Re:Two questions from ignorance
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 3, Insightful
This is not much different from a big company like Microsoft acquiring/buying a smaller company... sooner or later the smaller company gets its life suck out of it.
USB 3.0 provides more juice compared to 2.0. You could probably plug and power up a 3.5" desktop drive (assuming the enclosure has the circuitry to use power over USB) and it will run it without the need for brick adapters.
Vista post SP2 is fast and stable... I have it on a Thinkpad T61p too and on a desktop. As I said on a previous post, all MS had to do was to wait a couple more months until the hardware and drivers caught up, add some fancy interface tweaks, fancy marketing, and viola... profit!
It also probably helped that many websites, etc., needed something new to hype about to keep making ad money.
MS snatched victory from the jaws of failure...
on
A Tale of Two Windows 7s
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well it looks like Microsoft has turned the Vista blunder into a Windows 7 success, money making opportunity... great move on their part. They did this by basically just waiting for drivers to mature, waiting for the hardware to catch up, and focusing on creating some fancy ads like these: Windows 7 Ad Campaign Kicks Off, Focuses on Features
I tend to agree with Dvorak... Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3...plus some fancy interface updates but basically the same deep down.
You don't have to google for crazy instructions and edit the registy to uninstall the Microsoft.NET Framework Assistant 1.1 add-on. Just launch the add-ons dialog in FF, go to the Extensions Tab, select the.NET add-on and click the Uninstall button or the Disable button if you just wish to disable but not to uninstall it. These 2 options are available for this add-on just like the other add-ons. For the WPF Plugin, select the Plugin Tab, select the Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in from the list and click Disable. This is the only option available for Plug-ins which includes those from Java (of which there are 3 in my machine I may add), Adobe, Shockwave, and others.
I might be mistaken but don't these add-ons/plugins from Microsoft specifically allow certain web pages to render properly under Firefox which otherwise would have required users to run IE? If so Microsoft centric IT Enterprise users who have started using Firefox at work might revert back to IE. This might reduce the gains that Firefox has been achieving in Microsoft centric IT Enterprise shops.
+1 on the Logitech MX Revolution... I have the MX5500 Bluetooth version (comes with the Keyboard). A charge can last up to 7 days for me but I usually just put the mouse on its cradle at night so it is fully charged in the morning. Highly programmable but as the others noted, the best feature for me is the ability to switch the mouse wheel to work in click mode (you can feel the detents) or in smooth mode... The wheel is heavy and acts as a flywheel so you can easily flick it and it will scroll for a few seconds... great for scrolling through long documents or for programs written cut and paste style.
Again as others have noted, the multitude of buttons are a boon. I my case I programmed the button above the scrollwheel to switch tabs (in the IDE or in the browser)... the wheel on the side I programmed to zoom in and out text/images with its middle click to return to normal zoom.
Finally, the form factor is the best of all the mice I have used so far. It fits my hand perfectly and the weight is just right. I actually like this MX5500 Bluetooth combo so much that I got 3 of them, 2 at home and 1 at work. The Bluetooth also has a very long range such that I can even use it as a remote control when I want to turn the volume up and down on the media player while riding my stationary bike.
Indeed, I use Songbird and feel lucky I did not activate/register an account with Last.fm. After reading about this item on reddit/slashdot, I immediately uninstalled Last.fm's addon plus I also uninstall Last.fm's album cover addon.
From now on I won't touch anything with "last.fm" on it with a 10 foot pole.
The above post is correct... the one before it marked insightful is wrong. As a matter of fact certain current model Quad Cores don't support VT-x. Some of the cheaper dual cores, even that run as high as 2.66 - 2.8 Ghz don't support VT-x too. You actually have to eyeball the specs to be sure your new Intel CPU supports VT-x. Finally you also have to enable this feature in the BIOS.
I assembled an AMD Athlon / Athlon ASUS A7N8X and a Pentium 4 / MSI motherboard powered PCs at about the same time more than 5 years ago and these computers are being powered on and off almost everyday. They still work.
