eliminated any actual competition by setting uniform rates (usually out of step with costs and far too low), discouraged any innovation, and forced railroads to carry on the financial black hole of passenger service. It was only deregulation that saved the network we have today. If the railroads hadn't been allowed to set rates to cover their cost of capital and discontinue unprofitable services, we'd probably have one worn-out, crappy nationalized system today similar to what Conrail was in the 1980s. Instead, we have the best rail freight system in the world in terms of ton-miles carried and cost per mile.
Detroit does not need to be retooled to build rail vehicles. It's a whole different engineering problem, and there are plenty of qualified companies out there who could do the job. The problem is that if we want national passenger rail service, we need to somehow encourage a network of high speed lines to be built.
In the long distance market, Amtrak is an anachronistic novelty. I say this as someone who takes the SWC and CZ from Colorado to Chicago regularly - at least 6-7 times/year. I hate flying and I regularly get too lazy to drive it, so I spend more and take Amtrak because I'm a train nut at heart. It cannot compete, no matter how much money you throw at the problem, because it's dependent upon its host railroads. They're not interested in building out 200+ mph infrastructure - hell, half the time they're not even interested in keeping Amtrak on schedule.
Quite frankly, it's nuts to mix express passenger traffic with an endless glut of coal and mixed freight on the existing network. It needs it's own dedicated network, and that's going to take some serious private-public partnership that will, no doubt, find powerful enemies in the airlines and bus companies. If we're serious in developing a long distance passenger network, we need to start from scratch and leave the freight boys to what they do best - move freight.
Actually, no, you can legally photograph nearly everything you can see from public land in the US. There are a few places where they're known to lack a sense of humor about it, but almost everything is fair game. (That said, there are a few rare restrictions on such things.)
Now understanding that this is the law in your country, and it is (apparently) clearly posted, well... yeah, they broke the law and got caught. As usual, /. distorts the story.
Rosie O'Donnell will be cheering for you if you don't get back to work.
Signed,
Your Boss
Lemme fix that for you:
Woah, dude....
I don't define myself as "hesitant" to use manage code, I define myself as "where's my pointer?" You're right, I'm generally skeptical at best of new trends. My job isn't to be trendy or try new stuff - it's to solve problems in something standard, efficient, and sustainable. C has proven a language capable of nearly every practical task thrown at it for the last 30 years. It is easily the most portable ever created. Why would I want to switch?
Yes, there are those that say I shouldn't be tied to a programming language, because they come and go. That's absolutely true, but I see no reason to use new tools if they offer no substantial advantages to my problems over the old toolsets.
I'm sorry, I can manage memory and manage pointers. I do not need to incur the penalty and nuisance of using java. C very closely resembles how the underlying machine works (at least for Von Neumann architectures), and I think that's a very good thing for programmers.
NAT is not a permanent solution, but there are so many places out there using public addresses everywhere - including, for example, my employer, where everything sites behind a firewall that forwards damn near nothing through. Sure, the production subnet can access the whole world, but what about those other two Class B subnets and another partial B that we own? Hint - not being used in any way where private addresses would make a difference.
That said, I'm like you. When my ISP tells me "here's your IPv6 addresses, you might want to switch", I'll get right on it. (Speakeasy, you listening out there?) Until then, it's IPv4 for me.
Talk about insensitive clods - 127.0.0.1 is my address! Stop using it! :)
I disagree that following procedures is more important than saving lives in a terrorist attack -- even if the law were clear and undisputed regarding the procedures.
Seriously, show me where following existing laws would have caused a terrorist to succeed in the last eight years. I mean, go ahead, just try...
(pause)
Oh wait, that's because there are no known situations. We have to take the government's good word for it. I personally don't trust anyone's good word. Show me proof. Let it be independently validated. Then we'll talk. And let's not whip out the "compromising state secrets" bit - surely if they've thwarted more than a few terrorists using this method, there must be a couple of examples that wouldn't give much away.
Even then, I personally would rather accept some risk than live under an increasingly invasive government. I would rather live - and possibly die - by the principles I believe in (strictly limited government power with checks and balances) than give them up.
I voted for Barr. He would have fixed it... Probably would have screwed up a bunch of other stuff, but at least worked to put protections of our civil rights in place.
Uh, yes, that's the desired effect. We don't want corporate co-conspirators helping the government do covert and unconstitutional things. The telecoms, like all big companies, have entire legal departments and no doubt numerous policies about these sorts of things, and they almost certainly had fair notice that what they were doing was at best fuzzy and most likely blatantly illegal. I've been all for suing their asses off since day 1, and even more so since their government cronies tried to cover them.