Newer PC components especially the motherboard usually still have juice in them even though you power them off. The CPUs and graphics card even when powered on will still experience heat cycles ranging from just above room temp when idle and depending on the efficacy of the cooling system, to 60 C (for CPUs) or 90 C (for high end graphics cards) when playing games.
More specifically for me, until Chrome incorporates addons/extensions equivalent to NoScript, Adblock, and Flashblock I won't be using it except perhaps when I need to do a quick check of my Google Calendar appointments.
Exactly, circa early 2000 and I was going with Western Digital when I noticed their new drives at the time becoming noisier (rotational whine) compared to Seagate's and IBM's. At around the same timeframe, the company I worked for received a bad batch of Western Digital drives installed on Dell desktop PCs. One drive after another failed. At about the same time frame or a little later, it was IBM's drives that started failing (infamous DeathStars) with IBM finally selling off their HDD operations to Hitachi.
At this point I was already going with Seagate drives and felt relieved that their drives were quieter and more reliable than the competition's. Then a year or 2 ago, Seagate's quality control seemed to have taken a hit (at around the time they bought Maxtor). First they seem to have problems with the firmware on certain 500 GB models which was causing performance degradation (Seagate Firmware Performance Differences). On their latest models, it appears they are still having firmware issues. Lately the 100 GB Seagate drive on my year old Lenovo Thinkpad started acting up and Vista started giving me warnings about impending drive failures. I get "Spin Retry Count" fail when I run HDTune but Seagate's own SeaTools gives it a clean bill of health.
To cut this short, I am now using Western Digital Caviar (640 GB AALS Blacks, AAKS Blues, 1 TB Greens) and I noticed that these are faster, quieter (not just rotational but seek as well), vibrates less, produces less heat than comparable Seagate drives (I have 500 GB Seagate 7200.10 drives and a 750 GB Seagate 7200.11). So for now it appears the pendulum has swung in favor of Western Digital performance and reliability wise.
Having said all this, I still religiously maintain image copies of my OS/App partition and data partition... multiple times. You can never be paranoid enough with your data.
If you installed Intel's AHCI drivers during the OS install, eSATA will be hot pluggable. That means you can plug an eSATA drive to a PC, use it, then, unplug it without the need to reboot the PC.
I agree, $200 is money well spent for VMWare Workstation if you are a developer. Actually, I think of it (200 bucks for Workstation) as an investment with an ROI > 1000%.
I bought Workstation 6.0 almost 2 years ago for and I have been getting free upgrades ever since (now Workstation ver 6.5.1).
I use Google Notebook quite a bit... more for saving online bookmarks so I can reference them at work or at home. In this way it serves a purpose similar to online bookmarking sites such as Delicious. I do save actual clippings of webpages from time to time.
You could set-up multiple notebooks and categorize entries per notebook. You could also use Google to search entries in your notebooks. I actually find Google notebook more useful than Delicious for saving and searching bookmarks which I could then access from multiple PCs.
I assembled a computer for someone using a late model ASUS motherboard and it too will wake up a few seconds after I set it to Hybrid Sleep (S3) in Vista.
The solution for me was to go to the mouse's Hardware Properties and under the Power Management Tab, deselect the "Allow this device to wake up the computer". After changing that option, the computer now sleeps when told to do so. The only downside is you cannot wake it up from Hybrid Sleep by moving the mouse. You have to press the power button on the PC.
Seagate appears to have started going downhill after acquiring Maxtor. First there was the infamous AAKS firmware bug that was discussed at length here in/. that made a specific model of Seagate drive underperform. In various web forums, people have also started complaining about more noise when Seagate harddrives perform seek operations, along with other firmware related bugs affecting burst speed performance. Seagate also now appears to be behind Western Digital in terms of performance on its line of desktop hard drives. All these happening after the Maxtor acquisition.
To me the ability to block DoubleClick, GoogleAnalytics, annoying and potentially dangerous 3rd party/injected Flash animations, etc., with extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, and/or Flashblock makes Firefox my browser of choice. Until I could do this with Chrome, it will remain just a curiosity.
I worked in the Middle East for a couple of years. It is a perfect base to explore Europe, Africa and Asia. Many companies (Banks, Hospitals, Oil and Gas, etc.) offer/entice their expatriate employees lots of paid vacation time with free airline tickets (oftentimes for you and your spouse and kids)... The pay is good, there are no taxes, plus most employers give their expatriates free housing accommodations. Bottom line, you have more money to spend for those European vacations.
In my case it was 1 month vacation for every 6 months of work. To be honest, work sucked but vacations were great. Europe, Africa, and East Asia are just hours away by plane. In addition, countries in the Middle East also have interesting cultures worth exploring.
I think the blame also lies with Microsoft... they and their marketing arm put too much emphasis on "shiny looking" doodads (Silverlight and the latest collection of AJAX Toolkits comes to mind) on the front-end instead of focusing on how to build robust and scalable applications using time proven techniques which is easily implementable using C# which IMHO is a great tool if used properly.
What I notice is some (not all) of the so called Architects and Senior Developers also just want to get their hands on with the latest and greatest Visual Studio release so they could put it on their resume. Many of these guys blew by C# 2.0 in Visual Studio 2005 without fully understanding when and how the use of Generics could be beneficial. You are right, many of these folks will put most of the business logic in stored procedures and marshall the info to their fancy grids and ajax controls using typed datasets.
The great irony is you actually end up with more code, not less when you use these doodads improperly... Reuse through proper object orientation is replaced by cut and paste code that ultimately becomes a maintenance nightmare... thousands of lines of C# code in a single form, hooked up to another couple hundred javascript code on the client side that may or may not work fully on different browsers! On the other hand, I don't know what to think anymore... maybe Object Oriented programming is just too abstract for 80% of the programmers in the world and the article might have a point that what is needed is back to basic COBOL style procedural, cut and paste programming that anyone and his grandma could at least understand in one glance... fuck, might as well bring back the GOTO!
These current tools give architects and developers more and more ways to do the same thing. Some are great for prototyping but bad for large scale development. Then there are doodads that look good on a demo but cause nothing but headaches when implemented in production (ie. Infragistics grid control for.NET).
The problem is "Software Architects" who have very little experience use these prototyping tools for real production projects. Worse, developers who have had very little experience writing large scale apps take to them like flies to a fly paper.
The problem is exacerbated by the rapid updates to the Tools themselves thus giving developers even less time to master how to use them. Microsoft for example has updated Visual Studio (and now SQL Server and Windows Server) every 2 to 3 years... not even bothering to fix bugs in the last release, telling developers who complain about the bugs to use the next version of the tools.
Also a lot of.NET developers, despite using the latest tool/IDE still write.NET code as if they were coding using a scripting language... I have seen 2000 plus lines of C# code encapsulated in a single class. Developers have no fucking clue about object orientation much less the use of design patterns.
... I would "stress test" the hell out of it more so if the manufacturer will be replacing it with an Intel or ATI GPU...
Sure this might be borderline immoral but aren't the laptop manufacturers in conjunction with nVidia acting in bad faith by not replacing the defective laptops with non defective ones? BIOS updates to run the fans all the time is not the real solution.
The key to losing weight is to do both...
on
How Do Geeks Exercise?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... resistance training (multiple sets of situps, pushups, crunches, bicycle crunches, bench/military presses, etc.) followed by cardio (interval training on a real bike mounted on a trainer), not the other way around. This basically guarantees that your muscles will be toned but will not bulk up plus your metabolism rate will increase so you continue burning calories even while inactive. I do this 2 times a week indoors... the other 2 or 3 times I either cycle to work or participate in a group bike ride.
Another key to losing weight is to sleep at night feeling a little hungry.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not much different from a big company like Microsoft acquiring/buying a smaller company... sooner or later the smaller company gets its life suck out of it.