Call it a deterrent, call it vengeance, but I call it justice.
How exactly is libertarianism a totalitarian fantasy? Libertarians by definition believe the state should control almost nothing, which would be the exact opposite.
If people want the government to give everyone rainbows and blowjobs, you have no business telling them it shouldn't.
Even as a libertarian, I agree with you. If that's what the people want, then great. Except I'd add that those who want these things can go through the proper channels - constitutional amendment. Then, after that, the libertarian in me wants to see only those interested in rainbows or blowjobs be charged (perhaps at a group discount rate) for these services.
Personally, I prefer the private sector. That way I have the freedom to choose my blowjob provider.
Although if we can make these part of the new healthcare program, I'm willing to go for a constitutional amendment.
Okay, as budget-conscious concession, I'm willing to forgo the rainbows.
Defense? Against what? The US has, BY FAR, the largest military budget in the world. It is larger than the next 46 largest combined. And most of those are strong US allies. So, who poses a threat?
Yet strangely, a bunch of poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly armed locals manage to hang on in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We have the largest military, but perhaps due to budget bloat, we may have become too obsessed with technology and without focusing enough on tactics.
Of course when we have rules of engagement tying our back and they don't, which tips things in their favor significantly. We always have the solution of merely leveling the place.
Once again, the FSF takes a noble goal to a loony extreme.
If the device manufacturers had put the firmware in ROM (flash/EEPROM/whatever) attached to the peripheral rather than downloaded by the driver, does that really change anything? You haven't given the user any more or less freedom; you've just redistributed what lives where and probably increased hardware costs (and made firmware upgrades less simple). However, then those releases could support the device and be fully "free" according to this new FSF decision.
Quite frankly, I'm a pragmatist who admires all the great freedom in Linux (and that's why I choose to use it) and supports hardware manufacturers who release their specs (hence the reason I now have an ATI graphics card). That said, at the end of the day, I want a distro that makes my hardware work without a ton of fucking around because somebody philosophically disagreed with a driver. I also respect those who would rather not use such things.
Therefore, my hope is that the Ubuntu/Fedora will not change their approach. This is one of those dealbreakers on a distro for me.
I too prefer Ivan. I just have a lot more respect (or is that fear?) for anybody with the nickname "Terrible".
After all, why vote for a lesser evil? Er, wait, Cthulhu for Copyright Czar!
But hey lets bash for a while anyways as though we don't know that this is already out of date.
Who cares if it has been changed? The mere fact that this sort of assinine stupidity happened in the first place is news enough. Stupidity is defeated on a daily basis - that doesn't make it less stupid or less worthy of discussion.
Agreed. I don't boot work's computer for fun, so if they don't pay me for it, I don't do it.
Of course I'm salaried, but my day starts when I first think about solving work problems, and ends at the last thought I have about them. Now if I go off and do other things for more than about 15 minutes, I put work time on hold, but it has nothing to do with when I'm in the office or when the computer is booted.
...or have sex while the computer boots
Actually I had sex while on conference calls a few times. Thank god for mute, both for my sake and for the sake of coworkers. My ex was a screamer. Good memories, I tell you.
GM and Chrysler are really no better. Both have massive legal bullying departments that have a track record of picking on fans and enthusiasts.
Fortunately, thanks to their own corporate stupidity, neither one of the above will be around in their current form for long. Somewhat unforuntately, however, is that the legal department's employment will likely outlast that of the actual schmucks trying to make cars.
Couldn't agree more. I just finished building a quad core machine for home (my desktop was nearing three years old, and figured I might as well change it out in conjunction with upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10), and found AMD to be the more cost-effective choice. I have no ambitions of having the fastest proc out there (or the most overclockable, since I don't overclock) - I want the most cost effective processor under about $200.
The other thing to consider with AMD is it's not just the processor price, it's proc+mb price. Sure, a Q6600 Kentsfield produces slightly better benchmarks and is only slightly more expensive. That said, good Intel motherboards are pricey ($225+), whereas good, reliable AMD boards can be had for $120.
Bear in mind I'm not a gamer, I'm a programmer and a photographer. My main concerns are stability, reliability, performance/$, noise, and power consumption, in that order. I need a machine that can run a ton of processes without bogging, but the speed of any single thread isn't all that critical. So, better parallelism and greater I/O bandwidth is the name of the game for me - your requirements may differ.