USB 3.0 provides more juice compared to 2.0. You could probably plug and power up a 3.5" desktop drive (assuming the enclosure has the circuitry to use power over USB) and it will run it without the need for brick adapters.
Vista post SP2 is fast and stable... I have it on a Thinkpad T61p too and on a desktop. As I said on a previous post, all MS had to do was to wait a couple more months until the hardware and drivers caught up, add some fancy interface tweaks, fancy marketing, and viola... profit!
It also probably helped that many websites, etc., needed something new to hype about to keep making ad money.
Well it looks like Microsoft has turned the Vista blunder into a Windows 7 success, money making opportunity... great move on their part. They did this by basically just waiting for drivers to mature, waiting for the hardware to catch up, and focusing on creating some fancy ads like these: Windows 7 Ad Campaign Kicks Off, Focuses on Features
I tend to agree with Dvorak... Windows 7 is more like Vista SP3...plus some fancy interface updates but basically the same deep down.
You don't have to google for crazy instructions and edit the registy to uninstall the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.1 add-on. Just launch the add-ons dialog in FF, go to the Extensions Tab, select the .NET add-on and click the Uninstall button or the Disable button if you just wish to disable but not to uninstall it. These 2 options are available for this add-on just like the other add-ons. For the WPF Plugin, select the Plugin Tab, select the Windows Presentation Foundation plug-in from the list and click Disable. This is the only option available for Plug-ins which includes those from Java (of which there are 3 in my machine I may add), Adobe, Shockwave, and others.
I might be mistaken but don't these add-ons/plugins from Microsoft specifically allow certain web pages to render properly under Firefox which otherwise would have required users to run IE? If so Microsoft centric IT Enterprise users who have started using Firefox at work might revert back to IE. This might reduce the gains that Firefox has been achieving in Microsoft centric IT Enterprise shops.
+1 on the Logitech MX Revolution... I have the MX5500 Bluetooth version (comes with the Keyboard). A charge can last up to 7 days for me but I usually just put the mouse on its cradle at night so it is fully charged in the morning. Highly programmable but as the others noted, the best feature for me is the ability to switch the mouse wheel to work in click mode (you can feel the detents) or in smooth mode... The wheel is heavy and acts as a flywheel so you can easily flick it and it will scroll for a few seconds... great for scrolling through long documents or for programs written cut and paste style.
Again as others have noted, the multitude of buttons are a boon. I my case I programmed the button above the scrollwheel to switch tabs (in the IDE or in the browser)... the wheel on the side I programmed to zoom in and out text/images with its middle click to return to normal zoom.
Finally, the form factor is the best of all the mice I have used so far. It fits my hand perfectly and the weight is just right. I actually like this MX5500 Bluetooth combo so much that I got 3 of them, 2 at home and 1 at work. The Bluetooth also has a very long range such that I can even use it as a remote control when I want to turn the volume up and down on the media player while riding my stationary bike.
Indeed, I use Songbird and feel lucky I did not activate/register an account with Last.fm. After reading about this item on reddit/slashdot, I immediately uninstalled Last.fm's addon plus I also uninstall Last.fm's album cover addon.
From now on I won't touch anything with "last.fm" on it with a 10 foot pole.
The above post is correct... the one before it marked insightful is wrong. As a matter of fact certain current model Quad Cores don't support VT-x. Some of the cheaper dual cores, even that run as high as 2.66 - 2.8 Ghz don't support VT-x too. You actually have to eyeball the specs to be sure your new Intel CPU supports VT-x. Finally you also have to enable this feature in the BIOS.
I assembled an AMD Athlon / Athlon ASUS A7N8X and a Pentium 4 / MSI motherboard powered PCs at about the same time more than 5 years ago and these computers are being powered on and off almost everyday. They still work.
Newer PC components especially the motherboard usually still have juice in them even though you power them off. The CPUs and graphics card even when powered on will still experience heat cycles ranging from just above room temp when idle and depending on the efficacy of the cooling system, to 60 C (for CPUs) or 90 C (for high end graphics cards) when playing games.
More specifically for me, until Chrome incorporates addons/extensions equivalent to NoScript, Adblock, and Flashblock I won't be using it except perhaps when I need to do a quick check of my Google Calendar appointments.
Install LogMeIn on your beefy Home Workstation and logon to it from the browser running remotely on a netbook, laptop, or desktop.
Exactly, circa early 2000 and I was going with Western Digital when I noticed their new drives at the time becoming noisier (rotational whine) compared to Seagate's and IBM's. At around the same timeframe, the company I worked for received a bad batch of Western Digital drives installed on Dell desktop PCs. One drive after another failed. At about the same time frame or a little later, it was IBM's drives that started failing (infamous DeathStars) with IBM finally selling off their HDD operations to Hitachi.
At this point I was already going with Seagate drives and felt relieved that their drives were quieter and more reliable than the competition's. Then a year or 2 ago, Seagate's quality control seemed to have taken a hit (at around the time they bought Maxtor). First they seem to have problems with the firmware on certain 500 GB models which was causing performance degradation (Seagate Firmware Performance Differences). On their latest models, it appears they are still having firmware issues. Lately the 100 GB Seagate drive on my year old Lenovo Thinkpad started acting up and Vista started giving me warnings about impending drive failures. I get "Spin Retry Count" fail when I run HDTune but Seagate's own SeaTools gives it a clean bill of health.
To cut this short, I am now using Western Digital Caviar (640 GB AALS Blacks, AAKS Blues, 1 TB Greens) and I noticed that these are faster, quieter (not just rotational but seek as well), vibrates less, produces less heat than comparable Seagate drives (I have 500 GB Seagate 7200.10 drives and a 750 GB Seagate 7200.11). So for now it appears the pendulum has swung in favor of Western Digital performance and reliability wise.
Having said all this, I still religiously maintain image copies of my OS/App partition and data partition... multiple times. You can never be paranoid enough with your data.
If you installed Intel's AHCI drivers during the OS install, eSATA will be hot pluggable. That means you can plug an eSATA drive to a PC, use it, then, unplug it without the need to reboot the PC.
I agree, $200 is money well spent for VMWare Workstation if you are a developer. Actually, I think of it (200 bucks for Workstation) as an investment with an ROI > 1000%.
I bought Workstation 6.0 almost 2 years ago for and I have been getting free upgrades ever since (now Workstation ver 6.5.1).
I use Google Notebook quite a bit... more for saving online bookmarks so I can reference them at work or at home. In this way it serves a purpose similar to online bookmarking sites such as Delicious. I do save actual clippings of webpages from time to time.
You could set-up multiple notebooks and categorize entries per notebook. You could also use Google to search entries in your notebooks. I actually find Google notebook more useful than Delicious for saving and searching bookmarks which I could then access from multiple PCs.
I assembled a computer for someone using a late model ASUS motherboard and it too will wake up a few seconds after I set it to Hybrid Sleep (S3) in Vista.
The solution for me was to go to the mouse's Hardware Properties and under the Power Management Tab, deselect the "Allow this device to wake up the computer". After changing that option, the computer now sleeps when told to do so. The only downside is you cannot wake it up from Hybrid Sleep by moving the mouse. You have to press the power button on the PC.
Seagate appears to have started going downhill after acquiring Maxtor. First there was the infamous AAKS firmware bug that was discussed at length here in /. that made a specific model of Seagate drive underperform. In various web forums, people have also started complaining about more noise when Seagate harddrives perform seek operations, along with other firmware related bugs affecting burst speed performance. Seagate also now appears to be behind Western Digital in terms of performance on its line of desktop hard drives. All these happening after the Maxtor acquisition.
You just have to enable it... It's under Options > Basic Tab > Home Page > Check show home page on toolbar option.
To me the ability to block DoubleClick, GoogleAnalytics, annoying and potentially dangerous 3rd party/injected Flash animations, etc., with extensions like NoScript, Adblock Plus, and/or Flashblock makes Firefox my browser of choice. Until I could do this with Chrome, it will remain just a curiosity.
I worked in the Middle East for a couple of years. It is a perfect base to explore Europe, Africa and Asia. Many companies (Banks, Hospitals, Oil and Gas, etc.) offer/entice their expatriate employees lots of paid vacation time with free airline tickets (oftentimes for you and your spouse and kids)... The pay is good, there are no taxes, plus most employers give their expatriates free housing accommodations. Bottom line, you have more money to spend for those European vacations.
In my case it was 1 month vacation for every 6 months of work. To be honest, work sucked but vacations were great. Europe, Africa, and East Asia are just hours away by plane. In addition, countries in the Middle East also have interesting cultures worth exploring.
I think the blame also lies with Microsoft... they and their marketing arm put too much emphasis on "shiny looking" doodads (Silverlight and the latest collection of AJAX Toolkits comes to mind) on the front-end instead of focusing on how to build robust and scalable applications using time proven techniques which is easily implementable using C# which IMHO is a great tool if used properly.
What I notice is some (not all) of the so called Architects and Senior Developers also just want to get their hands on with the latest and greatest Visual Studio release so they could put it on their resume. Many of these guys blew by C# 2.0 in Visual Studio 2005 without fully understanding when and how the use of Generics could be beneficial. You are right, many of these folks will put most of the business logic in stored procedures and marshall the info to their fancy grids and ajax controls using typed datasets.
The great irony is you actually end up with more code, not less when you use these doodads improperly... Reuse through proper object orientation is replaced by cut and paste code that ultimately becomes a maintenance nightmare... thousands of lines of C# code in a single form, hooked up to another couple hundred javascript code on the client side that may or may not work fully on different browsers! On the other hand, I don't know what to think anymore... maybe Object Oriented programming is just too abstract for 80% of the programmers in the world and the article might have a point that what is needed is back to basic COBOL style procedural, cut and paste programming that anyone and his grandma could at least understand in one glance... fuck, might as well bring back the GOTO!
These current tools give architects and developers more and more ways to do the same thing. Some are great for prototyping but bad for large scale development. Then there are doodads that look good on a demo but cause nothing but headaches when implemented in production (ie. Infragistics grid control for .NET).
The problem is "Software Architects" who have very little experience use these prototyping tools for real production projects. Worse, developers who have had very little experience writing large scale apps take to them like flies to a fly paper.
The problem is exacerbated by the rapid updates to the Tools themselves thus giving developers even less time to master how to use them. Microsoft for example has updated Visual Studio (and now SQL Server and Windows Server) every 2 to 3 years... not even bothering to fix bugs in the last release, telling developers who complain about the bugs to use the next version of the tools.
Also a lot of .NET developers, despite using the latest tool/IDE still write .NET code as if they were coding using a scripting language... I have seen 2000 plus lines of C# code encapsulated in a single class. Developers have no fucking clue about object orientation much less the use of design patterns.
... I would "stress test" the hell out of it more so if the manufacturer will be replacing it with an Intel or ATI GPU...
Sure this might be borderline immoral but aren't the laptop manufacturers in conjunction with nVidia acting in bad faith by not replacing the defective laptops with non defective ones? BIOS updates to run the fans all the time is not the real solution.
... resistance training (multiple sets of situps, pushups, crunches, bicycle crunches, bench/military presses, etc.) followed by cardio (interval training on a real bike mounted on a trainer), not the other way around. This basically guarantees that your muscles will be toned but will not bulk up plus your metabolism rate will increase so you continue burning calories even while inactive. I do this 2 times a week indoors... the other 2 or 3 times I either cycle to work or participate in a group bike ride.
Another key to losing weight is to sleep at night feeling a little hungry.